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This chapter is about the relationship between Networked Organizations and Appreciative Inquiry. To set a context, Theory about networks is related to the expressed needs of Appreciative Inquiry. Stories follow, from both appreciative and network perspectives. Ideas are put to work through practice as expressed by method – consisting of principles, practices, and processes. Further, method is embedded in technology to support functioning networks. In research, we look at learning about human systems and suggest that online digital places form natural laboratories to collect, analyze, and synthesize data. Concluding with Search, we revisit the question of consciousness in human systems.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

We argue that by conducting systematic research with communities rather than on communities, community-based research (CBR) methods can both advance the study of human interaction and strengthen public understanding and appreciation of social sciences. CBR, among other methods, can also address social scientists’ ethical and social commitments. We recap the history of calls by leading sociologists for rigorous, empirical, community-engaged research. We introduce CBR methods as empirically grounded methods for conducting social research with social actors. We define terms and describe the range of methods that we include in the umbrella term, “community-based research.” After providing exemplars of community-based research, we review CBR’s advantages and challenges. We, next, summarize an intervention that we undertook as members of the Publication Committee of the URBAN Research Network’s Sociology section in which the committee developed and disseminated guidelines for peer review of community-based research. We also share initial responses from journal editors. In the conclusion, we revisit the potential of community-based research and note the consequences of neglecting community-based research traditions.

Despite being the standard against which all other offshore work sites are compared, the male-dominated work culture of the Gulf of Mexico has received little attention from social scientists. Drawing on the literature on women and work in the United States, on women in the U.S. South, in the military, and in the oil field, and on interviews with hundreds of individuals this paper explores the roles of women in the development and maintenance of the offshore oil and gas industry in southern Louisiana.