Shih-Hao Kang a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
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- 1.3.2 The case study methods
- 1.3.3 The advantages of my fieldwork
- 1.3.4 The challenges in the case-study field
1.3 Methodology1.3.1 The research objectTo answer questions about the interaction between trade union activity and workplace relations at enterprise level the research aimed to focus on and investigate trade union organisations which are active in terms of working to defend the demands and labour rights of their members. The ineffectiveness of FNPR union organisations, however, made me look at alternative trade unions, especially their situation after the implementation of the new Labour Code and the withdrawal of the AFL-CIO’s financial support. Among the various analytical works published after the miners’ strike in 1989, there is still a great lack of detailed analyses and sociological reflection on labour relations in Russian labour studies – whether at the enterprise level or at broader ones. Interestingly, apart from the studies on Russian miners and their union organisation NPGR or NPRUP, there is little literature published about Russian alternative trade unions.21 Many arguments among the studies mentioned in the last section were conducted on the basis of interviews and surveys. While doing labour study, we might go to factories, to assembly lines, to observe people who work there; and study the trade union activities as an outcome of a series of social acts, which are essentially embedded in the character of the social and labour relations in the workplace and wider society. Interviews with individuals, however, encounter the challenge of capturing sophisticated connections behind the claims of union leaders. In other words, their day-to-day contact could easily be simplified when relying on trade union leaders to capture the capacity of their organisational work, as could details of everyday contact between the workers and their organisations. The central consideration of various methodological approaches reflects how researchers estimate the privileges of establishing contact and collecting information about the object can be reached with the chosen methods.22 In my view, labour organisation exists not only as an economic actor, but also a cultural, societal subject together with its labour-economic function. Moreover, the problem of studying ‘Russian union organisation’, as Ilyin (2001) indicated, arises from the characteristic of the limited membership basis underpinning the development of Russian trade unions. He therefore emphasised ‘the researches about Russian trade unions as an investigation of the union apparatus’ (ibid., p.127). More importantly, a critical perspective of study on union’s internal networks should be able to develop an understanding of the immediate reactions to labour grievances in the workplace. Following such an idea, my prime aim was to meet ordinary workers, who at the same time are active or at least enthusiastic in trade union activity, to constitute my research work. The advantage of focusing on this intermediate group of workers is to receive immediate information about the interrelation between positions of union leadership and ordinary workers. Among all the relatively active Russian trade union organisations, the Russian transport workers, benefiting from their special occupations, have played a leading role within the Russian trade unions since the beginning of the new Russian labour movement. Most academic studies outside Russia, however, focus on Russian miners and other manufacturing enterprises. The Warwick Russian research programme and its Russian fellow teams have produced broad-scale studies based on various case-study analyses, several collections of the reports had been published (Clarke et al.1995; Clarke 1996a; Borisov and Clarke 2001). These materials provide extensive and interesting details and analyses about the formation of several non-FNPR trade unions, yet only a few case studies were about the famous alternative trade unions of transport workers.23 Apart from the fact that Russian labour studies is still at the developing stage, the investigation of labour relations in the Russian transport sectors encounters two more difficult conditions: the sensitivity related to the concern of the Russian government over national security; and the practical challenge due to the broadly distributed workplaces. The general difficulty for the research on the Russian transport sector and its workers is the lack of secondary materials, especially those with analytic investigation. Since there were few resources even for establishing reliable contact, to fill the gap of existing information and to avoid the weak observation points as mentioned earlier, the research methodology of this thesis chose to follow a qualitative design. Furthermore, the case study can hardly be conducted through either secondary materials or breakthrough interviews if it is to gain the research advantage of ‘hidden features revealed’ (Whipp 1998, p.52). The precondition for this research therefore has been case study research methods employing direct observation of the process from entering the setting to investigating unions themselves. Certainly, there were two critical challenges to be considered for the research plan. First, as an outsider, how and what to do to make the first contact regarding the access to the ‘circle’ / ‘community’ of the research object. Second, the fact that labour movement activity in