It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate.
-- Joseph Joubert
7.1
Introduction to Three Key Decision Journeys
While analyzing the transcripts of my study participants, three key decision making situations emerged that illustrated the multi-level and complex nature of the interactions occurring for each decision process. These decision situations were partly chosen because they speak to two subsets of the first objective of this project; namely, how groups (the entities within the wool supply chain) influence the decision making of individuals (the farmers), and how the contexts (including intangible components such as the forces of globalization) influence relationships among decision makers. These real-life scenarios also reveal the complexity of decision making processes for individuals and groups involved in the global economic arena. The first decision I will discuss concerns the farmers who were contemplating leaving the industry. The second and third decisions include choices of coordinating wool conduits to markets, and wool manufacturers’ sourcing of products and selling their value-added products to new entities. The latter two examples involve complex interactions and players from several stages in the supply chain, and hence will be described after I analyze the influences and pressures on farmers deciding whether or not to remain in the industry.
7.2
Revisiting the Review of Farmer Decision Making
As discussed in the results (see Chapter Five), the farmers I interviewed described two broad methods of coming to decisions; one, intuitively, appearing to rely on ‘gut feelings’ and internally-motivated factors to arrive at the perceived ‘right’ decision or, two, rational-
analytically, presenting themselves as examining the decision systematically by using methods that he/she has found to minimize confusion, and further describing themselves as logically or systematically selecting one option from a group of perceived options, often discovered through external sources. In addition to cognitively leaning in the direction of ‘intuitive’ or ‘rational-analytical’ (See Chapter Five: Results of Farmer Interviews, Section 5.4 and 5.5), farmers also navigated perceived emotional pressures from many sources. Thus the actual decision making that occurs comes across as a process, a continuous contemplation of inputs, options, and judgment of information sources, as well as reflection post-decision on the part of the individual. The process also occurs within the context of groups (e.g., families, cooperatives, businesses, and supply chain entities) – sometimes referred to as ‘decision making units’ (DMUs see Chapter Three, Literature Review, Section 3.2) in the literature - who make their unique contributions to the social decision making process, but usually come to a decision together. The intuitive farmers will now be indicated with an “I” at the end of their coding, while rational-analytical farmers will be indicated with an ‘R.”
7.3
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
In the case of deciding to remain in the industry, pressures (inputs) were identified as coming from at least four - though often more - sources prior to the farmers’ own cognitive and affective psychological processing. These sources included: the media (television, newspapers, agricultural websites, periodicals, business reports, or technical reports released by agricultural or environmental research and development companies); the farmers
immediate circle of friends, sometimes including other farmers; the farmer’s family (present day and past members in an inter-generational sense); any farming group or cooperative they belonged to and, explicitly in three cases, other entities within the chain they belonged to. The following excerpts illustrate the demands that other people and groups, and media can make on a farmer navigating the decision of remaining in the sheep/wool growing industry (or
converting to dairy, other stock, service farming, crop farming, selling land, changing their career, or retiring).
7.3.1 Media Influences
Farmers and their families indicated several ways in which the media affected their decisions to remain in the industry (please refer to Chapter Five: Results of Farmer Interviews Section 5.4 for an account of the situation in the varied agribusiness sectors in New Zealand during the study period in order to help position the decision making pressures); these have included the accounts of successful trends in other agribusinesses, the misrepresentation of information on the state of the wool industry over longer periods of time and over a global market, the selection of sources of information for media articles in relation to agribusiness, and the framing of articles. First, I will examine how trends in other agricultural fields and the media presentation of those trends influenced the decision making of the study
participants.
“Every day I read the forecasted payout numbers in the paper. There’s good news in it for a lot of farmers, tucked in there in the business section with all the doom and gloom and stocks down and the like. ‘Dairy’s going to pay well this year.’ ‘Predicted record year for payouts and volume’, you know? How can you say no to that? I just keep thinkin’ that there’s a reason it’s reported in the business section not lifestyles or other parts. Like the other stocks, there’s going to be the downs soon too. Can’t just keep going up, can it? But, it is tempting, the way it’s put, all rosy.” INTF3-I
“I read the reports from [National Representative Body] regularly. They send them by email. They’re just a lot of numbers for the most part, and notes on who got promotions and who left the company. I feel like sometimes they don’t tell us everything. I mean, they talk about having meetings and give attendance records and reports about what their goals are for the next year or so, but I still feel like so much goes on behind the scenes that they don’t tell us about. Makes me want to be there in person, but I can’t because I’m here on the farm. And then I only hear parts about what happened from others.” INTF13-I
“We read about the conversion numbers in the [local paper] and talked about it, I guess we mulled it over for a couple of months, him more than me I think. He just kept seeing the articles, the success stories, the numbers reported in the news. Everyone just talked about how it was the next step for us, that sheep-
meat was over now. The papers even talked about how Asia was importing more and more dairy as their middle class grew and that was convincing, you know, being middle class ourselves. All you ever read about for wool was ‘when would the bottom hit?’ and ‘No future’” INTF1S-R
Within the first account, external pressures are found in the form of numbered payouts reported in the media, the implication that industries other than dairy are full of “doom and gloom,” and the reference to the descriptions of dairy successes as “tempting” and “all rosy.” Of note is the farmer’s indication that although the descriptions seem positive, the reports are found in the business section, not the ‘lifestyle’ section as expected, and like other stocks and markets, the farmer is wary or almost hopeful that the dairy industry will have its ‘down time’. The cynical voice perhaps reflects two internal processes that were mentioned by other participants; one an envy of the success of a farming system doing well when his was not, and two, a high degree of experience in the farming sector indicating a knowledge that there are both positive and negative times over a long career, hence a questioning of the newspaper reports’ accuracy in representation of the state of the industry. This ‘intuitive’ and highly experienced farmer illustrates his lack of belief in the accuracy of the newspaper through his cynicism and mistrust. This farmer is cautious in using the media reports to help his decision making.
