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3. Methodology and Research Design

3.5. Participant observation

79 3.4.8. Storing interviews

The AAA principles for professional responsibility state that the ethnographer must protect and

preserve her records.35 In this study, my records have mainly been digital, taking the form of electronic field note documents and recorded audio files. I have stored these files in secure online locations in personal, protected folders that I have at both Copenhagen Business School and at Ferring to which only I have access. My backup files have been saved on an encrypted external USB with password protection. Upon completion of the study, I will maintain these files only as long as I continue to work with them and thus have a professional reason for keeping them, as prescribed by the AAA principles as well as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

80 observation helped me realize how informants’ understandings and experiences could be very different from what I might have observed.

For example, during my fieldwork, I went to a small conference that was held at a university abroad and was sponsored by Ferring (this event will be described in more detail in Chapter 6). In interviews prior to attending this event, as well as in conversations during the conference, the employees involved in arranging the event emphasized several times that it was not a Ferring event, as the university was in charge of planning it and setting the agenda. Ferring merely sponsored the event and helped with logistics, but it had no influence whatsoever on the actual program, so I was told. It was further emphasized that the conference was a highly scientific educational event for doctors working with a specific medical condition. Had I only conducted interviews, I would have only had these statements to describe this event. However, when I participated in the conference, I obtained a different impression.

When I received the conference program, I noticed that it had a Ferring logo at the bottom, with the words ‘Supported by a Ferring grant’. This was rather surprising, as I had gotten the impression in the interviews that Ferring was nearly invisible. Second, most of the participating doctors were

accompanied by a company representative from their country of origin, and three out of the 13 presenters on the agenda were Ferring employees. A Ferring employee also moderated one of the sessions. Moreover, the entire agenda focused on a condition that can be treated with one of Ferring’s products, and the majority of scientific studies presented at the conference had investigated effects of the same compound that also happens to be the active ingredient in this product.

Thus, supplementing interviews with participant observation allowed me to identify a gap between employees’ perceptions of the conference as a neutral scientific event and my own experiences of it as a sophisticated marketing initiative, if not an ‘infomercial’ for Ferring’s products. This example to me underscores the strength of ethnographic methods; nothing replaces ‘being there’. Conversely, an obvious limitation to participant observation and to ethnographic work in general is the lack of generalizability. However, as Flyvbjerg writes:

‘The advantage of large samples is breadth, while their problem is one of depth. For the case study, the situation is the reverse. Both approaches are necessary for a sound development of social science. […. Hence,] a discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and that the discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one.’ (Flyvbjerg 2001:87).

81 The present PhD dissertation is one such thoroughly executed study with the aim to contribute to furthering knowledge on ethics programs and ethics as practice.

3.5.1. Participant observation - where, when and how?

As mentioned earlier, I was with the company on a weekly basis from January 2017 until Autumn 2019, while the actual fieldwork period began in June 2017, ending in June 2018. As mentioned earlier, most of the fieldwork was conducted in Denmark. Three weeks of fieldwork were conducted in Switzerland in autumn 2017 and an additional three weeks in China in spring 2018. During the entire project, I was organizationally affiliated with the Global Ethics Office in Denmark, which facilitated my access to documents, informants and activities in which I could participate.

Like other anthropologists in business settings before me (see e.g. Krause-Jensen 2010), and as part of the participant methodology, I have also participated, albeit on a limited basis, in the daily work of the Global Ethics Office in order to gain an understanding of Ferring’s ethics program.

Moreover, in order to understand how this program is communicated and brought into action by ethics officers, I have employed the method of shadowing, a technique designed for settings where the fieldworker follows selected people in the course of their work in different locations (Czarniawska 2007). Hence, I have shadowed ethics officers abroad for their ethics training and the marketing and sales officers in their customer activities. One might ask where shadowing ends and participant observation begins. Indeed, I have also participated actively in the workshops conducted by ethics officers in Denmark. However, the notion of shadowing is intended to illustrate how ethnographers now need to follow people on the move, especially those whose interpretations and activities can lead us to new insights.

Work, these days, is not just carried out in offices and meetings. It is carried out in front of a screen, theoretically anywhere in the world (including in our own homes or on weekends). The digitalization of work practices has made ‘daily work’ continuously (and notoriously) difficult to study. Outside of meetings and other ‘events’, most everyday office work takes place on computers and in email

exchanges, or using shared online folders with colleagues around the world. Hence, I have found myself conducting my participant observation also in the digital realm. For example, I have been included in the outlook distribution lists for the clinical trial teams that I have followed; as such, I received the correspondence sent out to these teams, and as mentioned earlier, I have had access to all the shared folders of the Global Ethics Office. I have also conducted virtual participant observation, which entailed

82 participating in an online training course facilitated by ethics officers for global counterparts. I have also participated in virtual staff meetings, as mentioned in section 3.2.3.

