Between Defensivness and Openness

Field access to appointment committees as an ethnographic experiment

Abstract

Appointment committees are highly formalized and difficult-to-access arenas of university decision-making processes. Ethnographic research in this field is therefore associated with particular challenges: confidentiality obligations, legal restrictions, and institutional defensiveness make access difficult. In this context, the article understands field access not only as a prerequisite, but as an epistemically insightful component of the research itself. It shows how resistance, rejection, and unpredictable opportunities already provide insights into the social and cultural logics of university institutions. Access proves to be an experimental process: difficult to plan and control, and characterized by uncertainty, improvisation, and the constant negotiation of one's own role in the field. Contacts in the field of gender equality – often mediated by “weak ties” (Granevetter) – became central bridges that enabled access. Ethnography thus becomes tangible as a tentative, risk-taking search movement whose potential lies precisely in the fragility of access. By taking institutional resistance seriously, it transforms it into analytical insights, thereby highlighting the experimental nature of ethnographic research at universities.