One question arising from this instance and others with experienced farmers is whether the lack of trust in the media created the caution and cynicism, or conversely, whether the cautious stoicism of intuitive farmers generates a discourse of a lack of trust of the laudations of the media? In this instance, the media acts as a further compounding variable in the farmer’s decision processes; first alerting attention to a successful trend that the farmer is not involved in, then continually promoting that trend. Second, the farmer believes that the newspaper gives a skewed account of the actual success thereby influencing his decision to (dis) trust the newspaper as an information source. Third, the framing of the information (section of newspaper, tempting and promising wording) may have an influence on the farmer’s perceived success of his/her own farm in comparison, causing reflection, regret, or
other internally located affective states. Farmers indicated that the ‘Business’ and ‘National’ sections of the newspapers seemed more serious in nature and were written in more sombre tones than those articles written for the ‘Lifestyle’ section, where articles are written as human interest pieces rather than empirical reports of the economy.
The national representative body was the information source for the reporting mentioned in the second account. An interesting feature of this statement is that the farmer perceives that the reports are incomplete. The perception reflects uncertainty on three levels: first, there may be uncertainty or an inaccurate representation given from the representative body itself as to how the industry is faring (though speculative this might be what the farmer perceives about the representative body); second, uncertainty as to how much information to share with farmers; and, third, uncertainty from the farmers about the honesty and
thoroughness of their own representative body.
Additional external sources of information identified by this farmer were ‘others,’ meaning other farmers or people who attended the meetings. The farmer reflected on not gaining complete information, only ‘parts’ from them as well. This source of multiple uncertainties complicates the decision making of farmers in the industry. Already faced with situations of complex and variable economic reporting, unpredictable weather and resultant stock development, and skewed media reports of competing industries (as perceived and revealed by the farmers), questions arise as to how the farmer catalogues and uses the information he/she has in order to uncover a preferred choice in the given circumstances.
The similarity between the first two quotations is that there seems to be either a suspicion on the part of the farmers (both intuitively-based decision makers) of the accuracy in the reporting of the information from the sources, or a miscalculation of the probability of an event (i.e., upturn in the industry). The suspicion was found amongst most intuitive farmers’ discussion of information sources. This brings us to a key social psychological influence that moves through the chain.
7.3.2 Uncertainty, complexity, suspicion and probabilities moving through the chain There is a key difference between uncertainty and suspicion in decision making. Uncertainty (a lack of certainty, a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe an existing state or future outcome, or when there are more than one potential outcome to a problem) has no implied emotive component. Instead, uncertain situations beg for increased information seeking, and judging probabilities from decision makers.
Uncertainty can be differentiated from unrecognized complexity, in that the latter refers to a
number of elements in a problem, and the extent to which they are interrelated. Complex decisions can be overcome using information gathering and other techniques in order to minimize the unknown variables, but uncertainty cannot be overcome in that way. I will turn to the examination of how complexity and uncertainty affected the decision makers in Section 7.3.3 below, but for now, I will concentrate on the emotive components of uncertainty and ‘suspicion’.
Feelings of uncertainty among the respondents seemed to be described in a tone reflecting suspicion, or as an uneasiness that participants had to deal with in order to come to a decision. That suspicion was sometimes targeted towards an information source, a particular person, or a level of the supply chain removed from the participants. I believe the community ‘instinct’ worked to move feelings of suspicion or uncertainty away from people in the context in which the respondent was most familiar, and to a context where respondents did not have much experience (i.e., farmers were suspicious of retailers, and vice versa). In
decision theory there is also the notion of higher-order probabilities (i.e., the probability that a probability is a particular value). Though suspicion could be affected systematically by the nature of interactions with others (for example, experiencing a cooperative act from another person can reduce one’s suspicion toward them, or their ‘group’), other perceived sources of unreliability for a given probability cannot.
