Asking The ‘Rights’ Question: A Reflection On Interviewing Hotel Managers And Migrant Workers

This paper will contribute to on-going discussions over the relevance of qualitative research and reflective methodology in the field of business ethics and CSR (for a review see, Brand, 2009). It is an evaluative discussion of the researcher’s experience during the early fieldwork for her doctoral research project, entitled ‘Business Human Rights Responsibilities and Migrant Workers in the Hospitality Sector in Britain: A Multi-stakeholder Study’. This project has examined the implementation of the United Nations-set norm of corporate responsibility to respect human rights (UN A/HRC/17/31), with a specific focus on its implication for migrant labour in the hotel industry in Britain. Although some quantitative studies have shown that listed businesses in Britain have begun to include human rights language in their codes of ethics (Preuss, 2011), it is yet unclear what human rights responsibilities mean when applied to business (Muchlinski, 2012). The study is taking place in the context of a dearth of in-depth research on how different stakeholders make sense of and experience business ethics generally, and human rights particularly, in specific business contexts (Liedtka, 1992; Crane, 1999; Whitehouse, 2006; de Gama et al., 2012; Deva, 2009). The objective of this paper is to provide insights in the conduct of qualitative research in business responsible practice. It will reflect on the researcher’s positionality, and the challenges and opportunities of conducting a qualitative study on the question of business human rights responsibilities and migrant workers in the hotel industry in Britain. It will examine the intricacies of approaching and interviewing hotel managers and migrant workers on the ethical question of human rights in business. It will evaluate how the research process and the researcher’s encounters with the different participants may have challenged both her notions of how research should be conducted and her relationship with the participants.