These interviews took about an hour each, so getting them transcribed was quite a task. Luckily someone invented Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing website, which gave me access to a bunch of humans who were willing to transcribe these interviews (for a little money). It is a great resource, and it saved me the onerous task of transcribing all 20 hours of interviews.
Now, lets go into a little detail about what the interviews consisted of. They were semi-structured, which means that I did not have a fixed set of questions to ask. Rather, I allowed myself the freedom to ask different questions to each interviewee depending on what he/she said.
To get my interviewees talking about the issue of sustainability as it relates to both social and environmental concerns I devised a series of (index card) sorting exercises. These exercises were intended to get my interviewees to share what brands strike them as sustainable and why (Exercise 1). I also wanted to find out how my participants ‘believe’ any company ‘should’ act (Exercise 2). Finally, I wanted to explore whether any of the brands from Exercise 1 could be associated/disassociated with the behaviors the interviewee had identified as ‘important’ during Exercise 2 (Exercise 3).
A more robust description of each exercise follows:
Exercise 1: Please sort these branded cards according to how sustainable you believe them to be. Create three groups: sustainable brands, unsustainable brands, and brands of unknown sustainability. You may have as many or as few cards in each group as you wish, but you must sort all the cards into one of the piles.
1. Adidas
2. American Apparel
3. Ben & Jerry’s
4. Chipotle
5. Chiquita
6. Haagen Dazs
7. Kettle Chips
8. SunChips
9. Timberland
10. Urban Outfitters
Once participants sorted these brands I asked a series of questions to explore the participant’s reasons for sorting the brands into the groups they did.
Exercise 2: Please sort these behavior cards in to a hierarchy according to how important it is to you that a company engages in each of these activities. Behaviors may tie for a position on the scale. If one or more of these behaviors is not important at all to you, please do not include the card in your ranking system.
1. Employees may organize and bargain collectively
2. Company is actively working to reduce energy and resource consumption
3. Company is working to reduce the amount of waste it creates
4. Company employs independent monitors to oversee overseas production
5. Company practices environmental stewardship even if the country it operates in lacks environmental regulations
6. Employees have freedom from forced labor
7. Company is engaged with the community and supportive of it
8. Company employs metrics to measure and manage energy consumption
9. Employees earn a living wage
10. Employer sponsors job-related education programs for employees
11. Company routinely collaborates with non-profit groups
It is noteworthy that none of these behaviors include corporate behavior related to the accumulation of profit. For this research I took it as granted that companies are expected to generate profit in order to fulfill responsibilities to stockholders, so I chose to focus this exercise particularly on behaviors that tend to be associated with sustainable businesses. After the participants sorted the eleven behaviors into a hierarchy I asked them to explain why they felt compelled to place the behaviors where they did on their respective hierarchies.
Exercise 3: Please use the groups of branded cards and your hierarchy of behavior cards to answer the following question: Do you associate/disassociate any of these brands with the corporate behaviors you identified as important?
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So, that’s the long and short of my interview process. I have begun coding (to identify key points) the transcripts using grounded theory. From there I will begin to elucidate a theory to explain the themes that emerge – that’s the interesting part, so stay tuned!
