already done fieldwork there under my supervision, researching anti-social
behaviour related to coffee shops (Bilic, 2011).During the interviews I
learned that thehoreca-co-ordinatorshad access to extensive detailed infor-
mation and were also actively involved in visiting coffee shops and check-
ing whether they complied with the AHOJG-criteria. Each informant
turned out to be a key-informant as well as an expert because they not only
organized the documentation of all the inspections, but also had firsthand
experience with visiting coffee shops themselves on a regular basis.
All of the co-ordinators I interviewed had been police officers for over
20 years and had been involved with monitoring coffee shops since the
beginning of Rotterdam’s cannabis policy in the mid-1990s. Because of the
sheer amount of detailed knowledge of the everyday practice of their work,
I already to my surprisereached saturation (in relation to their
perspective on coffee shops, the people who work there and the monitoring
of coffee shops) after six interviews, which is in contrast to most of my
previous research experience.
My intention was to interview coffee shop owners in order to see how
they perceived the police inspections, but this turned out to be a difficult
task. The owners were under great stress because of the prospect of a more
severe policy, which might jeopardize their shops and their livelihood. I
had two formal interviews with a coffee shop owner who used to be the
president of the organization of Rotterdam coffee shop owners. In the sec-
ond interview (which was rather tense), he accused me of doing research
for the public prosecutor. When I sent him information on the research
project which contradicted his accusation, he apologized. However, my
(new) neighbour turned out to be the former manager of three coffee shops
in Rotterdam and he was quite willing to share his experience and opinions
on the coffee shop business. Others were less willing to talk, except in a
casual way during, for instance, a conference where I presented the findings
of my research. I used the information from the coffee shop owners to
triangulate the findings from the interviews with the police officers, which
confirmed their narratives. I also triangulated my findings with the thesis of
Bilic (2011),^5 which substantiated my research.
In addition, I conducted observations at a variety of coffee shops. The
observations consisted of regular visits to coffee shops at varying times in
order to see whether there were men hanging around and how they were
dealt with by the coffee shop owner. Policy documents on cannabis and
coffee shops and the yearly reports by the ‘Administrative law enforcement’
of the city were also studied.
Moral Entrepreneurship Revisited 147