Book Review: Being Barney Glaser

I was a little taken aback when Astrid Gynnild asked me to review this work for Grounded Theory Review. As I explained, I have been impressed by a lot of what Glaser and Strauss and Glaser writing alone have said to me about sociological research, I teach methodology at masters and doctoral levels and always recommend these works to my students, encouraging them, where appropriate, to adopt some of the more familiar strategies of this approach—let the data speak, theoretically sample, write memos, conceptualise, in particular. I will, however, not allow them to say that what they are doing is grounded theory and nor do I claim that that is what I do; I may have been impressed, even inspired by Glaser’s work, but what I do is other than it. So I’m not sure that I am qualified to review the book. Nevertheless, I agreed, only to be disconcerted by the announcement of audience in the introduction by Gynnild & Martin: