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Fostering Surprise and Productive Discomfort in Audience Studies through Multi-Sited Ethnography

Kim Trager-Bohley

Today an increasing number of third-generation audience scholars have experimented with multi-sited ethnography in order to demystify and “ground” everyday life in a mediatized, globalized world. This impulse is particularly strong among those who are interested in new media such as mobile phones, blogs, and podcasts (Bakardjieva, 2005; Hartmann, 2006; Karl, 2009). Many of these researchers have already pushed the boundaries of ethnography beyond the field's early theoretical formulations of this approach (see Radway, 1988), for example by defining fieldsites conceptually rather than spatially. Interestingly, though, with a few notable exceptions (Green, 1999; Lotz & Ross, 2004), there has been relatively little shop talk collectively among these scholars about the pragmatics, ethics, and implications of multi-sited ethnography. Surprisingly, some keystone contemporary overviews in audience studies only devote a couple pages to this methodology (see Bird, 2003).

What, if anything, does multi-sited ethnography offer media and audience studies? The present chapter explores this question. Ultimately, I argue that multi-sited ethnography has the potential to generate greater insights into new modes of translocal social experiences and everyday life in a mediatized, globalized world than a single-sited audience/media study or a political economy-based analysis. Moreover, I contend that the insights garnered from the former approach are more likely to reveal the fluid and multilayered complexities of power dynamics and social relationships than the latter modes. Finally, I suggest that multi-sited ethnography is a particularly effective approach to discover the intertextual links and disjunctures among various intersecting, though not always apparent, discourses and sites where we can witness the fabrication of the taken for granted concept of culture.

In my experience, multi-sited ethnography has offered an important methodological tool to examine the continuity and disruption between competing ideologies, practices, and discourses of reading, in an age in which global capitalism is increasingly structuring and intersecting with consumers' media experiences. Drawing on the ethnographic and theoretical problems I encountered during my fieldwork on global sponsors of literacy in the United States and Singapore, I suggest that there are several dimensions of multi-sited ethnography that have the potential to invigorate tired narratives of audience studies and to disrupt limited notions of reception, of audience activity, and of the global–local nexus.

Though multi-sited ethnographies have informed and inspired the “research imaginary” of media scholars – for example, Nick Couldry's (2003) conceptualization of “passing ethnography” (pp. 49–52) and Patrick Murphy and Marwan Kraidy's (2003) understanding of “translocal ethnography” (pp. 304–305) – in most cases multi-sited media ethnography has been carried out by cultural anthropologists. Here are three examples in cultural anthropology: Abu-Lughod's (1997, 2005) studies, which track a television serial as it circulates from Cairo to Upper Egypt, Hannerz'(2003, 2004) studies, which investigate the practices of foreign news correspondents in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Cape Town; and Rotenberg's (2005) study, which explores the transnational connections between podcasters, producers, listeners, and advertisers.

These studies deploy ethnographic observations from fieldwork to illuminate contemporary modes of translocal social experiences. They also provide important insights into the ways in which the micro-practices of everyday life, including media rituals and media consumption, are tied to larger, macro-forces of global capitalism. Most notably for the purposes of this chapter, these authors reflect about the ethical and methodological issues that typically mark this genre of research. Unfortunately, in most audience/media studies that have attempted this kind of multi-sited approach, such reflexivity is absent or tenuous. All too often the phrase “multi-sited ethnography” is just dropped into the methodological section of a media studies article, without much explanation or discussion.

While anthropologists of various stripes have been grappling with the benefits and pitfalls of multi-sitedness for years (Coleman & von Hellermann, 2009; Falzon, 2009), media scholars have been slower to engage in a sustained dialogue about the rationale, proposed objectives, and political/ethical stakes of this approach. Moreover, when one flips through current and past issues of the Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, the Global Media Journal, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and other journals, only a few studies explicitly position themselves as multi-sited ethnographies. Even global media studies are marked by “a paucity” of works that directly embody or discuss this approach, as Kraidy and Murphy (2008) lament (p. 346). Clearly a large number of media ethnographies still remain single-sited, at least geographically (Baisnée & Marchetti, 2006; Hasty, 2006).

Intriguingly, several researchers who have conducted multi-sited or multi-sited(esque) media ethnographies have deliberately chosen alternative names to label their work. For example, Georgiou (2006) injects the phrase “multi-positioned ethnography” to describe her study, which draws on fieldwork research carried out in London and New York and designed to explore mediatized spaces and diasporic cultures among the Greek Cypriots (p. 35). And, though Terhi Rantanen (2005) draws on George Marcus'understanding of multi-sited ethnography and asserts that “multi-sitedeness” is a key term in her study, she prefers to use the phrase “global mediagraphy” rather than “multi-sited ethnography” to define the methodological approach in the book The Media and Globalization, which uses ethnographic methods such as oral history to examine how “four generations of three families” dispersed across five countries “connect or disconnect via media communications” (p. 14).

Perhaps some scholars who study the media and its audiences are reticent about defining parts of their work as “multi-sited ethnographies” because of the stern, albeit necessary and productive, critiques that were levied at the pioneers of media ethnography: they were attacked for producing only “quasi-ethnographic” studies, which did not live up to the anthropological ideal (Abu-Lughod, 1997, Ang, 1996; Bird, 1992; Murphy & Kraidy, 2003; Nugent & Shore, 1997; Ortner, 1995). The ongoing criticism waged at contemporary multi-sited projects within cultural anthropology may also give some media scholars pause (Candea, 2007; Coleman & von Hellermann, 2009; Hage, 2005). On top of this, reports of cultural anthropologists researching more than eight geographically dispersed fieldsites in one study (Falzon, 2009, p. 17) and assertions made by Peterson (2003, p. 269) and others that, “to be done properly, multi-sited ethnography may well require a team of ethnographers” are no doubt overwhelming – say, for a media studies doctoral student, who in all likelihood has only taken one or two courses in ethnographic fieldwork and none specifically geared toward multi-sited ethnography, as this remains an undertaught research method in communication and media graduate programs.

