Striving for a hierarchy-free relationship with participants, I completely disclosed my industrial designer identity as an attempt to “promote collegiality” both in our correspondence and during the interview (Minister 1991). As I explained in the previous section, in my e-mails I offered participants the link to my personal web site where they could find all my professional work and my updated CV to enable them to investigate who I am, which university I graduated from, in which workplaces I had worked etc. In our meetings, some of the participants told me that they knew me and my work and asked me some questions about the companies I had worked in and people whom I might know, whereas some others implied that they have opinions about me and my work. For example, one of my participants said,
You have worked as a professional designer, too. You have done difficult work in many companies, too, trying to make yourself accepted in these
places. [1]
Since it was the first time I had seen this person, it was clear that before making his decision to take part in my research he had investigated who I was.
Some others asked their questions directly to me at the beginning of the interview. They wanted to know, for example, when I had moved to the UK, why I had given up professional practice and chosen an academic career, why I was interested in this topic for study etc. I answered all of their questions regarding my biography; as Minister (1991) recommends, being a feminist researcher I gave the participants the opportunity to interrogate me about myself. This transparency which is available for my industrial designer identity let the participants share their professional narratives with a colleague who probably can tell similar ones and who can understand them well.
However, I was careful not to disclose too much regarding the research project in order not to lead them with my approach. Although some of the participants asked questions such as what I would say at the conclusion of the thesis, or what I was thinking about gender issues, I responded with brief answers and underlined that it was not me, but themselves who would enable me to arrive at certain conclusions with their stories. For those who were interested in the final thesis, I promised to e-mail it as soon as it is completed.
Being a former practitioner in the field of industrial design in Turkey, I was, to a certain extent, an insider in the community on whose experiences this study is empirically based. However, I was rather an outsider in certain relationships and settings. I was an insider in terms of getting access to a large group of industrial designers graduated from or in close relationships with METU. But, due to the very same reason, I was an outsider for industrial designers graduated from other universities. I found it very difficult and made much effort to get access to a satisfactory number of potential participants from these universities.
Apart from getting physical access, I encountered this issue in my relationships with the participants as well. For METU graduates it was rather an act of solidarity to help a researcher who has an affiliation with METU. Some of them asked me questions about the members of staff, reminiscing about the good old university days. On the other hand, for the participants
who graduated from other universities I was an outsider. I did not know their studying environment and their relationships within the department, so they had to give a lot of explanations regarding these issues. Also, some of them praised their universities at some point in the interviews, sometimes comparing them to METU, and one of them even made an “us” versus “you” distinction. When I encountered this attitude, I tried to show that I did not share such a concern.
To the extent that I could be an insider, I utilised certain advantages of the insider role (Hodkinson 2005). Once the issues regarding relationships were solved and once the participants could see me as a former industrial design practitioner who is familiar with their experiences, concerns and problems, I felt that the level of trust and cooperation in our relationship was influenced positively. Also, being members of the same discipline enabled us to ‘speak the same language’ and thus, reduced the required time and effort to understand each other.
However, this does not mean that sharing a common disciplinary background is completely unproblematic and does not bring any possible disadvantages. During the interviews participants disclosed their personal relationships with their colleagues, clients and employees in their stories. There was the possibility that participants could feel distressed as in their stories there could be some people whom I knew or had the possibility of knowing. For this reason, at the beginning of the interviews I informed the participants that they could use pseudonyms for people and companies in a way that would not influence their stories and never asked for further details about these people and companies.
In relation to this, once I noticed that a participant had some reservations regarding the confidentiality of her/his stories, I took a break from the interview and talked about the strategies that I had developed to provide confidentiality. I explained that each participant as well as other people included in their accounts, would be given at least one pseudonym6.
Also, I said, any data with the probability of identifying the participant such as company names, city names and details of the products that the participant designs would be anonymised before being used in any publications. I gave some examples referring to the papers I presented in conferences and explained how I used the data there in a way that the
6 I gave additional pseudonyms to some of the participants when I thought that the details given in their stories could be linked in a way that reveals their identities.
participants cannot be identified. At this point I realised that although issues of confidentiality are clearly explained in the participant information sheet and the consent form, these documents were not convincing enough for all participants. Some said that they would not care if I shared their narratives with others, whilst others were very careful not to disclose any information that could be a problem if I shared with anyone. For both groups, the consent form was just a part of the procedure but not something they had confidence in.
