Fieldwork and empirical material

The topic of this research stems from the author's personal interest towards entrepreneurship, and it is not a given topic from an external client. As presented in the Chapter 1, limitations of this study are well formed yet the scope and size of this project has inevitably exceeded the original time span. Fetterman (2010, p. 40) highlights that interview is the ethnographer’s most

important data-gathering technique, and researcher can use questions as icebreaker in discus-sions, or apply a structured interview technique. Originally, a major part of data was collected in Autumn 2018 and handling, analyzing, and interpreting of data was done during August 2018 and April 2019. After that intensive phase, the author had three meetings with independent freelancers during August 2019 and October 2019. Author of this study has a background in the human resource and software technology industry. On Finnish market there are local and international talent agencies which have no internal software developers, they are there to in-termediate projects to consultants from consulting houses or end-customers. Consulting com-pany is a comcom-pany whose primary business is to sell their own employees, however, occasion-ally they need to ask suitable technical skills from external freelancers. Main field of this eth-nographic study is a tech talent agency, Personal Agency (“pseudonym”), which aims to build a community for independent software developers, and they are intermediate between inde-pendent professionals and end-customers.

Personal Agency led author to be a non-identified participant as the author was already working for the company. Bryman & Bell (2011, p. 432) depict this role as complete participant, a re-searcher who immerses oneself in an active role in the setting. During Autumn 2018, when most of the data was collected, the author was working in a software talent agency and had a good network of freelancers available. Direct contact was available as suggested by Eriksson

& Kovalainen (2016, p. 54). Brewer (2000) determines a participant who has already been part of the setting as an observer as a participant because it takes on the role of observer (Johnstone, 2007, p.107). Gaining access to the field was therefore already provided, and later in the begin-ning of the research process, the author had oral consent from the owner of the talent agency.

In order to protect the individuals’ privacy, in the beginning of an interview, informants were acknowledged that this interview will be transcribed into notes and stored, therefore, of the orders of European Union Directive (2016/679), also known as GDPR directive, a permission to process personal data was requested. Informed consent was asked (Seale et al., 2004, p. 219).

Interview transcripts were primarily used for the purposes of Personal Agency, however, those discussions included various questions linked to motivation factors within entrepreneurship.

For a researcher, the dual role in the company offered an excellent environment for full-time participation from Monday to Friday, as well as in the unofficial events related to IT. Fetterman (2010, p.8) suggests that the time spent in the field should be at least six months or longer, on the other hand, Millen (2000) has analyzed a rapid ethnography process which is intended to

reduce the time on the field. Admittedly, the author's time on the main field was less than six months, while the whole research project lasted one and half years. It should be noted that this study is conducted in the author's own culture and country, and author has a background from both ICT industry and living with small business entrepreneurs. Later on, after leaving the main field, the author has been a connection in LinkedIn with freelancers and have seen multiple posts of their current situations and thoughts. Fetterman (2010, p. 9) recommends leaving the field when similar patterns start to emerge over and over again. This phase happened before leaving the main field. More is explained in the findings and results chapters. Freelancers vis-ited a talent agency for the first time in a formal interview which lasted approximately one hour.

After that, a smaller group of freelancers integrated as part of the talent agency’s services and they used for example the opportunity to work at the same office with talent agency’s employ-ees, eat lunch together and visit events. This kind of informal behavior offered an opportunity for new insights as new information revealed over time, as well as to do an observations and field notes. Analyzing fieldwork’s data can take as long as time conducted in the setting (Fet-terman, 2010, p. 10). Below the research project’s stages are summarized in Figure 7. Bryman

& Bell (2011, p. 427) present a term micro-ethnography to be used if a research is carried out in few months, and Neergaard & Ulhøi (2007, p.61) depicts that micro-level processes of en-trepreneurship can be analyzed with a micro-ethnographic method.

Figure 7 Realized ethnographic stages of the thesis

Johnstone (2007, p. 113) recommends ethnographic researchers to reveal his/her background and how it fits the social environment in the field. Author is in her mid-20’s, a young white

•More formal data

female with Northern European and Finnish background who has a formal education from uni-versity and has been working approximately ten years in the business sector. In contrast to the researcher, informants were all men, as they tend to be in the software industry, and their age estimate ranged from 25-years-old to 55-years-old. Sources for preunderstanding (Gummesson, 2000, pp. 67-71) of entrepreneurship comes from personal experience, experience of others such as textbooks, research reports and lectures, and access via personal involvement. Author’s both parents and grandparents are small entrepreneurs, each of them had/has their own business to run without generational handover. None of them is an entrepreneur in the ICT industry, conversely, they are closer to craftsmen. Despite the differences between industries, the author has undoubtedly a good understanding of small business entrepreneurship in Finland. The au-thor has almost established her own business in 2016 and studied the opportunities of this for her bachelor’s thesis. Furthermore, experience in human resource management (e.g. recruit-ment, payroll) has brought a holistic view of what kind of compensation and benefits employers offer to employees in Finland.

Later, in Autumn 2019, the author was working in a global consulting enterprise, her unit fo-cused on IT consulting, and this offered a complete perspective onto this freelancing topic, from the perspective of a buyer and seller of outsourced services, including freelancing. Holistic view could be formulated when combining the previous know-how into the current situation where the primary work task is to sell consulting services for end-customers. This provides subjective insights into the relationship between motivation and freelancing, compared to regular form of employment and total rewards. Usually, it is a great challenge for the researcher to position herself in the position and mindset of the subject, but the author's background makes it easier for her. However, in the chosen methodology, it is as important to reveal preconception and presupposition as a researcher, as the goal is to be able to question, distance oneself away from, and expand understanding through research. Therefore, in the findings (Chapter 6), discussion (Chapter 7), and conclusion (Chapter 8) it is clearly stated if opinion comes from the author of the study. If not separately explained, the meaning of interpretation is from independent soft-ware freelancers.

Possible biases in ethnographic research related to reflexivity and researcher’s experience to analyze the data and recognize her subjective viewpoints. General challenges of using ethno-graphic research are for instance; how to get access to the field, it is time consuming, ethics of covert observation and the focus on what to observe, and problem of reflexivity because it is

not replicable (Johnstone, 2007; Fetterman 2010; Madden 2017). On the other hand, the ad-vantages of using ethnography to study entrepreneurship in general are, for instance, richness in the observational data that are collected, discussions and interviews are authentic and high-quality, and being immersed in the field allows researcher create a full picture of behavior and context of the study. (Flick, 2007, p. 99; Seale et al., 2004, p. 207; Madden, 2017, p. 20). To summarize, layers of objective points of view are brought to visible light. In addition to this, ethnography allows higher levels of subjectivity from the researcher, as long as the author of the study will reveal and disclose her biases and preunderstandings. Ethnographic researcher can either position oneself as an objective interpreter or subjective interpreter. Subjective ap-proach is recommended is studying strategic intentions which require uncovering deeper mean-ings (Johnstone, 2007, p. 105). In the end, a researcher is the instrument of data collection.