Some 20 years after the emergence of configurational theory as a key perspective in organization studies in the 1990s, this approach has yet to deliver on its promise. While we know that configurations the relative arrangement of parts and elements - matters, empirical research on configurations is just beginning to deliver on its promise.

In response to the needs of lecturers, the acclaimed Handbook of Organization Studies has been made available as two major paperback textbooks. In this, the first of a two-volume paperback edition of the landmark Handbook of Organization Studies, editors Stewart Clegg and Cynthia Hardy survey the field of organization studies. Studying Organization is an ideal textbook around which to build courses on organization theory and research methodology. Central to the enterprise has been a concern to reflect and honour the manifest diversity of the field, including recognition of the extent to which the very notion of a single field of organization studies is debated. Part One locates the study of organization by reviewing some of the most significant theoretical paradigms to have shaped our understanding. The second part reflects on the relationships between theory and research in organization studies.

This handbook provides a clear examination of case-oriented research. It defines case-based social research as a subfield of methodology.

This study on multilevel analysis cuts through the confusion surrounding the development and testing of multilevel theories. It illuminates processes and effects within organisations, synthesising and updating current theory.

This book explains psychological, sociopolitical and organisational change in multidisciplinary settings. It shows how advanced techniques of contextual analysis can be applied to complex situations and offers a new cybernetic agency paradigm based on living systems theory. It models, diagnoses, and analyses complex, realworld situations to anticipate patterns of behaviour.

In this guidebook, we have a powerful contribution to social science methodology in a context where methodology is contested, and is therefore political: different methodologies can produce quite different results or findings using the same evidence. The evidence in Ragin and Fiss s book is survey data. Ragin s has developed for 25 years a way to bridge the case study method and the large n statistical study. He calls it the set analytic method --making use of fuzzy sets to bridge the divide between quantitative and qualitative methods. Paradoxically, the fuzzy set is a powerful tool because it replaces an unwieldy, "fuzzy" instrumentthe variable, which establishes only the positions of cases relative to each other, with a precise onedegree of membership in a well-defined set. Now, with Intersectional Inequality, Ragin and his coauthor, Peter Fiss, show how the method works in application to a very mainstream sociological research topic. That topic, the use of IQ and school achievement tests as predictors of life chances, is advanced here by viewing cases intersectionally, i.e., in terms of the different ways they combine causally relevant conditions. The specific controversy they take up is the famous Bell Curve book of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein which argued that IQ is influenced by both inherited and environmental factors. Controversy has gone on for 20 years over which variable has the strongest impact on life changes: education, or test scores, or family background. The centrality, now more than ever, of education to American social and economic policy, compels close re-examination of traditional methods (and the blind spots of the so-called net-effects approach). By use of this sophisticated qualitative comparative analysis, Ragin and Fiss underscore the importance of racial differences in addressing social inequality in America today."

Scholars have studied international organizations (IOs) in many disciplines, thus generating important theoretical developments. Yet a proper assessment and a broad discussion of the methods used to research these organizations are lacking. Which methods are being used to study IOs and in what ways? Do we need a specific methodology applied to the case of IOs? What are the concrete methodological challenges when doing research on IOs? International Organizations and Research Methods: An Introduction compiles an inventory of the methods developed in the study of IOs under the five headings of Observing, Interviewing, Documenting, Measuring, and Combining. It does not reconcile diverging views on the purpose and meaning of IO scholarship, but creates a space for scholars and students embedded in different academic traditions to reflect on methodological choices and the way they impact knowledge production on IOs.