The analysis of documents is the starting point and the basis of the analytical work for this thesis. Documents were analysed in terms of the major story-lines and metaphors which were interpreted within them. The documents in question were mainly official policy documents, strategies and information publications produced by public authorities. Some of these documents were historical, and were analysed together in terms of changing story-lines and the process of institutionalisation, and others were analysed in terms of the current story-lines and metaphors of competitiveness within them.
This document analysis was an ongoing iterative process with the interviews and the contextual sources of evidence, as discussed in the next section. That is, although the document analysis was very much the starting point of the analysis overall, the documents were analysed over a longer period of time and with the evidence from the interviews and contextual sources taken into account.
Access to documents was fairly good, which is related to the fact the document analysis was mostly of policies, strategies and other publically-available
documents. The contemporary documents related to the national ministries and Vejle Municipality were initially accessed through the internet, the national library and the local library. In the case of the municipality, other publications, particularly strategies from the individual departments, were obtained through the interviews. Furthermore, Vejle Municipality has generally good availability of municipal documentation through their website, including current and some previous plans and strategies, minutes of committee and city council meetings, and itineraries of municipal study tours.
Interviews
The second major source of evidence for the analysis in this thesis is interviews. I carried out 15 interviews in total, with 17 different interviewees, as two people were present on two occasions (the interviewees are listed in the primary sources).
13 of these interviews were in connection with the case study of Vejle Municipality and three of the interviews were related to the national policy-making level. The interviews were carried out at different points from November 2009 until August 2010, either at the offices or homes of the interviewees. The majority of the interviewees were found through general contact via email to their organisations, although a number of the Vejle Municipality interviewees were recommended to me by initial interviewees in the municipality. I broadly attempted to select interviewees from a range of the municipality’s departments, related to my initial analysis of documents from these departments. In the case of the national level, the interviewees were again contacted via email, and were representatives of the two ministries on which I focused my document analysis.
All the interviews were semi-structured. This was to allow the interviewees the opportunity to discuss broad issues they found important, rather than following a rigid set of questions. Carrying out the interviews in various stages also allowed a reflective process, meaning that I could adjust questions slightly in different interviews, according to other points I had been investigating or information from previous interviewees. The general themes which were discussed in the different
interviews were related to the themes I deemed important from the initial document analysis. The most problematic of these themes was perhaps the difficulty in discussing the discourse of ‘competitiveness’ explicitly. Although a majority of the interview themes were implicitly related to ‘competitiveness’, I also introduced the discourse explicitly at some points. This is a potential issue in that it was me, as the researcher, who was both introducing the term and asserting its importance to the interviewees. This most likely led some interviewees to emphasise its importance, although I still left the questioning open enough that they were free to interpret how they understood and wished to discuss the discourse. This bias is lessened by the overall research approach, which due to the fairly broad conceptualisation of discourse, the use of the word ‘competitiveness’
by interviewees is not in itself of great significance. The story-lines and institutionalisations of competitiveness could be discussed in interview without direct use of the term ‘competitiveness’ by the interviewees, meaning that my use of the word does not critically affect my results.
I made the decision prior to beginning the interviews to carry them out in Danish, with the intention of giving my interviewees the freedom of using their native language and the terms and reference points familiar to them. This did however mean that at times I myself, using my second language, had to rephrase and re-explain points to clarify what I meant. In retrospect this seemed to be a good decision, as open misunderstandings were minimal, and I feel that it did give my interviewees the ability to explain their views and thoughts in the way to which they are accustomed. In terms of the analysis, the ‘shift’ to English occurred in the writing up and presentation of the analysis, with direct quotations translated at this point, rather than translating larger portions of the interviews.
The analysis of the interviews was very much an iterative process with the document analysis. Story-lines and metaphors of competitiveness were identified in the documents and the interviews. At times this led interview evidence to reinforcing the points drawn from the documents, and at other times this started an iterative process whereby my interpretation of the story-lines altered because of what was said, leading me to reinterpret the sources of evidence in conjunction with one another. Therefore the analysis of the interviews was by no means a
simple, one-way process following on from the document analysis, but existed in a fairly complex ongoing dialogue with that part of the analysis.
In terms of ethical issues with regard to the interviewees, I agreed to check direct quotations with all the interviewees prior to publication. This was both in the original Danish transcription and my English translation. The English quotations were also presented to them along with the surrounding paragraph of analysis, for the purposes of context. Although nobody refused to have a quotation included, this process did open up the possibility for censorship, however only in terms of direct quotations. Although this type of quotation offers a certain power in writing, it is rare that this is the only way of expressing a point. For this reason, censorship from this process was not a huge concern, as usually the points made could be made using other evidence or without a direct quotation being absolutely crucial. Another issue with regard to quotations is the issue of translation, through which I have attempted to keep hold of the meaning as far as possible, however, it is not always possible to translate completely satisfactorily. To make this process as transparent as possible I have provided a list of original Danish quotations in the appendix, which are numbered throughout the text (p.X).