Contacting selected individuals

In order to identify individuals for interviewing, my approach differed according to the three locations.

The main difference was due to the differences in available time to identify and engage with informants between the field site in Denmark (where I reside) and the two shorter periods of fieldwork at

headquarters in Switzerland and in China.

Prior to my arrival in the office in Denmark, a colleague in the Global Ethics Office had contacted the heads of departments of all major functions and arranged that I could contact them to set up a meeting with each of them upon my arrival. This initial contact proved to be invaluable, both as an access strategy as well as an early and much needed immersion into the details and processes of

pharmaceutical development. Some of these heads of departments later became gatekeepers²⁸ so that

26 As this strategy may give the reader the impression that I interviewed more people than I did, I have stated the exact number of interviewees in Table 1.

27 Anthropologist Jakob Krause-Jensen had similar reasons for not anonymizing the Danish luxury consumer electronics company Bang & Olufsen, where he conducted fieldwork (Krause-Jensen 2010).

28 ‘Gatekeepers are sponsors or individuals who smooth access to the group. They are the key people who let us in, give us permission, or grant access. (…) They may be in a position to grant permission themselves or able to persuade others’ (O’Reilly 2009:132).

67 I could gain access to clinical trials teams and key informants within these. However, the majority of main gatekeepers, I approached myself.

For example, I happened to participate at an introductory course for new employees together with a new head of the clinical trials department in Denmark. This initial contact allowed me to approach him with a subsequent request to interview and follow people in his department. He invited me to present my research at a meeting for the clinical trials staff, and when I later approached informants, many recognized me and understood the overall purpose of the project.

In this endeavour, being an employee at Ferring was also an advantage, and my access within the Danish subsidiary was facilitated by my presence in the physical office. I could drop by people’s offices, randomly meet people in the building, and get to know staff members in other contexts. It was also facilitated by my access to the intranet, where detailed organograms specify who is who, the division of functions, and people’s place in the organizational hierarchy, which made it easier to recruit informants with the kind of range of job function and hierarchy that I was looking for. If I had a particularly good connection with an informant or had difficulty locating exactly who to speak to next, I used snowball sampling, whereby the researcher recruits new informants via referral from other informants, using the connection and rapport established with one informant to establish trust with another (cf. Bernard 2011:145–47).

My strategy at headquarters was not entirely different. As part of the aforementioned introductory meetings with heads of departments facilitated by the Global Ethics Office, I also had online meetings with a few managers from headquarters, among them a manager from the human resources

department. Since I had relations with clinical trials officers in Denmark, one of my primary aims with the fieldwork at headquarters was to understand how Danish ethics office messages were

recontextualized locally in Switzerland, as this was a kind of knowledge that I thought I could not gain from fieldwork in Denmark (at that time, I had anticipated that the geographical difference would be the major determinant for how the ethics program was understood).

As the local human resources departments are in charge of administering the ethics program locally, I decided to locate myself within this department during my stay at headquarters. I arranged with the manager that I could use one of the free seats in the human resources wing at headquarters during the period when I was there. Indeed, sharing an office with the colleagues from the HR department

facilitated access to this group. However, my physical presence in the HR department also meant that I was less present among the marketing and sales officers or clinical trials officers.

68 In seeking out members of the clinical trials group, I was limited by the fact that there were few of these located at headquarters; in fact, only a few project managers. However, since I had focused on the clinical trials officers in Denmark, and likewise had access to local marketing and sales personnel in Denmark, I felt it would be most beneficial to share an office space with the human resources

colleagues. In retrospect, with the experiences of ordinary ethics of marketing and sales officers and clinical trials officers, my study could have benefitted from having asked for an office with the sales and marketing group or the small clinical trials team at headquarters. On the other hand, having done that would have prevented me from gaining certain insights from the human resources context. Moreover, I did not stay in the HR office for the entire day. I used the office as a platform, conducting interviews and taking coffee and lunches with marketing and sales and clinical trials officers to an extent that I believe I obtained sufficient empirical material from the choices I made.

In order to gain access to interviewees at headquarters, I used the intranet to locate those informants whom I wished to meet and interview. As calendars quickly get booked, I arranged many of my interviews while still in Denmark, before my arrival in Switzerland. Additional interviews not arranged beforehand were arranged using the snowballing strategy.

In China, my sampling strategy was initially quite different. During my first visit in China in October 2017, I had followed ethics officers here in their work to conduct ethics training for managers and for local human resources personnel. As mentioned earlier, the CEO of the Chinese subsidiary was Danish, and when he came to Denmark on Christmas holiday later that year, I had the chance to meet with him and ask permission to conduct fieldwork in the spring of 2018. Moreover, during my first visit in China, I had made good contact with the local human resources officers. Informed by a cultural stereotype of the Chinese as being rather hierarchical and anxious that I as a mere PhD student might be offensive if I approached some of the managers in the Chinese subsidiary, I made the mistake of not taking the same approach of just contacting people as I had in Denmark and Switzerland when preparing for my

fieldwork in China.