Of course, these are just speculations. One certainty, though, is that, at this point in time, the role and place of multi-sited ethnographies in media studies in general and in audience studies specifically seems unclear. This position of multi-sited ethnography is all the more puzzling given the fact that, in his highly influential article on multi-sited ethnography, cultural anthropologist George Marcus (1995) asserted that media studies was “one important arena” in which this approach was emerging. What happened? And how might an increased engagement with multi-sited ethnographies revitalize the field?

In this chapter I argue that multi-sited ethnography has the potential to break down the circumscribed boundaries that have enclosed media/audience studies, if researchers avail themselves of its central strengths – its emphasis on unpredictable outcomes of fieldwork and on flexibility. Too often, media/audience study scholars have tended to hamstring ethnographic methods by making a priori assumptions about the audiences the audiences, their activities, the research sites, and the temporal sequence of the research (Amit, 2000, p. 17). In doing this, researchers do not leave themselves open to discovering the unexpected connections and disjunctions that are supposed to unfold during a project (Marcus, 1995). Consequently their fieldwork experiences and subsequent accounts contain a lot of recycled themes and few surprises.

I contend that “being surprised” is an important component of intellectual inquiry, especially in ethnography, even though it has received little attention in cultural studies and media studies, as noted by Murphy (1999, p. 208). When entering the field, media researchers need to embrace a flexible research imaginary that is open to surprise, modification, and the productive discomfort that comes with the unknown. Fortunately, several overlapping elements embedded in the multi-sited ethnographic approach encourage this orientation: (1) its tracking strategies; (2) its emphasis on complicitous relationships; (3) its greater exposure to multiple perspectives, including multi-level power dynamics; and (4) its unbounded, open-ended notions of the field, which are not limited or constrained by place.

It is important to note that one particular aspect of multi-sited ethnography prematurely closes, or at least limits, research possibilities and surprises: its conceptualization of the object of inquiry. I discuss this limitation in the next section. Here I also give a brief overview of the origin and development of multi-sited ethnography, especially as it pertains to media and audience studies. Then I provide a description of my multi-sited approach to global sponsors of literacy. The remainder of the article ethnographically contextualizes the four aforementioned dimensions of multi-sited ethnography and discusses their potential to reinvigorate theory construction and methodological innovation in audience/media studies.

Multi-Sited Ethnography: Possibilities, Problems, and Pleas

As a concept, multi-sited ethnography made its official début on the academic radar in 1995, with the publication of George Marcus' “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” This is not to say that anthropologists and others weren't previously practicing this sort of method. They were, of course, as Marcus carefully details (pp. 102–105). But, prior to his article, multi-sited ethnography lacked a unifying name, a documented history, and an articulated vision. Marcus gave this approach a voice and brought seemingly disparate areas of study under one methodological roof. During the past 15 years, Marcus' conception of multi-sited ethnography has been critiqued, modified, and “refunctioned” by researchers across the social sciences who have adopted multi-sited approaches to explore the ways in which world systems such as globalization, capitalism, migration, postcolonialism, and transport technology impact local and transnational networks, flows, and movements (Holmes & Marcus, 2004, 2005).

Marcus' (1995) “reformative thesis,” as Falzon (2009) calls it, can be read as an attempt to elevate ethnography's place in an increasingly globalized world and as an intervention into debates that questioned whether this approach could keep pace with the complex systems, processes, and realities that characterize a postmodern society (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Marcus, 1995, p. 97). Marcus defined the object of inquiry in multi-sited ethnography as the circulation of particular social formations – such as objects, identities, and cultural meanings – embedded in interlocking world systems, in diffuse time–space (p. 96).

One significant point to stress here is that Marcus initiated a shift in the focus of fieldwork, from set places and subjects to the movement of complex social formations that cannot be investigated from a single fieldsite (Hartman, 2006, p. 280; Marcus, 1998). This has obvious implications for the audience study scholar, because, as she examines a particular formation that moves along and through circuits and paths, her inquiry will inevitably be pushed beyond “an audience,” “the text,” and “reception” due to the fact that a social formation on the move (be it a television show, a communication practice, or a media corporation) will invariably intersect with multiple social actors (producers, cultural critics, editors, distributors, and so on) and cultural/communicative contexts (production, distribution, public reception, home viewing, cultural performances, and impersonations).

For Marcus, “the very heart” of the multi-sited mode is “following connections, associations and putative relationships” among and through multiple sites that crosscut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system” (Marcus, 1995, p. 97). Therefore he advocated that researchers adopt tracking strategies that would enable this sort of intellectual discovery. More specifically, he urged scholars to literally follow the objects of their study, for example “the people,” “the thing,” “the metaphor,” “the conflict,” “the biography,” and “the plot, story or allegory.” Researchers have added to Marcus' original list since its inception. Strauss (2000), for example, decided to “follow the practice” in her transnational study of yoga. And Green (1999) attempted to follow multiple paths within her single study of virtual reality technologies. Today certain tracking strategies have been identified as particularly apt for specific fields. For example, Boyer and Hannerz (2006) encourage ethnographers of journalism to “follow the story.”

