Theory Of The Gimmick

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Theory of the Gimmick

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher : Belknap Press
ISBN 13 : 0674984544
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Theory of the Gimmick by : Sianne Ngai

Download or read book Theory of the Gimmick written by Sianne Ngai and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Gauss Award Shortlist Winner of the ASAP Book Prize A Literary Hub Book of the Year “Makes the case that the gimmick...is of tremendous critical value...Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag’s best work.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Ngai exposes capitalism’s tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labor-saving devices we call gimmicks.” —New Statesman “One of the most creative humanities scholars working today...My god, it’s so good.” —Literary Hub “Ngai is a keen analyst of overlooked or denigrated categories in art and life...Highly original.” —4Columns “It is undeniable that part of what makes Ngai’s analyses of aesthetic categories so appealing...is simply her capacity to speak about them brilliantly.” —Bookforum “A page turner.” —American Literary History Deeply objectionable and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-saving trick) and working too hard (a strained effort to get our attention). When we call something a gimmick, we register misgivings that suggest broader anxieties about value, money, and time, making the gimmick a hallmark of capitalism. With wit and critical precision, Ngai explores the extravagantly impoverished gimmick across a range of examples: the fiction of Thomas Mann, Helen DeWitt, and Henry James; the video art of Stan Douglas; the theoretical writings of Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno. Despite its status as cheap and compromised, the gimmick emerges as a surprisingly powerful tool in this formidable contribution to aesthetic theory.

Ugly Feelings

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674041526
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Ugly Feelings by : Sianne Ngai

Download or read book Ugly Feelings written by Sianne Ngai and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity. Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening. Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Our Aesthetic Categories

Author : Sianne Ngai
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780674046580
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (465 download)

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Book Synopsis Our Aesthetic Categories by : Sianne Ngai

Download or read book Our Aesthetic Categories written by Sianne Ngai and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.

The Topological Imagination

Author : Angus Fletcher
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674968867
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis The Topological Imagination by : Angus Fletcher

Download or read book The Topological Imagination written by Angus Fletcher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boldly original and boundary defining, The Topological Imagination clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining two commonly opposed domains, literature and mathematics, Angus Fletcher maps the imagination’s ever-ramifying contours and dimensions, and along the way compels us to re-envision our human existence on the most unusual sphere ever imagined, Earth. Words and numbers are the twin powers that create value in our world. Poetry and other forms of creative literature stretch our ability to evaluate through the use of metaphors. In this sense, the literary imagination aligns with topology, the branch of mathematics that studies shape and space. Topology grasps the quality of geometries rather than their quantifiable measurements. It envisions how shapes can be bent, twisted, or stretched without losing contact with their original forms—one of the discoveries of the eighteenth-century mathematician Leonhard Euler, whose Polyhedron Theorem demonstrated how shapes preserve “permanence in change,” like an aging though familiar face. The mysterious dimensionality of our existence, Fletcher says, is connected to our inhabiting a world that also inhabits us. Theories of cyclical history reflect circulatory biological patterns; the day-night cycle shapes our adaptive, emergent patterns of thought; the topology of islands shapes the evolution of evolutionary theory. Connecting literature, philosophy, mathematics, and science, The Topological Imagination is an urgent and transformative work, and a profound invitation to thought.

Benjamin's -abilities

Author : Samuel Weber
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674033957
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Benjamin's -abilities by : Samuel Weber

Download or read book Benjamin's -abilities written by Samuel Weber and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-10 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts. Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings. Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

Expressions of Judgment

Author : Eli Friedlander
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674368207
Total Pages : 134 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (743 download)

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Book Synopsis Expressions of Judgment by : Eli Friedlander

Download or read book Expressions of Judgment written by Eli Friedlander and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kant’s The Critique of Judgment laid the groundwork of modern aesthetics when it appeared in 1790. Eli Friedlander’s reappraisal emphasizes the internal connection of judgment and meaning, showing how the pleasure in judging is intimately related to our capacity to draw meaning from our encounter with beauty.

Finding a Replacement for the Soul

Author : Brett Bourbon
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674028597
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Finding a Replacement for the Soul by : Brett Bourbon

Download or read book Finding a Replacement for the Soul written by Brett Bourbon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship. The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect. Table of Contents: Preface Note on Abbreviations Introduction: What Are We When We Are Not? Part I The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning 1. From Soul-Making to Person-Making 2. The Logical Form of Fiction 3. The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 4. To Be But Not To Mean 5. How Do Oracles Mean? Part II Senses and Nonsenses: Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 6. A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 7. The Analogy between Persons and Words 8. "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 9. The Senses of Time 10. Being Something and Meaning Something Bibliography Acknowledgments Index This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive -- if tellingly irreducible -- relations to literary texts. --Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge

Dissent Events

Author : Sean Scalmer
Publisher : UNSW Press
ISBN 13 : 9780868406510
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (65 download)

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Book Synopsis Dissent Events by : Sean Scalmer

Download or read book Dissent Events written by Sean Scalmer and published by UNSW Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia offers a contemporary history of collective action in Australia over the last four decades, from the halting experiments of the early sixties, to more recent actions involving Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, the quest for reconciliation, and the anti-corporate campaigners of the S11 Alliance. It tells the story of these performances, develops a set of concepts to analyse their changing form and illuminates the larger story of social and political change in recent Australian life."--BOOK JACKET.