Being a fieldworker in a business setting requires flexibility in one’s choice of method (Czarniawska 2007; Gusterson 1997; Krause-Jensen 2010). I have therefore oscillated between observation and participation (DeWalt and DeWalt 2002:19–20; Madden 2010:77–84). In some cases, the method has been closer to participation; e.g. when working in the Global Ethics Office or when participating in general staff meetings as an equal to other employees present. At other times, the method has been closer to observation, for example when attending clinical trial team meetings. As all activities during an entire year of fieldwork are not easily (nor meaningfully) accounted for in a table, Table 3 presents an overview of major activities in which I participated.

Table 3 - Overview of key activities36 Activity

Location (or where I was at the

time for online meetings) Time period One year fieldwork in Denmark Denmark

June 2017-June 2018

3 weeks fieldwork in the global HQ Switzerland November 2017

3 weeks fieldwork in a Chinese subsidiary China April 2018

4 Ferring Philosophy Workshops for new

employees Denmark 2017-2018

1 ‘Train the trainer’ workshop on ‘the Ferring

Philosophy workshop’ Denmark February 2018

2 ‘Leading with Integrity’ online training for

managers in Asia Pacific Denmark January 2018

1 ‘Train the trainer’ workshop on ‘the Ferring

Philosophy workshop’ China October 2017

2 ‘Leading with integrity’ workshops for

managers China October 2017

1 ‘Train the trainer’ workshop on the ‘Leading

with integrity’ workshop. China October 2017

2 ‘Leading with integrity’ workshops for

managers India October 2017

1 Medical conference for healthcare

professionals (HCPs) sponsored by Ferring Central Europe October 2017 1 ‘Ferring Philosophy workshop’ for new

employees China April 2018

1 ‘Leading with ‘integrity train the trainer

refresher workshop (facilitated by me) China April 2018

36 As part of the fieldwork, I have participated in various other formalized meeting settings, such as information meetings, global and local staff meetings, team meetings in the Global Ethics Office, clinical trial meetings and internal presentations. All such activities are part of the fieldwork, but I have only listed the larger key activities in this table.

83 1 Workshop with ethics officers (facilitated by

me) Denmark May 2017

1 ‘Leadership principles’ training workshop for

all employees Denmark September 2018

1 online ‘Train the trainer’ workshop on

Leadership Principles for HR China April 2018

1 Sales visit to doctors with sales

representative Switzerland November 2017

1 Presentation at HQ for Chinese visiting HCPs Switzerland November 2017 Biannual multi-day meeting for the

Compliance, Ethics and Legal team Denmark May 2017

3.5.2. Field notes

Central to qualitative research are the field notes written by the researcher (Sanjek 1990; Sanjek and Tratner 2016). Thanks to the widespread usage of laptops in corporate settings, writing field notes has been relatively unproblematic in this project. Often, anthropologists struggle with the awkwardness of taking out a notebook in social settings, or with the practical difficulty of having a flat surface to write on e.g. when the informants they follow are on the move, or when they have worked in areas where there was no electricity, not to mention sunlight, rainstorms, desert sand, mud, dust and ubiquitous mosquitos. During my fieldwork, however, the laptop was a standard accessory in most contexts.

During meetings, trainings and presentations, my informants used their own computers for taking notes, such that I did not stand out when doing so as well. This routine of note-taking has facilitated that I have been able to take notes almost verbatim when attending meetings and trainings, allowing me to capture many details of what happened as well as what was said by whom and in what way.

3.5.3. Documents and written sources

Another source of the empirical basis of this dissertation comprises the internal, written documents that I have encountered in the field. For example, the Global Ethics Office maintains and develops an extensive site on the Ferring intranet, containing guides, tutorial exercises and stories, facilitation toolkit for ethics workshops, etc. Together with reports about the clinical trials that I have followed, documents about Ferring’s new Leadership Principles as well as marketing and sales-related materials, these written sources have all informed this project. The vast majority of these materials are internal sources and thus not directed towards external stakeholders or the public.

84 3.5.4. Informed consent in participant observation

As the AAA Principles of Professional Responsibility state, we must always be open and honest about our work and obtain informed consent from our research participants.37 As the ASA guidelines further point out38, when doing participant observation, the problem of consent can be difficult when our observations take place in crowds of people or at large gatherings and events such as e.g. the global staff meetings that I attended from my computer or in an auditorium where it has not been possible to introduce myself to the many hundreds of people who attended worldwide. However, as the ASA guidelines prescribe, whenever possible, I have made myself known, stated by purpose of participation and asked for permissions to carry out interviews or attend meetings. In more formalized settings, such as ethics workshops or clinical trials team meetings, this process of requesting access has been fairly straightforward. For example, the clinical trials team meetings are biweekly events attended by the same group of people. These people already knew why I was there from one meeting to the next.

Whenever a new person joined, the meeting manager would start out with individual introductions around the table, where I, too, had the chance to introduce myself and my research project.