Global and local factors in green food

2021 Fiscal Year Research-status Report

• Project/Area Number: 21K13343
• Research Institution: Hitotsubashi University
• Principal Investigator: パドロン・エルナンデス イバ 一橋大学, 大学院経営管理研究科, 講師 (80877001)
• Project Period (FY): 2021-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: international business / organization theory / institutional change / food / sustainability

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

Article 1: As planned, data collection accounted for the largest part of the first year. This was done through help from student research assistants, who together spent approximately 600 hours gathering information on green hamburgers. A database with details about more than 1300 hamburgers released by over 400 companies is the result of this work. In addition, research assistants have compiled information about surrounding information such as the involved restaurants, suppliers of green patties, market shares and vegetarian/vegan friendliness rankings in different countries and cities. For the Israeli market, I hired a company for market research that was then merged into the main database. A manuscript presenting the data, together with a preliminary theoretical framing and analysis, has been accepted for presentation at the 2022 annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
Article 2: I have commenced a literature review and some initial data collection. I am considering to shift the its focus from organic food certification to the emerging topic of entomophagy. This would still be in line with the main focus of this research project, both theoretically (institutional maintenance and change) and empirically (green food). The decision to change topic is not final, but I will decide before June 2022 whether to pursue the original topic or not.
Access to the Factiva news article database helped in surveying press coverage relevant for both articles. Also here, I am using research assistants in reading and summarizing news articles.

Current Status of Research Progress

2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.

Reason

While there have been some changes in framing, methodology and empirics, the project is progressing according to the original aims and time plan.

Strategy for Future Research Activity

Article 1: I aim to follow the original plan with journal submission in Q2 2023. After the conference presentation in July 2022, I will adjust the article accordingly, both in terms of theoretical framing and empirical data. Additional data collection is likely to be needed before submission.
Article 2: While I might change the subject of this article, the time plan is being followed. I have collected relevant previous research and am in the process of hiring four research assistants to start with data collection in May 2022. I will wait until findings have emerged before decided what conference to send it to in late 2022 or early 2023.
Change in type of main data: I had hoped to conduct extensive fieldwork for both articles in this project, including primary, semi-structured face-to-face interviews. While I have done some informal interviews over Internet telephony, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to arrange for fieldwork. Therefore, I am shifting toward a different methodological approach, where I instead construct databases of qualitative data from public sources. This is done partly through manual work done by research assistants, and partly through Natural Language Processing. As a consequence of this, the budget for the first year was spent in a different way than planned, e.g., no fieldwork, no voice recorder and only a small amount of interview transcription. Depending on how the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, I might conduct in-depth qualitative interviews for both articles.

Causes of Carryover

While I have done some informal interviews over Internet telephony, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to arrange for fieldwork. Therefore, I am shifting toward a different methodological approach, where I instead construct databases of qualitative data from public sources. This is done partly through manual work done by research assistants, and partly through Natural Language Processing. As a consequence of this, the budget for the first year was spent in a slightly different way than planned, e.g., no fieldwork, no voice recorder and only a small amount of interview transcription.

The main reason why a part of the funding will be spent during the 2022 fiscal year can be explained by Factiva billing. It was my understanding that yearly access is paid as a lump sum, and I had budgeted for this. However, payment must be divided into multiple installments, several of which are planned for 2022.