So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Robert M. Pirsig’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values includes: Historical context Chapter-by-chapter overviews Cast of characters Themes and symbols Important quotes Fascinating trivia Glossary of terms Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work About Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is three books in one, including the author’s account of a transcontinental journey, his struggle to reconcile both halves of an identity fragmented by his own mental illness, and a rumination on Eastern versus Western philosophy. Now, more than forty years since its original release, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has become a modern classic—the kind of book that challenges readers to step outside of their everyday thoughts and consider some of life’s most profound questions through the entertaining lens of a father-son trip. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Summary of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974. Told through the frame of a long motorcycle trip across America, the book explores life and how to best live it. The world of ideas takes center stage, providing both the conflict and resolution for living such a balanced approach to life. Perspectives from Eastern and Western philosophy and religion are referenced, highlighted, and explored, and through this exploration, the narrator addresses the pivotal question of how to pursue technology in a way that enriches human life as opposed to degrading it. Told through first person narrative, the book parallels the motorcycle trip and all of its accompanying trials and tribulations with the ideas, trials, and tribulations of the narrator’s own past life, ideas which come into contact with the present. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the two protagonists are actually one person. The narrator is a lightly fictionalized version of the author, Robert Pirsig, who is taking a motorcycle trip with his son and another couple. The narrator speaks in the first person and uses the present tense. Phaedrus is the name of the narrator's alter ego. His story is told in the third person and the past tense. (In some editions of the book, the Phaedrus sections use a different font from the narrator's.) As the narrator describes him, Phaedrus is the person he used to be before suffering a mental breakdown in mid-career. By the book's end, the two characters begin to merge into a single individual. The motorcycle trip starts in Minneapolis, Minnesota and concludes near San Francisco, CA. The narrator and his son, Chris, are accompanied by a couple, the Sutherlands. As a contrast to the narrator, John and Sylvia Sutherland represent people who are uncomfortable with technology. They feel oppressed by it and use motorcycle trips to escape. At the same time, however, they are dependent on technology. This conflict hints at a larger conflict in society and life. The narrator aims to explore this conflict with technology and get to its root. The group travels together to Bozeman, Montana, which is an important location related to the narrator's teaching career and unusual past. At this point in the book, the Sutherlands return home, and the narrator and his son continue the trip after undertaking a hiking expedition in the mountains outside Bozeman. The hiking trip includes significant explorations of the inner world of spiritual development and of the narrator's difficult relationship with his son, thus fleshing out the narrator’s past ideas and helping incorporate them into his present. Throughout his travels, the narrator weaves together observations about life, diving into the struggles and backstory of a shadowy character called Phaedrus. These are, of course, mixed with the day-to-day details of the trip, showing a resonance between the two “worlds” being presented as ideas and thoughts build upon one another. Phaedrus is introduced with reluctance, and there is a mystery surrounding his relationship to the narrator. As the book unfolds, however, this mystery is resolved, and readers learn that Phaedrus is the name that the narrator has given to himself to represent his life before his nervous breakdown and shock therapy. This therapy resulted in a new personality. Here is a Preview of What You Will Get: ⁃ A Full Book Summary ⁃ An Analysis ⁃ Fun quizzes ⁃ Quiz Answers ⁃ Etc Get a copy of this summary and learn about the book.

This book provides rare, insider accounts of the academic research process, revealing the human stories and lived experiences behind research projects; the joys and mistakes of a wide range of international researchers principally from the fields of accounting and finance, but also from related fields in management, economics and the social studies of science.

Models that explore vulnerability under various planned and unplanned conditions hardly exist. This title focuses on the vulnerability of societies in low lying coastal and deltaic environments to tropical cyclonic storms and floods.

The management of quality and sustainability in higher education institutions ensures that proper standards are maintained. Such enforced standardization allows for the highest caliber of training opportunities for various fields and disciplines. The Handbook of Research on Quality Assurance and Value Management in Higher Education is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on quality management and assurance programs and standards in college-level environments. Highlighting global perspectives on academic and professional learning, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and professionals actively involved in the field of higher education.

`This is an insightful book... offers an in-depth understanding of the dynamics at work within organizations, but also offers ways forward for new researchers. [A]n original contribution to the area of occupational psychology. The book is appropriate for people who want to study organizational behaviour and occupational psychology. It is thought-provoking and practical′ - Profbooks.com Reviews This Second Edition contains key themes with all new contributors and is a completely separate work from the first. Emotion in Organization presents original work from leading scholars in the field, they engage with emotion as a qualitative phenomenon which shapes and is shaped by organizational life. Examining how emotion cannot be simply separated from thinking, judgment, decision-making and other so-called rational organizational processes, the book challenges us to build a passionate theory of organizations. The introduction reviews the expansion of organizational emotion studies and their appeal to several social-scientific disciplines. Divided into four parts, the book reveals through stories, interviews, confessions, ethnographies and observations the way feeling and emotion lie at the heart of organizational functioning.

Peter Drucker has introduced us all to the knowledge era, where knowledge is the primary resource and intangibles (intellectual capital resources and assets) are now largely recognized as the most important sources of organizations' competitive advantage. With the recognition of the importance of Intangibles comes the problem of how to properly identify them and assign them a value within the corporation. This is an area of concern in 5 fields: 1) accounting and financial reporting, 2) performance measurement and management, 3) valuation in the finance field, 4) the Human Resources field in terms of management, strategy, and planning, and 5) Intellectual Capital. Over the past eight years, over 25 methods have been proposed for the valuation of intangibles coming out of these 5 fields. In this book, Andriessen evaluates 25 existing methods of intangible valuation according to highly developed criteria. In performing his evaluations, Andriessen synthesizes the state of the art research from these fields based on extensive research. He then presents his own method for valuing intangibles, which he began developing and testing as a Senior Manager at KPMG Knowledge Advisory Services in The Netherlands. He relates six case studies in which this method was tested in actual companies, carefully reviews the results of his tests, and then concludes by offering a new and improved method for valuing intangibles in his Weightless Wealth Toolkit, a complete step-by-step process for identifying, valuing, and managing Intangibles to help managers operate successfully in the Intangible Economy.

A thorough account of Langer's philosophical career

Defines, analyzes, critiques, and proposes new policy solutions for achieving sustainable development.

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. He does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, Powers of the Mind constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.