post-soviet Russia can somehow (still) develop into a sensitive field.24 To reach its objectives, the methods must consider a practical risk-ridden setting and secure a reliable access. I thus designed a long-term observation fieldwork staying in St Petersburg, the second city, the so-called northern capital of Russia, to study interrelationships of workers and their union organisations. The conception of how to produce a proper and efficient methodological framework for this thesis is thereby presented in more detail below. At the beginning of the fieldwork observation, every opportunity to secure access could be useful to facilitate the investigation. When the thesis idea was first presented, the immediate contact I had was with ‘activists’ in St Petersburg who were enthusiastic about labour issues but did not really participate in any enterprise union organisations, although they had set up their own labour organisation. Another resource I had before leaving for Russia was a former trade union activist whom I did not know personally, but he had left the local union circle when I arrived in St Petersburg in 2001. Therefore I decided to take it from a very basic ground – the local labour activist circle of my already-known informant. The solution was simple and unique: go to the picket action and find people there. When people asked me later on, ‘How did you find your interviewees?’ or ‘Where did you get your Russian worker friends?’ I could probably say it all started from standing beside protest actions in the first place. I found these potential informants when I went to several local pickets and meetings, while they were also surprised that a ‘foreigner-researcher’ came and even showed some sympathy to their activities. This first step has credited me with their basic trust in many ways. That also somehow made them not to be bothered when they were helping me. By keeping them as basic informants, I could then build up basic contacts and ask them if it is possible to meet their colleagues at the workplace. Such access had opened many useful images and expanded further access to reach the people who did not come out: the ordinary, silent or passive workers, as well as those formal and informal leaders. For the direct and participant observation on the local trade union activists, Touraine’s (1987) conception of ‘sociological intervention / researcher as actor’ reminded me to keep a reflexive position in the field as well as to expose my sociological knowledge to the object/social actor. The exposure of my research concern was also to establish their basic trust in me, as well as to encourage them to inform me of any new local meeting events.25 During the first year, I met and talked to many local activists (some should be called ‘former participants’). Coincidently, during my stay there was the emergence of a very short oppositional campaign over railway transport privatisation. There I started to meet railway workers and activists from local free trade unions (they are not worker leaders in the real sense). By entering into their circle, I got various opportunities of access to observe, to talk to the ‘working people (masses)’. In the first year of going to various meetings, I could then ask for help from local activists to arrange appointments with the port committee of dockers of St Petersburg sea port. The contact with them, however, turned out to be much more challenging, since the union organisation is quite powerful at the port, their resource conditions made their presence more like being behind the ‘walls’. In addition, the security guard of their building and access to the port was very restricted, and the observation of the dockers’ environment was not really as free as it was with railway workers. Such a situation provided limited opportunity to observe more about the everyday work of both dockers and their organisations. At the end, the contact with the subjects of the two case studies, the active workers, had different conditions: with railway workers I could attend their meetings freely and meet the members, while with the dockers it turned out all the meetings needed to be arranged more carefully. 1.3.2 The case study methodsThere were three major methods employed in this case study: in-depth interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis. Each will now be discussed in turn. Interview, in-depth interview As described earlier, this is a study conducted in the way that I spent over two years participating in various pickets, meetings, conferences; listening to labour activists’ internal debates and quarrels; visiting the workplaces; as well as chatting, joking, drinking, and dining in or out with these ‘interviewees’. All these occasions helped me to observe their relations and even to conduct interviews right after the meeting events. The aim of the interviews was twofold: firstly, to explore information which could be useful for understanding the connections among the subjects; secondly, the interview was supposed to establish further contact with the interviewees for the close observation in the next phase. The interviewees included the union leaders, their activists, their colleagues, and the legal consultants of the trade union. Most of these interviews took place at the corner of their workplaces, in their union offices and several in interviewees’ houses. Some of these occasions were impressive and even unique, in which my interviews were conducted in a more relevant context.26 I also received special access to observe their internal