Ethical Considerations

I am highly grateful to InnoTex for having opened the doors of their studio and for allowing me to learn about their everyday work and their passions. In hindsight I realise I had thought too little about the issues that might arise along the way and how to pre-empt or address these issues at an early stage. In the course of discussions with Marie

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about the nature of our collaboration—what Guillemin and Gillam (2004) call

‘procedural ethics’— we agreed that I would share with InnoTex my interview notes and observations from the field, as well as my draft papers. In doing so it was my hope that providing the team with the opportunity to read and correct my notes would help me to gain their trust as well as to solicit their feedback and thus gain further insights (Kaiser, 2009, p. 7). Marie encouraged me to identify InnoTex in my work, hoping that our collaboration would strengthen the group’s research agenda as well as their consultancy.

The Swedish cross-disciplinary research programme also welcomed our initiative, especially since part of its remit was to encourage collaboration amongst project partners. Having InnoTex as a case study thus seemed a win-win situation for all concerned.

While procedural ethics for collaboration are effective in promoting researchers to consider ethical issues, they may also be seen, as noted by Guillemin and Gillam (2004), as being largely a mere formality incapable of addressing the specific ethical dilemmas that may arise along the way for the qualitative researcher. Thus, challenges related to confidentiality, defined by Sieber (1992, p. 52) as the researcher’s “agreements with persons about what may be done with their data”, began to arise 3-4 months into my fieldwork, induced by the planning of our research in China and discussions concerning the meaning and practice of design thinking. My five years’ experience of working with CIID had influenced the way in which I thought of design thinking (Brown, 2008), but I soon learned that the understanding of design thinking promoted by IDEO was only one of many definitions of design thinking (Buchanan, 2015; Cross, 2006; Friedman, 2003;

Kimbell, 2011; Schön, 1983). Around the same time, Marie, on behalf of the university, asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, explaining that signing it in effect meant nothing in terms of our collaboration. But reading the NDA made me concerned. By signing it I would give Marie’s university full permission to hold back my fieldwork material and papers at their convenience, thereby also putting the completion of my PhD in their hands. The NDA went back and forth between the legal departments of our respective universities for months, but following the recommendations of my university I did not sign it and Marie’s university eventually stopped pursuing it. The issue of the NDA, together with some of the reflections I made on my fieldwork, ended up causing a breach in my relationship with InnoTex, and particularly in my relations with Marie.

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The process of looking over my empirical material, evaluating the validity of my own observations and considering different ways to present this material was an unsettling process at times (Kaiser, 2009; Goodwin, Pope, Mort and Smith, 2003). In particular, the following two concerns arose:

- What would be the acceptable balance between maintaining and/or regaining the confidentiality of my respondents while at the same time presenting a rich and detailed account of their everyday work and the contexts in which they found themselves? (Berg and Lune, 2014).

- To what extent would my analysis be valid and useful for InnoTex?

In the end it was these concerns that made me turn towards the use of pseudonyms (Lahman, Rodriguez, Moses, Griffin, Mendoza, and Yacoub, 2015; Geest, 2003). One of my aims in doing so was to avoid, as far as possible, giving any grounds for InnoTex to perceive a threat, and further, in the hope that Marie would thereby find my work more useful for her own purposes. Having previously agreed on identification, I later wrote to Marie to ask what she would prefer; however, this query received no response and I therefore made the decision to use pseudonyms. This in turn raised an additional set of questions regarding the protection of my interlocutors, including the extent to which I should include or remove such matters as the size of the organization, the industry, and the gender and nationalities of my respondents. As noted by Kaiser, however:

unlike changing specific names, changing additional details to render data unidentifiable can alter or destroy the original meaning of the data. For example, in a study of work-family policies, removing or altering details of employer size, industry, policies, and family structure might protect

individual and employer identities but these changes make the data useless for addressing the research questions at hand. (2009, p. 5)

Accordingly, I use pseudonyms to refer to my primary case organization, to the Chinese brands and factories, etc. and to all respondents except Miss Ana Diaz, who joined us for

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our research in China, and our fixer, Echo. With the agreement and acceptance of H&M, I do identify this particular organization. The extent to which I changed additional details was guided by the distinction drawn by Tolich (2004) between external and internal confidentiality, as well as by my own reflections on the target and likely audience of this thesis (Kaiser, 2009). Tolich (2004, p. 101) defines external confidentiality as being like the tip of an iceberg above the surface: “External confidentiality is traditional

confidentiality where the researcher acknowledges they know what the person said but promises not to identify them in the final report.” Internal confidentiality concerns what is below the surface: “This is the ability for research subjects involved in the study to identify each other in the final publication of the research.” (Tolich, 2004, p.101) Internal confidentiality, states Tolich (2004), often goes unacknowledged in ethical codes. Yet this too has the potential to scuttle both researchers and their informants.

While I was struggling to find a balance between sharing details that I considered to be key to my analysis and a self-imposed use of pseudonyms, what happened was that Marie, for good and bad, seemed to loose interest in my ‘academic writing’. While our discussions and my initial attempts at writing had to some extent made her feel

vulnerable on behalf of InnoTex, aiming to publish within the field of organization and management studies and cultural studies my writings took a direction that seemed to make Marie less concerned about my work. In light of this I chose to adopt an approach in which I focus more on the tip of the iceberg and less on what lies beneath the surface.

The use of pseudonyms is an integral part of social science research, albeit one that is often applied with little thought or deep reflection. The process of naming participants itself, however, has an impact on our interpretation of specific situations, since research shows that people will assign characteristics to other people according to their names (Lahman et al., 2015). In this thesis I have chosen pseudonyms that reflect the gender and, for the most part, the nationality of my respondents. Respondents’ names have been created on the basis of lists of ‘popular names’ in the respective countries/regions. This approach has the downside that the name in question does not necessarily indicate age, as names tend to be more popular during some decades than others. My field

descriptions, however, should compensate for this by providing an indication of each individual’s age. In creating pseudonyms for the various public and private

organizations, I have also tried to create names that represent nationalities and specific

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trades, etc. InnoTex have not objected to my choice of pseudonyms and my proofreader accepted the name to the extent that he was surprised it did not show up in his Google search. While it is unlikely that the people to whom we spoke in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou—or anyone in their immediate network—will read this thesis or any of the individual papers, I have also chosen here to use pseudonyms to protect them from any harm that could arise as a result of my work.

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