I also noticed that doing a PhD abroad put me in a superior position for some participants and I felt that this caused them to feel uneasy, especially at the beginning of our meeting. In such situations, again, I tried to shift their focus towards my designer identity by talking about my previous experiences as a practitioner. On the other hand, there were also the cases where participants took a superior position to me, as a business person speaking to a postgraduate student. With these participants it was much more difficult to set up a balanced relationship in terms of power and authority. Indeed this is indicated as one of the primary challenges qualitative researchers encounter in the studies that rely on interviews with elites and professionals (Harvey 2011, Kezar 2003, Mikecz 2012, Welch et al. 2002). Through such interviews I observed that an asymmetrical relationship affects the quality and the depth of the narrative negatively, even when it is the participant who holds power.
Considering my fieldwork experience, I agree with Mikecz (2012) that the location of the interview can have considerable impact on the power asymmetry between the researcher and the interviewed professional. As I mentioned above, interviews were conducted in various locations depending on convenience, such as the participant’s office, home or a public place. I met with ten participants in their offices. In these interviews I felt that being in the participant’s own ‘territory’ provided her/him with control and authority over the interview setting compared to myself (see also Welch et al. 2002). Although meeting at the participant’s homes had a similar impact in terms of empowering the participant as the ‘host’ over myself, the ‘guest’; the office environment, especially when the interviews were conducted in the rooms that were designed to meet (and possibly also to impress) the guests of the firm, further reflected the position and power of the business person over the researcher.
Moreover, whilst a few participants considered the interviews as formal meetings that should be conducted in a meeting room away from any distraction, others kept on answering their
phones, or occasionally paused the interview to discuss some issues with other people in the office. A participant whom I visited in her own design consultancy firm, for example, wanted us to make the interview in her employees’ room rather than hers. This was because they were working on a design project with an approaching deadline, and she wanted to be accessible to the designers in case they needed to consult her about the project. Inevitably, our interview was interrupted at times. Regarding interviewing business people, Harvey (2011) suggests that such small breaks can offer a good opportunity for the researcher to catch up on their notes. I accept that this can apply to qualitative researchers who conduct interviews in a question-answer format. However, in my narrative-based research such breaks and interruptions rather caused inconvenience, since after every break it took some time for the participant to get back to the narrative, and to remember the point she intended to make with a specific story left incomplete. As expected, this was not a productive interview. Overall, I found meeting in public places more advantageous in terms of creating a more egalitarian interview relationship, since it removes the guest-host roles I observed in the office, and distributes control over the interview setting between parties more equally.
In addition to issues of power and control, the openness of the interviewee is also indicated as a challenging aspect of researching elites and business people by qualitative researchers. Welch et al. (2002) state that the degree of the openness of participants can vary according to their organisational positions. For example, data derived from the interviews with senior professionals who consider themselves representatives of their companies may provide the researcher with little more than what a press statement could do. Indeed in a couple of interviews I conducted with the designers who own their design consultancy firms I had similar experiences. Rather than discussing any problems, these participants placed more emphasis on their success stories, introduced their products and the awards they won. Moreover, I suggest that in my research the degree of the openness of participants was also considerably influenced in a negative way by the sensitivity of talking about gender inequality.
As I will discuss further in Chapter 6, some of the male participants seemed to assume that as a female researcher I was trying to understand their attitude towards women at work. This assumption was particularly strong at the beginning of the interviews. When I noticed their uneasiness regarding this, I asked them to focus on their experiences as industrial designers, so that we can see together if gender would be relevant at some point. Overall, male participants considered gender an issue about women, not themselves. Only some of them
talked about the problems they experienced as men, such as the military service that is compulsory for every man in Turkey, and the pressure of finding well-paid jobs to take care of their families. Similarly, women approached gender as an issue about themselves. Among them there was a tendency to indicate that gender has rarely, or never, been a source of inequality in the office environment. This was especially the case with the women who own their design consultancy firms or who work in large-scale companies in large cities. As I will discuss further in Chapter 6, there were only three women participants who reported discriminatory behaviour towards women in their workplaces. Apart from these, women stressed that it is being an industrial designer rather than a woman that is the source of the problems they experienced in the workplace.
Although participants’ denial of the relevance of gender to their work experiences was a challenge for my analysis at the beginning, this very challenge had a great influence on developing and applying my theoretical framework. The emphasis in the narratives on interdisciplinary relations in discussion of the designers’ problems led me to investigate how ‘being a designer’ can be understood gendered, drawing on Acker’s gendered organisations theory by combining it with Harding’s gender triad. With this framework I analysed gender not only at an individual level, but also in terms of symbols and images attached to occupations, and division of labour in organisations. I will elaborate on this further in the following chapter (see Section 6.3).