Centering Negative Emotional Responses: The Utility of Strategic Membership Researcher Status in Sino-German Cross-Cultural Trainings

Abstract

This article explores the utility of strategic membership researcher status in the case of Sino-German cross-cultural training courses to understand the paradoxical practices that reinforce and mitigate cross-cultural conflicts in transnational contexts. Drawing upon autoethnographic positioning analysis, I connect my own negative emotional experiences with positioning dynamics to reconstruct conflictual social events. This approach not only exposes the implicit field logic but also reveals the arrangement of social relations in an unexpected way. These findings highlight the epistemic potential of combining position-analytic and emotion-analytic reflexivity. In so doing, this article provides a practical, methodological model and furthers scholarship on the utility of autoethnography for the study of social relations.

This article explores the utility of strategic membership researcher (SMR) status in the case of Sino-German cross-cultural training courses. Such training programs are regarded as sites designed to promote “cultural understanding” and prevent “cultural frictions.” Drawing upon invectivity, an emerging theory of interaction and communication processes which focuses on aspects of disparagement, offense, exclusion, and devaluation (Ellerbrock et al., 2017), this article considers how “culture-based” problems are regarded as invective ¹ and how social actors deal with them.

Language courses and cross-cultural trainings are considered means for improving bilateral cooperation between China and Germany, based on the assumption that linguistic and cultural differences (and misinterpretations of them) may hinder this partnership (Stepan et al., 2018, pp. 77–78). This assumption emphasizes the conflictual aspects in transnational relationships and frames them as cultural problems. Interactions between German and Chinese groups are subsequently and hypothetically constructed and anticipated as potentially invective acts for this particular transnational relationship. In an effort to deal with these invective aspects of transnational relations, training courses serve as a social institution to mitigate cross-cultural conflicts in transnational contexts.

This article is based on my larger research project which focuses first on how culture becomes constructed as a predominant and potential cause of conflicts in transnational relations. Second, my research examines how this framing of culture sustains invective latency of transnational relations. The latter extends the conception of “invective latency of ethnographic relations” (Greschke, this issue), which is considered a consequence of the ethnographic crisis and post-colonial critiques. Greschke points out how asymmetric power structures of contemporary world social orders undergird this dilemma of ethnographic relations, manifesting in reciprocal representations between the ethnographer and the social world under study. I adopt Greschke’s concept to consider the latter in my particular ethnographic site and scrutinize its structural features of invective latency.

While examining the social functions that cross-cultural trainings provide as institutions to “handle” and negotiate transnational relationships, my participation in these trainings as a “trainee” challenged social orders, disturbed negotiations of positionings, and produced subsequent emotional experiences in the process as well. I therefore adopted an autoethnographic approach over the course of my research to recall these tense moments in my ethnographic work. Particularly, I embraced the concept of SMR (Greschke, this issue) to examine the researcher’s positionings in more detail. In so doing, I was able to systematically document the emotional dimensions in the research process as evidence of critical “breaches” and reconfigurations of social orders produced and contested within and from transnational relations. This methodological development subsequently aims to facilitate the understanding of field logics and their effects.

To illustrate the utility of autoethnographic positioning analysis in this article, I first describe my field experiences to highlight the “problems” I faced within the field and to discuss how autoethnographic approach furthers their analytical usefulness (section “Ambiguous Role and Discomfiture in the Field”). I then delineate how I adopted SMR status to explore this field-specific phenomenon. I particularly draw upon positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) and sociological scholarship on emotions to consider both positioning practices and emotional responses as analytical lens in this approach (section “The Potentials of SMR Status Within Positioning Theory and Sociological Scholarship on Emotions: A Conceptual Framework”). Following this methodological design overview, I demonstrate its epistemic potential by presenting data and analysis of key breaches over the course of my research, and how they relate to knowledge production pertaining to specific mechanisms in Sino-German cross-cultural trainings (section “Autoethnographic Positioning Analysis by Example”). In the final section, I provide a summary of those findings and discuss the implications of this methodological approach for future research (section “Conclusion and Discussion”).

