Books about Inquiries from Amazon.com

"The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself.'"

One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live and a meditation on how to live better. The narrative of a father on a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest with his young son, it becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life's fundamental questions. A true modern classic, it remains at once touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.

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Price: $9.46 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $5.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Creswell does an excellent job categorizing the various qualitative methods into five approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study...The author has expanded on and updated the information he presented in the first edition of the book (Creswell, 1998), including discussion of the various schools of thought that have developed among qualitative researchers since the mid 1990's...Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing among five approaches is a highly informative book; researchers will likely return again and against to the book as they expand their comfort zone within qualitative research." 

                                                                          -Peggy M. Delmas, University of Alabama

“Creswell has produced an even more outstanding and valuable text for qualitative research than the First Edition.” 

                                                                                      -Edith King, University of Denver

Like the bestselling First Edition, this new version explores the philosophical underpinnings, history, and key elements of each of five qualitative inquiry approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. Using an accessible and engaging writing style, author John W. Creswell compares theoretical frameworks, ways to employ standards of quality, and strategies for writing introductions to studies, collecting data, analyzing data, writing a narrative, and verifying results.


New to the Second Edition:

• Brings the philosophical and theoretical orientations to the beginning of the book: This grounds students in the foundational thinking behind these methods much earlier.
• Gives broader coverage of narrative research: One of the original five approaches is expanded from "Biography" to "Narrative," thus exploring a wider range of narrative opportunities, biography still being one of them.
• Offers a much deeper discussion of interpretive approaches: There is much more emphasis on interpretive and postmodern perspectives such as feminism and critical theory.
• Provides more specific steps for doing research within each approach: The actual procedure for each approach is discussed and includes the sub-types of qualitative research within each of the five approaches.
• Illustrates phenomenology and ethnography: Two new, recent sample journal articles: one covering a phenomenological study; the other on an ethnographic study are included.
• Includes additional examples: More examples from the human services add to the robust examples in education, sociology, and psychology already present in the text.

Innovative Instructor's Resource CD:
An accompanying Instructor’s Resource CD contains many useful resources including PowerPoint slides, syllabi, checklists, exercises, annotated references to SAGE journal articles, and relevant Web links.

Intended Audience:
This is an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in introductory qualitative research methods across the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences. (20071207).
Price: $40.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An Easy To Read Introduction To The Theory Of Change Management That Focuses On What Works. --This text refers to the paperback edition of this title.
Price: $7.08 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This unprecedented book by one of Britain’s most admired historians describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of history has had in the Western world over the past 2,500 years.

Treating the practice of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part of the culture of Europe and America, John Burrow magnificently brings to life and explains the distinctive qualities found in the work of historians from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the present, including Livy, Tacitus, Bede, Froissart, Clarendon, Gibbon, Macaulay, Michelet, Prescott and Parkman. The author sets out not to give us the history of academic discipline but a history of choices: the choice of pasts, and the ways they have been demarcated, investigated, presented and even sometimes learned from as they have changed according to political, religious, cultural, and (often most important) partisan and patriotic circumstances. Burrow aims, as well, to change our perceptions of the crucial turning points in the history of history, allowing the ideas that historians have had about both their own times and their founding civilizations to emerge with unexpected freshness.

Burrow argues that looking at the history of history is one of the most interesting ways we have to understand the past. Certainly, this volume stands alone in its ambition, scale and fascination.

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Price: $18.10 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance examines life's essential issues as he recounts the journey down the Hudson River in a sailboat of his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus. Reprint..
Price: $4.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Written by the originators and leaders of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) movement itself, this short, practical guide offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more desirable future, experience with the whole system, and activities that signal "something different is happening this time." That difference systematically taps the potential of human beings to make themselves, their organizations, and their communities more adaptive and more effective. AI, a theory of collaborative change, erases the winner/loser paradigm in favor of coordinated actions and closer relationships that lead to solutions at once simpler and more effective..
Price: $7.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From Galileo to scientists working on cloning, notebooks have been used to document scientific discovery. Science notebooks are also effective tools in the classroom. They make science experiences more meaningful and authentic for students as they observe, record, and reflect on what they've learned. For time-strapped teachers, notebooks offer a natural way to integrate science and language arts.

Brian Campbell and Lori Fulton spent four years investigating the use of science notebooks by students, teachers, and practicing scientists. This book not only details what they learned, it serves as a ready resource of strategies and methods for teachers to incorporate science notebooks into their school day. Along the way, the book intersperses additional help:

• Classroom vignettes demonstrate how science notebooks actually function in class.
• Student samples allow readers to see student entries at a variety of levels.
• Thinking points throughout link ideas presented in the book to practice and philosophical beliefs.
• Connections to standards--both the National Science Education Standards and the Standards for the English Language Arts - reinforce the rationale for using science notebooks to develop scientific concepts AND literacy.

Use science notebooks and watch as your students write as scientists do, share their thinking, support their ideas with evidence, and improve their literacy through reading, writing, and speaking.

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Price: $13.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Power of Appreciative Inquiry describes a new strategy that inspires people and brings about a higher performance level in any organization. This method encourages people to study, discuss, learn from, and build on what works well when they are at their best, rather than focusing on what’s going wrong. The theory, practice, and spirit of this approach to organizational change is described in plain language. The authors provide guidelines for defining the change agenda, initiative, or project; forming the "steering team"; and launching an organization-wide kick off. Case histories demonstrate how organizations can attain sustained positive change by studying their strengths. This book is the most authoritative, comprehensive guide to Appreciative Inquiry by two of the founders and pioneers of this technique..
Price: $18.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]

We must bring money back down to earth.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earth—philosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.

The months and years ahead will surely see a flood of books proposing micro- and macro-economic fixes to the financial crises of the day. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money brings a different vision—a meta-economic vision, looking above the top tine and below the bottom line, a new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the economy.

The soil of the economy? Bringing money back down to earth?

This is the path towards a financial system that serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. To discover this path, and to begin to walk down it, is the mission of Slow Money.

This mission emerges from decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur by Woody Tasch, whose explorations shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility that is not stuck in the industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which reflects the new economic, social and environmental realities of the 21st century.

These explorations take us from the jokes of his father to the insights of his son, from the Board rooms of foundations and start-up companies to the farm fields of Vermont, from gopher holes in New Mexico to the possibilities of an alternative stock exchange, from Carlo Petrini to Muhammad Yunus, from Thoreau to Soros.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money investigates an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations.

• Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local?
• Could a million American families get their food from CSAs?
• What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?

Such questions—at the heart of Slow Money—are the first step on our path to a new economy and a new culture. Inquiries into Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built around—not extraction and consumption but—preservation and restoration.

Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.
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Price: $10.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]