meetings. After the close observation and conversations at their work posts, several group interviews were organised.27 The interviews focused on workers’ career history, responses to their working life and their opinions about the management and the trade unions. The questions were to clarify the immediate stories over collective and individual conditions at a Russian enterprise. The interview questions were specifically focused on the practices of the organisational activities, which were usually hidden behind the very visible scene, especially those which may involve conflicting issues. To analyse the impact of their internal tensions over relevant topics I had to conduct most interviews over a longer period and with more arrangements, so that I could trace and examine the reliability of many sources. Participant observation Most of the interviews worked out successfully, and did expand my contact with the Russian workers into close participation. The research contact was also very helpful for getting access to go to demonstrations or public meetings, and the situations easily made me close to the organisers (I had a camcorder to record what I had seen and heard). After seeing each other’s presence at the action and introducing each other, it was always easier to ask to visit their (union) offices and see how they discussed the relevant issues. Under a deliberate arrangement, they gradually got used to my presence at their meetings and in their offices. Through such a step, I received many precious chances to observe their discussions, their reactions, and the atmosphere of their interaction. And from my presence at meetings, my subjects also gradually came to understand my genuine request to them: please show me their workplace, their social life and the working problems they have met. All of these were not as easy to arrange as just conducting an interview, and their basic trust in me granted me more access to visit their workplace, family, the internal seminars and the conferences of the union organisation to make my further observations. Documentary analysis Through the fieldwork period and personal contacts with local activists, I received ample documentary material such as unions’ newspapers, bulletins, and press-releases so that I can compare the personal stories with their official accounts. Moreover, the resource of the official website became available and useful for basic understanding of their organisation’s activities and persons’ characters. There are plenty of documentary resources about both the official and the alternative trade unions of railway workers on the internet. The official web pages of the trade union organisations (ROSPROFZhEL and RPLBZh) release numerous articles covering the history of the organisation and the struggle events of their member organisations across the Russian Federation. There was much less opportunity to obtain literature about dockers, however. Not to mention the fact that these documentary resources still lack accounts showing the relationship between the union and the members. Noteworthily, the fieldwork afterward did not finish with the access for observation. Regarding the basic ethics of doing qualitative research with participant observation, I tried to establish mutual relations with most of my interviewees. The basic procedure included two elements together: contact and interactive communication. Together with collecting information and establishing contact with various organisations and trade unions, I introduced myself, my background and answered questions related to their interest about me. My intention was to open the approach for the interviewee. During most of my interviews, I always tried to expose my research motive in the first place and provided information about my research work; I also suggested to them that they have a right to raise any question for mutual communication.28 By arranging mutual personal relationships, I was able to keep myself more often in their circle. Such a position brought a certain convenience for conducting research. The other part of this fieldwork approach is the effect of interaction. As I have mentioned earlier, my previous experiences in the Taiwanese social movement suggested to me to establish a proper individual relationship with the people I intended to observe. Such mutual communication under its specific circumstance was an essential condition of effective research. Such a mutual practice granted me even more privileges of knowledge of the case studies. Several times my interviewees invited me to the courts together to witness what they were fighting for; sometimes I followed them to see how they confronted their administration. The long-term close observation with participation had embraced elements of an ethnographical approach to case study work. Since I have been a frequent ‘attendee’, the information I gathered came from multiple events, and this allowed me to assess its significance more readily. There was an additional factor under the consideration of research methods and research ethics in relation to feedback and mutual communication. I tried to persuade my observation subjects that I would not be an ‘ask-and-leave’ outsider, by ‘keeping space’ for my interviewees so that they were able to ask me what they wanted to know. I also tried to prove that I could provide at least something as immediate feedback. Corresponding to such an attempt, therefore, in this case study I had to establish participant access and compel myself to act as a participant researcher. Such a