ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the research design and processes. It also discusses author's experiences in the Tasmanian context are somewhat unique, as they transcend a few of the more commonly observed boundaries within and between the two fields. Themes and findings are founded upon a combination of primary data from semi-structured interviews and extensive involvement in the two fields of interest, as well as secondary data in the form of publicly available documents, and reference throughout to a large body of international empirical literature. The inclusion of secondary data is beneficial in independently confirming the nature and scope of workforce characteristics and dynamics, as well as several of the key thematic issues raised in practitioner narrative accounts. However, themes and findings in this research are also mediated by the researcher's standpoint and the contextual conditions in which the research has occurred, rendering the need to be reflexive an essential pre-cursor to the themes and analyses.