Ambiguous Role and Discomfiture in the Field

I participated in eight Sino-German cross-cultural training programs between April 2019 and April 2021 that were held in different locations throughout Germany. The length of the training programs varied between 1-, 2-, and 4-day sessions. The target groups of the training programs included employees from German companies and universities who either had regular contact with Chinese groups in their professional context in Germany or intended to establish contact with them. In another case, training courses as a part of a larger program are specifically offered for scholarship holders (university students) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to strengthen their “China competence.” ² The number of participants in each course ranged from five (the smallest group) to 24 (the largest group). In some cases, I attended trainings through official registration and enrollment procedures. In other cases, I initiated research cooperation with instructors and training institutions first. The difference between these two ways of “accessing the field” not only impacted how I entered the field and how I legitimized my presence in these training-course spaces, but it also shaped the interactions that unfolded between other field actors and myself. I did not initially recognize that my presence in these situations was an issue. Conversely, when I signed up for courses, my role and presence in the course seemed problematic not only for myself but also for “the field” (e.g., the instructors, the other trainees). When participants are asked to introduce themselves during the first session, for example, I often felt especially compelled to clarify the purpose of my presence in the course. I usually prepared a few “plausible” reasons to explain my attendance (e.g., declaring my Taiwanese heritage and adding my interests in the life and job context of China). By distancing myself from “Chinese” heritage, I underlined the geo-political distinction between myself and the course material to legitimize my presence in the field. Yet, the interactions that unfolded throughout the course pointed to the fact that my ambiguous role in the course was more associated with the national distinctions embedded in the frameworks of training programs (e.g., Chinese vs. German culture). Because Sino-German cross-cultural training programs focus on teaching trainees about “China” or “Chinese-related” features, participants identified as Chinese are considered suspect in this field. After all, why would they have to “learn” about China if they are from there? Distinguishing myself as Taiwanese and not Chinese served as a strategy for me to first minimize my “suspicious” presence in the course and second soothe my own uncertainty in the space. The latter brings attention to my emotional experiences in the research process that I now turn to discuss.

Through exploring the (re)production of potentially invective acts in interactions in my ethnographic work, I increasingly realized that my attendance in these programs was also producing conflicts and emotional struggles between others and myself. The struggles I faced in the field not only arose from my own personal fear of being perceived as an illegitimate participant but also from confrontations and experiences of being constructed as illegitimate, too. Field actors’ (e.g., instructors, other participants) indiscriminate ascriptions of my identity (i.e., occasionally Taiwanese, Chinese, Asian, or neither-nor), whether intentional or not, evoked personal discomfort that included feelings of irritation, confusion, disappointment, awkwardness, embarrassment, and sometimes unclear emotions. On the contrary, the ambiguity or perhaps even the “invisibility” of my participant status caused my anxiety regarding the legitimacy of my presence in the field. These emotional experiences resulting from my ambiguous role were not only consequences of social interactions, but they also shaped the research process (Kleinman, 1991). Researchers’ neglect of their own feelings in ethnographic work has been criticized repeatedly (e.g., Ellis, 1991b; Holland, 2007; Kleinman, 1991). For example, Kleinman and Copp (1993) argue that if the researcher ignores or represses negative feelings for the purpose of withstanding possible threats to his or her professional and personal identity, we will miss the chance to better understand our own assumptions of the social worlds under study. In a recent discussion about ressentiments in fieldwork, Brill and von Stetten (2022) acknowledge the fruitful utility of negative emotional responses to and in the field as an important analytical dimension in data material. In line with their idea, I boldly started my data analysis from the premise that my struggle might be important data for understanding the causes and mechanisms of social conflicts. Embracing this epistemic value of emotion, I decided to adopt an autoethnographic approach to record the challenges I faced in these courses as indicative, relevant data for answering the questions guiding my research.

A prominent pioneer in autoethnographic scholarship, Carolyn Ellis (1991a) encourages researchers to investigate their own lived emotionality by telling and analyzing their own stories in an introspective manner (p. 128). The evocative autoethnographic approach she and her colleagues endorse focuses on the retrospective and selective writing about epiphanal moments that stem from possessing a particular cultural identity (Ellis et al., 2010, para. 8). In their view, the kernel of autoethnographic work should reveal “the emotional, sensory, and material effects of experiences that escape observation or even conscious awareness” (Adams et al., 2022, p. 4) and “seek an active and reciprocal relationship with audiences” (Adams et al., 2022, p. 7). I agree that personal and especially emotional experiences are part of fundamental subject knowledge that can provide particular insights into those connections between everyday-lived moments and specific social phenomena. However, I am less interested in mobilizing the demarcation between writer and reader within narrative accounts and evoking moral, emotional, and experiential resonances. Rather, I draw on emotional experiences to identify and navigate the complex and overlapping social constellations that not only affect the research process but also the structure of social relations in and beyond it. Particularly, I center the interconnectedness between my ambiguous role in the field setting and negative feelings produced from it to account for those negotiations of broader power relations and social conflicts embedded in them. In an attempt to achieve this goal, I first discuss (auto)ethnographic positioning analysis, focusing on positioning dynamics during the process of becoming a member of the field. I further draw upon sociological scholarship on emotions to explore field logics and their effects on social interactions. I elucidate this methodological development in the next section.

