Constructing the field and selection of field sites

3.2.1. Empirical setting and constructing and delimiting ‘the field’

As a discipline, social anthropology focuses on the social life of peoples and the logics and practices of various groups, often referred to as ‘cultures’. For some decades, anthropologists have questioned the traditional conception of geographically bounded spaces which containing ‘a culture’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) and with it, the notion that cultures are ‘rooted’ (Malkki 1992) in one particular

geographical location. As Hannerz (1992) and many others have pointed out, the incoherence of culture within a bounded space poses a challenge to the ethnographer when constructing the field of study.

Anthropologists have suggested how to address this challenge, one of the most influential being Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) notion of ’scapes’ (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, etc.). This is a vision of how to conduct transnational research that breaks with the former ethnographic practices of ‘locating’

‘a culture’ in a specific geographic territory, region or village. Another highly influential work is George Marcus’ (1995) review of multi-sited fieldwork approaches, where he addresses the issue of how to delimit an ethnographic field site when studying global phenomena such as migration, cultural diffusion or media.

Marcus suggests a number of strategies for conducting multi-sited research as well as for delimiting a research project and creating coherence but without necessarily spatially delimiting it. He proposes, for example, that the ethnographer ‘follow the people’, referring to studies of people on the move such as migrants or pilgrims. To study the ‘careers’ of material objects, he proposes that we ‘follow the thing’, be it money, commodities or gifts through different contexts. Marcus also proposes that we could

‘follow the metaphor’, which can be used when the object being studied is within the realm of discourse and modes of thought. In such cases, he writes, the circulation of signs, symbols and

metaphors guides the research design (Marcus 1995:106–9). In a more recent contribution, Wright and Reinhold (2011) propose the technique of ‘studying through’, which involves tracing an object of study, such as a policy, within different sites, different people and different means of communication.

The research strategy used in this dissertation has been inspired by Marcus’ proposal to follow persons, objects and ideas and by Wright and Reynolds’ proposal to observe these through various sites, people and means of communication. I have thus followed an organizational thing, which sometimes takes

57 physical form in posters, pamphlets and digital content but which to a large extent is a discursive object as well as a mode of thought: namely, an ethics program with its accompanying understandings of

‘doing the right thing’ as these understandings unfold in practice. This kind of strategy is not without obstacles, among them being the potentially vast scale and large numbers of field site (Burrell 2017:53) that could be impossible to cover by a single researcher’s qualitative inquiry. Hence, I have also been inspired by Brannen’s (2011) proposal to design multi-sited ethnographic research as a ‘focal

ethnography’¹⁴ with complementary case studies, where the insights gained from one main site of research are compared with insights from similar ‘case studies’ for a strengthened analysis. The focal ethnography was carried out at a Ferring subsidiary unit in Denmark, followed up by complementary ethnographic fieldwork at Ferring’s headquarters in Switzerland and in a subsidiary in China (where I spent three weeks in each of the latter two places).

In the following, I will describe in more detail how these field sites were selected and how ethnographic material was generated. I will also reflect upon the benefits and limits of these choices of field site. I purposefully use the term ‘generated’ to underscore my constructionist approach and my

understanding that data is not ‘out there’ to be found but rather co-constructed in the interaction between researcher and field. The first co-construction, and perhaps one of the most fundamental for how a study develops, is the choice of field sites to study. In a large multinational company (MNC), such as Ferring, with its numerous subsidiaries, there exist numerous options for what and where to focus ethnographic attention.

3.2.2. Constructing and delimiting the physical field¹⁵

The corporate headquarters of Ferring Pharmaceuticals is located in Switzerland, and its largest

Research & Development (R&D) site is based in Denmark. The main empirical setting for my research on Ferring’s business ethics practices has been these R&D facilities, where the Danish branch of the Global Ethics Office is located and where the central clinical trials department is based.

14 Brannen’s (2011) overall argument contains elements that resemble positivist research rigour, to which I do not subscribe. However, the notion of a ‘focal ethnography’ with comparative case studies is nevertheless helpful to think with and to emphasize that longer, more intensive fieldwork was conducted in the Danish field site relative to the Chinese subsidiary and the Swiss headquarter contexts.

15 This section is based on: Gosovic, Anna and Anne-Marie Søderberg. (forthcoming). “Developing responsible global leaders in a multinational high reliability organization”. In: Mendenhall, M. E., Stahl, G.K., Clapp-Smith, R &

Zilinskaite, M (eds.) Responsible Global Leadership: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, and Opportunities. The Routledge Studies in Leadership Research series.

58 The R&D site in Denmark comprises the physical site for this focal ethnography. At the beginning of the project, the main activities of the Global Ethics Office were carried out from Denmark¹⁶, which made it an obvious starting point for examining how Ferring’s ethics initiatives were organized and

disseminated to subsidiaries. Moreover, due to the requirements of the industrial PhD scheme under which this study was co-funded¹⁷, I have been employed by the Danish branch of Ferring and have thus had an office space here. This arrangement allowed me to conduct an extensive fieldwork and to be present in the Danish offices of the company for the entire period of my field research, including the time before I formally began the fieldwork and the time after completing it.¹⁸

The decision to also include Ferring’s Swiss corporate headquarters as a field site was an outgrowth of my desire to explore the headquarters’ perceptions and practices. Moreover, the head of the Global Ethics Office is located in Switzerland, together with the majority of top-level decision-makers.