I have detailed the two different approaches to information gathering and decision strategies below in Figure 7.1. In short, experienced farmers are able to ‘sift’ (Martin, personal communication, 2009) through the information, sources, and their own experiences in order to uncover what is relevant for a particular decision (in terms of relevant information, and relevant style of making a decision). Inexperienced farmers had difficulty narrowing information, sources, and decision processes down to an acceptable one for a particular decision. This could have been due to both their inexperience with the situations, and their inexperience with dealing with ‘suspicions’ (see below) or probabilities.
Figure 7.1 Inexperienced and Experienced Approaches to Information Gathering
Another potential analysis of this situation is that although the decision seems to be located within an uncertain situation, the farmer may be thinking about the decision as a process, one that is ‘unwindable.’ In that way, instead of using resources to find more
information, the farmer may be able to ‘live with’ a decision that appears uncertain if it is low risk and can absorb downturns, or if it is fairly easy to unwind that decision if it proves to be a mistake. Thus, a decision that may appear to be highly risky and poorly informed, may
Figure 7.1 Inexperienced and Experienced Approaches to Information Gathering Inexperienced
Information Sources and Information, profiles of similar problems and catalogued experiences
Relevant Information, decision strategies
Decision discovered
Sifting through information and strategies to locate the most relevant
Experienced Information Sources and
Information, perceived context of problem
Relevant Information as perceived by the inexperienced decision maker
Potential decision options are numerous and require much time and effort to weight up Inadequate sifting and cataloguing
actually serve as an exploration of the uncertainty and complexity prior to coming to an impasse that does not have withdrawal as an option.
A concept related to uncertainty is suspicion. Suspicion differs from uncertainty in that it is an emotional feeling involving notions of (unfulfilled) duties or obligations to be
honest. When suspicious, a person focuses their cognitive energy on the occurrence of an event that confirms whether another person has been forthright in giving information. A disconfirmation leads to behaviour from the victim which is intended to reduce negative consequences of being duped, and can result in future behavioural changes in order to avoid a repeat of the situation. In other words, having a suspicion means that one has an impression that something is being withheld from one purposefully which will result in a non-ideal circumstance. There is an implied fear component to suspicion; that is, the fear that the suspicion and resulting behaviour/choice will not, or did not avoid the consequence of a poor decision. Suspicion concerns the concealment of information, whereas uncertainty does not imply concealment, but only a lack of information about a future event.
The tone of the comments from the first two farmers gives the impression of suspicion, of the farmers knowing that something is being withheld. The tone of the comments from the third farmer (one whose decision making was typically rational- analytical) reflects an uncertainty; that the information about globally successful trends is there to be discovered, not concealed. The question arises as to whether it is advantageous to be suspicious, or be attentive to one’s intuition regarding suspicion, or whether simply to seek to fill information gaps. The question also arises on which farmers have accurate intuitions and suspicions, and when they have misread or been poor cataloguers of available
information. In this way, suspicious farmers’ catalogue information related to how trustable the source of information is, rather than simply cataloguing information as an input to a decision.
7.3.3 How do Farmers Cope with Uncertainty, Complexity and Risk?
People often have a difficult time assessing and estimating risk and uncertainty appropriately, since there are variables that just cannot be known (e.g., exactly when an earthquake is going to happen along a particular fault). Rational-analytical decision makers have difficulty recognizing when problems involve risk and uncertainty, rather than
complexity and tend to treat the problems in the same way (using information gathering as a main strategy). Intuitive farmers are aware of when a problem involves uncertainty (though they did not specifically use the word to label given situations), and they tend to rely on gut feelings, but are also adept at recognizing complexity and seeking information, from sources they might become suspicious of if they believe the sources have the information that would help them solve a complex problem. Intuitive farmers also appear better equipped to manage suspicions, or avoid situations where suspicion could arise. It could be that their experience with decision making amidst varied social memberships and structures has helped them develop a specialized ‘lens’ through which to examine interactions and their own internal judgments about those interactions with an eye to revealing whether the suspicion is warranted.
Through their cataloguing of information needs for decisions, trustworthiness of sources, and their ability to remain attuned to cues in their environment, intuitive farmers often are better able to decipher whether they have adequate information to solve a dilemma, or when they have an information deficit either through their own oversight, or through incomplete sharing from another agent. They seem to be better at sifting through information to get at the required details. Again, they did not list complex situations using the specific terminology, but instead tended to explain key parts of decision where they knew (intuitively) that there was information they needed to find, or that the decision was beyond their current abilities (subsequently taking actions to solve the gaps).
Uncertainty and suspicion are related, but differ in tone (emotion). Farmers who are intuitively guided should be more likely to recognize a motivated response of suspicion (in