Researchers of education, migration, sociology, religion, and other fields have viewed Marcus' conceptualization of multi-sited ethnography as groundbreaking because it pushed ethnographic research beyond the classical anthropological notions of a single, bounded fieldsite (often represented as Malinowskian ethnography), and it broadened and diversified the scope of topics deemed worthy of ethnographic inquiry. As noted earlier, though, a number of reservations have been expressed about multi-sited ethnography. From the beginning, some scholars have challenged Marcus' depiction of the “boundedness” of early fieldwork and fieldsites (Falzon, 2005; Hendry, 2003, p. 499; Strathern, 2004). Other scholars have suggested that, in purporting to study the “world system,” multi-sited ethnography embodies the very tacit holism it was trying to critique and escape (Candea, 2007; Hage, 2005).

One of the most frequent criticisms waged against multi-sited ethnography is that it compromises the researcher's ability to capture local texture, depth, and breadth (Burawoy, 2003; Hage, 2005). This charge is of particular interest to, and concern for, audience and media scholars, who have for years bemoaned the contextually challenged ethnographies that too often characterize their craft (Ang, 1996; Darling-Wolf, 2003). Probably for this reason, Abu-Lughod (1997), Kraidy and Murphy (2008) as well as others insist that a multi-sited ethnographic approach to audience and media studies must work in tandem with a Geertzian “thick description,” which is based on rich contextual interpretation (Geertz, 1973). Though Kraidy and Murphy seem to concede that Geertzian thick description has some limitations (e.g., its peripheral placement of power issues), and though Abu-Lughod suggests that it may need to undergo “some creative stretching to fit mass-mediated lives,” none of these researchers explains what sort of modifications thick description needs when extended to multi-sited ethnography (Abu-Lughod, 1997, p. 110). In such applications, do our conceptualizations and practices of thick description need to be modified? I think so.

A multi-sited ethnography in which the ethnographer geographically and conceptually follows a mobile object of inquiry through systems, chains, or paths is going to require a type of thick description that looks and feels different from the thick description that is traditionally associated with interpretative ethnography. This is because the latter approach is directed by different goals and assumptions from those of the former. Traditionally, for example, one assumption of thick description is that, to interpret and understand a particular culture, an ethnographer must fully immerse herself within it (Geertz, 1973, p. 4). Yet, as noted by Horst (2009, p. 126), “the purpose of multi-sited fieldwork is not a ‘full,’ located understanding of ‘culture,’ but rather one which targets transnational networks and flows.” For Horst (2009), Wittel (2000, p. 5), and others, depth and breadth in a multi-sited ethnography is sought through the thick description of a network, not of its individual nodes. Given the practicalities and objectives of multi-sited ethnography, some sites will – and should – be thicker than others.

For the purposes of this chapter, my primary concern with Marcus' formulation of multi-sited ethnography is his preconceived and ultimately reified understanding of the object of inquiry (social formations such as objects, identities, and cultural meanings). Even though he and his colleagues stress the importance of choosing research sites as they unfold in the field, a posteriori, and the importance of following the moving objects through their various crisscrossing and unexpected paths (Falzon, 2009), these researchers do not embrace the same open and flexible orientation toward the transformative nature of the objects themselves and their potential conceptual and material offshoots. In my study of global sponsors of literacy, which will be detailed in the next section, my initial object of inquiry changes and multiplies. While I set out initially to follow a “thing” (according to the corporate model), that thing soon became coupled with a “practice” (book browsing) that led to multiple physical and discursive “conflicts” (for example, kiasu browsers). Through my tracking, I also observed the way in which individuals whom I labeled as “audiences” (book browsers) in one site transformed themselves into “producers” (letter writers) in another site.

Drawing on his multi-sited ethnography of Malayali migrants in Rome and Ernakulam, Gallo (2009) considers the transformative nature of multi-sited objects of inquiry and of pleas for a more radical openness to this reality. His reformulation of the relationship between multi-sited ethnography and the object of inquiry is particularly relevant to my insistence on the intellectual importance of surprise. So I quote Gallo (2009) at length:

In line with Gallo and others, I urge multi-sited audience scholars to allow their initial object of inquiry, along with their site selection, to unfold and transform through their fieldwork and relationships with informants – or “paraethnographers,” to use a term by Marcus. An inability to recognize or adapt to the transformative modifications of circulating social formations will result in the same sort of closure that the conceptual foreclosure of fieldsites engenders.

My Project: Multi-Sited? Multilocal? Or Just Multiperspectival?

During graduate school I became interested in the anthropology of reading and textual practices in the context of globalizing capitalism. More specifically, I became fascinated with the ways in which commercial “sponsors of literacy” increasingly structured and intervened in the reading experience. Deborah Brandt (1998) developed the concept sponsors of literacy to refer to any agents – personal or public, elite or nonelite – who “enable, support, teach and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 166). I have found her work extremely useful in considering how individual textual practices are tied to larger socioeconomic structures. Brandt's work prompted me to ask: How have the practices and ideologies associated with particular sponsors of literacy impacted mundane textual practices such as reading, book buying, and bookselling? How have ordinary readers and print professionals understood and responded to these powerful cultural institutions?

With the growing popularity and ascendancy of Borders Group, Inc. and Barnes & Noble in the late 1990s, I began thinking about these questions in the context of mega-bookstores. Importantly, Borders and Barnes & Noble are not just companies in the business of selling books and CDs. They are powerful corporate sponsors of literacy that have in recent decades rivaled traditional ones – such as libraries and public schools – in guiding individuals on “what, when, why, and how” to read (Brandt, 2001). The conceptualization of reading that mega-bookstores propagate stands in contrast with the reading experiences institutionalized by traditional sponsors of literacy in the West. These sponsors taught the masses in their home country (Soltow & Stevens, 1981) and abroad (Forbes, 1986; Rooke, 1980) that reading was a serious activity, and they tamed unruly readers by imposing discipline on the body and on the mind. In general public schools, religious Christian publishers, and independent bookstores have traditionally encouraged slow, deliberate reading, reading as a process driven by the goals of spiritual enlightenment, intellectual development, and aesthetic awareness, not by sensory pleasures (Wright, 2005).

