Thread by @lportwoodstacer

It's totally normal for academic book writers to struggle w/ organizing their material into chapters that make sense and propel readers thru the book. It's tricky when yr trying to revise a diss & maybe equally tricky when yr on a 2nd book w/o a pre-existing structure in place

What isn't super compelling, structurally, is dividing the book up into 4-5 case studies & just showing how yr main argument or concept plays out in each case. Why wd a reader spend sustained time w/ yr bk if they can get the gist from just 1 chapter? Here's how to do it better:

The 4-5 case studies or research sites/objects isn't the problem. It's that each successive one should show the reader something new, something that enhances or complicates the concept or thesis introduced in the first chapter

Even if your chapters follow an intuitive chronological order or some other kind of natural organizational scheme, each chapter needs to earn its place in the book (bc it will eventually need to earn its place in the time readers decide to devote to engaging w/ yr scholarship)

Here's an ex. of a bk that does this well:

Lilly Irani's CHASING INNOVATION has at its core the concept of "entrepreneurial citizenship." Lilly argues that entrepreneurs have become more than self-interested wealth generators; they've been positioned by govts & other entities...

...as figures who do good for *society* thru their entrepreneurial activities. As this understanding of the entrepreneur has taken hold, entrepreneurialism starts to get advanced as *the* solution to both individual & social, systemic problems, esp. in the realm of development

We can imagine a book in which Lilly found five examples of entrepreneurial citizenship in the real world & just gave each one a chapter, explaining how each example illustrated the concept. But that's not what she did, because that wouldn't be very interesting.

Here's how Lilly pulled her thesis abt entrepreneurial citizenship thru her book's chapters in a richer, more engaging way:

1. The first body ch situates historically how diff actors, e.g. state & business elites, tried to make entrepreneurial citizenship common sense in India

2. The next ch follows that common sense to new actors, showing how ppl in the realm of education took up the entrepreneurial citizenship concept and concretized it in educational projects. In the prev ch, we saw how the idea emerged; here we see it gather material force

3. The next few chapters follow actual entrepreneurial citizens, looking at how ppl who position themselves as innovators take up the ideology of entrepreneurial citizenship in their own work and self-concepts

The first ch in this group introduces an emic concept that helps us see even better how entrepreneurial citizenship is inhabited -- the idea of "adding value." This ch focuses on that specific aspect of of how ppl live entrepreneurial citizenship to enrich the concept further

4. The next ch looks at one of byproducts of entrepreneurial citizenship, which Lilly calls a "bias to action." Here readers are continuing to see how entrepreneurial citizenship plays out in the real world, but they're also gaining new insight into some of its less rosy effects

5. The following ch continues to add layers to the central concept by bringing in the perspective of those who entrepreneurial citizenship is supposed to help. It provides a critical perspective by showing how the ideals break down in practice

6. The next chapter takes everything to a new level, by asking a broader question about how entrepreneurial citizenship leads to "innovation" being defined in ways that inherently include & exclude based on pre-existing power relations. Here we're seeing bigger stakes...

...of the research, not just in one specific site or group of ppl, but how the central concept and its layers can be used to understand and question dynamics we see elsewhere too (that's been true throughout the book, but this ch is where it really comes together)

Obviously a tweet thread can't do justice to an entire scholarly book. But hopefully you could see how a set of chapters might be arranged so as to keep things interesting and really justify the development of a single (rich) idea over 250 pages

If yr still struggling with this in yr own book, writing up a chapter outline (or tweet thread!) can help. Try to summarize what you want rdrs to get from each ch. Is there something interesting & new in each one? If not, can you figure out something new to extract & highlight?

And know that this struggle is just part of writing a book. Writing books is hard. Making sense of years of research is hard. Books that have a thoughtful, compelling structure probably didn't start out looking like that; their authors put tons of work into getting it right