Phthalocyanines

The crew for the wider research journey was made up of people from the vaka moana in Waitakere at three levels, the wider community, WPB ethnic representatives as part of the research team and the Research Collaboration Group.

In terms of the wider community, the research included each of the Pacific communities, who attended several ethnic-specific and pan-Pacific meetings. This was achieved because the ethnic representatives of the WPB canvassed Pacific groups resident in the Waitakere region.

The initial research and design development team (for work in 2001) consisted of Pacific and European design, project management and cultural professionals, including the author. Ethnicities within that group were Niuean, Cook Island,

Samoan and Fijian. This team initiated and lead multilingual consultations across each cultural group for the concept definition and feasibility study for the PBCC.

The author had responsibility for concept development, writing and analysis as well as for research conducted during this phase.

Five studies were done at that time as action research to support the development of the PBCC concept. Two were market based, examining aspirations for the range of services and outcomes that a cultural attraction and business incubator might provide.

One was community based, exploring the expectations of business, church and community board leaders. A fourth study visited eight best-practice cultural centres around the Pacific. The fifth study conducted a series of stakeholder interviews with city councils, enterprise and tourism agencies in Auckland. However it was beyond the resource capacity at the time to look at specific ethnic communities, international and domestic tourist markets or purchases made at the annual Pasifika Festival.

These came later in Phases 2 and 3.

The academic work commenced in 2003 as a continuation of the first research (Phase 2), also as collaboration between the author and WPB. It identified potential cultural tourism and enterprise ideas for the PBCC from the perspective of ethnic communities, highlighting contrasts between ethnic-specific and pan-Pacific values.

Data collection and analysis here was driven by the ethnic representatives who sought ethnic-specific respondents in ways appropriate to their communities. The developmental work for the tourism attraction had intended to be the focus for this PhD but for various political reasons internal to WCC who had developed their own research capcability, that work was halted, requiring a change in PhD topic.

The community enterprise phase was an explicit cultural partnership and collaboration with the WPB. The research agenda was defined and agreed by the WPB Board and communities. However, the processes and players involved in this phase meant that the author‘s role changed to one of social advocate, speaking on behalf of ethnic communities to the pan-Pacific WPB. Research methods were developed from within the collaboration, linking sequentially and in some cases longitudinally (such as the Auckland regional residents and Pacific ethnic-specific habitus analyses, the Pasifika Attendee and the International/Domestic tourist studies). Each stage of analysis informed the next so that issues that arose from each set of studies were picked up and investigated in the studies that followed. The research progressed within loose conceptual parameters drawn from management, community development and cultural theory, and undertaken as emic collaboration from within Pacific migrant society. The first series of studies painted a picture of perceptual limiters and prior knowledge as key drivers for market participation. The second series examined the assumptions, inhibitors and enablers of enteprise development within each community.

The research team developed a collaborative leadership style shared between the WPB research convener (Samoa) and the author. Reverend Ministers and Elders guided both teams. Resource provision was shared between WPB and Waikato Management School (WMS) and within the WMS research team. The research team was made up of WMS staff (Solomon Island and NZ European), and nine WMS and Faculty of Arts and Sciences post-graduate and undergraduate students (Cook Island Maori, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga).

The researchers adopted an interpretivist approach grounded in collaborative principles for the Pacific community side of the research, as well as more positivist approaches to achieve statistically valid for the market surveys. These methods were used to produce artefacts of the process such as records of meetings, verbal presentations, visual summaries and reports. It was hoped that the iterative process as well as the verbal and visual research outputs would empower Pacific peoples to manage, use and undertake research.

The research reports produced were also intended to be of sufficient quality to provide data for policy formulation, community action and to argue for resources from potential funders, local government, central government and sponsors. This has in fact happened, since the research conclusions were included in WPC and WCC public consultation documents for community strategic planning in 2009.

From the outset, the Research Collaboration anticipated and privileged multiple cultural voices – the nine Pacific cultural communities who reside in Waitakere. The research team encompassed six ethnicities, both in the WMS team of young Pacific researchers and the WPB Research Collaboration Group, named and acknowledged in the frontispiece of this dissertation.

A Mutuality Research approach was developed within the collaborative team to develop understandings relevant to each of the respective cultural contexts, articulated by community voice, recorded, and interpreted by multilingual researchers matched within their communities, from which common pan-Pacific themes might emerge.

However, this did not assume any inherent ‗Pacificness‘ of method nor adoption of the many Pacific research methodologies that are currently emerging out of renewed Pacific-for-Pacific research hegemony. This research was initiated by a non-Pacific person and included several Pacific ethnicities in its scope. The team recognized that the approach would need to hear clearly the multiple Pacific voices and to interpret the multiple lenses at play, as well as the European lens of the principal researcher and the academic lens of a PhD. A pan-Pacific approach was not feasible, nor was a western academic frame. The principle of collaboration ignited the research.

Therefore, the Mutuality Research approach to data collection became an important means of ensuring that respective cultural voices were heard. This encompassed process, interactions, relationships and roles, minimised cultural filtering and ensured that accurate cultural perspectives were maintained, albeit at a practical level affected by the multilingual abilities and cultural competencies of the focus group facilitators, notetakers and data synthesisers.

All of the vaka moana (ocean going canoes) of each island nation in Waitakere were included, if not on the analytical team, but in the scope of research at all phases. The triangulation of personnel, the Mutuality method and ethnic representatives leading the sampling, ensured inclusiveness.