In the 1990s US mega-bookstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble began to promote a conception of “good reading” and “good bookselling” that stood in contrast to the one propagated by traditional sponsors of literacy (Miller, 2006; Mitchell, 2006; Trager, 2005; Wright, 2005). In an effort to increase sales and attract consumers, Barnes & Noble and the Borders Group ushered in a social, sensual model of reading, which distanced itself from the didactic functions incorporated by the model of traditional sponsors of literacy. By the late 1990s Borders began transporting this model of bookselling and this ideology of reading to the Asia–Pacific region. Borders opened its doors in Singapore on November 1997, during the maelstrom of the Asian financial crisis. With an initial stock of more than 120,000 book and 2,000 magazines, Borders became the source of another maelstrom in the book world. Its “social, sensual” model of bookselling was unequivocally viewed as the format innovator among consumers and print professionals (Trager-Bohley, 2010).

My first endeavor in exploring how social and sensual models of bookselling intervene in everyday reading practices took place in a Borders bookstore located in a Midwestern university town in the United States. There I conducted a single-sited ethnographic study that entailed in-depth interviews, participant observation, and systematic participant observation. After conducting interviews and engaging in participant observation for one year, I decided to systematically document and analyze the café reading that occurred in the store. So I recorded the readers' activities on a reader profile sheet. The time frame was one week, from nine o'clock in the morning to eleven o'clock in the evening each day.

The reader profile sheet was designed to help me assess reading practices and habits, including reading absorption level. I noted, for example, how many books, magazines, and newspapers readers brought to their table. I documented the types of material they read. I documented how many reading breaks they took. I recorded whether they read alone or with others. And I timed how long for they read. On the basis of these profile sheets and of my other fieldwork, I discovered that a large percentage of these café readers “inhabited,” to use a term by Fuss (1989), many of the contemporary reading practices, including hyper-reading breaks, genre blurring, and manic skimming, that mega-bookstore promote to increase consumption.

Through interviews and participant observation, I discovered that even the self-defined serious readers in the café, who shared a history of being closely affiliated with traditional sponsors of reading (that is, libraries, universities, and literary critics), had adopted many of the above practices. I found their responses to the reading environment constructed by Borders significant because it provided some insight into the socializing potential of mega-bookstores as contemporary sponsors of literacy. In my findings, I argued that Borders had intervened in the way in which these individuals came to understand and practice reading.

Though some of my informants, namely the more serious readers, characterized the reading culture at Borders as undisciplined when comparing it to that of libraries, for example, the environment still seemed pretty orderly, to judge by my Singaporean friend's account of the “chaotic” scene that marked the Borders bookstore in her home country. Her report encouraged me to read more, among other factors, about some of the controversies, confusion, and questions that accompanied Borders' transnational expansion in the late 1990s.

Informed by my research in the United States, I became interested in the way in which Borders Group and other transnational booksellers such as the Japanese-based Kinokuniya emerged as global sponsors of literacy in Singapore and elsewhere during the late twentieth century. At this time, the internationalization of transnational booksellers and of the practices they encouraged had not been the subject of a focused research. To pursue this topic, I knew that my research would have to take a transnational turn. A multi-sited project began to emerge. But where does one begin? At the time when I was designing my study, Borders had more than two dozen international stores in five different countries. The question of how to select the initial fieldsite is a common concern among multi-sited ethnographers, who are often attempting to follow an object that is located geographically or conceptually in multiple sites (Falzon, 2009). Eventually, on the basis of several conceptual and practical factors, I chose to commence my transnational fieldwork in Singapore.

To begin, Borders Singapore was the corporation's first international store, and I thought it would be interesting and revealing to study this business prototype. Second, I thought the cultural context of Borders Singapore would provide a greater contrast with my single-sited study in the United States than the other (mostly Western) international Borders stores would. Though I was pursuing an initial field-site that was culturally and politically very different from my former fieldsite, I also sought to do research in a country in which English was spoken by the majority of its citizens. As an initial fieldsite, Borders Singapore met this condition. Finally I was drawn to do research in Singapore because of the country's multicultural diversity and geographical proximity to other international Borders stores. With a limited budget and a one-year time frame, I thought these variables would afford me some flexibility in exploring the multiple and diverse cultural sites that might unfold during my fieldwork. In general, I tried to pick an initial fieldsite that blended multi-sited opportunities with the feasibility concerns of doing a project abroad.

During my year in Singapore (2005–2006), a former British colony that is now an island nation-state in Southeast Asia with a population of more than 4 million, I conducted open-ended interviews with more than 80 individuals associated with Singapore's print culture, including publishers, writers, librarians, booksellers, everyday readers, and government officials. In addition to the in-depth interviews, I conducted five focus groups with individuals associated with various sectors of a print culture (e.g., Malay librarians and Readasia book club members). In Singapore I tried to go to as many book and cultural activities as possible. To triangulate my interviews and participant observation data, I distributed a five-page survey concerning reading and textual practices to 235 undergraduate students enrolled at the National University of Singapore.

While my research in the United States involved “studying sideways” and “studying up” in a single place-based site, my research in Singapore required me to study “up,” “down,” and “sideways,” in virtual and physical space, while considering the complex ways in which “audiences” participate in and/or intersect with a web of social actors (producers, distributors, journalists, and the government) in the production, consumption, and reception of transnational media (Nader, 1972; Hannerz, 1998, 2004). While initially I had only planned to interview print professionals and consumers associated with Singapore's English print cultures, eventually I broadened my informant pool so as to include professionals and consumers associated with Singapore's Chinese, Malay, and Tamil book sectors. This unexpected expansion of sites was triggered by several field opportunities that opened up through my meeting new informants – who became paraethnographers – associated with these minority print cultures.

