Field Methods and Analysis

This section describes how the study of fashion’s role in garment production was conducted in practice. It discusses how and why different methods were used in the empirical research and provides and overview of how the data were collected, interpreted and analysed. A critical realist perspective supports the identification of methods that are the most appropriate to the research questions while at the same time pursuing a critical and cautious methodology that seeks to explore and contrast multiple perspectives to arrive at ‘practically adequate’ conclusions. Morrow (1994) argues that critical methodology must include three components: (1) logics-in-use; (2) historicist and deconstructive reflexivity; and (3) existential reflexivity (which refers essentially to

5 _{Empirical analysis is crucial to theory building: ‘(T)heories make their strongest claims at the} abstract level about necessary or internal relations, and about causal powers, or in other words, about necessity in the world. Where relations between things are contingent, their form must always be an empirical question, that is, one which must be answered by observing actual cases’ (Sayer 1992:143).

6 _{This positions the research in relation to the literatures from which it arose and in which it is} embedded: ‘(c)hanges in the structure of conceptual systems and hence in meanings can be precipitated not only by empirical, practical anomalies but by discovering inconsistencies and omissions in the system of theoretical reflection’ (Sayer 1992:86).

insider knowledge). The idea of logics-in-use validates methods-in-use by critical reflection on the research questions and tentative evidence, so that logics operate as heuristic devices.

The research questions posed in Section 1.4 span diverse realms and as such present challenges for research design and data collection. A critical realist approach implies the deployment of multiple methods – both intensive and extensive – to collect, analyse and present information (Sayer 1984, Pratt 1995). This project’s multi-strategy approach deployed different mixes of methods in different parts of the research. As the project developed, it became increasingly clear that while quantitative investigation could establish the facts about patterns of international clothing sourcing, it would be necessary to rely on qualitative methods to answer the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of commodity chain and network relationships.

The third of Morrow’s (1994) three fundamental research elements – existential reflexivity – was in abundant supply in this study, which commenced after the author had been engaged in research on the Australian textiles, clothing and footwear industries for a number of years. As such, the project was grounded in extensive knowledge of the situation of the Australian industry, the networks of information and resources on which it relied, and the dominant explanations for its situation at the turn of the millennium. The author’s considerable ‘insider’ knowledge of how the industry operated both in Australia and overseas produced the seeds of an understanding of Australia’s peripherality in economic relations which subsequently framed the selection of questions, methods, approaches and research sites.

The most important impact of the initial stock of accumulated knowledge about the industry was to reject at the outset the option of basing the work on case studies tracing the international extensivity of specific firms and their supply chains and networks. Firstly, the emphasis on fashion promoted a focus on brands and ideas flows between firms and places rather than within firms. Secondly, the option was precluded by its magnitude: a firm-based case study would demand a thorough examination of firm supply structures, but each firm is engaged in multiple supply arrangements (for each garment type and season), and each supply channel spans multiple locations and incorporates numerous sub-chains. Tracing the complete set of firm-related chains is too large an endeavour for a sole researcher, and is better suited to a collaborative project involving multiple researchers in multiple locations. Thirdly, the specificities of a single firm case study would not provide adequate answers to the research questions.

The decision to focus the field research on Australian firms’ immediate links into Fiji, Hong Kong and China enabled the work to focus on the nature of links and their relations to the fashion industry, while at the same time highlighting the commonalities in firms’ strategic approaches.

The research program comprised three distinct and sequential aspects – understanding fashion, explicating how fashion influenced the restructuring of the Australian industry, and finally understanding how fashion shaped international clothing production supply chains.

(i) The first component – understanding fashion – relied on desk research exploring the structures of ownership and control in the global fashion complex and Australia’s role within it. This part of the work includes a quantitative ‘content analysis’ of Australian fashion magazines to demonstrate the depth of the global influences over Australian fashion. It also draws extensively on secondary data from a range of inter-disciplinary sources to introduce new interpretations.