position granted me many useful experiences, but several serious dilemmas also occurred which may affect the research work. Gradually and practically, I learned one of the appropriate solutions for my visible feedback was to provide them with relevant information: discussing the working conditions in the West or in Taiwan; giving interview recordings, films or digital pictures. This solution at least made them happy to see me again. By keeping such a principle, the interviewees and key informants maintained more mutual access with me. They provided their writings, articles about the actions or situations, their comments on the academic works that studied their actions and we could share moreover our opinions. There was even once a mutual cooperation for both sides of us. They asked me to lend them my camcorder so that they could film the awful working conditions at their section, where the administration denied their accusation. That was an occasion of official labour inspection and I became unwelcome to the administration after their first round meeting, although I did not speak a single word. Sometimes workers’ requests were rather difficult to give a positive response to, but still showed the establishment of mutual interaction through my participation.29
In most cases, the participant observation method made most of my interviewees unafraid to disclose their genuine, even awkward life stories. By employing such a method, great benefit has enriched this research by providing in-depth insight into variant materials. In short, the methods provided me with more chances to track the process of how the individual decision or their collective discussion was formed or destroyed. To take one example, Alexander, a local labour movement ‘hero’, as he was called by the local newspaper, was actually an inexperienced new union activist who was forced to leave the routine depot meeting under the order of the depot chief, when I witnessed the event. The ‘hero’, as a new union campaigner at the time, actually made no resistance but simply obeyed the brutal order. I myself can therefore have a more complex understanding of how the ‘hero’ at the workplace faced his dilemma in daily struggles. More importantly, the frequent contact with local activists had supported my observation to discover the great prejudice behind many literatures. For example, the political spectrum of those so-called free trade unions was found often oversimplified, which dismissed them as blind supporters of liberal politicians in the post-Soviet era. In fact, one should sonly note that many union activists and leaders have different political ideologies. Some of those who campaign together are ultra-left (in the Russian context), some of them believe in liberal (bourgeois) democracy. More specifically, in the face of the lack of union resources, whether Stalinist communists, liberal unionists, political apathy unionists or even anti-globalisation activists, they could actually sit side by side or attend the same actions even when they might be very sceptical of each other. Most importantly, it is for sure that in completing my field work I am grateful to the circle of trade union activists in St Petersburg. And the experience of the St Petersburg labour circle indeed supported me to have close access and to choose the most active union organisations, railway workers and dockers, which later on became the two comparative case studies in this research. In other words, the character of the local trade union organisations also highlights the distinctiveness of my two case study objects. 1.3.4 The challenges in the case-study fieldAs a foreign researcher, a ‘genuine’ outsider, to conduct a case study of Russian labour organisation I faced considerable but also meaningful challenges. From the understanding of Russian people’s life style, their forms of expression, to the organisational culture, a number of differences / difficulties came out during the period of conducting this two-year-long participant research. The methods I applied in this research to some extent generate conditions when becoming involved in the research objects. I had to manage my access while realising there were considerable effects on the events and the information (knowledge) which I aimed to explore. Some of the situations were even unlikely to be fully avoided. To establish regular contact, for example, to enter into the trade union circle is not as easy as think-and-go. The idea of establishing interactive relationships is fairly challenging at any point. Considering the methods applied in the case of industrial relations, Kitay and Callus (1998) point out that the failure to identify key informants in the account of the analysis poses a serious danger to the validity and reliability of case studies. These challenges in the practice of this research not only show the problematic dimension of the accounts of several analysts mentioned earlier but also reveal an important aspect in terms of sociological reflection. Therefore, I present three critical situations the research methods had met during the fieldwork period. The first dilemma to face was the situation in the face of conflicting informants. At the first stage of my participant observation, I realised how key informants could produce effects on the information. For a sociological researcher, to overcome conflicting information we may apply triangulation or cross-check methods to examine the reliability of the received information; the difficulties in my early fieldwork experiences were rather