The Potentials of SMR Status Within Positioning Theory and Sociological Scholarship on Emotions: A Conceptual Framework

Drawing upon Anderson’s (2006) notion of complete membership researcher (CMR) status, Greschke (this issue) proposes an alternative concept, namely SMR status. She criticizes Anderson’s neglect of the acquisition of CMR as an epistemic resource and proposes paying more attention to the process of becoming a CMR. This concept is based on positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) in which positioning is considered an analytical lens for understanding the process of “going native” as more complex than either “opportunistic” or “convert” (Anderson, 2006, p. 379). According to Harré and van Langenhove (1999), positioning emphasizes the fluid processes of how people cope with the current situation in which they are involved (p. 17). Positioning signals how members jointly produce location-specific storylines (B. Davies & Harré, 1990) and is a back-and-forth process in which positions are assigned, ascribed, appropriated, resisted, or repudiated (Harré, 2012, p. 195). The notion of positioning theory proposes a thorough investigation of interactional dynamics. In my case, exploring these positioning dynamics helped me to comprehend how field actors’ roles and understandings were mutually constructed and how my ambiguous role in the field setting was negotiated in positioning processes.

Referring to ambiguous roles, it is important to revisit the different ways I accessed the field. The legitimacy of my presence in the course was challenged less when I was positioned as a researcher or doctoral student versus when I registered as a participant. When I relied on the status of course participant to enter the field, it was almost unimaginable for me to acquire Anderson’s (2006) “convert CMR”—autoethnographers who “begin with a purely data-oriented research interest in the setting but become converted to complete immersion and membership during the course of the research” (p. 379). In this sense, the ultimate goal in autoethnographic approaches ought to be an entire transformation of the researcher’s role to fit their role which is given in the field. Yet, this perspective tends to focus on how (auto)ethnographers confront and overcome “hurdles” in the early phase of their studies rather than considering these struggles as indicative data of field logics. SMR, on the contrary, encourages autoethnographers to examine their positioning in more detail and document the process of how membership is experienced. Stated differently, a strategic understanding of membership researcher status considers the process of field access as important data in itself, in which the researcher draws upon these experiences to capture those unexpected or even conflictual ethnographic relations embedded in broader social structures (see Greschke, this issue).

This empirical data can be used to explore how transnational relationships are projected onto concrete social encounters. This maps onto what George E. Marcus (1997) asserts: Observations of the nexus between local knowledge and discourses or expectations elsewhere can reveal mutual uncertainties within ethnographic relations and further facilitate understanding of complicated relationships. Since the Writing Culture Debate (Clifford & Marcus, 1986), scholars have long discussed how research relations are imbued with and often produce or reinforce power inequalities particularly in those encounters that consist of two or more divergent life worlds. This is particularly true for cross-cultural and transnational studies in which researcher-researched relations are often associated with unequal positions of power (e.g., geographical location, race, gender, colonial relations). In this (Eurocentric) model, the researcher is often assumed to be positioned as the one in power and with privilege. However, recent studies have shown that power relations in ethnographic fields become more complex and dynamic on account of increasing geographic mobility of scholars (Kim, 2012) and negotiations of researchers’ identities (Adebayo & Njoku, 2023). This reminds us of the importance of “interpretive reflexivity” (Lichterman, 2017) that considers the processes of “how and where which position might matter to the researcher and the researched” (p. 40). Employing SMR therefore enables the investigation of the flux and flow of positioning processes as well as their connections to power structures on the global level.

