Research is difficult. Even though students are trained in the basic research methodology skills, when confronted with research writing, it feels to them as if they enter a bizarre world, with its own language and conventions, where it is hard to get things right. This book translates the apparent complexities of research writing into everyday ideas, language and skills, and will enable novice researchers to start overcoming the major stumbling blocks immediately.This book focuses ...

Integrating insights from learning science with practical guidelines and stepwise approaches, Teaching Complex Ideas helps educators masterfully translate their expertise into easy-to-understand, interesting, and memorable instruction. Covering areas such as identifying the critical ideas within a complex topic, designing clear explanations, and making lectures useful and engaging, this resource brings together subjects and skills never before adequately addressed in a single book...

Researchers are expected to produce original findings, yet nobody explains how original contributions are conceived in economics. Recently there have been calls for more creativity in economic research, yet there is no literature that explores creative research apart from collections of biographical essays. This book aims to address that gap, exploring the process of conceiving and generating ideas for interesting and original research contributions in economics (and potentially other soci...

This book presents a theory of learning that starts with the assumption that engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we get to know what we know and by which we become who we are. The primary unit of analysis of this process is neither the individual nor social institutions, but the informal 'communities of practice' that people form as they pursue shared enterprises over time. To give a social account of learning, the theory explores in a systematic way the inter...

Building on lecture notes from his acclaimed course at Stanford University, James March provides a brilliant introduction to decision making, a central human activity fundamental to individual, group, organizational, and societal life. March draws on research from all the disciplines of social and behavioral science to show decision making in its broadest context. By emphasizing how decisions are actually made -- as opposed to how they should be made -- he enables those involved in the pro...

Many of today’s books on the tools and techniques of leadership and management provide descriptions of long lists for use in decision-making, leading, coaching and project management. This book takes a completely different approach. It contests the claims that the tools and techniques are based on evidence and explains why human activities of leading and managing are simply not amenable to scientific proof and consequently, why long-term futures of organizations are unpredictable.T...

Making Sense of Social Theory opens by carefully exploring what it means to follow the scientific method in a field like sociology. The book goes on to analyze sociology as a genuine science with a body of explanatory insights. Sociological theory is applied in ways that make its relevance and power apparent so that theory no longer stands divorced from real world research or practice. Making Sense of Social Theory clearly establishes the pertinence of sociology's great t...

The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies provides a comprehensive and timely overview of the field. This volume offers a compendium of perspectives on process thinking, process organizational theory, process research methodology and empirical applications. The emphasis is on a combination of pedagogical contributions and in-depth reviews of current thinking and research in each of the selected areas, combined with the development of agendas for future research.

Our approach to knowing and doing is based on delegating physical phenomena to physicists, biological phenomena to biologists, social phenomena to sociologists, economic phenomena to economists, and so on. This approach to knowledge and practice works very well when one category of phenomena dominates (as in mechanical and technical systems), but does not work when many categories of phenomena make significant contributions (as in the biological and cultural spheres). As a result, our civi...

The MBA is probably the hottest ticket among the current university graduate degree offerings--every year, more than 120,000 students enroll in MBA programs in the United States, and the estimates in Europe do not lag far behind. In addition, job prospects have never looked better for business school graduates; corporations are hiring more business school graduates every year, and compensating them more handsomely. The Future of the MBA provides a sorely needed detailed and system...

This unique book explains the central role that research paradigms play in the design and conduct of social research. The authors argue that social research should not just describe or confirm a social problem but should seek to find an explanation for it and to do so requires research with �eyes philosophically wide open�.Important philosophical and practice elements of three widely recognized paradigms Neo-Positive, Interpretive and Critical Realist are carefully elaborated...

The past decade has seen increasing focus on the importance of information and knowledge in economic and social processes, the so-called 'knowledge economy'. This is reflected in the popularity amongst practicing managers and organizational theorists of notions of learning, sense-making, knowledge creation, knowledge management and intellectual capital in organizations and more recently, of emotional intelligence as an important management skill. This insightful book:argues t...