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Personal website of Sebastiaan Mathôt
links for 2010-01-18
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Floor Covering Weekly, the undisputed industry leader, has a long and proud history of keeping our readership informed and up to date. That's why more specialty retailers choose Floor Covering Weekly above all other industry magazines. Carpet, Area rugs, Laminates, Wood, Resilient, Tile & Stone.
Doing Research in a Time of Crisis
This is an unedited version of a quick ditty that I wrote for the CCSEAS Winter 209 Newsletter.
Doing Research in a Time of Crisis
Jim Delaney
In January of 2009, I made my way to visit an old friend, Mr. Pham Van Khai, who runs a small bamboo construction cooperative on the outskirts of Hanoi. Two years ago, when we first met, Mr. Khai and his small cooperative were entering into new relationships with foreign customers and struggling to meet rapidly expanding orders. It was that initial meeting that sparked my interest in bamboo products, an interest that quickly became the topic of my Ph.D. However, during this return visit, it took three attempts to find anybody in the workshop. Most of the cooperative members had retreated to their farms, as demand for their products–chairs and tables for European homes and gazebos for resorts–had completely collapsed.
The year 2009 was a strange time to be doing economic research, particularly for those working on any topic connected to the Northern housing and home furnishing industries. My own Ph.D. research looks at the role of institutions in structuring relationships along the global value chain for industrial bamboo products—bamboo flooring in particular. I was initially interested in how the amazing boom that we have seen in demand for bamboo products in the North was reconfiguring longstanding trade relationships in Vietnam. I am working with a wide range of actors, including farmers, small scale producers, large factories, NGOs and government institutions. All of these actors, with one surprising exception, were thrown into a complete state of disarray by the systemic economic crisis that became apparent in the United States two years ago.
Mr Khai’s story of collapsing sales was repeated time and time again by other actors in my study. First, a French-owned flooring company that had once invited me to spend a few weeks on their shop floor saw orders cancelled from the major distributor who alone comprised 70% of their sales. Although I was able to conduct two interviews and a visit to their factory, I was asked to put the rest of my study on hold while they re-evaluated their position in the market and developed new products. A recently established bamboo-focussed NGO that had offered to work with me also found themselves in a funding crisis, as two of their major donors were forced to slash aid budgets in response to their own fiscal crises at home, leading to the departure of my two primary contacts.
I was left with what I thought at the time was a shattered dissertation. My boom market had gone bust, and the questions I was asking no longer seemed relevant, either to me or to my informants. It was difficult and uncomfortable to ask about price negotiations and quality standards when nothing was being sold anymore, a fact that no less than two informants impressed upon me in strong terms. In the end, I found other things to do, including looking at another foreign company that was not as impacted by the crisis, and spending more time with farmers. Only in the past few months have I got my research fully back on track.
While my initial assumption was that the economic crisis would change everything, in the end, the collapse confirmed my suspicion that control of these global chains rested with those companies and institutions that are closer to the consumer. Factories, whether foreign or locally owned, found themselves squeezed by their larger customers. They in turn put pressure on their own suppliers—small cooperatives and businesses located close to the supplies of cultivated bamboo. Surprisingly, this downward pressure did not immediately translate to lower prices for farmers. While demand for bamboo to feed global markets was in decline, there remained plenty of local uses in the construction industry and for paper pulp, among others. And farmers did not get a price premium for the high value products favoured by Northern consumers in any case.
Indeed, seeing these struggles work themselves out during a time of major economic crisis threw many of the already existing power relationships into stark relief. This became clear when working with the NGOs and development institutions supporting bamboo farmers and processors. When aid money flowed freely, there seemed to be relatively few conflicts; but when money became scarce, what were initially small difference ballooned into seemingly insurmountable ideological divides. Once again, the time of crisis offered a window into power struggles that would have been difficult to discern when times were good.??In the end, while the crisis did not have a major impact on my research questions, it did have a major impact on how I conducted my research. During the early stages of research, many of my research partners became less than hospitable–they were far too busy trying to stay afloat to spend much time with me. It took another nine months to arrange for more visits to bamboo flooring companies. As for my NGO friends, I decided strategically to stay away while they worked out their financial issues and internal struggles.
All of this leads to a number of lessons. First, qualitative and ethnographic research takes time, and out of necessity involves adapting to suit changing circumstances. Had it not been for a decision to move my whole family to Vietnam rather than conduct research through short visits as was my initial plan, I would likely not have managed to work my way through my research. The economic crisis simply amplified the all too common problems experienced during fieldwork.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, in choosing bamboo flooring as a case—a new commodity in a market that was rapidly changing—I was opening myself up to the very real possibility of being overtaken by events. Placing my research within a broader context of agrarian and rural industrial transformation has allowed me to pursue my questions without being wholly focused on the specific issues that arose during my field research.
The global economic crisis did not change everything—indeed, it is becoming clear that it has in some cases changed very little, but it did have a profound impact on my research. Being able to change and adapt, and using the crisis as a window to economic relationships that existed before, has been key to picking up the pieces of my shattered Ph.D. dissertation off the floor.
links for 2010-01-12
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Very interesting and useful teaching tool for commodity chains.
links for 2010-01-11
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John Quiggin's ongoing book project in Wiki form. Things that I want to but don't have time to read in even more formats!
links for 2010-01-10
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Commission on Growth and Development final report completed in 2008.
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Free streaming documentary films. Many interesting recent additions. Videos are for the most part hosted on other sites.
links for 2010-01-04
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In Lao only, but looks interesting and useful.
Bono: ‘The People’ can’t be controlled…they must be controlled.
Bono’s ditty in the New York Times has raised some heckles because of his seemingly absurd stance on the need for ISPs to police copyright. It makes one wonder how he can at once argue that:
Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.
and then…
We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.
So it is ignoble to control people’s use of and access to information in order to control dissent, but fine so long as it secures corporate profits.
Note to self: When arguing for more corporate control over the flow of information on the internet, ensure to mention child pornography and poor singer-songwriters on the cafe circuit.
