This book is a real-life documentary of two of these challenges, and their eventual successful outcomes and their discoveries; but more than that it is an adventure story in ideas, and the surprising synchronicity that is the Daily Lot of the postmodernist wandering scholar. Read-on and enjoy the journey.

‘Humble Anecdote of the Invisible’ is the final part of my condensed ‘Lebenswelt Studies’, necessarily autobiographical, and centred mostly on what amounted to a ‘mesocosm’ —an intermediary spiritual -world, between the macrocosm and microcosm, by artists, thinkers, poets and dancers who founded an experimental community, the ‘Hill of Truth’ in Ascona, during the early onset of Modernism, and later at Eronos, the intellectual and aesthetic hub founded by Olga Frobe in Ascona in 1933, to discuss the most pressing issues of the times: the nature of body and soul, social norms, religious belief, relationships, value of life, the human spirit, art and creativity; and their eventual making of an alternative spiritual and intellectual history of the twentieth century.

Courses in management research have traditionally focused on quantitative techniques, and no available text adequately covers the many different perspectives within the qualitative model or shows which qualitative techniques work best in different settings. "Crafting Qualitative Research" fills this need. In clear and readable prose, this comprehensive text offers a detailed guide to the rich diversity of qualitative research traditions, with examples and applications specifically designed for the field of management. Each of the book's four main sections includes a descriptive "tree" diagram that lays out the historical origins of that section's traditions. Each chapter is devoted to a specific methodology and includes historical origins and development; techniques and applications; current controversies and emerging issues; and a summary box highlighting that method's utility. With its detailed and easy-to-understand coverage, this will be the text of choice for any instructor who wants to include the qualitative approach in a research methods course, as well as a useful resource for anyone doing research in the post-positivist traditions.

Based on a Ph.D. thesis (Narrative ethics and intuition of the infinite) -- University of Gothenburg, 2008.

This book provides an overview of qualitative research models and their applications in organization and management studies. Focusing on the philosophical underpinnings and practical implications of diverse qualitative methods, this comprehensive text offers a guided tour of the options available to qualitative researchers, highlighting aspects of research design, execution, and analysis in each tradition. In clear, readable prose, the author offers insight into the ambiguities, tensions, and interconnections of diverse qualitative research traditions without resorting to oversimplification. The book’s four main sections include examples and applications specifically designed for the field of management. Each chapter is devoted to a specific methodology, describing techniques and applications as well as current controversies and emerging issues. Summary boxes and practical examples will help the reader to navigate this terrain and generate research that is both relevant and of high scholarly quality. With its detailed and easy-to-understand coverage, this will be the text of choice for students working with qualitative methods in organization studies, consumer research, public administration, information systems, and media and communication studies. Instructors teaching qualitative approaches in a research methods course and researchers wanting to acquaint themselves with non-positivist traditions will also find this a useful resource.

Based in sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity, this volume describes and critiques key aspects and practices of liquid education--education as market-driven consumption, short life span of useful knowledge, overabundance of information--through a systematic comparison with ancient Greek paideia and medieval university education, producing a sweeping analysis of the history and philosophy ofeducation for the purpose of understanding current higher education, positing a more holisitic alternative model in which students are embedded in a learning commutity that is itself embedded in a larger society. If liquid modernity has left a vacuum where, according to Bauman, the pilot’s cabin is empty, this volume argues that no structure is better positioned to fill this vacuum than the university and outlines a renewed vision of social transformation through higher education.

Utilizing Lacan's psychoanalytic theory and Žižek's philosophical adaption of it, this book brings into dialogue a series of modernist and postmodernist literary works, films, and critical theory that are concerned with defining America. Ahmed Elbeshlawy demonstrates that how America is perceived in certain texts reveals not only the idealization or condemnation of it, but an imago, or constructed image of the perceiver as well. In turn, texts which particularly focus on demonstrating how other texts about America communicate an untrustworthy message themselves communicate an unreliable message, inventing and reinventing a series of imagos of America. These imagos refer to both idealized and deformed images of America constructed by the perceivers of America. The first part of this book is concerned with modernist perceptions of America, and includes discussion of Adorno, Benjamin, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, as well as Emerson and Seymour Martin Lipset. The second part is dedicated to postmodernist representations of America, focusing on texts by Edward Said, Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, David Shambaugh and Charles W. Brooks, and films including Lars von Trier's Dogville and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.

For Jerome McGann, the purpose of scholarship is to preserve and pass on cultural heritage, a feat accomplished through discussion among scholars and interested nonspecialists. In The Scholar’s Art, a collection of thirteen essays, McGann both addresses and exemplifies that discussion and the vocation it supports. Of particular interest to McGann is the demise of public discourse about poetry. That poetry has become recondite is, to his mind, at once a problem for how scholars do their work and a general cultural emergency. The Scholar’s Art asks what could be gained by reimagining the way scholars have codified the literary and cultural history of the past two hundred years and goes on to provide a series of case studies that illustrate how scholarly method can help bring about such reimaginings. McGann closes with a discussion of technology’s ability to harness the reimagination of cultural memory and concludes with exemplary acts of critical reflection. Astute observation from one of America’s most bracing and original commentators on the place of literature in twenty-first century culture, The Scholar’s Art proposes new ways—cultural, philological, and technological—to reimagine our literary past and future.

This book presents a study of twelfth-century humanism seen as an all-embracing discourse in which the human and the divine interact on equal terms. The book focuses on a number of twelfth-century intellectuals, especially Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and Alan of Lille. Defining characteristic of their texts is the fact that God, nature and humanity enter into a trialogue of sorts involving many disparate subjects and aiming to bring out the archetypal relatedness of all kinds of knowledge with respect to human nature. As the authors studied here engage the divine and the universe in a joint conversation, the book ultimately concentrates on trying both to understand its appeal and to explain its subsequent demise.