Epistemic Value of Emotions in SMR

In her introduction of autoethnographic positioning analysis, Greschke (this issue) particularly considers emotions as important navigating tools for understanding social constellations (i.e., how they affect the research process and structure social relations in and beyond research accordingly). This relates to theoretical perspectives about emotions in which emotions are “situation- and culture-specific conceptualizations and classifications of . . . bodily reactions, evaluatively directed towards specific objects, including the historically contingent norms, values, and social expectations to which they are related” (von Scheve & Slaby, 2019, p. 49). This concept refuses the unilateral consideration of individual emotional production and embraces the linkage between emotional lives of individuals and broader social contexts. Furthermore, it also suggests that emotions are “indicative of situational entanglements and the relational co-constitution of actors, situations and evaluative orientations” (von Scheve & Slaby, 2019, p. 43), which corresponds to the fluctuations and intersubjectivity of positioning processes. Particularly from a sociological perspective, emotions are not merely a response to an occurrence but are also guides for our encounters with others because they “do not come from outside the relationship and impact upon it, but are constituted by those relations that make up social life” (Burkitt, 1997, p. 41). Therefore, I consider emotions as key components of positioning processes in which emotional connections to others form a central element of our agency and shape the dialogical interaction (cf. Burkitt, 2016). Investigating effects of emotional experiences on interactions between social actors is thus an important analytical lens to study how social relationships are constituted and arranged.

Like sociological scholars who reflect upon their own emotional experiences during fieldwork to generate rigorous insights about the social contexts they study (e.g., Bergman Blix, 2015; Wettergren, 2015), I use my own emotions as methodological tools to account for “clash moments” produced by my presence. As stated earlier, particularly those negative feelings such as discomfort, insecurity, or anxiety in the field are resources of knowledge production to understand conflicts, dissonance, and friction embedded in asymmetric power structures. Instead of using evocative accounts to empower myself or people similar to my position, emotional responses serve as interfaces that link structure and agency (Barbalet, 2002, p. 3) in my case. The latter argument is premised at least in part on the idea that emotions are socially constructed and thus their “appropriate” display is learnable; or what Hochschild’s (1975, 1979, 2009) famous studies on emotions describe as “feeling rules.” She distinguishes feelings from feeling rules by illustrating a conflicting scenario: It is possible that a situation makes someone annoyed, but he or she is also aware of how they should (not) display their vexations in situations that are not (or less) perceived to be associated with annoyance. It is subsequently necessary to refer to how these feeling rules are established and how they pertain to social structures. Here, the orientation of feeling rules and emotional negotiations could shed light on the constitution of social relations and how we perceive the world, ourselves, and others (cf. Burkitt, 2012).

The Methodological Application of Recording Emotional Experiences

In efforts to capture those moments in which I experienced “awkwardness” which initially seemed indescribable and hardly accessible, I intentionally reflected those emotional involvements in the form of self-dialogues, which provided powerful sources of information about both my personal experience and the historical context of emotional experience (Ellis, 1991a, p. 138). Although I do not deny the effects of physiological mechanisms and processes of emotions, ³ I view emotions as embodied experiences within covert and overt, inner and outer dimensions (Denzin, 1983). In this article, I focus on the organization of my introspective thoughts about my experiences and confrontations. The writing in the brackets and italics refers to the notes I logged about my field experiences after every observation. Here is a brief example to demonstrate how I recorded my experiences:

Shortly after 9:30 the other 3 male participants arrive with their suitcases. They seem very friendly and energetic. One of them approaches me, holds out his hand and says with a smile: “Hello! You must be the instructor.” (It was an awkward situation!) I immediately declare that I am a participant as well. Then I show him the “real” instructor who stands at the door. The man turns towards the instructor and greets her with a friendly smile. She smiles and greets the man, too. (This made me embarrassed. I somehow didn’t dare to look at her directly). Then I go to the other two men and we greet each other. We shake hands and announce the names. (Protocol, translation M.-C.S. ⁴ )

While recalling and reconstructing these happenings in detail, I also found myself reflecting my lived experiences of (especially those “awkward”) emotions. This ex post engagement with puzzlements and confusions I experienced in the field therefore encouraged me to focus on my emotional responses to them as important data for my research. As the example shows, the large part of my data represents the interactions in the field. Given that the notation consists of two forms, I consider the data as remembered episodes with introspective accounts that I study as reflexive documentation. This approach is designed to generate interpretive material and to establish a coherent connection between emotional experiences and social situations. The data is a textual product that strives to retain accountability and plausibility of social situations by integrating reconstructions of life experiences and self-reflections of emotional involvement.

Combining the two most important aspects of strategic membership in my case, I wish to highlight the epistemic value of sociological scholarship on emotions that can further methodological developments of autoethnographic positioning analysis. To demonstrate how this approach could be implemented in research, I describe and analyze positioning processes intertwined with my emotional responses in the following section.

