A Health Warning for Value Chain Analysis Research

While working on my Micro-enterprise Development final, I reread a document that has one of the funniest introductions I can recall. The document, A Handbook for Value Chain Research by Kaplinsky and Morris, begins with the following warning:

In case you have trouble seeing the image, or want an abridged version, here are some of the best lines:

Lest anyone feel overwhelmed by the depth of detail in this Handbook, especially with respect to the sections on methodology, we would like to emphasise at the outset: this Handbook is not meant to be used or read as a comprehensive step by step process that has to be followed in order to undertake a value chain analysis. We know of no value chain analysis that has comprehensively covered all the aspects dealt with in the following pages, and certainly not in the methodologically sequential Handbook set out below. Indeed to try and do so in this form would be methodologically overwhelming, and would certainly bore any reader of such an analysis to tears.

It is not an attempt to restrict researchers within a methodological strait-jacket, but rather to free them to use whatever tools are deemed suitable from the variety presented below.

...as an array of possible technical tools, some of which may be usefully adopted and methodologically applied either partially or fully depending on circumstances; or whole parts can be skipped and not read at all.

...it is not even our intention that everyone should read the Handbook in the way one would go through a (good) novel – sequentially, and from cover to cover. We therefore urge readers to use their common sense and treat it as one does an edited book, or researchers to read it in the same way one reads a mechanics manual for finding out about one’s car. Treat the contents page as an à la carte menu, read the bits that are interesting, take what is relevant for whatever research task is at hand, and skim what is not relevant.

While the rest of the text loses the sense of humor, it is a pretty useful document. Get the pdf here.