A common experience among those of us who talk to lawyers about their work is to hear the lawyers recite their war stories. In contrast, when you talk to an experienced social scientist about his or her work, you tend to get something of a sanitized version of the research process much like the “methods” section of a research article. However, if you start to dig, as the creators of this volume have done, you often start to see a much messier business, as Keith Hawkins (“Research is a messy business”) and StewartMacaulay (“[W]hen people write about research methods – it's all so neat and pretty. The messiness of much of it just doesn't come through in the books”) so honestly tells us. The more vigorously you dig, the messier things often get. If, in addition to the wonderful interviews that compose this book, the editors had looked at early documents from the research projects – memos, research designs, grant applications, and the like – they would have often discovered that many of the authors started from very different points than the authors themselves now recall (I by no means exclude myself from this phenomenon, although I have not gone back to my own early research materials).

The ability to produce high-quality and influential social science research products is a craft that is acquired through a combination of instruction from those who have previously mastered the craft and one's own practice doing that research. Dealing with the unexpected and being able to cope with messiness is a common feature of “craftwork.” The nature of the messiness depends on the specific craft involved.