(ii) The second building block involved explicating the role of fashion in the restructuring of the Australian industry and in local firms’ strategic decisions about offshore sourcing and subcontracting. This part of the study was informed by the author’s detailed knowledge of the local industry’s strategic responses to Australia’s policy re-orientation in the 1990s (Webber and Weller 2001). The current project represents both an extension and a reorientation of the earlier work, and draws from it in Chapters 7 and 8, which concern the restructuring of the Australian industry after trade liberalisation. In an attempt to quantify the extent and direction of Australian firm’s offshore sourcing, the study sought initially to collect data via a mail survey, which was posted to a stratified random sample of local clothing firms in September 2001. The response was poor, primarily because the survey questions probed sensitive commercial and ethical issues that were at the heart of target firm’s competitive position. Campaigns by labour rights activists - which seek to trace responsibilities for working conditions through the supply chain - increased the suspicion with which some firms viewed the survey, and the introduction of the Australian Goods and Services Tax at about the same time increased firms’ administrative workload and discouraged their participation. In retrospect, however, the survey approach would not have provided the understandings that emerged from the interview program, so the shift from a survey to interview-based strategy was fortuitous. The chapters on the

Australian industry draw on qualitative interviews with key firms which focused on understanding the Australian clothing industry’s position in the global fashion complex.

(iii) The third element in the empirical research aimed to understand how fashion shapes commodity flows. It explored, in interviews conducted in Fiji and Hong Kong, the role of fashion in the clothing manufacturing industry and the perceptions of suppliers of Australian overseas supply networks of the situation of the Australian industry in global flows of commodities and ideas. The primary means of collecting data for this task was semi-structured qualitative interviews which developed as communicative events and rich exchanges (Schoenberger 1991). The samples for the interviews were identified from business directories published by the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council and the Fiji Department of Trade and Industry. Each firm was approached initially by telephone to establish whether it had dealings with Australian firms. All those that answered in the affirmative were invited to participate in the interview program. An interview schedule was piloted with Australian-Chinese clothing firms in Melbourne. Face-to-face interviews were conducted in Hong Kong and Fiji between June 2000 and September 2001 (see Appendix A). The interviews sought to understand how clothing supply chains operated, understand Australia’s position in multi-national changes in supply routes, and understand how value and surplus value were allocated within and between firms and places. The interviews adopted an in-depth probing technique which allowed the discussion to be diverted to the topics that interested the interviewee (Yeung 1995). The interviews also developed as they progressed, creating ‘logics-in-use’ that floated, tested and debated tentative theorisations with these expert informers. Thus, the process of theory development blurred the artificial separation between data collection and data analysis. The interviews were conducted in English, which was not the first language of many interviewees but was the language used in their business dealings with Westerners. A greater problem was establishing trust. Here the author’s extensive knowledge of the global industry encouraged a positive exchange that moved beyond ‘text book’ responses. The richness of the Hong Kong data was enhanced through numerous informal discussions with traders, buyers and manufacturers at Hong Kong Fashion Week events in 2000 and 2001.

Each of the field components of the research was strengthened and validated by the incorporation of data from various secondary and statistical sources. Published statistics were most useful when describing national systems of clothing production and clothing trade flows, but their structure made it difficult to identify the relationship between commodity trade flows and the international patterning of the fashion system. During the course of the project newspaper clippings, company reports and stock market analysts’ assessments of the main companies operating in the clothing and fashion industries in Asia and Australasia were collected and analysed. These provided an additional check on the veracity of interview data and also informed the analysis and theory development process. Desk research at the University of Hong Kong and University of the South Pacific (Suva) introduced materials and perspectives that were not available in Australia and repositioned the author’s localised (Australian) perspective. The Fiji Reserve Bank provided detailed unpublished data on the development of the Fiji clothing industry.

Numerous texts are available to guide the analysis of qualitative data. The nature of the research questions, and the explicit intention to suspend a priori acceptance of either ‘chain’ or ‘network’ understandings of industrial organisation (Chapter 2) promoted the use of a ‘grounded theory’ approach to qualitative analysis (Strauss 1987), in which understanding emerges from the data in a process of iteration. This approach fits well with a critical orientation. The analysis also drew extensively on techniques to summarise, categorise and map the relationships between different concepts arising from the data (Miles and Huberman 1984).

To conclude this section, what follows is the outcome of a multi-stage and multi-method research program spanning three nations. The work transcends the artificial division between qualitative and quantitative methods in an effort to arrive at an explanation which provides – to the satisfaction of an author embedded in the complexities of this industry – a practically adequate explanation of its global configurations.