about how I could keep my contact with them equal and reflexive. In order to gain all possible lines of access for the case-study observation, this research tried to focus on the practical strategies or the conditions of the interactions among union activists and union members. Understandably, only the researcher knows the best what kind of information is needed in the field. The dilemma over the communication priority when in the field of research observation, however, often came out. My request to observe their action, for example, is a request to them to remember and inform me about their actions during the preparatory period, not only on the day of their action. However, when on the occasion the research subjects were not keen to conduct mobilisation or coordination, the request itself became a ‘problematic’ conception. As for my investigation, the preparatory work can reveal more details of their organisational and coordination work. Such observational access normally depended on how much I was involved in the local activists’ circle. The situation was even more complicated. When an interest conflict appeared, in terms of the ‘sensitivity issue’, should they treat me as an outsider and ask me not to involve myself in their situation? Or treat me as an insider so that they should try hard to defend my right to participate in meetings? The challenges were very impressive, and such situations could arise very concretely and suddenly. At the time of my first case study, for example, two railway workers once invited me to participate in the labour inspection meeting, together with the depot administration, official inspector and representative of the pro-administration trade union. My presence was not welcomed by the depot chief, he then refused my presence in their repair section, and I was then forced to leave the depot by the security guard. The challenge, nevertheless, was not about should I stay but about the mutual relations between the activist (insider and my informant who insisted ‘transparency of labour inspection’) and me (an outsider who wanted to witness their interaction): shall we insist on my presence together? Or should they leave me alone?31 The field observation therefore could only gradually match a certain mutual interest. After experiencing several events, I realized, firstly, that it was better not to make more problems for them while they are dealing with their administration. Secondly, the balance is really necessary for stabilising the conditions of my observation work. Besides the above factor, another difficulty within the participant observation derived from the fact that sometimes the ‘events’ of the subjects (such as discussion, seminars, meetings and so on), quite often ended up in fierce arguments with personal topics or emotional words. (The circle of St Petersburg labour activists comprises liberals, unionists, Stalinists, Trotskyists and those embracing mixed beliefs.) Through the meetings (whether formal or informal) in which I have participated, from time to time, there have been awkward situations arising from my presence. Sometimes the union activists started to attack each other personally; and even asked me not to listen to what the ‘targeted person’ said. There had always been a dilemma between my position and their basic trust of me; while the accuracy / objectivity of the information I got from them concerned me the most. On several occasions I learned that to work out a proper balance for my presence was necessary. It was important to draw a line for myself, as well as for my research subjects that ‘this person’ (the researcher) would participate but not intervene in it.32 Still, the challenges on other sorts of occasions could not always be fundamentally resolved. There were situations in which I had to take immediate and efficient action. A safe line was to expose clearly what is my focus, while leaving all participants to take a free decision in the meantime. After all, it is a tough task to make a proper balance: remind yourself to reflect the short-comings in the fieldwork and thus to be cautious of primary findings; and to deal with the dilemmas and to avoid compromising the relationships with informants. Nonetheless, through close participation, I have understood more the ways in which local union activists discuss their internal tactics for trade union activities. The second difficulty was the accurate understanding under cultural difference. For a foreign researcher, the fact of not being a Russian worker, not even a Russian, means that the researcher could easily be attracted to the perception of seeing unique information by taking the societal background as a ‘meaningful’ part of the study. Looking through all my interactive stages or the interviews, there were frequent occasions which showed how the cultural factor related to the ‘language’ formed an obstacle to mutual communication. The difficulty of distinguishing linguistic factors while interacting with my subjects had constantly been the most critical challenge. ‘Language’, as a necessary but also a ‘problematic’ medium between the involved parties in the fieldwork, presented a not only interesting but also critical aspect to sense the ‘perception’, which was the boundary of cultural backgrounds. If I missed the interpretation of Russian slang, or the context of the received narratives, the subjects’ words could cause me confusion. For example, the definition of their formal income and informal income (levye dengi) from Russian workers’ immediate expression has