I classify my research in Singapore (not just my geographical move to Singapore from the United States) as multi-sited, and not just multilocal, because of the cultural differences that marked each site. As others have noted, a site or field doesn't necessarily have to be a geographical place involving a sojourn to two or more countries (Falzon, 2005; Gallo, 2009). Of this, Mark-Anthony Falzon asserts: “It seems that multi-sitedness actually means not just sites, but spatialized (cultural) differences – it is not important how many and how distant sites are, what matters is that they are different” (2005, p. 13). I would also contend that my project on global sponsors of literacy is best defined as multi-sited rather than multiperspectival, because it goes beyond offering diverse perspectives from one site about a set social formation. It examines various perspectives found in multiple and diverse sites about mobile, transformative social formations.

Drawing on my fieldwork in the United States and Singapore, I will now explore four overlapping elements embedded in multi-sited ethnographies that encourage surprise, productive discomfort, and a flexible research imaginary.

The Diffusion, Modification, and Rejection of Borders' Model of Bookselling

Dimension One: The Unexpected Connections and Disjunctions Discovered Through Tracking

During my first few weeks in Singapore, I spent much of my time observing the reading and social scenes that occurred in the 32,000-square-foot Borders bookstore on Wheelock Place, off Orchard Road, the posh shopping district in Singapore. I took notes throughout the store – in the jungle of the children's section, in the cruising zone by the magazines, and in the al fresco Borders Bistro. Given my interest in tracking the internationalization and diffusion of Borders' social, sensual model of reading, I was particularly eager to discover the ways in which the store's layout, clientele, title selection, and social practices were similar to and different from those found in the Borders store that I had previously examined. Early on in my participant observation of Borders, I became aware of one significant difference between its bistro and the Borders café that I had observed in the United States. An excerpt from my fieldnotes offers these observations:

While Borders Group Inc. attempts to construct a social, sensual model of reading in all of its stores, it adapts and modifies its format to ensure financial success. Borders' decision to prohibit unpurchased print material in its bistro was, in part, a preemptive move to curb potentially destructive behavior that might reduce store spending. This policy was a major deviation from the bookseller's standard operating procedure in the United States, where its stores encourage patrons to take unpaid material into the cafés. Borders' decision to prohibit newspaper browsing in its Singapore shop was another departure from corporate standards. Collectively, these differences and others contributed to reading environments distinguishable from those that I observed and documented in the United States (Trager, 2005).

The disciplinary signs throughout the Borders store in Singapore were also in contrast to the store environment that I observed in the United States. In the Singapore store, customers were barraged with “dos and don'ts” signs such as:

Despite its explicit disciplinary measures, Borders Singapore still held onto its reputation as a social, cool, liberal hangout place. In interviews and focus groups with young middle-class and upper-class consumers, Borders was often described as “funky,” “hip,” and “fun” with the “latest blockbuster books.” For many educated and affluent Singaporeans, Borders constituted a spatial conduit for the articulation and performance of their cosmopolitan identity or global persona. In regard to this motivation, consider the following comment from a male Singaporean Malay reader in my Wardah Books (English Islamic Bookstore) focus group: “People are enjoying this moment. They can go to a huge bookstore like Borders in between shopping and going to a movie. And they can feel like they are a part of this global culture.” In news accounts and political speeches, Borders and other transnational booksellers in Singapore were equated with the global and the modern, while local bookstores were critiqued as provincial. The majority of booksellers in Singapore modified their models to various degrees, in response to Borders' initial format innovations, as the following headline in The Straits Times highlights: “Times [the Bookshop] revamps to draw Borders' crowd” (Kerk, 2002).

During my fieldwork, several of the booksellers whom I interviewed conceded that they had spent time at Borders in an attempt to understand the success of its corporate model. In regard to this, a male Chinese Singaporean owner of a used bookstore said: “One has to admit they [Borders] are successful. Our store is different, what we do is different, but I have learned a couple of things from them.” While tracking the way in which Borders' social, sensual model of reading was being diffused, modified, and sometimes rejected by Singaporean booksellers, I met two former Borders employees who now own or work at an independent bookstore. They both asserted that the present stores in which they work are informed, in one way or another, by the knowledge and skills they acquired while working at Borders. Both stressed, however, the fundamental ways in which their current bookselling practices and philosophies differed (oftentimes quite intentionally) from Borders' model of bookselling.

After two years of work, Mu'Hsin left Borders to become a bookseller at an Islamic bookstore, Wardah Bookstore. In an interview, his boss pointed out several contributions that Mu'Hsin had made to his store, including the open display of books. Mu'Hsin and his boss wanted to capture some of the physical “attractiveness” that Borders embodies. Though they had few qualms with the social, sensual dimensions of Borders' model (minus a few menu items in the bistro), they thought it was missing another important “S” word: spiritual guidance. For Mu'Hsin, bookselling is a calling, and it has the potential to play an important role in spiritual development. For this reason Mu'Hsin didn't approve of Borders' “fast-food approach” to bookselling, in which booksellers seldom seek to understand a reader's knowledge and spiritual base. At Wardah booksellers are expected to offer book recommendations that are in harmony with their customers' “spiritual level.”

Kenny Leck was once a shining star at the Borders bookstore in Singapore, and he even has an “employee of the month” certificate to prove it. But, a few years into his job, he became dissatisfied with the corporate culture of the store, and his performance began to decline in the eyes of his supervisor. Eventually he was fired from Borders. But this termination actually inspired Kenny to fulfill his dream of owning a bookstore that “would include all the things I liked about Borders and exclude the things I didn't [like].” Books Actually, a quirky store that specializes in literature, is the manifestation of Kenny's dream. A large sign in the middle of his store captures one of his dissatisfactions with Borders' model of reading. In big black print, the sign reads: Books Actually Worth Reading. And it is a critique of Borders on the grounds that the latter carries, in his opinion, too many bestsellers. Though Kenny has problems with some dimensions of Borders' corporate model, he admits: “I learned a lot there, and some of the things I did there, I do here [such as author signings].”

