In this study, the author takes a discourse-analytic approach to study the research that two managers carried out in an educational institution to produce and legitimate knowledge that would be used for decision making in the institution. The author suggests that the various steps of any research and writing process can be understood as a system of genres, some written, some spoken, that must be produced in a particular relationship to each other for the final written report of the research to be accepted as a legitimate research report. The author focuses on one aspect of the research process, the production of data through the writing and reading of notes taken by the managers during interviews conducted as part of their research. The author shows that the writing and reading of these notes was a crucial step in the construction of the knowledge on which the decision making was based.
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