ESCENARIOS TENDENCIALES

The interviews were conducted in different official institutions in Aqaba city, comprising the main Army Unit, the Economic Zone Authority, the Aqaba Court, schools, and the city centre. At the beginning, communicating with the chosen participants in such locations was not an easy task, particularly the main Army Unit and Aqaba Court, where certain routine formal procedures must be followed; however, the researcher‟s brother and friends helped in gaining

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access to interview the participants in these places. While interviewing people in their places of work, the initial difficulty encountered is the small amount of contact between the informants and the public space, although they were shown the images of the common brand names. This methodological issue was resolved by asking the informants to carry out the interview in a coffee shop or a restaurant, where the LL signs are clearly displayed. The place of interview did not have any significant impact on the participants‟ viewpoints. In fact, the use of people‟s professional places was specifically intended to gain access to contacting informants with different socio-economic backgrounds in Aqaba. For instance, the visits to the main Army Unit, the Economic Zone Authority, and the Aqaba Court were a means to interviewing high-ranking officers, senior managers, and judges. In addition, informants such as pharmacists were interviewed in the city centre, particularly in their places of work. The interviews conducted in Aqaba schools were aimed to meet teachers. The majority of other people were also met in their places of work in the city centre. These interviewees included people selling goods in wholesale shops and stores, and craft workers such as dry cleaners and truck drivers.

Informants‟ approval for taking part in the study was arranged in advance, while people in the city centre approved their participation in the study at the time of interview. All of the data were collected during these one-to-one meetings. Locations were also chosen with the convenience of the participants in mind, and typically took place in private areas such as a study room in a library, or an office conference room. The duration of the interviews was between 20 and 30 minutes. Furthermore, data collection was mainly carried out within a planned time; the work lasted for four weeks, where two to four people were interviewed on a daily basis. Most interviews were arranged with the informants in advance via the researcher‟s friend, brother, or sister, while a few were conducted in the city centre, such as those with pharmacists, truck drivers, and dry cleaners.

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The practical phases of the interviews included managing, recording, and closing the interview. Managing the interview involved preparation for the interview questions and arranging the date and time for the interview. In terms of the interview questions, as discussed in Chapter Four, twenty brand signs were chosen according to their recurrent visibility in the LL of Aqaba, designed as small cards, and each was shown to the respondents. The signs may include images, brand names, or both. The questions were established in English but presented in Arabic too, so that no difficulties might arise during data collection. Most of the interviews were carried out by me, while six were conducted in the girls‟ school, where my sister undertook the interviews with the female teachers. The interviews started with me introducing myself to the respondents, and providing a brief idea about the fieldwork of the study conducted in the LL of Aqaba in Jordan, and how the respondents‟ views were important for supporting the research issue. I told my sister to follow the same procedures when conducting the interviews with the female teachers. Hence, she started the interviews by introducing herself to the respondents, and telling them briefly about the project, and how their views are supportive to the study. After obtaining the respondents‟ oral approval for participation, they were required to read and sign the consent form in Arabic, as shown in Appendix V. In addition, the participants were required to confirm their permission for the researcher(s) to write down their responses while interviewing. Within this phase, the participants were asked to examine each brand sign and to express their points of view concerning their social and cultural viewpoints about the COR and LOR of the brand names designated. More specifically, the interviewees were asked to examine the brand images, and a discussion begins to be built, based on two main questions – „Which language do you think of when you see these brand names?‟ and „Which country do you think of when you see these brand names?‟ – as stated in Appendix V. If the interviewee had difficulty answering a question or hesitates, the interviewer would explain the matter again. With this in mind, the responses was recorded

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during the interview. Recording can be carried out through different methods, including tape- recording, video-recording, and/or note-taking (Punch, 2005: 175). Here, the practical constraints of the Jordanian context require me to use note-taking as a means of recording the respondents‟ viewpoints, since many did not accept the idea of recording their voices during the interviews. My sister also met with a refusal from the female teachers for the interviews to be recorded, so she too had to use a note-taking procedure. In terms of closing the interview, the respondents were thanked for their participation, and the answers were transcribed as they were translated into English. After this, all the answers were stored in a file on our laptop.

5.3 Concluding Remarks

Following the interview procedures in the preceding LL research, the current study has adopted a similar strategy with the consideration of the ethnographic influence during conducting the interview. The strategy includes analysing the brand names as discussed in Chapter Four, and then the interview questions are supplied in light of the linguistic issues related to brand names. For these reasons, the interviewing approach has been evaluated as a positive tool for seeking informants‟ views about the existence of brand names in Aqaba‟s LL.

