Appendix: Methodologies and Work Practices in the Archives

Circus Troubles and a Sense of Work Practices

To tell the story of the first British Crime Survey through its work practices, critiques, office politics and operational deliberations, I have composed this book in the form of a statistical procedural, with each chapter focussing on a sequence of scenes that were instrumental in the preparation of the first report. The book aims to offer a ‘sense of practices’ through a respecification of the notion of the ‘crime survey circus’. My approach contrasts with other ethnomethodological studies of work, which tend to analyse ‘real-time’ multimodal interaction (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh, 2010). In taking up the idea of the ‘crime survey circus’ as a sensitising device for an archival ethnography, the book has offered a meso-level ethnographic account of government research work. ¹ In doing so, the book seeks to explicate praxiological features of an interaction order through which Home Office officials prepared the survey. The book largely focussed on the organisational work that marked this project from proposal to its dissemination. These temporal sequences of work are, in some senses, the empirical sites of Home Office officials' practical concerns. In focussing on these sites, the book seeks to understand how preparing the survey report can be used to demonstrate features of government research work. ² By attending to these sequences of action, I have attempted to describe the natural accountability of administrative actions. This involved analysing how small groups worked to prepare and present evidence, undertake administrative work and contribute to understanding the history of criminological (practical) reasoning. This approach involved asking several questions: What does the historical record state about the administrative, social scientific, methodological, policy and practical troubles encountered in preparing the first British Crime Survey? How were different groups of Home Office officials involved in deliberations, discussions and disagreements about the methodology, organisation and representation of this survey? How did Home Office officials develop and deliver administrative plans to propose the survey, collect data, represent the survey findings and disseminate the survey report? How have government researchers, policymakers, social scientists and elected officials articulated the early history of the survey?

The sketching out of a sequence of steps was enabled through dialogue with scholarship in archival ethnography. Archival ethnography stays close to what archival records hold, what they do not retain, what is missing from these folders and what has been forgotten (Burns, 2010; Stoler, 2010). Former Home Office officials had attempted to get hold of relevant folders. They remarked that it seemed ‘somebody would have been employed to thin it out and just get the interesting stuff, and I don't know what criteria they applied, but I don't think they're sinister criteria; they might be, but….’ ³ As became evident in comparing what was in the National Archives with what could have been there, a significant number of Home Office folders that would be needed to tell the comprehensive history of the survey are missing. ⁴ Former officials described the actual folders they worked with as ‘bureaucratic nightmares’ rather than the thin folders that remained. ⁵ This is a series of chance observations of what is missing from the archives. ⁶ In my analysis of archival materials, I put archival materials in reference to secondary literature on the history of the British Crime Survey and victimisation surveys, autoethnographic reflections on government research work and interviews with former Home Office officials and academic criminologists.

Each chapter describes actions associated with ordinary administrative troubles encountered at several stages in the report's preparation, from preliminary discussions amongst civil servants, making the case and proposing the report, designing the research instruments, redrafting the report and circulating the report. ⁷ These are troubles of intelligibility, professional reputation, power, office politics, inter-professional rivalries, alliances and doing research in government. In dealing with what Sianne Ngai has called ‘ugly feelings’, as well as fun and exciting feelings, each of the chapters deals with a cluster of these troubles associated with administrative criminological work and, in so doing, describes the ‘ordinary’ troubles related to the preparation of a work product. The archives contain a plethora of accounts about the procedural preparations of the survey and the book's attempts to engage with debates about archival research in historical criminology which suggests archival research can be taken up as a ‘methodological tool’ (Bosworth, 2001; Guiney, 2020). The book further attends to how participants involved the survey narrate its history of actions within the Home Office. ⁸

The archives consulted in this study do not speak of ‘everyday life’ in the Home Office. We are instead faced with hundreds of missives and correspondence about meetings, committees, work plans and progress reports. I have read and cited these fragmentary traces to construct a bricolage account of an administrative project. ⁹ This is not the only available account, as it involves little to no observations of the survey in the field. Nor does the book claim to be an ‘anthropology of bureaucracy’. The book takes work practices associated with the work involved in the preparation and treatment of the survey as its object and how this object was treated by a small group of officials. ¹⁰ In this sense, the book is an experiment in what can be rendered visible through reading the leftovers and silences in accounts of administrative action.

