La infancia como sujetos de derechos: desarrollos latinoa mericanos

Interview based research raises significant ethical issues regarding confidentiality during the interviews and in reporting the findings, regarding access by third parties and retention of the recordings and their transcriptions and to the use and publication of their contents. Many of these concerns were addressed following guidelines of the Institutional Review Board of the University of South Carolina. All participants received an informed- consent invitation letter (Appendix E.) explaining the research purpose and their rights as participants, providing details on access, use and retention of the recording and their transcriptions, and assuring their complete anonymity in the dissertation and in any future publication that may be derived from it. Additional details were sent to participants in Asia, who were all sourcing agents, intermediaries and apparel suppliers whom I reached through referral from other retail executives, to assure them that none of their statements would be shared with their referents, or any other clients or competitors.

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Managing confidentiality posed some interesting challenges during the interviews because of the need to balance the usefulness of the knowledge built from previous interviews and of statements from various participants in eliciting deeper reflection and more sophisticated responses, with the obligation to keep interview contents confidential. Any breach of confidentiality during an interview would not only represent a violation of my code of conduct as a researcher but also compromise the participants’ trust in the integrity of the research process, reducing their willingness to share their views with openness, and to contribute with invaluable examples from their experience with specific firms in the apparel global value chains. Fortunately, the process of referral itself, gave all participants a degree of awareness of my connections within the industry, and the caliber of my referents afforded me a level of ‘borrowed trust’ in discussing specific firms and industry dynamics. Because of the referral chain, many interviews went in much greater detail discussing my referents’ present and past firms, as well as insights on other firms in the industry with which I had no known connection. A few participants presented me with an unexpected twist in the issue of confidentiality, as they probed me for opinions and views from their clients and competitors, on and off the record. While their curiosity opened interesting lines of inquiry, confidentiality took precedence. The preliminary data collection, specifically industry press articles, books and case studies proved invaluable in these instances allowing me to pursue these unplanned threads making references to published views rather than breaching other participants’ confidentiality.

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CHAPTER FIVE

RESEARCH FINDINGS

In this chapter I follow the basic outline of the theoretical model to present the results of the field work associated with this study, and to discuss the finding in relation to the model’s propositions. The completed field work consisted in in-depth interviews with a total of fifteen sourcing executives, agents, suppliers and trade intermediaries, conducted in the US, Hong Kong and Indonesia; in addition to the interviews, I was invited to attend an internal training seminar for country managers at Li & Fung’ s headquarters in Hong Kong, featuring a presentation by the firm’s COO and principal. The interview recordings span close to 30 hours, averaging 1h 53’ per interview, yielding 322 single spaced pages rich with content, as all formalities to introduce the research topic and regarding informed consent, were addressed via e-mail prior to the meetings, to maximize useful interview time in consideration of the participants’ schedule constraints. Besides the interview transcriptions, I have created interview reports with additional observations regarding each participant’s main contributions, recording issues that arose during the interview.

The analysis of the transcripts benefitted greatly from the use of NVivo 11 Pro for coding, which greatly facilitated the manipulation and extraction of data. The theoretical

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model (Figure 5.1) which provided the basis for the interview protocols was also the basis of the initial coding scheme (Appendix III).

Figure 5.1 Determinants of buyer-supplier governance mode in apparel GVC

In addition to the codes, categories and themes from the study’s theory development, I included nodes for the eleven propositions, and a code for quotable statements to facilitate their retrieval when presenting the data. Overall, the interviews yielded 1370 references to 35 nodes, and 73 direct references to the 11 propositions. These 1370 references represent the data points of the research and feature prominently in the presentation of the results, which I organized in sections by variable: I begin the presentation with a discussion of the GVC governance, the dependent variable, followed by the two independent variables, institutional distance and supplier capabilities, and concluding with the moderator variable, institutional brokerage. A quantitative mapping of the data points shows how the data fit against the theoretical model (Figure 5.2)

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Figure 5.2 Coding and reference mapping vs. theoretical model

In order to organize the data, I have subdivided each variable section into subsections corresponding to the original coding scheme, I extracted all coded content for each node, weeded out non-usable or redundant passages, and then created a master document pasting all relevant coded data in their corresponding subsection. The resulting document maps out over 500 participants’ original contributions, edited only for clarity, preserving all the data pointing at emerging consensus, as well as those revealing divergence of opinions. Finally, I write up the results weaving the data points in a narrative, assessing the validity of a priori assumptions made in the theory development, and gauging the concordance of the model’s propositions with the opinions and preoccupations of the research participants. The interpretation of the findings presents

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challenges linked to cultural difference between Asia participants and US participants as well as difference in roles and positions in the value chain, as for example between an agent and a manufacturer. Another subtler challenge is posed by the immanent nature of many participants’ concerns, and the occasional banality and one-sidedness of some of the opinions offered as expertise. One executive at Li & Fung, the world’s largest Hong Kong based apparel intermediary, used an old Buddhist parable to describe the cognitive challenges ahead, as he described the narrow views and misconceptions among the industry buyers, suppliers and competitors about Li & Fung’s business model, and its role in the global value chain:

ITI3: you know the old parable of the elephant and the blind men? They take a bunch of blind men and ask them to tell you what an elephant looks like: and the first blind man feels the elephant’s trunk so he says: “I know what an elephant looks like: it looks like a snake” another one feels his legs and says “No, no it is like a tree” the third one feels the body and says “No, an elephant is as big as a house …”