ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book is not only to provide the reader with individual accounts of research-on-change-in-practice but to use these to help further general understanding and reflections. The categories of formal/informal interviews, semi-structured or not, do not capture the fluidity and complexity of interpretation flowing from what are, in Burke's terms, essentially different rhetorical encounters, capturing little more than what Mills termed situational 'vocabularies of motive'. A reflective appreciation of this phenomenon is a key feature, an intellectual lightness, a cognitive and emotive toggling, characteristic of an elegant observer. The first anecdote from Cokemaking Oz, the case study employed in this paper, relates to the uncertainties surrounding our interpretations of meaning, and the insecurities that bedevil any claim that our 'findings' are the reflections of the character of the field rather than the constructions of the observer. The reflections provided in this paper take a different form.