Autoethnographic Positioning Analysis by Example

To illustrate the methodological procedure I used and its epistemic potential, I draw upon the data that documents one of my encounters in an online training ⁵ designed to develop participants’ capacities to establish partnerships with Chinese universities. The training was for members of higher education institutions and included both non- and academic personnel. This class, held in January 2021, was part of a larger program that took place over three half-days. The course provided participants with an overview of the political and educational systems in China as well as firsthand accounts of exchanges with Chinese groups. The cross-cultural training component was the last session of this program and was held virtually over one and a half hours through an online conference platform in which all participants interacted through microphones, chats, and (partially) webcams. During presentations, the use of webcams for course participants was unavailable. The only one exception was the group discussion in the cross-cultural training. Participants were encouraged to turn on their microphones or use the chat function to raise questions or give comments. Before the beginning of the cross-cultural training, we ⁶ took a 30-min lunch break. As the break neared its end, an informal conversation took place:

During the break, I go to my daughter to see what she is doing. She is in the living room, while I do my “field” research in my bedroom. Then I grab snacks in my kitchen. After that, I go back to the computer. 5 minutes before the training gets started, the instructor Martin Farmer ⁷ joins us with his webcam on. The organizer Ms. Kuria turns on her webcam and greets him. Both talk to each other about the organization and working from home. I observe the small talk between them. My webcam and microphone are off. Shortly after, Mr. Farmer says: “A person with a Chinese first name. Is that a Chinese man, a Chinese woman? A Chinese woman probably.” (I felt like I was addressed, but I hesitated whether I should respond right away and point out that I am not from China.)

Ms. Kuria says, “Ms. Spiegelberg, can you hear now?” (That she directly addressed me put me in a difficult situation in which I couldn’t ignore this addressing anymore. Silence wouldn’t be a polite and honest manner for me to response her addressing.)

I write in the chat:

Mei-Chen Spiegelberg, TU Dresden: Hello, just got back from the kitchen. Did I hear my name?

Ms. Kuria replies with a smile, “Yes, that’s right. You heard your name. Your first name. Dr. Farmer had -.” While she is still speaking, Mr. Farmer takes over: “That you are Chinese, I guess. That makes it exciting. So we can discuss if you have a different opinion than mine. That would certainly be interesting for the participants.” (His argument sounded awkward to me. If I have a different opinion, it does not mean that it is because I am Chinese or not German. But it seemed inappropriate for me to disagree with him in the very first encounter.) I turn on my microphone and say with a laugh, “Hi. I just had another sip in my mouth. That’s why I was writing.” Ms. Kuria replies, “You are welcome to do it. There is still time.” But then she realizes that the break is just about over. I laugh: “Now we have to start.” (At that moment, I felt somehow relieved not to talk about where I am from.) She replies: “Exactly. It’s 35, then we’ll get started, I’d say.” She speaks the opening word: “I welcome Dr. Martin Farmer,” and says that this last session closes the conference with “a completely different view” compared to the previous lectures. She hands over the floor to Mr. Farmer. (Protocol, translation M.-C.S.)

Struggle for Authority on Cultural Knowledge and the Strategy Against It

In this opening sequence, though the instructor did not explicitly “name” the addressed person, the organizer acknowledged his surmise and nominated “Ms. Spiegelberg” without any skepticism. Unlike my surname, which was solely employed to state personal identification in a courteous fashion, my Chinese-like first name was understood and interpreted by the instructor and the organizer as a resource for national distinction, and one that ultimately overrode any other possible categories of “human distinctions” ⁸ (Hirschauer, 2021). This linguistically discernible part of my name is a positioning category, which is based on the connectedness between national and personal identification.

This emphasis on national belonging reveals the structural condition of the culture-learning setting, that is, the necessity of an “intracultural” constellation, aligning with the condition of stereotype communication Nazarkiewicz (1997, 1999) suggests in which interlocutors identify themselves possessing the same group membership. ⁹ The presence of a “Chinese” is thus akin to “breaching experiments” (Garfinkel, 1964) in which utterances about “culture-based” problems are risky because the “intracultural” discretion is no longer guaranteed. This was even more evident in the present case when for instance, a different instructor in another training course apologized to me for making a stereotypical statement about China and Chinese culture (Spiegelberg, 2022). The absence of “cultural representatives” on participants’ part is thus intentional and becomes a necessary structural condition for the training courses to function in the manners that they do. Paradoxically, and while social institutions such as Sino-German cross-cultural trainings are designed to mitigate social conflicts, they produce them through cultural and national demarcations.