From the Archives and Back Again

Most substantially, the book draws on archive records about the British Crime Survey held at The National Archives in Kew, London. The archives examined in the book were consulted at The National Archives and, in the main, can be found in two folders held by the Home Office SD and the Police Department (F3). Neither of these folders was, strictly speaking, ‘owned’ by HORU/HORPU, the principal researchers responsible for managing the survey. HORU/HORPU correspondence can be found in other folders, but The National Archives holds no folders about the survey owned by HORU/HORPU. NatCen (the predecessor to SCPR) had no records of the British Crime Survey readily available. I primarily focussed on the contents of these two folders, along with a larger set of folders relating to the HORU/HORPU, the SD, Home Office committees, Cabinet Office meetings, and so on, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. These two folders only contain a fragment of the volume of paper materials circulated during the survey preparation and its report. In these folders, we find sequences of exchanges on topics related to the survey, with specific interactions taking place over several days or weeks.

Following Arlette Farge's (2013) insights on archival research, I proceeded to dig around, follow false leads and identify clues about where else I might find archival materials related to the survey. Home Offices officials wrote these records with the knowledge that they would be read and are work products that relate to other work products, offering further resources and topics for examination. I expanded my search to all other records held by the HORU/HORPU and SD from 1981 to 1984.

Outside of The National Archives, I examined records held by the London Metropolitan Archives, the Black Cultural Archives and the National Records of Scotland. These archival records primarily related to research and policy work undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s on crime and victim surveys in London, the Runnymede Trust's work on crime, policing, the criminal justice system, racial harassment and racial attacks, and the development of a separate Scottish Crime Survey in the early 1990s. ¹¹ I also gathered additional research materials held by the UK Data Archives based at the University of Essex, and through Freedom of Information requests made to the Office of National Statistics and the Home Office, focussed on staffing numbers and budgetary costs.

In addition to the archival work, I conducted a series of background interviews between August and October 2022 with former Home Office officials, academic criminologists, statisticians, policy officials and GSR professionals in the criminal justice system. The interviews were a mixture of in-person unstructured and video-enabled semi-structured interviews. During in-person interviews, I used archival documents as elicitation devices to prompt discussions. ¹² These interviews were transcribed by a professional transcription company and analysed using an iterative coding framework, partly developed through preliminary analysis of archival materials. The names of the interviewees and identifying details have been anonymised in this book.

In reading the archives, returning to the folders, reading across different folders and in combination with interview materials, I have attempted to analyse the materials contained in the folders as a ‘vulgarly competent’ in administrative criminology and government research work. I was a user of the folders, attempted to understand how folders seem to have been organised and, through discussion with former Home Office officials, as well as handling the documents and identifying clues found in marginalia inside the folders, authorship and copy list of letters, sought to determine the relative significance of documents and their relation to an administrative order. The folder's liner notes provide cues, as do the order of documents in folders in ascertaining how meetings and documents related to other research and policy activities across the Home Office. The archives offer resources with which to explicate how the development of the survey was documented and accounted for, administrative critiques of the administration of the survey, negotiations between public officials and how different divisions within the Home Office made sense of the survey. Reading the archive in this way enabled me to retrace, or reconstruct, a sequence of steps taken with the development of the survey, focussing on how different groups of Home Office officials worked on the project through deliberations over the next action, accuracy, methodological rigour and compositional methods.

Interludes and Autoethnography

The book proceeds through a sequence of phases in the development of the survey, supplementing these descriptions with autoethnographic writing in the form of interludes. These interludes draw on 40 months of working as a GSR professional in the Ministry of Justice. They have been composed as forms of autoethnographic text focussed on congregational practices of writing, rather than the gesture of writing (Wyatt, 2018). ¹³ These interludes are ethnographic fabulations, mixing anecdotes with generic observation, based on my experience using British Crime Survey data and doing government research. ¹⁴ These are fabulations of being inside a circus, largely focussing on my memories of being part of a community of government researchers, and the emotional disorientation of administrative work. ¹⁵ Some of these fabulations have a confessional quality and, albeit brief, have been put in relation to archival and interview materials in an experiment with moving between self-referential texts to administrative structures (Campbell, 2017).

These interludes, placed between each chapter, are intended to act as resonance devices, elongating any stable sense of orientation to those practices explored within the preceding and subsequent chapters. These interludes offer observations of working with Crime Survey data and alongside government researchers. They are provided as lures to examine Home Office officials' practices and recognisable features of administrative criminology work. These interludes have been composed as readings of what else these archives could be showing about this work, not settling on what the archives mean for the British Crime Survey, but as sensibilities, orientations, scenes of action, impressions, antagonisms and relationalities of government research work. They point to gaps in my reconstruction of events and what further could be known about the work practices examined in each chapter. In this sense, the archival materials have been read as if they could be used to explain these interludes as recognisable scenes of action for a government researcher. ¹⁶ Furthermore, these interludes have been composed as forms of flash ethnography, illustrating a cluster of themes. ¹⁷ The composition of these fabulations also approach the archives as proxies that are not proximate to my experience as a government researcher. ¹⁸ But, these are also analytical constructs that, again, provide a mere ‘sense of practices’.