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However, despite this phenomenal body of work and human endeavour, there has never been a cohesive narrative on how this method was rediscovered by a researcher over the course of a new series of studies, redeveloped in the context of a topic previously undisturbed, applied, poked around, and problems generated (with solutions to these found or not). There has never been a narrative on how a researcher sat down and worked through data over decades in order to evolve his or her own grounded theory and methodology about a specific phenomenon. Unlike other empirical methodologies, those who are using or planning the development of a grounded theory should not have a set of highly prescriptive rules to work with; grounded theory is not a highly designed and micromanaged method. As I argue later in this book, it is as much about a state of mind as it is about a process of data collection and analysis. Its discovery by Glaser and Strauss (1965, 1967) led to philosophies of working and an evolution that would take two seemingly radically different paths for conducting data collection and analysis, although the only real changes that were being made to this method were in the meaning of its data gathering and relationships. Since this early period, there have been differing claims to conventions in this literature. Glaser and Strauss separated and Strauss teamed up with Corbin, also a methodologist from a medical sociological background, with both founders claiming their own orthodoxies until Strauss’s death. However, despite this impassioned debate, there has still never been a grounded theory on a grounded theory. In this book, that is what I aim to achieve.
My second reason for writing this book is that if Glaser and Strauss (1967) are to be believed, the process of determining materials and discussions can be incongruous in grounded theory, and so in this text, I attempt to put the record straight in my own use of it. For example, as grounded theory was discovered then, the arguments about minor details of form and function are an irrelevance in subsequent rediscoveries, because logically they should exist only in unique forms and on a case-by-case basis. Thus, in this book, I take a wholly different approach by describing the processes and evolutions that brought me to develop