Writing and Research Methodology: How This Book Was Written

Here we explore methods, ethics and experiences arising from writing this book. The timescale begins before this book was envisaged, with the formation of a community of writing practice in the business school that led to a collection of articles for a special issue of a journal (MacKenzie and Warwick, Eds, e-Organisations and People, 26(2), 2019). This achieved, we set our sights on this book with a considerable degree of confidence. From this, we address two main issues: what we had originally planned, and what turned out to be the case. During the writing of this book, several things blew us off course, and we trace how our methods adapted in the context of the ethics of maintaining relationships with stakeholders to enable this book to be written. As co-editors, our general invitation to authors was to ‘write about what you know’ of life in a small business school. We held regular gatherings of a couple of hours each to support and encourage each other in what we called ‘Writing in a Social Space’ (Murray, Writing in social spaces: A social processes approach to academic writing, 2014). These conversations were also important in enabling more critical exploration of subjects, through relating with curiosity and asking open questions.