1.7 Structure of the Thesis

The relations between the various elements of interest to this study are spatialised, operate in dynamic contexts, and can be understood only as social relations and social processes. Comprehending the integration of processes at the global, national and

regional scales requires a multi-layered approach that spans multiple levels and connects inter-related themes. It is difficult, therefore, to select an entry point that will satisfy the pragmatic desire to develop a coherent presentation and at the same time respect the complexities of the task. Bell and Valentine (1997) resolve the problem in their study of food consumption practices by beginning with the body, moving ‘up’ through various consumption sites (household, locality, culture), to end with global production frameworks. Du Guy’s (1996) collection describing ‘cultures of consumption’ reverses the sequence by starting with sites of global production and working ‘back’ to the body. Neither adequately addresses the complex differentiations that arise within and between scales (see Allen et al 1998). To accommodate the complexity of the task, this thesis comprises two parts: the first develops an understanding of the global fashion system’s influence on production, while the second applies that understanding to the Australian garment industries’ positions in global commodity flows. The sequence of chapters is:

1. Introduction and Overview

2. Critique of Geographies of Clothing Production. PART 1 Fashion and the Production System

3. Australia’s Position in Global Flows of Fashion Ideas 4. The Commodification of Fashion Ideas

5. Fashion Knowledge in Mass Production 6. Fashion in Brands and Firm Strategies

PART 2 Fashion’s Influence on Industrial Organisation and Commodity Flows 7. Australia’s Internationalisation Strategy: Engaging the Global Economy 8. Restructuring of Australian Garment Retailing

9. The Restructuring and Internationalisation of Garment Commodity Flows 10. Fiji: Capturing Value in Production Networks

11. Hong Kong: Capturing Value from Global Flows 12. Conclusion: Ideas, Commodities and Value

Chapter Two sets the framework for the study by critically appraising contemporary metaphors of the international clothing production industries. It highlights the gaps in existing explanations and their disregard for the impacts of fashion trends. Drawing on a diverse literature concerning the social and cultural role of dress, the meaning of clothes and the economics of fashion, the chapter defines fashion as the intersection of dynamic changes in styles and the temporal rhythms of fashion change. It specifies the

range of mechanisms through which fashion might impact on production. Chapters Three to Six then explicate the powers and relations that create and commodify fashion ideas. Chapter Three positions Australian fashion ideas in global ideas flows through a case study of the penetration of the fashion magazine Marie Claire in the Australian market. It also examines local resistances to global ideas and the possibility of ‘Australian’ national dress practices. Chapter Four identifies elite designers’ relationships to the fashion ideas publicised in the mass media, locates them in places and in firms, and discusses the complex interactions between the fashion media, elite designers and global luxury goods conglomerates. The manner in which fashion ideas are incorporated in mass production is the subject of Chapter Five. Chapter Six then explores the ways that firms incorporate and exploit fashion. It focuses on the role of brands as creating communities of firms united by a brand identity and develops a framework for understanding fashion processes in production − the notion of an articulated fashion production system. That understanding provides the basis for the discussion of the Australian garment production and trade in subsequent chapters. Chapter Seven describes Australia’s change in accumulation strategy in the early 1990 and the local garment industry’s consequent engagement with global production structures. Chapter Eight reviews changes in Australian garment retailing in the light of changing social conditions and the consumer-oriented strategies adopted by retail firms. The description of local production in Chapter Nine focuses on its restructuring to an outworker-based subcontracting model. Converging firm strategies during the restructuring process render obsolete the ‘old’ classifications of retail, wholesale and manufacturing. The chapter also describes the strategies by which Australian firms internationalised their operations and the strategies by which transnational firms entered Australian garment markets. The next two chapters examine in detail the nature of garment flows from Australia’s two main import sources − Fiji and Hong Kong − to highlight inequities in fashion knowledge and highlight the relationship between fashion knowledge and economic power. These chapters examine the tension between network and commodity chain formations as they intersect with geo-political, social and economic pressures. The final chapter concludes that the global garment production industry’s configuration is structured not only by incremental value adding processes but also by ruptures in value frameworks that are linked to shifts in meaning at the intersections between flows of fashion ideas and flows of garments.