In line with the body of literature on “local entrepreneurs” and globalization (Martin-Barbero, 1993; Skalli, 2006), my oral histories with Mu'Hsin and Kenny demonstrate the powerful role that local actors play in driving global forces and local variation forward. These former Borders employees are neither victims nor heroes in any sort of stale global–local audience study plot. They are just entrepreneurs/workers who have tried to capitalize on the “local” and “global” resources at their disposal, within an evolving cultural context full of “local” and “global” constraints. Their stories illustrate some of the unexpected connections and disjunctions I made while tracking the circulation of Borders' social, sensual model of bookselling transnationally and multilocally.

Dimension Two: Complicit Informants as Site Generators

During my in-depth interview with Kenny Leck (see above, p. 69), Enoch Ng Kwang Cheng, publisher of Firstfruits, walked into Books Actually. I recognized him from the Singapore Writers' Festival and other book events. While Kenny and I continued our talk, Enoch displayed several of his new titles in front of the store. Enoch and Kenny had become friends through their mutual interest in promoting Singaporean literature. After hearing more about my project, Enoch insisted that I should spend more time considering non-English-based print cultures in Singapore, specifically the Chinese reading/print cultures. He believed that the arrival of transnational booksellers in Singapore had also affected this sector. At first I resisted slightly: “The problem is that I don't know Mandarin,” I said. Convinced that non-English-based bookstores were an important area to explore, Enoch walked me down to Bras Basah Complex (Book City), introduced me to some Chinese booksellers, and helped me conduct and translate a couple of interviews.

Though I felt some anxiety and momentary discomfort walking into these Bras Basah shops, unprepared as I was for these unexpected interviews, the information that I gathered through my fieldwork on Chinese booksellers revealed an important and surprising disjuncture. Most Chinese booksellers asserted that their stores and their activities had not been affected by the arrival of Borders' social, sensual model of bookselling. Of this, Yeng Pway Ngon, owner of Grassroots Book Room, said in our interview (translated by Enoch): “Borders has not affected us [Chinese booksellers] but Kino has, because Chinese students go there now.” Chinese booksellers did not try to emulate Borders' model of reading and bookselling. In fact, several took pride in distinguishing their stores from it. Some Chinese booksellers did, however, view the Japanese-based bookstore, Kinokuniya, as a model to emulate because of its success and ability to preserve its Asian identity.

I think my collaboration with Enoch illustrates the complicit relationships that often mark multi-sited ethnography. Though these relationships can certainly exist in a single-sited audience study, they are more common and intense in multi-sited ethnography due to the various dynamics of this approach (Falzon, 2009; Gustavson & Cytrynbaum, 2003; Marcus, 1995, 2009), which include the basic realization that a researcher cannot be an expert in every potential site that unfolds. Consequently she must rely more heavily on her informants and on their knowledge of sites. Gustavson and Cytrynbaum (2003) contend that the relational dynamics in multi-sited ethnography push the researcher to multiple sites. I agree. And in this way informants become “site generators.” With more sites come more topics, and diverse subjects that may surprise the researcher. In turn, these surprises, as illustrated through my encounter with Enoch, can lead to fruitful connections or disconnections.

A former reporter for The Straits Times was another of my informants who became a site generator. Through her I learned that the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore drew on Borders' social, sensual model of reading in revamping the NLB and a few of its other branches. Though I had not originally planned on spending much time researching this library or its governing body, I chose to embrace a flexible research imaginary, wherein the NLB became a key site where I explored the circulation of Borders' corporate model. Through interviews with NLB members and others, I discovered that, soon after Borders arrived in Singapore, the visitorship rate at the National Library dropped. Of this, one NLB manager said: “When Borders came in, my senior quite openly said we are competing with Borders. So we adopted Borders' strategy by repacking the look and the feel of the library.”

The NLB attempted to compete with Borders through emulation. “Borders [Bookstore] was used as a model for emulation, as it was successful in bringing people in and spending their discretionary spare time. By looking at how Borders displayed its books and created the ‘cool’ look, we [learned] from them,” said former NLB Chief Executive N. Varaprasad. To emulate and compete with Borders, the NLB needed to know the specific areas in which it lagged behind its market competitor. Therefore the corporate planning division of the NLB conducted a market competitor analysis that positioned Borders as its market challenger. On the basis of the results and implications of this study, the NLB borrowed Borders' marketing concept of “the third place,” along with other lifestyle retailing techniques from this commercial sponsor of literacy.

At many levels, the NLB's efforts “to revitalize the image of the public libraries and to debunk the stereotype of libraries as old, unfriendly and uninteresting” were highly successful (Library 2000, 1994, pp. 9–10). Clearly the NLB's appropriation of marketing and retailing techniques practiced by Borders bookstore and other mega-bookstores helped the NLB achieve its successful makeover. But it appears that there have been some unexpected consequences connected to this model emulation.

In a 2006 press release, the NLB reported that “[it had] seen an alarming three-fold in the number of forum letters to the newspapers about the lack of library etiquette among library users.” While doing fieldwork in various libraries in Singapore, I heard numerous complaints from customers and patrons about bad library etiquette. During my focus group with Malay librarians, one woman said that “Borders-like behavior” such as “talking on the phone” and not returning books was on the rise. The following confessional comment, made by one library patron – MoMo – illustrates the sort of behavior the librarian was referencing: “I don't usually put back the magazines. Are you supposed to? I've seen others leave them on the table.”

