Renowned senior member of the adult development, leadership, and organization transformation fields, award-winning researcher, consultant, and teacher, Bill Torbert offers us this final and signature book -- an anti-heroic memoir named Numbskull that shares his dramatic early life in Spain, Austria, Italy, and Somalia, then at Yale, the Southern Methodist University Business School, and the Harvard Ed School, culminating with the creation of The Theatre of Inquiry. He recounts for us how he gradually learned, from the experiences of his own leadership efforts, a theory of learning from experience. From his experiences, he also learned a theory of organizational transformation, culminating in 'liberating disciplines' that help others learn transformationally from their own experiences. And, last but not least, he formulated a developmental theory of social science that culminates in the paradigm of Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry (CDAI). CDAI interweaves first-, second-, and third-person research and practice, as Numbskull illustrates by surrounding Bill's first-person memoir with an introduction, a postscript, and endnotes in the second-person voices of his action inquiry colleagues, as well as appendixes in the third-person voice. Torbert received his BA and PhD from Yale, played leadership roles at Yale Upward Bound and The Theatre of Inquiry, later served as Graduate Dean at Boston College (where the MBA rose from below the top 100 to the top 25 during his tenure) and as Director of the PhD program in Organizational Transformation. He consulted and served as a board member at dozens of companies, and is the author of a dozen books including the award-winning Managing the Corporate Dream, award-finalist The Power of Balance: Transforming Self, Society, and Scientific Inquiry, and Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership, translated into Chinese, Russian, and Japanese. Of his nearly 100 journal articles and book chapters, the best-known is his 2005 international-award-winning, Harvard Business Review article "Seven Transformations of Leadership" (co-authored with David Rooke). Partnering first with Susann Cook-Greuter and later with Elaine Herdman-Barker, he has transformed the Washington University Sentence Completion Test into the leadership development psychometric named the Global Leadership Profile. He currently serves as a founding board member of both Global Leadership Associates and Amara Collaboration and is a leadership professor emeritus at Boston College. In recent years, he has received a number of recognitions for his life work, including the Ulmer Applied Research Award from the Center for Creative Leadership in 2013 and the Argyris Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management in 2014.

oAction inquiryo is a fresh approach to learning leadership in the midst of action. This highly accessible process takes each of us beyond muddling through daily dilemmas to exercising transforming power at key moments and more timely action in general. Bill Torbert and Associates lead you through more and more sophisticated oaction-logicso-strategies for analyzing the world and reacting to it-until you are able to practice action inquiry continually. Speaking to everyone from new managers to CEOs to world leaders, real-life stories of leadership and organizational transformations show how action inquiry increases personal integrity, relational mutuality, company profitability, and long-term organizational and environmental sustainability.

Can you approach love in a way that opens your eyes rather than blinds you? Can you love passionately, compassionately, and dispassionately all at once? Can you love non-possessively but with commitment? Can you love inquiringly, bringing benefit to your beloveds? What is the relationship between your spiritual life and embodied love? How are we each to engage this great life adventure, in spite of our unique wounds? In this book filled with passion, compassion, and dispassion, Hilary Bradbury and Bill Torbert go way, way out on a limb. Sharing their erotic autobiographies with us - the beautiful and the ugly - starting with the history of their relationship with one another as professor and student, they invite exploration of the secret places where true love gets lived (and gets crushed). They ask us to reflect on our own stories of love and loss as a way to re-imagine the whole world of erotic friendship in more life affirming ways, at home, at play and at work. Coaxing love under the sign of inquiry they suggest that we already know that passionate love can enchant us, exerting a power over us that can feel like the most liberating feeling in the world. Yet it can also lead us into torturous agony. They discuss the exercise of power to love rather than imprison self and other. These pages invite you to invite yourself and your friends further into this living inquiry, inviting love with inquiry, joining Eros with Power.

The Handbook of Research Methods in Organizational Change offers innovative and practical information to aid in the successful implementation of research methodologies. Written by a collective of experienced scholars, it provides inspiration for future academics wishing to advance research into human system changes.

