Conti and O’Neil: Studying power
interactions. These on-going interactions shape how counsels approach litigation at the WTO, highlight the complexity of the relationships in which informants were embedded, and provide insight into how deep historical structures of the global economy are mediated and reproduced through the WTO. The WTO is not a monolithic machine; rather, it is a complex social forum that is daily reproduced through the activities of many people engaged in WTO disputing for a variety of personal, professional, and organization rationales and goals. Some informants explained how they exercised their personal commitment to improving the situations of the Third World by working on the ‘inside’ of the WTO; several feared that the Third World may have entered the WTO without a clear appreciation of its implications for them. Another informant linked the desire of his country – a postcolonial state emerging as a Third World trading power – for national legitimacy to specific approaches to the WTO dispute settlement system. These perspectives on the WTO emerged when Joe invited his interviewees to think about the operation of the WTO from a sociological standpoint. Initially, this was a strategy Joe employed to diffuse the power relationship in the interview but it permitted a nuanced vision into how power operates not only in the WTO but in the international economy regulated by the WTO. While Joe found it appropriate to conceal the identities of the respondents, his sense of accountability to them did not manifest in absolute honesty about his own motivations out of a fear that it would compromise the entire project. In the practice of studying elites there is less need to protect elites from the power of the researcher (Cookson, 1994; Hertz and Imber, 1995). As we have described, the authority relationship in the interview must be strategically managed. In doing so, a premium is placed on tracking the effects of such interventions on knowledge claims. This accountability to the knowledge claims requires that researchers also afford ‘complex personhood’ (Gordon, 1997) even to the most powerful. Recognizing and portraying interviewees as complex and even sympathetic human beings disrupts easy or uncomplicated links between the social realm of the WTO and the impacts of the WTO as an organization. At the same time, these portrayals carry important political consequences and at times feel anathema to scholars who are committed to social justice. The demand to retain the complex personhood of the informant challenges dominant notions of how power operates when studying elites. Employing feminist methodology to understand how power operates in the interview and how it shapes the production of knowledge suggests that ‘studying up’ distorts and reifies the complex power dynamic in the interview and in the social world more generally. ‘Studying up’ obstructs an analysis of the complex agency and subject positions of all people involved in the research process. First, this terminology denies the agency, responsibility and accountability of the researcher. By assuming a hierarchy of power of up or down, the researcher can lose sight of their own role in the research process including the ability to intervene in the power dynamic of the interview. Second, understanding
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