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Medical uncertainty is recognized as a critical issue in the sociology of diagnosis and medical sociology more generally, but a neglected focus of this concern is the question of patient decision making. Using a mixed methods approach that draws upon autoethnographic accounts and third-party interviews, we aim to illuminate the dilemmas of patient decision making in the face of uncertainty. How do patients and supportive caregivers go about navigating this state of affairs? What types of patient–doctor/healthcare professional relationships hinder or enhance effective patient decision making? These are the themes we explore in this study by following patients through the sequence of experiencing symptoms, seeking a diagnosis, evaluating treatment protocols, and receiving treatments. In general, three genres of culturally available narratives are revealed in the data: strategic, technoluxe, and unbearable health narratives.

David L. Altheide, Ph.D., is Emeritus Regents’ Professor of the Faculty of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where he taught for 36 years. His work has focused on the role of mass media and information technology in social control. His most recent books are Qualitative media analysis (2nd ed., Sage, 2012) and Terror post 9/11 and the media (Lang, 2009). Altheide received the Cooley Award three times, given to the outstanding book in symbolic interaction, from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction: In 2007 for Terrorism and the politics of fear (2006); in 2004 for Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis (2002); and in 1986 for Media power (1985). Altheide received the 2005 George Herbert Mead Award for lifetime contributions from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the society’s Mentor Achievement Award in 2007.

Stories govern the criminal justice system and consequently the millions of individuals under its control. In the US the harms experienced by those individuals, their families and their communities are massive. A prominent system-sustaining story is that antisocial persons, who are essentially different from the rest of us, get that way through negligent parenting. The story's moral oppositions rest on textual absences concerning crime, work, care, humanity and the mind of the scholar. In this chapter, first, I discern what goes unsaid via close analysis of the story of antisociality constructed by Gottfredson and Hirschi in their 1990 book A General Theory of Crime. Second, I offer a method for cataloguing what goes unsaid in stories that effect control, by (1) evaluating figurative language and other means of ambiguation; (2) assessing patterns of elaboration and explanation and (3) asking what and whose knowledge is missing. Rigorously deployed with a reflexive stance on one's position as to what should be said, the method can help uncover subtext, understatement and silencing.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

It’s been thirty years since the original articulation of “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life” was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article – first published in Research in Organization Development and Change – generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry, as well as well as the enormous impact and continuing reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary I am presenting the article by David Cooperrider (myself) and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with new horizon insights. In particular I write with excitement and anticipation of a new OD – what my colleagues and I are calling the next “IPOD” that is, innovation-inspired positive OD that brings AI’s gift of new eyes together in common cause with several other movements in the human sciences: the strengths revolution in management; the positive pscyhology and positive organizational scholarship movements; the design thinking explosion; and the biomimicry field which is all about an appreciative eye toward billions of years of nature’s wisdom and innovation inspired by life.

This article presents a conceptual refigurationy of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline’s steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

This chapter describes the development and evaluation of an interdisciplinary group-based inquiry-based learning (IBL) project across two professional degree programmes in Scotland – educational psychology and social work. After outlining the policy and practice contexts for interdisciplinary inquiry-based learning, we articulate how IBL can facilitate professional identity development, mirror key aspects of professional practice such as interprofessional collaboration, and provide deep interdisciplinary learning. It is argued that the process of IBL provides an authentic and complex practice scenario which allows for the articulation and development of professional knowledge, values, identities and roles in collaboration with another professional grouping. The process of IBL development is described and we report on the results of a small-scale qualitative evaluation of the short-term outcomes of the IBL approach to teaching and learning. The IBL activity enhanced students’ appreciation of interdisciplinary collaboration and allowed them to practice relevant skills. The views and reflections of students are reported and reinforce the relevance and efficacy of the approach. The chapter concludes with a series of suggestions and advice for the replication of using IBL as a tool to enhance and facilitate interdisciplinary learning.

It’s been nearly 30 years since the original articulation of Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life was written in collaboration with my remarkable mentor Suresh Srivastva (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). That article generated more experimentation in the field, more academic excitement, and more innovation than anything we had ever written. As the passage of time has enabled me to look more closely at what was written, I feel both a deep satisfaction with the seed vision and scholarly logic offered for Appreciative Inquiry (AI), as well as well as the enormous impact and reverberation. Following the tradition of authors such as Carl Rogers who have re-issued their favorite works but have also added brief reflections on key points of emphasis, clarification, or editorial commentary we have decided to issue a reprint the early article by David L. Cooperrider and the late Suresh Srivastva in its entirety, but also with contemporary comments embedded. To be sure the comments offered are brief and serve principally to add points of emphasis to ideas we may have too hurriedly introduced. My comments – placed in indented format along the way – are focused on the content and themes of furthermost relevance to this volume on organizational generativity. In many ways I’ve begun to question today whether there can even be inquiry where there is no appreciation, valuing, or amazement – what the Greeks called thaumazein – the borderline between wonderment and admiration. One learning is that AI’s generativity is not about its methods or tools, but about our cooperative capacity to reunite seeming opposites such as theory as practice, the secular as sacred, and generativity as something beyond positivity or negativity. Appreciation is about valuing the life-giving in ways that serve to inspire our co-constructed future. Inquiry is the experience of mystery, moving beyond the edge of the known to the unknown, which then changes our lives. Taken together, where appreciation and inquiry are wonderfully entangled, we experience knowledge alive and an ever-expansive inauguration of our world to new possibilities.

This article presents a conceptual refiguration of action-research based on a “sociorationalist” view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline's steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.