The paper offers a confessional tale (Maanen 1988) about the use of qualitative interviews and focus groups in three projects concerned with exploring the practice accounts of manager-academics and administrators in UK universities. These techniques were supplemented by the use of ethnographic principles (Atkinson, Coffey et al. 2007 ) in order to locate the data in a cultural and social organizational context, rather than simply being a snapshot (Deem 2002). The context-setting techniques included case studies of people managed by organizational leaders, hanging around in campus cafes and open spaces, generating life history accounts from a small sub-sample of respondents and studying the interaction between institutional websites and the values of universities in relation to equality principles. These in turn helped to illuminate how leadership and management operate in higher education settings and how principles of equity and diversity (or their absence) affects how leadership and management are exercised. References Atkinson, P., A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, et al. (2007 ). Handbook of Ethnography. London, Sage. Deem, R. (2002). "Talking to university managers - methodological dilemmas and feminist research strategies'." Sociology 36(4): 835-855. Maanen, V. (1988). Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. Chicago, University of Chicago.