The problem of this structural condition is even amplified when the instructor re-emphasizes my nationality (Mr. Farmer takes over: “That you are Chinese, I guess. That makes it exciting. So we can discuss if you have a different opinion than mine. That would certainly be interesting for the participants.”). In his claim, he presumes that I will contest and challenge his cultural expertise—because he identifies me as a “Chinese” person and therefore, by default, a quasi-natural expert for Chinese culture. The clear-cut manner in which the instructor conflates nationality with expertise points out how national belonging is considered a powerful resource for accessing and possessing knowledge, so much so that simply “being Chinese” is understood to jeopardize the instructor’s authority on cultural knowledge in the course setting. This in turn shows how the asymmetry of knowledge in cross-cultural training courses is not necessarily structured through the instructor–participant relationship. National categories are also used to negotiate authority on cultural knowledge as well.

To counteract the threat my presence presented to his authority, the instructor framed my presence in the course as an “interesting” act of exchanges for the participants and turned the potential threat to his authority on cultural knowledge into a surplus from which participants could profit. While positioning me as an alternative knowledge source, he also presumed that I would have “a different opinion” than him, ascribing and demoting my knowledge to an “opinion.” Yet, in doing so, he ironically undermines the quality of his own knowledge as well because he seems to feel easily threatened by my “opinions,” which suggests that the knowledge he possesses is not authoritative. In his positioning, there is no longer a clear demarcation between opinion and cultural knowledge, which underlines the dilemma of establishing an evident structure of knowledge in the culture-learning setting. Furthermore, it seems indispensable to forestall criticisms by inviting the presumably opposing “Chinese” voice to discussions. In so doing, his own authority on cultural knowledge can be legitimized against any other possible or critical reading of cultural interpretations. Therefore, the reconstruction of my presence shows the struggle for authority on cultural knowledge and its negotiation on the part of the instructor.

Invective Latency of Transnational Relations

By approaching SMR, it is clear that my attempt to become a participant in the field is a form of “breaching” (Garfinkel, 1964, 1967) that made social norms and orders (that might otherwise remain intangible and invisible) evident and explicit. From this ethnomethodological perspective, breaches are the very moments in which the normality and legitimacy of invective latency ¹⁰ are exposed and challenged.

In response to the instructor’s positioning based on his reconstruction of the breach he faced, I experienced discomfort by virtue of the insignificance of individual personhood in comparison to cultural attributions within transnational relations (His argument sounded awkward to me. If I have a different opinion, it does not mean that it is because I am Chinese or not German.). This “crisis” of personal identity in which self-positioning clashes with others’ positioning of me reflects my struggle of being othered. This case therefore shows that social actors in this field are almost unavoidably situated in the “metainvective positioning circle” (Greschke, this issue) in which categories of human distinction are particularly susceptible. Because national categorization serves as an orientation for framing the course and distributing cultural knowledge, it pushes back against individual personhood or other feasible positioning categories that would challenge this structure. Individuals in this setting are more or less overloaded with their national belonging, which constrains multiple possibilities of positionings. According to Greschke (this issue), when social positions are not unambiguous, exclusive and unchangeable, any specific positioning within a classificatory sorting strategy becomes potentially invective. The national category as the predominant positioning resource is thus invective-driven, particularly in inclusionary and diversity-oriented societies because it reigns supreme among all human-differentiating categories. In this case, the invective latency is structurally conditioned in the transnational relationship.

While the instructor underlined my background as culturally different, he (necessarily) labeled me as the cultural Other and excluded my membership among training participants. His invitation to a joint discussion is a social strategy to prevent challenges of his authority on knowledge, but it also reproduces the imagination of invective communication in transnational relations; essentializing this relation through an intercultural framing. I, on the other hand, disagreed with his statement, yet endured it. In my reflection (His argument sounded awkward to me. If I have a different opinion, it does not mean that it is because I am Chinese or not German), there is no evident emotional patterns (e.g., anger, sadness, or disappointment) beyond a general sentimental feeling which did not drive me enough to even sanction his claim. As the data denotes, my following actions (I turn on my microphone and say with a laugh, “Hi. I just had another sip in my mouth. That’s why I was writing”) are not tinged with any sense of being demoted, degraded, or excluded. The inconsistency between my emotional responses and their performative outcomes indicates the legitimacy of invective acts because the position offered by the instructor that evoked my discomfort was not challenged or repudiated by me at all.