The decision to include China as the third field site was based on several factors. First, China is one of Ferring’s five ‘Local Board Operating Entities’¹⁹, which are regional headquarters with increased autonomy and which thus have been singled out as key markets for the company. Second, within widespread conceptions of national culture differences (cf. Hofstede 2001), China is stereotyped as being very different from Western national cultural contexts. With this prevailing stereotype somewhat in mind, I must admit, the original purpose of my research was to explore whether, to what extent and how such national cultural differences influenced how the ethics program was received and

recontextualized in the local context. Finally, as in any ethnographic enquiry, the choice of field sites was based partially on practical issues of access. The Chinese subsidiary was headed by a Dane with long seniority in Ferring. This individual had served on many levels of management and had experience from Scandinavia, the Swiss headquarters and from central European countries where Ferring also operates. I met him on a number of occasions before the fieldwork and established the necessary connection to be allowed to conduct the fieldwork in the Chinese subsidiary. Moreover, during the fieldwork, I had the opportunity to follow two ethics officers to China, where they trained local colleagues and counterparts. During this first trip, I established contacts with local staff that were central upon my return for the three-week fieldwork period.

16 As I will elaborate in Chapter 8, the Global Ethics Office has undergone significant changes during the course of the research.

17 As mentioned, the Danish industrial PhD scheme requires the co-funding company to employ the PhD fellow throughout the three-year project period.

18 My access to informants and material in the company will be elaborated in section 3.6 of this chapter.

19 This structure of Local Board Operating Entities was discontinued during the project period.

59 Choosing the three field sites was also an outcome of my negotiations with the needs of the company²⁰ and the need to balance these with the academic requirements for conducting qualified ethnographic research. One could argue that more time spent in fewer field sites could have facilitated an equally interesting study with more ethnographic depth. However, the number of field sites in this study and the variation between headquarters, subsidiaries and geographical locations facilitated an analysis of vocational communities across geographical locations. This possibility for cross-community comparison opened the way towards insights that contexts besides the national ones could be important for understanding how ethics programs are perceived and enacted. Conversely, a larger number of field sites, with less time spent in each, could have generated further knowledge regarding the extent to which insights from this study are similar across a larger variation of physical sites and within

subsidiaries of different sizes and structures. However, as ethnographic work focuses more on in-depth insights than large quantities of cases, I deemed it appropriate to limit the number of physical field sites to three. Thus, the choice of field sites has been based on assessments of empirical appropriateness as well as on access and logistical possibilities.

Furthermore, the choice of work settings as the main field sites was intended to focus in on the content of people’s working lives. As such, I chose not to follow them into their private spheres at home. Hence, I could not know whether their practices at work have had an effect on their domestic life or relations with friends and acquaintances, nor whether they brought perspectives from their private lives into their workplace practices.

3.2.3. Constructing and delimiting the virtual setting

Besides the physical venues in which I have been able to move around, my fieldwork also expanded into virtual and digital spaces. In today’s work setting, daily work is increasingly enacted through e-mail exchanges, in shared online folders, in online meetings as well as in a range of content on intranets and websites. Furthermore, in a multinational organization, these webs of cooperation are expanded also across time zones and continents.

20 Part of the purpose of the Industrial PhD scheme under which this research was conducted is to create knowledge that is valuable for a private company. In order to ensure that the project responded to Ferring’s needs, the company has been involved in the decision-making about the selection of geographical field sites. The rest of the research design described in this chapter has been based on my decisions alone.

https://innovationsfonden.dk/da/programmer/erhvervsforsker#accordion2955 Accessed 8. November 2019.

60 As Hine (2017) writes, studies that are not only multi-sited but also multi-modal, pose practical as well as analytical challenges, as the ethnographer must decide ‘when to follow informants between settings and which of the many possible connections between those settings to pursue’ (Hine 2017:22).

Moreover, for an ethnographer for whom ‘being there’ and experiencing events along with informants is one of the main methodological tools (and ideals), virtual ethnography poses a methodological challenge (Ruhleder 2000:14). However, as Ruhleder wrote when virtual ethnography was still a novel concept, incorporating digital activities into the field of study also offers an opportunity to capture and analyse interaction in the hybrid spaces that are becoming a fundamental part of how people,

institutions and communities organize and carry out their work (Ruhleder 2000:14).

