Beyond methods: Law and society in action [Introduction]

One may be forgiven for wondering what is to be gained from another book on research methods. Certainly no shortage of research methods texts exists, especially when one includes in the counting the volumes written for the separate disciplinary traditions that comprise Law and Society. Yet for scholars about to conduct empirical work for the first time, or about to attempt a very different approach, more should be said about the social realities of conducting research than is found in most of these texts. A proper grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of various research methods and an adequate understanding of the practical prescriptions about the mechanics of research are clearly essential aspects of one's training. However, the art of cooking is more than the following of recipes. Just as reading recipes in a cookbook does not sufficiently prepare you for your first foray into the kitchen (and certainly does not make you a good cook), most research methods books can only take you so far in preparing you for fieldwork. Orthodox methodological texts have two important limitations in this respect.

First, these texts do not generally convey a sense of what it feels like to be out in the field, particularly when things go wrong or become difficult (which is almost always the case). As the interviews contained in this book suggest, research projects are usually longer and their narratives more complex than the researcher would have imagined at the outset.