Research Methods. This final section of the introduction chapter gives an overview of how this research project was conducted. It addresses several facets of the doctoral project’s research methods, including research design, fieldwork and field methods, and reflections on the researcher’s positionality. It aims to discuss these in a reflexive manner. 6.1 Research Design and Choosing the Case Study Research design is largely a process of choosing and adapting methods that are suitable to answer the questions posed. Given that the research questions posed in this doctoral project concern the sociological and cultural implications of waste recycling, asking how the waste practice of recycling transforms values in addition to those of discarded materials, the appropriate methodological choice was to study ‘around’ the waste recycling and look into the lifeworlds which revolve around and were created by it. I found myself drawn to the humanistic model of social research, which serves as the methodological and ethnographic basis. That is, one of the best ways to study this world is to become closer to it and participate in it directly to enable an exploration of the meanings of the ‘field’—a naturally recurring setting—and its behaviour and activities from within (▇▇▇▇▇▇ 2000). This methodological approach reflects the research project’s roots in the interdisciplinary field of ‘area studies’, which draws on a ‘mediated research technique or methodology’ and depends on ‘local insights as a means to modify general, standardised disciplinary research methods’ in order to formulate a non- exclusive approach towards the research subject (▇▇▇▇▇▇ et al. 2003, 3). Overall, this project mainly adopts case-based qualitative methods, with some quantitative data serving as auxiliary and supportive statistical evidence if necessary. Generally speaking, case studies are useful for identifying causal mechanisms, exploring causal complexity, enhancing internal validity, and generating new understandings (▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 2007, 37-63), and they tend to be more appropriate to answering the questions posed in this research. Moreover, case studies enjoy a natural advantage in research with an exploratory feature. In investigating Taiwan’s waste recycling, far less scholarly attention has been paid to the non-governmental and non-private-business actors, or to the sociological significance of waste in Taiwan’s societal transitioning. This situation leaves many key issues, basic topics, empirical developments, and historical meanings unexplored. With many general questions unaddressed, there is more urgency to examine the scheme, meaning, operation, and relations of Taiwanese waste recycling through case studies rather than focusing only on a specific domain, namely policy, economy, labour, or discourse. Nevertheless, research design is an on-going process of adaptation and modification that accompanies the research process. The choice of Tzu-chi recycling, as well as the choice of a case-based method to understand the relation between waste and Taiwan, only came in the later stages of the research project. The changing research design and focus was a considered decision made based on what happened in the field, and it reflects the nature of field research. That is, as a mode of inquiry, field research entails more than simply collecting data. Instead, it is an ‘informed interaction between data generation and data analysis’, which involves a range of on-the-ground practices connected to research design, data selection, information mapping, strategy adaptation, and theory development (▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ and Read 2015, 9-10). In the earlier stage of the project, when I was based in the Netherlands, I primarily relied on online archival research to become acquainted with the topic of waste and recycling in Taiwan; public documents such as government regulations and school policies were the most accessible materials on the Internet. From there, I formulated the initial research design before going into the field to analyse the social-political structure of Taiwan’s waste recycling and to map out key stakeholders and systems. As the preliminary fieldwork unfolded between 2014 and 2015, I discovered something unknown to me: community recycling and Tzu-chi. When I talked to people about my research, Tzu-chi often cropped up in conversations, mentioned by people of different genders and social or economic backgrounds, within or outside of the field of waste and recycling. By then, I decided that the most useful course of action was to understand the field as it presented itself and thus included Tzu-chi as one of stakeholders representing community recycling. Nevertheless, as the research continued, I learned how much the organisation had spread into all corners of the recycling world, confirming its centrality. This turning point led to the decision to pursue this centrality. At the beginning of the second round of my fieldwork in 2016, I sought a case of (non-Tzu-chi) community recycling to continue my initial research plan. However, the community I found, ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇, ultimately had a developmental background in Tzu-chi recycling (see Chapter Six). From then on, Tzu-chi became the core of the project. When shifting the main focus, I made a methodological choice to study ‘up’ into the Tzu-chi recycling world. Instead of studying Tzu-chi institutional publications and interviewing the organisational representatives before (re)entering the field, I decided to first continue my participant observation approach to focus on recycling practice in everyday settings. This decision was first made considering the growing argument in the social sciences that static interviews are insufficient, and that a methodological approach which locates conversations within on-going, situated actions is to be encouraged to focus on ‘doing’ as well as ‘saying’ (▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 1996; ▇▇▇▇▇▇ and ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 2007; ▇▇▇▇▇ 2011b). Second, when reading the existing literature about Tzu-chi, it occurred to me that the studies on Tzu-chi are mostly informed either by observations made at an institutional level or by the accounts of commissioners. I sought to explore the perspectives of the community volunteers first before ‘moving up’.
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