Although action research in education offers researchers and practitioners a clear and philosophically appealing way of making improvements, fostering learning, and developing the individual and the organization, adherents sometimes find themselves defending this type of research because it has been practiced without appropriate rigor. This book…

A sociological field study of the development of a Puerto Rican community organization in an American city (Maplewood, New Jersey), this book describes what happens when an ethnic minority attempts to attain a voice in the affairs of an affluent city. Chapter 1 discusses the study's purpose. Chapters 2 to 11 narrate, from the members' viewpoint…

This book presents a fresh view of action research as a methodology uniquely suited to researching the processes of innovation and change. Drawing on twenty-five years' experience of leading or facilitating action research projects, Bridget Somekh argues that action research can be a powerful systematic intervention, which goes beyond describing,…

This essay presents some of the possibilities for doing systematic quantitative research in the field of African public administration and reviews some of the methodological problems involved. The authors argue that quantitative research is especially desirable because of the gains to be achieved in precision, reliability, comparability, and new…

This monograph, based on a conceptual model called an information support circle, describes a structured management process that can be used by higher education institutions to add value to institutional data and information. The model offers a sequence of (1) thinking about the management and use of data, (2) considering problems in providing…

This guide is intended to help organizational researchers involved in diagnosing organizations and helping them change. Part 1 focuses on defensive routines that limit learning at the organizational, intergroup, group, and individual levels. Part 2 focuses on the case study of a consulting firm at which a climate fostering learning and change was…

This book, which contains 15 chapters by various authors, aims to conceptualize new ways that knowledge is being "legitimized" through various formal and informal workplace-based research practices. It examines the new legitimations critically, and analyzes possible directions for future developments in work-based research and…

This book examines the rhetoric surrounding the notion of informal learning in order to expand debate about the uses of informal learning in workplaces and about attempts to "recognize" it through competency-based standards. The following topics are among those discussed in the book's eight chapters: (1) the nature of informal learning…