Geología estructural

There were times when George, a resident of the small town of Edenside and frequent user of the FOI Act appeared to assume I had knowledge that I might articulate so that he could respond to my research questions more fully. There was a sense in which he thought I was having difficulty articulating what I already knew, the division between us a consequence of the different knowledge that we had acquired and might either share or withhold. George was a grey haired gentleman, tall and slim, with a soft manner, and a slow walk. He was extremely careful with his words, a precision, he explained, that he had acquired from many years in business. He was a retired business systems analyst. He used to run his own small business with his wife, Helen, which entailed going into large companies and looking at the way they used

their IT systems, aspects of their business ‘usually connected with databases’, and recommending software. George was also developing his own philosophical theory of how the world worked, one that he had been contemplating for many years and to which he could now devote more time. Like all thinkers, he was finding it difficult to find the words to express his ideas. So George and I not only talked about the FOI Act, which he frequently used but mulled over some of his more theoretical ideas and how they might be developed.

I was introduced to George by Mike, the FOI Officer for the University of Edenside, with whom I had become familiar from attending a short introductory session on FOI that he had held at the University earlier in the year. Mike was in his early forties. He had been working for the University for some months, had a background in intellectual property rights and private business. George had known Mike since the end of 2004 when ‘as a trial run’ George had put an FOI request into the University, the year before FOI was enacted. Mike had treated this as a test case and George had subsequently put several requests into the University, which Mike generally forwarded to someone within the University who could respond, although George was not always happy with their efforts.

George was an active member of his local community and at the time of our meetings was principally involved in two projects. He was working on a response to a public consultation with other residents on the local council’s regional development plan that he would submit in a few weeks. In addition to this, he was making a case, with others, against the closure of his daughter’s primary school, part of a larger council run project to amalgamate and reorganize four existing schools in the area. On both projects he was someone who knew how to use FOISA, compose and submit requests on behalf of the group and ‘dig out the facts’. In fact, George had developed quite a technique for composing questions that could not ‘be easily misinterpreted’ by those who dealt with them and left no ‘wriggle room’. George had, for example, made requests for information on school closure procedures, pupil rolls and projected figures for the coming years, the number of university students with cars, and dog walking restrictions on university owned land.

Over the course of the year that FOISA came into force, George and I regularly met for morning coffee in a sunlit, glass-panelled conference centre on the outskirts of Edenside. Here, George could discuss the requests that he had made, out of earshot of other residents, and staff to whom he might have submitted a request. He did not want a discussion of how he went about getting information, thoughts on fellow residents and council and University employees to be overheard. In our meetings we discussed the requests that he had made and some of the e-mails that he had forwarded to me, containing correspondence between residents, information released as a result of a request, or an FOI request to which he was awaiting a response. He was also interested in learning more about social anthropology, and how its approach might fit in which his own research.

While I did what I could to assist George with his requests about social anthropology, as a requester or applicant myself asking for information from a ‘practitioner’, George did his utmost to

provide me with information that he considered I might find useful for my research. George did not want to provide me with ‘useless’ information and above all was concerned with neither ‘wasting my time nor his’. In fact, he wanted to know how best to fulfil the promise that he had made at our first meeting, as he explained in some detail:

‘I want to be quite clear in my mind… how [am] I best to carry out my promise to you without causing me a lot of extra work or you a lot of useless information… My simplest thing, if I was being pragmatic, [is to say] I’ll just feed her the e-mails, that’s what I’ll do, job done’.

As if a public authority FOI practitioner responding to a request for information, George could provide me with the ‘bare minimum’, e-mail correspondence, that was easy for him to forward and might be of some value to me but he was uncertain in what way. He might then consider his promise fulfilled. Our relationship seemed somewhat contained: in return for my assistance with his own research, he would provide me with relevant examples and cases from the material he had to hand. In order for an obligation to appear fulfilled, however, George had to provide me with what I considered useful information, which meant I had to be absolutely clear about what I wanted. It was as if George considered himself a resource from whom I might extract supporting evidence to argue, extend, or supplement what I already knew. Yet I found I could not always be either precise about what I wanted or provide him with an answer.

George seemed to expect me to at least know what research questions I had in mind, and the findings I would obtain from the material he gave me. But I tried to explain to George that I did not know what I wanted. On hearing or reading any material he could provide, such as e-mail correspondence, between him and a fellow resident, or a letter from a council official, I might then know. But prior to knowing, so to speak, I did not know and therefore could not share with him what I knew. Knowing, in George’s eyes, seemed a black and white matter of knowing or not knowing, something already in existence and slowly revealed rather than something that emerged in response. That I did not know what I knew before I ‘knew’ it, seemed to bewilder him. Unable to share with George what he only assumed I knew, George seemed increasingly frustrated and to think my silence disclosed an inability to express what I knew.

In George’s eyes (and as a researcher himself), being a good researcher entailed knowing what I wanted to know before I embarked on my research. Familiar with a model of knowing in which persons and knowledge travel independently of the person and relations through which they are created (discussed in chapter three), knowledge seemed conceived by George in the form of an independent unit— something that was either known or not known and travelled independently of the relations through which it was formed; in the form of an object that can be collected, and applied, revealed or concealed. But as George also realised, knowledge travelled in social relations…

While over the course of these meetings our interdisciplinary dialogue was put to one side in preference for discussing George’s recent activities in relation to FOISA, I did occasionally enquire how his research was going, as he frequently asked about my own research.