a few variations. Similarly, to understand the work content and workers’ evaluation of that, to a certain extent, has taught me a great lesson of the need to distinguish their ‘implications’. Back to the concrete context, as regards the difference that I do not work as they do in their workplace, sometimes I was not sure that the description they provided was the thing I have really understood within our mutual communication. The gap, however, was created rather by the difference in our social backgrounds rather than simply cultural differences. For example, while focusing on workers’ experiences at the workplace, one permanent factor which had always confused me was how to distinguish the ‘virtue’ of their making cynical judgement about others, whether the target is their chief or their colleague. Those judgements have always been an awkward matter I could hardly understand. The other difficulty derived from things like arranging the environment for ‘meeting people’. One of the permanent challenges to an outsider researcher who wanted to investigate the networks of Russian trade union activists was the difficulty of creating access to the rank and file through union leaders. For each society or community, the people may have their own social customs. The unfamiliar cultural experiences posed challenges in my interviews in order to manage the talk in ways that suited the locals or to perceive what they really mean. For example, how was I to find out if I had persuaded them to ‘adopt me’, to allow me to observe their day-to-day work?33 Generally to say, at first, and indeed for quite a while, the different backgrounds presented a primary difficulty for my participant observation. The differences between me and the local activist circle always implied risks to the access. Noteworthily, the cultural issue to some extent had discouraged me from developing questions about gender issues during the fieldwork on these two male-dominated professions.34Nonetheless, the cultivation of deepening understanding of the subjects’ environments would not have arisen without these challenges. The third difficulty faced was how to note the individualised features of the research subjects. The difficulty of extending contact resources can be understood as a cultural difference but indeed was a factor deeply related to the character of the interaction between Russian union leaders and their members. When I started to have contact with local unionists, the first trade union activist I found, driver M, was from the Free Trade Union of St Petersburg Tram Drivers. This active person was well-known because of his successful media-oriented campaign. In addition, he seemed to be one of the very rare local activists who kept in mind any chances of getting international contact. Probably because he knew that I was also an activist for union campaigns before, he tried very hard to help me to get the information I needed. But he repeatedly said that he did not expect to mobilise his colleagues or persuade them to participate in collective action, he rather relied on other left activists to make a joint campaign. He would help me to meet other local unionists but not his members. After several times of close observation, I decided to give up this potential subject because of the narrow perspective of such a source. This was because he is more like an individual fighter in his workplace and, most importantly, he has decided not to make more efforts at internal organisational work. The critical matter is that driver M was not a single exception, many local trade unionists and labour activists I have met were acting on an individualistic basis. Some of them were not even seen as relevant to their own members. There was a certain period during which I was so confused with the question ‘Do they really have “their organisation”’ or ‘Can I find any genuine union organisation with a genuine member base’? Certainly, such a characteristic can also be seen as a kind of cultural difference. As related to my research work the concern is that many leaders did not enjoy authority among workers – even among their own handful of members. That is very different from the trade union culture in Taiwan I was used to. On many occasions, I have seen the contradictory features: on the one hand that union leaders hardly could mobilise their members (as ‘fear’ has became a dominant mentality in current Russian society although workers in general have lots of complaints at work); but on the other hand the leaders did not take the mobilisation issue seriously. For both the leaders and the members, their consent and solutions are rather individualistic. This is partly due to the fact that collective action has not proved to be very effective; partly due to the fact that trade unions for them do not have a real capacity to engage in collective bargaining for wages. A further concern is that although people who are more active would not frankly suppress the contact between the researcher and those ‘passive workers’, a potential conflict about the ‘value’ of members’ opinions always existed. Such a factor derived from a very common response among leaders and activists: after so many exhausting efforts, their lonely feelings lead them to believe that only they really care about the advancement, the progress of their trade union activities. Once my investigation was under way, this research also provided a challenge to the task of how a researcher can reach those passive and hidden people. 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