Marcus’ (1995) aforementioned proposal for multi-sited fieldwork was written before digital field sites became inevitable parts of many field studies. As Burrell (2017) writes, with the emergence of such new, digital and virtual field sites and thus the expansion of possible fields and interactions to study, the delimitation of the ethnographic field has become increasingly challenging. And this challenge, she writes, is both conceptual and logistical. Conceptually, the emergence of digital ethnography broadens the object of study beyond the means of comprehension of one individual researcher in one research project. Logistically, virtual research broadens the sites of study across the entire globe (Burrell 2017), into communities whose only link is when they log on their shared chat room. Building on Marcus’

proposition to follow objects or people, Burrell proposes to view the field site as a network composed of fixed and moving points, including spaces (physical and non-physical), people and objects. Defining the field site as a network, she writes, is a strategy of foregrounding selected social phenomena against a complex social setting in which phenomena find themselves. In this way, a given social phenomenon is outlined in its complexity rather than detached from its context (Burrell 2017:55).

Burrell proposes a number of steps for how to construct a field site which is not spatially bounded. She suggests seeking out ‘entry points’ rather than sites and to follow the connections that emerge from that entry point (Burrell 2017:56). In the same vein, she proposes to explore the parts of this network by sometimes following these parts, however limited, e.g. within a country or a city, and by sometimes staying in place to ‘intercept’ the circulations of parts of the network as they flow in and out of the physical site of study (Burrell 2017:56–57).

In order to manage the conceptual and logistical challenges pointed out by Burrell, I have chosen in this study to combine her suggestion to intercept with the aforementioned focal ethnography using

comparative case studies (cf. Brannen 2011) where I follow an ethics program into different global locations. As the ethics program does not move in the same way that people and objects do (cf. Marcus

61 1995), I have selected a number of ‘entry points’ from which to elucidate the ethical field, as proposed by Burrell (2017:56). In this way, the field of study is delimited conceptually, as I follow and explore the perceptions and practices of the ethics program as well as the ‘ordinary ethics’ as expressed and practiced within different vocational communities. It is also delimited physically, as I have chosen country offices in Denmark, Switzerland and China as physical entry points for these explorations.

However, these entry points transcend the physical space, expanding into the digital webs of the company and its various on-line communities. As a fieldworker researching a global organization, whenever I open my internet browser, I am taken to the global intranet, and I am able to see what employees across the company see when they open their browsers. I receive announcements in my inbox sent out to global distribution lists of which I am a member. And on a number of occasions, I have attended global staff meetings from my desk or a meeting room interacting physically or virtually with colleagues around the world. Thus, from these three physical entry points in Denmark, Switzerland and China, I have explored both physical fields located in each country and the hybrid fields generated by global on-line participants in Denmark, Switzerland, China and elsewhere.

3.2.4. Constructing and delimiting the object of study

Usually, one of the main challenges for ethnographers is gaining access to relevant field sites and people. In this project, however, due to my position as an employee in the company and to a rare openness for my ethnographic explorations within Ferring, facilitated by the highly research-driven nature of the company, there were very little limitations imposed on me regarding whom I could talk to or where I could study.²¹ I was thus faced with the luxurious, yet equally challenging, ‘problem’ of what activities to follow and what informants to interview.

In order to narrow down the scope of the study, I selected, along with the ethics officers, three vocational groups: Human Resources (HR) officers, Clinical Trials officers and Marketing and Sales officers. Besides Denmark, where the Global Ethics Office is located (and where I myself live), the HR officers work in most of Ferring’s remaining global locations and are in charge of carrying out the work of raising awareness and conducting ethics training as local collaboration partners for the Global Ethics Office. The HR officers thus seemed to be a relevant choice to study. Clinical trials officers were

21 One of these limitations was that I am not allowed to mention any of the cases from the internal whistleblowing line, the Alert Line, in any of my writings. If I had attempted to access board meetings or executive committee meetings, I may have also encountered limits to the open access that I experienced, but as I have been focusing on everyday ‘ordinary’ decisions and judgments in practice rather than higher managerial ones, I never had to test the limits of higher level boundaries to access.

62 selected as a focus area because most of Ferring’s drug development projects are administered from Denmark, and I thus had a unique possibility to participate on a regular basis in project meetings and gain insight into a central part of Ferring’s work. Marketing and Sales was chosen as it represents a vocational group with tasks focused on customers, such that their practices would lie at the interface between the company and the outside world. I could have also chosen to focus on business functions that were more similar or to focus only on a single business function. However, when I originally designed the research, I had intended to focus on national culture differences and recontextualizations across different staff groups in order to assess the salience of these differences across a variety of staff types.

At first, the focus on ‘ordinary ethics’ within these staff groups – or as I define them later, ‘vocational communities’- was not an analytical focus. Rather, the choice of these groups was more a practical matter of limiting the object of study to the three geographical locations. However, as I progressed, I noticed commonalities among the vocational communities traversing the three geographical sites. The Human Resources, Clinical Trials and Marketing and Sales staff, regardless of their working location, were more alike internally than if they were Danish, Swiss or Chinese staff. Hence, my focus shifted to these vocational communities. While my study was originally designed to understand national culture communities across vocational groups, I ended up finding the reverse: vocational community

differences across countries and national cultures.