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation

Author : D. N. Rodowick
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674416678
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophy’s Artful Conversation by : D. N. Rodowick

Download or read book Philosophy’s Artful Conversation written by D. N. Rodowick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like. Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

In Praise of Athletic Beauty

Author : Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674021723
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (217 download)

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Book Synopsis In Praise of Athletic Beauty by : Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Download or read book In Praise of Athletic Beauty written by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks beyond the usual explanations of why sports fascinates, and also strives for a language that can frame the pleasure we take in watching athletic events. Gumbrecht argues that the fascination with watching sports is probably the most popular and potent contemporary form of aesthetic experience.

What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books

Author : Miguel Tamen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674067959
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books by : Miguel Tamen

Download or read book What Art Is Like, In Constant Reference to the Alice Books written by Miguel Tamen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art takes its technical vocabulary from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is ridiculous to think of poems, paintings, or films as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about other relevant matters.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Ninth Edition)

Author : Burton G. Malkiel
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393330338
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Ninth Edition) by : Burton G. Malkiel

Download or read book A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Ninth Edition) written by Burton G. Malkiel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-12-17 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated with a new chapter that draws on behavioral finance, the field that studies the psychology of investment decisions, the bestselling guide to investing evaluates the full range of financial opportunities.

Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences

Author : Philip Fisher
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674955615
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (556 download)

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Book Synopsis Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences by : Philip Fisher

Download or read book Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences written by Philip Fisher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or rare may become familiar. This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences. In three instructive instances--a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows--Philip Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought. Through these examples he places wonder in relation to the ordinary and the everyday as well as to its opposite, fear. The remarkable story of how rainbows came to be explained, fraught with errors, half-knowledge, and incomplete understanding, suggests that certain knowledge cannot be what we expect when wonder engages us. Instead, Fisher argues, a detailed familiarity, similar to knowing our way around a building or a painting, is the ultimate meeting point for aesthetic and scientific encounters with novelty, rare experiences, and the genuinely new.

The Conquest of Cool

Author : Thomas Frank
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226260129
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (61 download)

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Book Synopsis The Conquest of Cool by : Thomas Frank

Download or read book The Conquest of Cool written by Thomas Frank and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at advertising during the 1960s, focusing on the relationship between the counterculture movement and commerce.

The Seventh Function of Language

Author : Laurent Binet
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374715084
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis The Seventh Function of Language by : Laurent Binet

Download or read book The Seventh Function of Language written by Laurent Binet and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva—as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.” A brilliantly erudite comedy, The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition. “Binet juxtaposes car chases with highbrow in-jokes and ruminations. The book is a love letter to the power of language—the most dangerous weapon is the tongue.” —The New Yorker “An affectionate send-up of an Umberto Eco–style intellectual thriller that doubles as an exemplar of the genre, filled with suspense, elaborate conspiracies, and exotic locales.” —Esquire

Butterfly Economics

Author : Paul Ormerod
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 0307819418
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Butterfly Economics by : Paul Ormerod

Download or read book Butterfly Economics written by Paul Ormerod and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did VHS, an inferior video recording technology, succeed in the marketplace, driving the superior Betamax out of business? Why do big-budget, acclaimed movies sometimes flop at the box office, while low-budget, idiosyncratic films become huge hits? The answers to these questions, says Paul Omerod, remind us that economics is a science based on the workings of human society, as unpredictable an entity as there is. "Conventional economics is mistaken," claimes Omerod, "when it views the economy as a machine, whose behavior, no matter how complicated, is ultimately predictable and controllable." In this cogently and elegantly argued analysis of why human beings persist in engaging in behavior that defies time-honored economic theory, Omerod also explains why governments and industries throughout the world must completely reconfigure their traditional methods of economic forecasting if they are to succeed and prosper in an increasingly global marketplace.

Theory Building in Applied Disciplines

Author : Richard A. Swanson
Publisher : Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1609947339
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis Theory Building in Applied Disciplines by : Richard A. Swanson

Download or read book Theory Building in Applied Disciplines written by Richard A. Swanson and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2013-08-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory matters in applied disciplines—fields that apply scholarly research to professional practice, such as management, social work, health care, human resource development, education, and many others. Because these disciplines deal with human beings in the real world, a flawed theory can result in actual harm to people and institutions. When faced with a professional problem, practitioners resort to the latest fad or simply throw everything and anything at it because of the lack of sound theory. Scholars deal with problems by slicing them into small segments to study them but fail to address the practical implications. What's needed is a way to unite research and practice to create robust theory. This is exactly what Richard Swanson and Thomas Chermack offer here: a complete, five-step method for developing sound, field-tested theory in applied disciplines. Unlike many existing methods, which cover only the initial conceptualization of a theory, the authors offer a complete approach, from conceptualizing a theory to creating relevant assessment criteria, establishing a research agenda to test the theory's validity, applying the theoretical concepts in the real world, and using that experience to further refine and improve the theory. The method is not restricted to any single discipline, nor is it beholden to any research ideology. Swanson and Chermack provide a set of tools for each phase of the process, making this book accessible and applicable to a wide audience. And in addition to examples in each chapter, they offer two extended case examples of complete theory building. With flawed theories impeding the development of many applied disciplines, this book is desperately needed.