Through further fieldwork, I eventually concluded that the third-place brand and lifestyle practices that the NLB library adopted were embedded in Western capitalist habits and had corresponding ideological underpinnings, which triggered the “customer-oriented” (“Borders-like”) behavior that some Singaporeans, especially the elderly, deemed “bad.” Certainly the NLB's strategy of co-opting consumer culture to renew itself and to compete with transnational actors such as Borders confirms findings in other studies, which underscore the fallacy of simplistic audience studies and political economy-based analyses that equate the local with “stasis” and the global with “dynamic change” (Smith, 2001, p. 157; Chong, 2003).

Importantly, the NLB's version of the third place was introduced to and experienced by some segments of the local population such as disadvantaged Singaporeans, who probably would not have entered the Borders bookstore. In this way the NLB served as an important cultural mediator between local and global forces. While the NLB's appropriation of Borders' third-place brand demonstrates the creativity and resourcefulness of local players, it also demonstrates the constraints these agents face in controlling diffused models and concepts. Though transnational models, concepts, and practices have become dislocated from their geographical roots, they are not unmarked by their origin. My identification of the transformative modification of Borders' social, sensual model of bookselling – as it moved through various nodes in Singapore such as the National Public Library – would not have been possible without the help of my complicit informants or site generators, as I have come to call them.

Competing Discourses, Ideologies and Conflicts Concerning Borders' Practices

Dimension Three: Increased Perspectives Produce “Messy” Narratives

In tracing the circulation of Borders' social, sensual model of bookselling from the United States to Singapore and then to various sites within this island nation, I was frequently exposed to competing discourses, ideologies, and conflicts concerning the reading and the social practices that this sponsor of literacy encouraged.

When the Borders bookstore opened its doors in Singapore, many local booksellers still encased their print merchandise in shrinkwrap. But Borders laid all of its books and magazines naked on the shelf and ushered in an age of unbridled browsing in this equatorial island. Since the 1990s, browsing has been an integral aspect of Borders' “social, sensual model” of bookselling – one that helps yield an intense, experiential (“hands-on”) shopping experience for consumers (Trager, 2005). A number of Singaporean consumers, however, handled Borders' printed material in a fashion different from what this self-avowed “leading global book seller” expected or desired.

For almost a decade, various social agents – including publishers, booksellers, “good patrons,” and newspaper editors – censured “rough book browsers” at Borders for dog-earring magazines, clogging book aisles and failing to return magazines where they belong (Trager-Bohley, 2011). In many cases, the practices and discourses surrounding the browsing debacle at Borders became “boundary drawing” activities that divided “good patrons” from “bad patrons” (Bauman, 1992, p. 677). But the more perspectives I gathered on the browsing controversy, the more layered and tangled the story became.

One representative of an international publishing house in Singapore told me in an interview: “I don't think they [Borders] understood the psyche of Singaporean consumers; they didn't understand their conception of browsing at all.” For this publisher and a few others, manic browsing at Borders stemmed from a particular psychological attitude toward shopping that the general population of Singaporean consumers seemed to embrace. Several Borders store employees, however, expressed a more specific, concrete theory. They argued that much of the wild browsing and “bad” book behavior at Borders took place in the children's section of the store, where some adult Singaporeans allowed their children to run about unattended. A few customers blamed the browsing debacle on Borders' interior design and on its “desire-to-be-different” approach to bookselling.

From the beginning of the Borders' “browsing debacle,” editors from The Straits Times – Singapore's partially government-owned newspaper – made vague references that implicated their unrefined countrymen as the browsing offenders, even though the majority of patrons at Borders Singapore have always been middle- and upper-class cosmopolitans and expatriates (Trager-Bohley, 2011). Most of these journalists clearly put their editorial weight behind the global bookseller and positioned it as a positive “foreign talent.” Here is but one example:

In newspapers, online, and in my interviews, many cosmopolitans who defended Borders echoed The Straits Times pro-globalization, pro-transnational corporation argument. Similarly to The Straits Times editors, a large number of these Borders patrons also used “otherizing” language when they criticized browsing offenders, in an effort to affirm their cosmopolitan identity through negation and to position themselves as arbiters of proper behavior and etiquette. Though many of the discourses surrounding the browsing controversy of Borders intersected with and seemed informed by a larger hegemonic discourse propagated by The Straits Times and the People's Action Party, a few discursive formations departed from these influences; these included the “kiasu book browsing theory,” which will be discussed in the next section.

While the average reader may view book browsing as a mundane act, my research reveals the way in which this social practice became entangled in competing conceptions of reading, bookselling, shopping, and cultural values. Moreover, the discourses that spawned from “bad book browsing practices” became a “fertile ground for the reworking and reassertion of essentialist stereotypes” (Simmons & Lecouteur, 2008, p. 668), including class and ethnic ones. However, I didn't discover this dynamic until I began to seek “outside” perspectives on the problem in unexpected, non-place-based sites. I believe that the book browsing debacle at Borders Singapore was inherently messy because it involved tracking a mobile and transformative social formation (in other words a thing, a practice, and multiple discourses) through a web of social actors who occupied different and competing positions along the global–local faultline.

Dimension Four: Unorthodox and Unplanned Sites Can Yield and Support Insightful Research Data

Audience studies scholars who track moving social formations among multiple and unexpected sites that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global” are inevitably going to find themselves, at one point or another, inhabiting an outsider position. While this stance is beset with challenges such as fostering informant trust, the productive discomfort that often marks it yields intellectual surprises that push the scholar to review earlier observations, theories, and fieldnotes in light of new findings.

