Mike Wallace is a Professor of Public Management at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. From 2009 to 2012 he was the Economic and Social Research Council's Strategic Adviser for Researcher Development. His research on managing change in the public services is reported in many books and academic journals. He is co-author, with Eric Hoyle, of the book Educational Leadership: Ambiguity, Professionals, and Managerialism (Sage, 2005), lead editor, with Michael Fertig and Eugene Schneller, of the book Managing Change in the Public Services (Blackwell, 2007), and lead co-author, with Michael Reed, Dermot O'Reilly, Jonathan Morris, Michael Tomlinson and Rosemary Deem, of the book Developing Public Service Leaders: Elite Orchestration, Change Agency, Leaderism, and Neoliberalization (Oxford University Press, 2023). His contribution to teaching at Cardiff centres on the design of postgraduate research programmes incorporating research methods training.

Part 1: Becoming a Critical Reader and Self-Critical Writer
Chapter 1: What it Means to be Critical
Chapter 2: Making a Critical Choice
Chapter 3: A First Look: Interrogating Abstracts
Chapter 4: Getting Started on Critical Reading
Chapter 5: Getting Started on Self-Critical Writing
Chapter 6: Creating a Comparative Critical Summary
Chapter 7: Developing Your Writing Skills to Communicate Effectively
Part 2: Developing an In-Depth Analysis
Chapter 8: A Mental Map for Critical Reading and Self-critical Writing in Depth
Chapter 9: Tools for Thinking - Concepts and their Combinations
Chapter 10: Ways of Thinking - Philosophical Positions
Chapter 11: Reasons for Conducting the Research - Intellectual Projects
Chapter 12: Knowledge Claims - Creating Different Types of Literature
Chapter 13: Key Claim Characteristics - Certainty and Generalization
Chapter 14: Developing a Critical Analysis of a Text
Chapter 15: A Worked Example of a Critical Analysis
Chapter 16: Developing Your Argument in a Critical Review of a Text
Chapter 17: Writing a Comparative Critical Review of Several Texts
Part 3: Putting Your Critical Reviews to Work
Chapter 18: Focusing and Building Up Your Critical Literature Review
Chapter 19: Integrating Critical Literature Reviews into Your Dissertation
Chapter 20: Critical Literature Reviews in Alternative Dissertation Structures
Chapter 21: Tools for Structuring a Dissertation
Chapter 22: Using the Literature in Research Papers, Oral Presentations and Posters
Chapter 23: Understanding your Supervisor's Feedback