Furthermore, potentially invective acts can never be alleged as “genuine” ones unless or until they are challenged in follow-up communication. Stated differently, they can retain their legitimacy as long as they are not contested. Referring to this point, positioning processes shed light on the complicity of cooperatively permitting invective outcomes of othering. Through my silence, I acquiesced to being labeled as the Other, which facilitated the legitimation of othering and made its invective effects imperceptible. In other words, my contributions to othering processes undergirded invective latency in this transnational relationship. The way I left the instructor’s surmise open highlights how my complicity in the field to mitigate my own uncertainties buttressed the legitimacy of othering.

Entangled with the metainvective positioning circle in this cultural-learning setting, field actors can hardly rid themselves of national categorizations in positionings to account for cultural differences and therefore strive to legitimatize those positionings imbued with essentializations of national categories. This practice presents itself as “up-to-date” for managing contemporary transnational encounters deemed to be culturally problematic, but as a result, enhances the invective latency of transnational relations. Conceptualizations of cultural differences remain framed as predestined and are equated with distinctions through visible, explicit sources that become the basis of categories (e.g., linguistic, ethnic features). By approaching SMR status, my ambiguous status evidently served as an important resource to explore the invective latency embedded in transnational relations.

Managing Potentially Invective Acts

Given that field actors are situated in the metainvective positioning circle, I pointed out the mechanisms that secure and sustain the invective latency of transnational relations. How actors involved in this circle managed and negotiated with those potentially invective acts has yet to be addressed in this section.

Based on the instructor’s use of national categorization to highlight my presence in the class, I was troubled about how such inapt positioning might shatter my self-presentation as an “inconspicuous” participant. Here, the self-positioning and the positioning by others were not reconcilable. Because my presence was miscategorized as an unfavorable condition, my perceived self-presentation (i.e., being a “normal” participant) was not projected into the current situation. This is what Shott (1979) calls embarrassment, which “depends most on role taking with specific others” (p. 1331). Since the reflexive account of embarrassment is based on self-presentation to others (Shott, 1979, p. 1324), others’ misidentification of it restricts this self-presentation. The imprecise and ambiguous reflection of my feelings could be viewed as the embarrassment this mismatch evokes, and my own confusion and struggle to self-identify in this transnational relationship.

However, no significant conflictual interactions followed after the mismatch between self-image and public image (Goffman, 1959). I was neither willing to share with the instructor my national identity nor dispute his assertion, reflective of my own expectations about how to appropriately deal with social relationships in this situational framework (But it seemed inappropriate for me to disagree with him in the very first encounter). At the same time, I “overlooked” the positioning associated with the national category, and instead desired to avoid speaking of my national identity. While the instructor craved to make my status clear, I retained its ambiguity (I turn on my microphone and say with a laugh, “Hi. I just had another sip in my mouth. That’s why I was writing.”). This social strategy was “intentional” to reduce any risk that would endanger the social situation (e.g., dishonoring the instructor by correcting his “failure” or placing myself in an embarrassing situation by describing my self-identity in a way contradictory to his account). The prevarication functions as a withdrawal before serious conflicts jeopardize social relationships. It aligns with what Goffman (1967) describes as “[t]he surest way for a person to prevent threats to his face is to avoid contacts in which these threats are likely to occur” (p. 15).

I did not disclose my personal irritation in the given situation, nor did I know whether my intended claim was legitimate in that context. Reconstructing this situation from Hochschild’s (1979) perspective, my performance did not correspond to my inner experiences, which reflects specific “feeling rules” that should guide me to manage the process of tact pertaining to anticipations of situational appropriateness. Disregarding the positioning by the instructor, and refusing to reveal personal annoyance in this positioning-negotiating context, seemed the safest way to counteract the potential face-threatening act. This positioning aimed to restructure the storyline rather than confront it with an anticipated dilemma for all of us. Indeed, my burden on how to negotiate being labeled was solved by the cooperation of the organizer who brought attention to the administrative framework of the training setting. Skipping over the topic of my national identity to bring the class back to order, the tension produced by subtle othering finally disappeared (At that moment, I felt somehow relieved not to talk about where I am from). Social actors in this field site thoroughly dealt with those potentially invective acts, even if management strategies accompanied these repressed emotions. Because face-work is an exquisite tact to cope with invective dimensions of interactions, investigating emotional responses to them is a possible way to comprehensively reconstruct social situations imbued with invective latency.

