The research process

The proposal for this research was submitted to the Lincoln University Ethics Committee before any interviewing commenced. To seek approval for conducting the case studies, I approached several managers at different levels in AgResearch. I received support from the General Manager of the Grasslands Division (as in 1998 AgResearch still had a divisional structure) for studying the Endophyte Group; the Lincoln Campus leader (a position that no longer exits); the leaders of the Microbial Control Group (MCG) and the Wool and Skin Group; and the Animal Genomics Platform Leader, for the study of the Molecular Biology Unit. The latter two consulted with their workers before agreeing, and the General Manager consulted widely. All agreed on the understanding that group members would be asked individually to participate and they had the right to refuse. I indicated also that I would not be informing group leaders about who had or had not been interviewed. In this context I interviewed 56 staff members, observed over thirty organisational meetings and participated in other campus activities. I observed staff at work and documented hundreds of informal conversations. From my previous work within the organisation as a biometrician, ‘bid coordinator’ for a period, and member of the strategic planning network, I already had well established networks with most of the staff on the Lincoln campus and with many other staff throughout the organisation. I operated as a Referral Advisor for the Employee Assistance Programme till I left in February 2001. I still travel to Lincoln in a carpool with three AgResearch staff members.

40 _{This thesis is not the place for a discussion of the ‘knowledge society’, the role of IP and its} ownership. For a comprehensive discussion of this issue in an international context see Drahos and Braithwaites’ Information feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy? (2002).

Participants were fully informed about the nature and purpose of the research, free to withdraw at any point and/or ask that anything they had contributed not be used. As part of the Lincoln University Human Ethics Committee approval process, each participant signed a consent form to this effect. After each interview was transcribed I returned it to the interviewee to provide them with the chance to correct or delete anything they had said. (Some participants took this chance to clarify what they had said and one person removed the things she had said about other members of staff. Most made no changes.) I was freely available to all interviewees. In addition I returned to the research sites at the completion of the research to present the results in order to thank workers for their participation, to check that they identified with the results and to listen to their comments.

Participants were assured of confidentiality. The aim was to protect subjects from any personal risks they may have run as a consequence of their participation. The identity of the participants was known only to me. The transcriptions and tapes of the interviews were labelled according to the time of interview, not referred to by name. In this thesis I have used pseudonyms whenever I have quoted a participant. Some have been given more than one pseudonym if I was at all concerned that there could be a link made between one quote and another that could enable the participant to be identified. At some points I have also only identified the case studies by a letter of the alphabet (and in a different order from that first presented) if I was at all concerned about confidentiality issues.

In the interviews, I asked workers to tell the “story” of their involvement in science, how they saw themselves and their work, what made their work satisfying and what made it frustrating, and what it was like working in AgResearch (see questionnaire in Appendix A). The Hawthorne experiments at the Western Electric Company’s plant in Chicago …

highlighted a strong link between attitudes to work and the wider social attachments outside the plant, especially the early socialization of individuals, which the company were powerless to affect .… the employment situation cannot be analysed solely by reference to itself – the links between the domestic and the employment situation are critical (Grint, 1991: 126).

People do not have a work identity that is discrete from their history, society and their present social situation (home, leisure etc.). This justified the approach of

asking interviewees to ‘tell their story’ rather than answer more detailed, pre-chosen questions which would have assumed that I had anticipated their answers. As Rose (1988: 14) stated:

We should distrust words like ‘correct’ and ‘mistaken’. We aim to see more clearly what is going on – what people want, and why they do the things they do. But outside observers should keep a modest opinion of their objectivity and neutrality. Patterns of control … are not fixed but shifting.

The interviews I conducted were very open and exploratory, lasting from two to four hours, except for those of the Science Platform Leaders (SPLs) or Science GMs, as they did not have such time available. The interviewees gave permission for their interviews to be audio-taped. Within twenty-four hours of each interview I made “notes on notes” to record my personal impressions and thoughts.

The interviews were transcribed and these transcripts, along with the notes and observations, formed the qualitative data that was analysed to produce the categories and emergent themes discussed in Part B (assisted by the use of the software package NVivo, a form of NUDIST, Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorising (Richards, 1999)). The insights of Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer, 1969) helped me in the selection of these categories, or objects on which the

interviewees placed importance, and I was able to explore the meaning ascribed to those objects and how they were linked to develop emergent themes. This qualitative research process basically follows that outlined by Lofland and Lofland (1995) in their book, Analyzing Social Settings. In Part C these themes are linked into possible theories and sometimes supported by other literature as secondary data.

In the next section I describe AgResearch more fully, and introduce the case studies I chose within this organisation. My earlier discussion (Section 3.4) was concerned with how AgResearch fitted in the context of the restructuring of science. This section describes the organisational structure.