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Chapter Six: Findings and Discussions 6.1 Introduction

Having proposed a typology of signs based on the corpus recorded in Aqaba, and in the light of the conclusions drawn regarding the interplay between the language(s), script(s), images, and slogans on brand names as they appear in the LL, I analyse in this Chapter the reactions of the respondents and organise them accordingly. As outlined in Chapter Four, twenty brand names have been chosen on the grounds of their common occurrence in the LL to function as a material corpus. These brand names comprise L’Oréal, Panasonic, Western Union, Samsung,

Adidas, Levi’s, Nokia, Pepsi, Nescafé, Canon, GAP, DHL, Toshiba, LG, Sajeda, Coca-Cola,

Zain, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and BMW. For the purpose of obtaining more understanding of the symbolic connotations and meanings of the brand names analysed above, the chosen brands were used to complement my perspectives from the interviewing of 42 residents of Aqaba city. The purpose of the interviews is to explore Jordanians‟ symbolic understanding of the different associations of brand names from the perspectives of both the COR and LOR.

Following the premises of qualitative data (see Punch, 1998; Mason, 1996; Miles and Huberman, 1994), the analysis of the data in the present study went through different stages. Having made notes on the respondents‟ views and beliefs, I began by reading to obtain a general idea about these perspectives. Under each brand name, the process of analysing the data included labeling relevant pieces, words and phrases, with the aim of making more specific notes – a process called coding. By so doing, the brand name‟s data was summarised by pulling together topics and detecting closer patterns. These procedures also involved drawing some degree of „inference‟ beyond the interview data at hand (Punch, 1998: 205). For example, the single view „the preference for English for its readability and clarity‟ as a positive aspect of the language of the brand name, rather than any other foreign language, in

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this case lead me to infer that the interviewee means the use of English as a lingua franca language within the theme „prestige of English‟. At that stage, it was necessary to look at how the different views (codes) supported the relevant data and the overarching theoretical perspective of the project.

Meanwhile, all the responses were counted and given different cases and numbers within the coding stage, where 840 single views were articulated by the respondents. Having identified the relevant topics and patterns, I then created a category for each group of topics. The different codes and patterns were grouped together within the relevant categories. For example, the frequent occurrence of codes such as „modernity connotations of the language‟, „the freedom and liberty meanings of using English in the community‟, and „the meaning of the foreignism and difference‟ all lead me to initiate the category (theme) called „prestige of English‟ within the language of brand names. In this respect, it is worth mentioning that the cultural context of the interviews had a positive impact on the study‟s findings in terms of understanding and connecting the similar ideas and views together. In essence, the application of the rules of qualitative research required an acknowledgement of the subjective influences that I tried my best to avoid in the process of data analysis (Brewer, 2000; Roberts and Sanders, 2005).

Having implemented the coding and categorisation procedures of the qualitative research, the viewpoints of the citizens of Aqaba, as represented by the participants canvassed for this Thesis, were organised into five distinct themes which I present and dissect in this chapter. As shown in Figure 6.1, a range of responses has been recorded from the respondents, of which over a quarter (28%) is disparate and excluded from the data analysed; this includes highly individualised responses to brand names based on family experiences, or personal preferences for a given brand. Nevertheless, I group the remaining responses into five categories that I outline in this introduction and explore more profoundly over the course of this chapter. The

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first theme, which is attested by 25% of the responses, is what I am referring to as the prestige of the English language. A closely related but distinct theme, cited in 18% of the responses, is the correlation between positive beliefs and the US, where the US is perceived as the COR. The US is seen as a progressive, successful, and free country, whose culture is fashionable and desirable. The third theme is where brand names are associated with Islam and its traditions, and the language(s) of the signs are considered from an Islamic perspective. These responses can include what I might refer to as negative associations between the COR and Islam, where the brand is coloured by a perceived anti-Islamic stance. This theme is attested by 14% of the responses. Linguistic nationalism, both secular and sacred, reflects the value placed on Arabic in Jordan, usually in relationship to other languages, and this accounts for 14% of the responses. The fifth and final category is the association made by the respondents between the phonological dimension of the brand names and the particularities of a given language. This theme is organised around 4% of the responses.

Figure: 6.1 – Distribution of Participants‟ Dominant Perspectives

Further still, these five themes were studied in association with the participants‟ demographic information. This required me to make an approximate estimate of the effect of the most relevant socio-economic factors among the different categories. Based on the coding and

Prestige of the English Language

25% Prestige of the USA

18%

Islamic and Anti- Islamic Associations 14% Linguistic Nationalism and Language 11% Brand–Sound Associations 4% Other viewpoints 28%

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categorisation procedures explained above, I discuss each of these themes, and highlight the significance of the respondents‟ socio-economic and personal backgrounds so as to be able to organise the analysis.