Conclusion and Discussion

In this article, I explored one of the ways in which researchers can fruitfully use their personal emotional experiences during participant observations to account for conflictual transnational relationships framed as cultural problems. Drawing upon tenets of autoethnographic positioning analysis, I first elucidated the redistribution of cultural knowledge as an important means to structure role understandings and to reconstruct the plausible authority on cultural knowledge. As my data makes evident, national categorization was deemed as a quasi-natural intrinsic resource to distinguish individuals and to interpret their cultural differences. This mirrors the specific social phenomenon in which individuals are constructed as “culturally-bound” in transnational relations, and their individuality is rendered invisible. The interconnectedness between struggle for authority on cultural knowledge and my “failure” to become a member is thus indicative of the specific mechanisms of imparting cultural knowledge in transnational contexts and of how social institutions such as Sino-German cross-cultural courses produce social conflicts and depart from their initial aim of mitigating them. Based on this analysis, I second discussed the invective latency of transnational relations in this case. Despite the fact that national categorization in positioning ventures on the essentialization of nationality, ethnicity, and heritage, the invective significance of these essentialist understandings of culture is not problematized, but instead endures as a latent doctrine in transnational socialization processes. Finally, I pointed out potentially invective acts in positioning processes through an examination of the correlation between face-work and emotional experiences. It is surprising how the negative emotions I experienced and caused by my own crisis of self-presentation are more ambiguous and imprecise than simply feeling offended or aggrieved. I showed how this “awkwardness” could be better understood as a form of embarrassment that significantly relies on reflexive accounts related to others (Shott, 1979). In this relational constellation, the “avoidance process” (Goffman, 1967) seemed effective for managing potentially invective acts.

Through these findings, I demonstrated the utility of using a strategic membership approach in which I centered the interrelations between positioning processes and my own negative feelings produced from them to account for those social conflicts embedded in a transnational framework. Given that “emotions are experienced in relationship to an object and an activity” (Denzin, 1980, p. 254), investigating emotions, as these findings show, helps us to understand the relational context of self- and other-alignments, which corresponds to the focal point in positioning: to scrutinize how people cope with the current situation in which they are involved (van Langenhove & Harré, 1999, p. 17). The specific value of positioning analysis is the focus on those processes social actors mutually construct, which enables us to explore the dynamization, disruption, and stabilization of social orders and reveals the sustainability of invective latency in transnational relationships. This was illustrated by cooperative permission of othering. In inclusionary societies, othering is considered a highly invective practice. However, as this case shows, it can be trivialized, legitimatized, and performed under the transnational model in a complicit and subtle way that is not necessarily deemed as destructive, unacceptable, or offensive. The mutual construction of positionings and its effects upon and from emotional experiences particularly strengthen the analytical value of SMR status.

I further provided empirical insights into the importance of using SMR to understand specific mechanisms in Sino-German cross-cultural trainings. My strategic attempt to become a member in this field site and my failure to do so indicate the reproduction and multiplication of invective acts, as well as the tensions produced by the metainvective positioning circle. The reconstruction of the field experiences and my own emotional responses to them goes beyond Anderson’s (2006) heuristic image of CMR “who is considered a legitimate participant in the group’s conversations (and activities) through which (potentially multiple and contradictory) first-order constructs are developed, contested and sustained” (pp. 381–382). Instead, I centered my “illegitimate” presence as an access point to explore reconfigurations of social orders produced and contested within and from transnational relations that may have been otherwise overlooked. The fact that my presence was contested by virtue of my presumed national affiliation rather than as a “suspicious researcher” suggests that invective latency is structurally conditioned within the transnational framework, which offers a more thorough reconsideration of the interconnectedness between the ethnographer and the social world under study.

The approach of strategic membership I illustrated through this case of Sino-German cross-cultural trainings was developed during the research process to capture precisely those ambivalences between emotional responses and interactions regulated by expectancies of orders. This approach effectively enhances the visibility of dynamics of positioning process that are shaped by emotional experiences. This acknowledges what James Davies (2010) stated that ethnographers’ “integration” into the field accompanied with emotional experiences has methodological consequences that “shape and bend our subjectivity into a specific kind of research tool” (p. 25). Yet, the epistemic value of emotions is only possible if researchers thoroughly analyze, interpret, and integrate their emotional responses in the field into the social worlds they study. Particularly, those negative feelings are resources for understanding the implicit conflicts that are interconnected with social structures and intersubjective relations. This case only begins to outline the great potential and utility of strategic membership. Exploring and broadening this method in the future may provide further insights and implications for studying social phenomena, especially social conflicts in transnational socialization processes.