This book is a unique collection of alternative Muslim voices, predominantly from Europe, who come from a variety of backgrounds - academia, theology, acting, activism - and who make a transformational contribution to the debate of the future of Islam and Muslims in the West.

A 2023 SPE Outstanding Book Honorable Mention Generative Knowing explores the mystery of learning from the unknown in ways that reveal that learning is a dynamic phenomenon, encompassing both personal and societal contexts. Dewey defines learning in terms of experience, reflection, continuity, and interactivity. When learning happens, it eventually solidifies into reliable truths that become a shortcut for taking action or making decisions—thus a habit of learning is formed and becomes rigid. Generative knowing is an emerging theory of adult learning that seeks the not-yet-foreknown potential that waits to be uncovered in the richness of experience. The book delivers vignettes of different lived experiences of being and becoming, signaling multiple ways in which a person shapes and transcends traditional conceptions of self-other binary activating the power to respond to the ongoing complex evolution of self and society. Generative Knowing seeks to accomplish four goals: to offer a unique exploration of learning, positioned as response-ability that illuminates the relatedness of learning and complex, ambiguous, unsolvable challenges that are recognizable in society as social challenges (i.e. forced migration) to present and distinguish an emerging theory of adult learning, generative knowing. Generative knowing emerged as a distinct learning disposition at the intersections of personal meaning making capacity (developmental psychology) encountering the characteristics of rising ambiguity (complexity sciences) and the lived experience of undergoing experience to make visible and help others make the connections between generative knowing at a personal level and the complex, ambiguous unsolvable challenges in today’s society, and to provide illustrations of what generative knowing entails, how it shapes personal and societal transformation and how that may support educators, facilitator activists and change activists to make space for generative knowing when complex challenges call for both personal and societal transformations. Adult education as a field of practice is presently grappling with how adults learn in a world being recomposed by a global pandemic. Generative knowing—defined as ways of being and becoming that creatively activate potential—restores many rhythms of learning, helping readers gain fresh perspectives on how learning emerges from the unknown. The vital and personal stories in this book guide readers to walk in the territory of the unknown and to pay attention to the sensations of entanglements of self with multiple societal forces as a new way of learning. Perfect for courses such as: Adult Learning Theory │ Adult Learning Theory & Praxis │ Adult Development │ Transformative Learning │ Phenomenology │ Narrative Inquiry │ New Materialism │ Creative Research Methodologies

Presenting a new theory of power, a new practice of management and a new theory of social science, this volume: * contradicts the received wisdom that all power corrupts' and presents a power that generates productivity, justice and inquiry; the book also shows, through concrete illustrations, how leaders and organizations can develop in order to use, and encourage others to use, such power. * contradicts the received wisdom that all organizational structure constrains and develops a theory of liberating structure' through which organizations can generate continual quality improvement. * contradicts the received wisdom that social science is purer' the more it is divorced from action and introduces a new paradigm of engaged social science - action inquiry'.

The book is intended to provide a definitive view of the field of humor research for both beginning and established scholars in a variety of fields who are developing an interest in humor and need to familiarize themselves with the available body of knowledge. Each chapter of the book is devoted to an important aspect of humor research or to a disciplinary approach to the field, and each is written by the leading expert or emerging scholar in that area. There are two primary motivations for the book. The positive one is to collect and summarize the impressive body of knowledge accumulated in humor research in and around Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research. The negative motivation is to prevent the embarrassment to and from the "first-timers," often established experts in their own field, who venture into humor research without any notion that there already exists a body of knowledge they need to acquire before publishing anything on the subject-unless they are in the business of reinventing the wheel and have serious doubts about its being round! The organization of the book reflects the main groups of scholars participating in the increasingly popular and high-powered humor research movement throughout the world, an 800 to 1,000-strong contingent, and growing. The chapters are organized along the same lines: History, Research Issues, Main Directions, Current Situation, Possible Future, Bibliography-and use the authors' definitive credentials not to promote an individual view, but rather to give the reader a good comprehensive and condensed view of the area.