This book is about options for inquiry: options among the paradigms—basic belief systems—that have emerged as successors to conventional positivism. Three options are explored in this book: postpositivism, on the shoulders of whose proponents the mantles of succession and of hegemony appear to have fallen, and two brash and sometimes contentious contendors, critical theory and constructivism. Although all three alternatives reject positivism, they make very different diagnoses of its problems and, therefore, offer very different remedies.