In the past, Bosk has advocated living with IRB review. As he wrote in 2004
Prospective review strikes me as generally one more inane bureaucratic requirement in one more bureaucratic set of procedures, ill-suited to accomplish the goals that it is intended to serve. Prospective review, flawed a process as it is, does not strike me as one social scientists should resist. After all, we agree with its general goals: that our informants should not be subject to untold risks, that they be treated with decency, that their confidentiality and anonymity be safeguarded, when feasible. Given this, we should not waste our energies resisting a process that has an enormous amount of both bureaucratic momentum and social consensus behind it. Instead, we should focus our energies on reforming and revising procedures; we should fix the system where it is broken.
[Charles Bosk, "The Ethnographer and the IRB: Comment on Kevin D. Haggerty,'"Ethics Creep: Governing Social Science Research in the Name of Ethics'," Qualitative Sociology 27 (December 2004), 417.]
But at some point in 2005 or 2006, an IRB seems to have really pissed him off. In this essay, he writes that "having now been on the receiving end of IRB objections that I find incomprehensible, I appreciate my colleagues' multiple frustrations." (204) He now seems to think the system is not merely broken, but so defectively designed that it cannot be repaired:
The presumption of prospective review—that our subjects are in need of protection— has embedded within it an insulting distrust of our integrity and motives. The insult inherent in a regulatory regime based on distrust deepens when the barriers the review system places between us and the doing of our research appear to protect powerful institutions from close scrutiny more than they guarantee the well-being of our research subjects. For me, the most serious defect of the current regulatory system is that the requirements of policy reduce and trivialize the domain of research ethics. In the process, our ability to conceptualize, discuss, and make sense of the ethical problems of ethnographic work is dulled. As we do our work, we face ethical dilemmas aplenty, almost none of which have to do with the dual mandate of prospective research review—the adequacy of the consent process, which is invariably reduced to concern about a "formal document" or potential risks to subjects. (194)
Bosk's essay is rich in ideas--too many, really, for an essay of this length. I will do my best to unpack them.
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