ABSTRACT
These opening remarks are drawn from an autobiographical statement written by John Wakeford over 10 years ago about the management of team-based social research. His comments echo my own experience, not only in managing a research team, but also in establishing a range of teams in a research centre. For most researchers in the social sciences the conduct of social research focuses on the work of the lone scholar. This is epitomized in our experience of working on a doctoral thesis where the student works alone with a supervisor and is often engaged in small-scale empirical studies. Certainly, this was my experience in the 1970s. Subsequently, academics engaged in empirical social research often continue to conduct their studies themselves. Indeed this was my own experience in the 1980s when I decided to engage in a re-study of the school that I had initially studied in the 1970s (Burgess, 1987). In addition, I had also developed a research team, composed of one researcher and one secretary, who worked with me on a project concerning the mentally handicapped in residential homes (Candappa and Burgess, 1989). This was my only experience of teambased research in 15 years.