In what I later realized was a misunderstood effort to do things right in this national culture, I wrote and asked one of my local contacts in human resources that I had met during my first visit there how I should best tackle the interview arrangements and what would be the right approach to make

appointments with interviewees. In an effort from her side to help me, I believe but only realized later, she immediately answered that I should just write to her what types of people I was looking for and how many, and then she would approach them and inquire. Subsequently, I experienced the immense hospitality of this local human resources group and their tireless efforts to make my stay as pleasant

69 and easy as possible. At that time, however, I interpreted her immediate reaction as a hint that her way was the most appropriate and decided not to interfere with what I thought were the national cultural norms. I inquired about the possibility of following a sales representative on sales visits or tagging along with a marketing officer to an event, as I had done in Denmark and Switzerland, but the few times I asked, I was told that it would be difficult. I assumed that for some reason, it was simply not

appropriate to have me attend such activities. Nevertheless, I have later reflected on what made me take ‘No’ for an answer much more easily in China than I would have from a Danish or Swiss informant.

When conducting business research in international contexts, the methodological literature teaches us to be highly aware of national cultural differences and of the cultural assumptions with which we interpret events. It also teaches us to thoroughly prepare for fieldwork by learning as much as we can about the national culture into which we will enter (see e.g. Eckhardt 2004; Vallaster 2000). However, the preparation process for such research and in efforts to understand ‘the Chinese’, ‘the Japanese’ or

‘the Danes’ inevitably brings with it an exercise of stereotyping, an issue that is seldom addressed in the methodological discussions (for an exception, see Osland and Bird 2000).

In my preparations for fieldwork in China, and in an effort to get as much out of the few weeks I had in the most respectful and appropriate way, I made this exact mistake of stereotyping the Chinese as overly formal and hierarchical. Had it not been for my fortuitous attendance at an office dinner, my fieldwork would have been severely limited by this stereotyping. This ‘lucky dinner’, an example of the

‘serendipity’ that anthropologists often encounter in their fieldwork, occurred shortly after I had arrived in China.

A small group of local Chinese managers as well as a few counterparts from other regions in Asia had completed their quarterly meeting, which would be followed by a dinner. The CEO had kindly asked me to join their dinner, and the encounter that evening made me realize that my cultural stereotypes were ill-fitting and my presumed politeness was in fact nothing more than a self-imposed restriction. I was seated next to a friendly Chinese manager who shortly after I introduced myself invited me to interview him in the coming week. At my other side sat another manager whom I had already met. She inquired about my purpose of being in China, and asked if I was getting the chance to do what I wanted to do. I revealed that I would have liked to go with a sales representative on a sales trip or to a marketing event, as I had done with informants from Denmark and Switzerland but that the HR counterpart with whom I had been in contact had informed me that this was not possible. With an expression of wonder, my companion to the right yelled across the round, Chinese dining table to one of the marketing managers sitting a few seats away and asked him if I could go with him to a marketing event. He

70 immediately said, ‘Yes’ and explained that he would be going to another part of China for an event the following week. He also explained that he had actually volunteered to be interviewed when my contact in HR had inquired, but that he had been rejected because they had already made arrangements with another marketing manager. Unfortunately, I already had too many activities and interviews planned for the following week to be able to go with him to the other end of China for the marketing event to which he had so generously invited me, but I gladly took him up on the interview offer. This manager ended up being a central gatekeeper for my access to non-managerial marketing and sales officers in his team.

This ‘lucky dinner’ was a turning point in my Chinese fieldwork. Because it occurred just a few days after my arrival in China, I had time to correct my mistaken assumptions. From that point onwards, I kept in mind the informal way in which my dining partner had just yelled across the table, and I started simply approaching informants as I had done in Denmark and Switzerland, inquiring about their willingness to participate in the research. Rather than the hierarchical stereotype of ‘the Chinese’ that had somehow guided my approach, this experience, as well as my impressions as I progressed in the fieldwork, taught me that although thorough preparation can certainly be valuable, it may also reinforce narrow

assumptions through which we interpret and understand our fieldwork experiences and with which we artificially restrain our own behaviour in the field. Some fieldwork situations are simply not as exotic, nor as formalized, as we imagine them to be.

A final factor affecting my selection of informants across all three locations was their willingness to participate in the study. I have interviewed some informants several times. This was not always due to a sampling strategy where I had selected them as key informants but often because of their own personal willingness and interest in my research. On some occasions, informants contacted me on their own initiative to tell me more about a subject that they thought might interest me. Many expressed how much they enjoyed having these conversations with me. On other - more rare - occasions, people have been less willing.

One example of informant reticence was when I tried to obtain access to clinical trial teams. There was one particular early clinical study that I was very interested in following, as the compound would eventually be tested on pregnant women, which I imagined would generate a number of ethically relevant discussions. I had approached the manager of this clinical trial, and she had accepted my request to follow the clinical trial process. She put me in contact with one of her employees who was leading the project team and daily operations of this trial. I repeatedly tried to establish contact with this particular employee, who, although friendly enough, invariably forgot to reply to my emails. When I

71 approached her in person, she would explain that now was not a good time for me to join. After having tried various approaches and many attempts, I came to a point where I had to acknowledge that for some reason, she was simply not willing to have me attend her clinical trials meetings, and I had to respect this hesitancy from her side, despite the permission granted by her manager. Incidents such as these confirm a general feature of social science research, whether qualitative or quantitative, that sampling is a result not only of the researcher’s choice but also of the willingness of informants to participate. Moreover, especially in a corporate setting, where the formal hierarchy enables (or requires) managers to decide matters about their employees, it is central to ensure that informants consent to participate not only because they have been told to do so by their managers but also because they are willing to do so, as prescribed by the Principles for Professional Responsibility by the AAA.²⁹