ABSTRACT
This book has emerged very gradually out of work on which we have been engaged, individually and collaboratively over a period of ten years or so. Its central motivation has developed out of two fields of commitment and experiences. These have shaped and been shaped by the general approach to the reading and doing of research which constitutes the principal theme of the book. That is, that research is properly conceived, not, primarily, as a sequence of stages, nor as a collection of skills and techniques, nor as a set of rules, though it entails all of these. Rather, it should be understood, first and foremost, as the continuous application of a particularly coherent and systematic and reflexive way of questioning, a mode of interrogation.
