The collective voyage of discovery: How the book was developed and produced

Abstract

As the book is quite novel we feel it would be helpful if we explained the guidelines we have given to authors and the processes we incorporated in developing the book. We asked the past and current research students to describe their own voyages of discovery to capture some of the tensions researchers go through as they struggle to find a methodological approach to tackle their project. This is often initially perplexing as research students in the social sciences usually come from a background of professional practice and wish to research a complex issue of interest or concern from that practice. To present both their solution to the methodological, paradigmatic and theoretical issues and the way they accordingly presented and structured their thesis, we asked the authors of the 32 example chapters to use a common template. This asked them to explain: what the thesis was about; the methods, paradigms and theories drawn upon; and, the resulting structure of the thesis. The template ensures that the important common elements are present in each chapter, but still provides authors with sufficient flexibility to accommodate very different voyages of discovery and resulting thesis structures.