This book has its origins in long-standing research concerns of its authors that culminated in an ESRC-funded project Working in the Public Interest (WITPI), which ran from December 2017 to July 2020. The project investigated ideas of professionalism and the public interest in planning, with a particular emphasis on redressing an imbalance in empirical work on private-sector firms. This book is one of two from the project, and we think it is unique in its in-depth accounts of what planners actually do.

In writing the book, we took inspiration from an ethnographic tradition that is focused on telling stories sympathetic to the point of view of our empirical subjects; in our case, a small number of planners in four organisations that we followed closely over a nine-month period. The result is a series of stories, punctuated with contributions to and from theory. A storytelling tradition exists in planning, but this book is unique for its extensive, longterm ethnographic engagement in four very different organisational settings and the resultant ways in which it tells its stories. It opens the black box regarding what the planner does all day and how decisions and policies are actually arrived at through the interplay of seemingly insignificant organisational issues, interwoven with power plays of money, political power and cultural capital. In doing so, we reject commonly adopted qualitative methodologies, such as case studies that rely solely on interviews, since what we think we do can be rather different to what we actually do. Interviews are always recollections and they render the past neater than it really was.

To narrate sympathetic accounts of planners’ daily lives has meant that this book must create ‘thick descriptions’ of such lives. It is thus very different to most books in the planning field. As such, most of the text consists of four ‘thick’ case studies of planning practice. These are contextualised in an introductory chapter that follows this preface. The wider significance of our findings is highlighted along the way through the case studies, and is drawn together in a concluding chapter.

All four authors contributed equally to the book's production. Malcolm co-ordinated the project as principal investigator, Abby and Jason gathered the vast majority of the fieldwork, with some contributions and write-ups from Geoff and Malcolm.