In Singapore, my outsider position as an ang mo (“Caucasian person”) had an impact on the multiple sites where I researched and on the relationships that I had with my informants. At times, my positionality as well as that of my informants affected the topics broached and explored during interviews, focus groups, and casual conversations. In general, Singaporeans are reluctant to discuss local politics and race/ethnicity issues in public. They are doubly cautious about examining these topics with outsiders. Though some of my informants did – guardedly – discuss race issues with me, their reluctance to do so prompted me to explore the issue of race, reading, and bookstores elsewhere. One day I stumbled upon a couple of websites where Singaporeans did open up about this topic. To my surprise, I came to regard one of these websites as a fieldsite.

Several of my informants, as well as multiple web posters on soc.culture.singapore, asserted or suggested that the browsing problems at Borders could be traced to the so-called “kiasu/kiasi offender.”

ASEAN OBSERVER:

When they [Borders] started this new “liberal” bookshop I was certain it was a matter of time before S'poreans showed themselves so kiasu, thick-skinned and selfish that even Borders would have to impose some order. I'm just wondering when they'll have to wrap up all of their books like the other bookshops have had to do. (soc.culture.singapore poster)

Hwang, Ang, and Francesco (2002) have defined kiasu as an “obsessive concern with getting the most out of every transaction and a desire to get ahead of others.” While Singaporean Chinese frequently banter the word around in a playful manner to poke fun at one another, it can be an ethnicized, charged word when used by others in a disparaging manner. Consequently, non-Chinese Singaporeans hesitate to accuse Chinese Singaporeans of embodying this trait. During my fieldwork in Singapore, however, several Singaporean Indians, Singaporean Malays, and expatriates suggested that kiasu Chinese patrons were the main browsing culprits.

Although many of my interview and focus group informants initiated the topic of kiasuism, they appeared somewhat hesitant about discussing directly with me the link between ethnicity, kiasuism, and bad browsing. Online, however, this connection was explicitly discussed and quickly became emotionally charged and fueled by racism. A few bookstore patrons viewed the bad behavior at Borders as another example of the pushy, “get ahead,” kiasu attitude that marked the privileged majority ethnic group of Singapore ethnic Chinese. Consider the following exchange on soc.culture.singapore in 2002.

APU NEH NEH:	The disgusting habit of the Chinese of reserving seats can best be seen at Borders Bookstore. You will see the Chinese people take piles of books and bring them to the sofa to read the books for hours. They usually do this in pairs. When one needs to go to the toilet they will put the books on the sofa and their partner will “guard” the seat for them. Sometimes they will be gone for 15 mins to 30 mins and later come back with a new set of books. You will never see a Malay or Indian indulging in such anti-social behavior. Now it has almost become a culture at Borders.
KNONENEH:	Nothing new. Indians and other races do that too. Just another of your racist anti-Chinese posts.
CHENG THNG:	I go to Borders quite often and can verify that most of the borrowers are non-Malaysians and non-Indians. I asked a Malay colleague why and she tells me there are no Malay books there.

This charged discourse is an example of how explicit and implicit discourses about ethnicity in Singapore sometimes bubble up around seemingly ordinary acts such as browsing because the government stifles frank discussions on these topics. By tracking various permutations of the Borders browsing conflict as they unfolded in multiple (and sometimes unexpected) sites (in print, online, and in interviews), among a variety of agents (Borders employees, publishers, customers, and editors), for almost a decade, intertextual movements and disjunctures were discovered that provide insight into the interpentration of cultural and textual practices such as reading and bookselling. Many of these connections and disconnections would not have been discovered in traditional, place-based, bounded fieldsites.

Conclusion

At this point in time, the status of multi-sited ethnographies in media studies in general and in audience studies specifically is still murky and unclear. While an increasing number of researchers in this present wave of media studies are experimenting with multi-sited ethnography, there have been few sustained field-based dialogues about the rationale, proposed objectives, and political/ethical stakes of multi-sited ethnography. Several scholars who have conducted multi-sited or multi-sited(esque) media ethnographies have deliberately chosen alternative names to label their work. This fragmentation has made assessing the progress and innovations of this methodology difficult. This is an unfortunate situation, because, as this chapter attempted to illustrate, multi-sited ethnography has the potential to reinvigorate audience studies through its embedded elements of surprise, namely (1) its tracking strategies; (2) its emphasis on complicitous relationship; (3) its greater exposure to multiple perspectives, including multi-level power dynamics; and (4) its unbounded, open-ended notions of the field, which are not limited or constrained by place.

Surprise is an emotion that can be both pleasurable and unsettling to an ethnographer. It is the outcome of the unexpected. This unpredictability often engenders productive discomfort that drives a researcher to explore ideas and associations hitherto not anticipated, or seemingly disconnected. In this way surprise is an important intellectual tool in the field. Its value is in interrupting and perhaps displacing pre-determined research agendas and objects of inquiry. This disruption often destabilizes ethnographic narratives, offering new, “messy” layers of possibilities and questions about social formations and their conceptual offshoots. When embraced, the element of surprise may lead to a constructive process in which the ethnographer interrogates previous sites, being informed by her or his knowledge of new ones.

Though ethnographic surprises tend to undermine the unity and stability of a project, they also enlarge a researcher's capacity to make new meaning while deepening and extending previous arguments and theories. In an age of increasingly “globalized audiences,” surprise is a dynamic element connected to the practice of doing multi-sited work, because the nature of social formations and of their conceptual offshoots will inevitably transform and change as they move through tangled and unexpected networks.

Drawing on ethnographic examples, this chapter has shown that, if media researchers embrace a flexible research imaginary that is open to surprise, modification, and the productive discomfort that comes with the unknown, multi-sited ethnography has the potential to generate greater insights into new modes of translocal social experiences and everyday life in a mediatized, globalized world than a single-sited audience/media study or a political economy-based analysis would. Moreover, its insights are more likely than those of single-sited ethnography to be multilayered in terms of power dynamics and social relationships.

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FURTHER READING

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