One of the interview questions posed is:
For those companies where you do own shares, do you attend any of their Annual General Meetings (AGMs)?
STEP 1:
If they do attend, from a governance viewpoint, the following possible responses have been generated from the literature review:
To ask questions, vote or have a say in how the company is run.
Only to protest after being mistreated/cheated/exploited.
STEP 2:
From the semi-structured interviews, it was found that there were other potentially important actual motivations for attending AGMs. These include:
For the free food/free gifts that the company hands out.
For the experience of attending (to see what actually goes on).
Employer‘s (managers of the publicly-listed company itself) request.
STEP 3:
Potentially important motivations identified in STEP 1 and STEP 2 are incorporated into the final version of the questionnaire:
To ask questions, vote or have a say in how the company is run.
Only to protest after being mistreated/cheated/exploited.
For the free food/free gifts that the company hands out.
For the experience of attending (to see what actually goes on).
Employer‘s (managers of the publicly-listed company itself) request.
While the interview questions are partially structured in the sense that each one is contextualised (to a particular stage within the investment cycle) and deals with a specific action/factor/issue, investors‘ underlying motivations/justifications for each reported action/tendency are explored through the ―open-ended‖ response feature (where respondents are given the flexibility to provide all answers deemed relevant within the context of the questions asked). In addition, the interview questions posed are generic enough to be applicable to all investors. The example given above on AGM attendance clearly illustrates these design features.
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The full Interview Schedules for all interviewee categories (i.e. brokers, individual investors, company secretay and market insider) is provided in Appendix 5.A majority of semi-structured interviews conducted were tape recorded and transcribed. It is interesting to note that a total of six respondents expressed reluctance for their interview sessions to be tape recorded.
5.6.4 Coding of Themes
Codes are tags/labels for assigning units of meaning to the descriptive or inferential information compiled during a study. Codes are usually attached to
―chunks‖ of varying size – words, phrases, sentences, or whole paragraphs, connected or unconnected to a specific setting. They can take the form of a straightforward category label or a more complex one (e.g., a metaphor). Bliss et al.
(1983: 41) argued that a word or phrase:
does not “contain” its meaning as a bucket “contains” water, but has the meaning it does by being a choice made about its significance in a given context. That choice excludes other choices that could have been made to “stand for” that word or phrase, and that choice is embedded in a particular logic or conceptual lens, whether the researcher is aware of it or not.
Since pragmatists believe in the under-determination of theory by facts and also place emphasis on practical consequences that are useful from the researcher‘s viewpoint, ―meanings‖ are generated and made sense of from (i) the conceptual lens of corporate governance and (ii) the standpoint of individual investors. This distinct approach to meaning-making is applied to the subsequent coding/labelling of all governance-related attributes/trends/issues/considerations identified in the interview responses collated/transcribed.
Practically, the study applied a flexible and pragmatic procedure where the unit of analysis could be in the form of any blocks of data (a clause, sentence or paragraph) deemed ―meaningful‖ (i.e. deals which a particular motivation, action, tendency, consideration, context and/or situation). Also, some researchers have highlighted the potential of overlaps where a chunk of data is usually a candidate
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for more than one category/code. Even so, overlaps and multiple levels of coding (Miles and Huberman, 1994) is not a major concern for this study considering the overall design, structure and purpose of the semi-structured interviews.Respondents are first asked whether or not they take into consideration a particular issue/factor/attribute and/or undertake a particular action. Subsequently, the researcher enquires on the underlying reasons/justifications for that particular tendency. All semi-structured interview questions are designed with a similar structure. Framed in such a manner, most responses are specific, distinct and non-overlapping thus making the coding process both relatively transparent and unambiguous. Again, this is best illustrated by an example.
Table 5.2 Example of How Meaningful Blocks of Data are Derived and Isolated
Interview
Ok. So what kinds of shareholders or proxies of shareholders typically attend AGMs then?
The shareholders are basically all those aunty, uncles...
Proxies are also those that shareholders who are in KL who can't attend the meeting. They will just ask their relatives in Penang to be the proxy for the shareholders to just enjoy the food... (laughs)
So, they're just there to enjoy the food?
Yeah, that's right and the free gifts if any. They always ask for free gifts.
So, the primary motive there is actually to collect freebies.
Yup, and also the food... free lunch or free tea break.
Do these people form the majority of the numbers or are there some other proxies of shareholders that are supposed to be there for different reasons?
Mainly, they... most of them are actually this type of shareholders and proxies but then, apart from this, they also requested to be... they are also requested by the boss to be the proxy of the shareholders in order to propose and second the resolutions of the AGM... to pass.
Even for other listed companies that I know of, most of the time they will have their AGMs in their premises itself... in the office building itself… Then they just get
FOOD
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one or two shareholders and then most, majority of them will be their staff.
EMPLOYER (motivation)
The inclusion and exclusion of all relevant themes are discussed and illustrated in some degree of detail throughout Chapters 6 and 7.
The procedures established in carrying out of the semi-structured interviews alongside the various findings derived are undoubtedly accompanied by a number of validity and reliability issues. These are dealt with in the following section.
5.6.5 Validity and Reliability of the Interview Process and Findings
According to Kvale (2007), the concept of validity generally pertains to the degree to which a method investigates what it is intended to investigate. For the purposes of this study, the Respondent/Member Validation technique is employed (Bryman and Bell, 2003). This is where the researcher provides interviewees with an account of his findings, especially the interpretation of their responses to the many interview questions posed. As explained by Bryman and Bell (2003: 290), the aim is to:
seek corroboration or otherwise of the account that the researcher has arrived at…to ensure that there is good correspondence between their findings and the perspectives and experiences of their research participants… respondent validation can provide a means of confirming the validity of individual accounts.
Hence, the researcher obtains feedback from respondents interviewed to validate the meanings of their accounts and to address any inconsistencies in interpretation.
This, alongside triangulation of multiple viewpoints, increases the credibility of the findings.
The next issue is that of reliability. Kvale (2007) explained that reliability pertains to the consistency and trustworthiness of research findings. Trustworthiness is derived from the transparency of the procedures undertaken in both collecting and analyzing interview data. This is demonstrated by the details provided in this chapter regarding various aspects of the semi-structured interview design.