Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology

Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 699
Release: 2014-05-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004266178

The Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology presents the current state of knowledge in comparative sociology for students, scholars, and the educated lay public. The major aim of comparative sociological research is to identify similarities and differences among societies, studying variation across both geographical regions and historical periods. This volume is divided into six broad categories: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Comparing Societies, Comparative Historical Sociology, Comparing Institutions and Social Structures, Comparing Social Processes, Comparing Nation States and World Regions, and Biographies of Exemplary Comparative Sociologists. Nearly 60 essays written by distinguished experts in their fields focus on the first five categories, while the biographical section contains forty biographies of both classical and contemporary sociologists who have made major contributions to comparative sociology. Contributors include: David Baker, Wenda Bauchspies, Hans-Peter Blossfield, Harriet Bradley, Sandra Buchholz, Miguel Centeno, Karen Cerulo, Brett Clark, Amy Corming, William D'Antonio, Mario Diani, Mattei Dogan, Riley Dunlap, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Mike Featherstone, Claude Fischer, Joshua Fishman, William Gamson, Julian Go, Jack Goldstone, Ralph Grillo, John Hall, Steve Hall, Robert Heiner, Joseph Hermanowicz, Margret Hornsteiner, David Johnson, Andrew Jorgenson, Jack Levy, Robert Marsh, Bill McCarthy, David Johnson, James Midgley, Peter Mohler, Linda Molm, Benjamin Moodie, Victor Nee, Anthony Orum, William Outhwaite, Anthony Pogorelc, Harland Prechel, Danielle Resnick, Glenn Robinson, Luis Roniger, Thomas Saalfeld, Stephen Sanderson, Michelle Sandhoff, Masamichi Sasaki, Saskia Sassen, Andrew Savchenko, Harald Schoen, Howard Schuman, David Segal, Michael Siemon, Tom Smith, Joonmo Son, Hendrik Spruyt, Robert Stebbins, George Steinmetz, Piotr Sztompka, Henry Teune, Arland Thornton, Kathleen Tierney, Jonathan Turner, Nicholas van de Walle, Henk Vinken, Veljko Vujačić, Erich Weede, Michel Wieviorka, Ekkart Zimmermann.

Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology

Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology
Author: Michèle Lamont
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2000-12-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780521787949

This book provides a powerful new theoretical framework for understanding cross-national cultural differences. Researchers from France and America present eight comparative case studies to demonstrate how the people of these two different cultures mobilize national "repertoires of evaluation" to make judgments about politics, economics, morals and aesthetics. This approach goes beyond essentialist models of national character to compare varying attitudes on topics ranging from racism and sexual harrassment to identity politics, publishing, journalism, the arts and the environment. The book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists alike.

Max Weber's Comparative-Historical Sociology

Max Weber's Comparative-Historical Sociology
Author: Stephen Kalberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1994-03-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780226423036

The revival of historical sociology in recent decades has largely neglected the contributions of Max Weber. Yet Weber's writings offer a fundamental resource for analyzing problems of comparative historical development. Stephen Kalberg rejects the view that Weber's historical writings consist of an ambiguous mixture of fragmented ideal types on the one hand and the charting of vast processes of rationalization and bureaucracy on the other. On the contrary, Weber's substantive work offers a coherent and distinctive model for comparative analysis. A reconstruction of Weber's comparative historical method, Kalberg argues, uncovers a sophisticated outlook that addresses problems of agency and structure, multiple causation, and institutional interpretation. Kalberg shows how such a representation of Weber's work casts a direct light upon issues of pressing importance in comparative historical studies today. Weber addresses in a forceful way the whole range of issues confronted by the comparative historical enterprise. Once the full analytical and empirical power of Weber's historical writings becomes clear, Weber's work can be seen to generate procedures and strategies appropriate to the study of present day as well as past social processes. Written in an accessible and engaging fashion, this book will appeal to students and professionals in the areas of sociology, anthropology, and comparative history.

Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences

Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences
Author: James Mahoney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2003-02-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780521016452

This book systematically investigates the past accomplishments and future agendas of contemporary comparative-historical analysis. Its core essays explore three major issues: the accumulation of knowledge in the field over the past three decades, the analytic tools used to study temporal process and historical patterns, and the methodologies available for making inferences and for building theories. The introductory and concluding essays situate the field as a whole by comparing it to alternative approaches within the social sciences. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars in the field, and it will represent a challenge to many other social scientists - especially those who have raised skeptical concerns about comparative-historical analysis in the past.

Comparative-Historical Methods

Comparative-Historical Methods
Author: Matthew Lange
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1446291286

This bright, engaging title provides a thorough and integrated review of comparative-historical methods. It sets out an intellectual history of comparative-historical analysis and presents the main methodological techniques employed by researchers, including: - comparative-historical analysis, - case-based methods, - comparative methods - data, case selection and theory. Matthew Lange has written a fresh, easy to follow introduction which showcases classic analyses, offers clear methodological examples and describes major methodological debates. It is a comprehensive, grounded book which understands the learning and research needs of students and researchers.

Urban Outcasts

Urban Outcasts
Author: Loïc Wacquant
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2013-04-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745657478

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'. Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism. Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements

Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements
Author: Doug McAdam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 450
Release: 1996-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521485166

Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement are a prominent feature of the modern world and have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many countries. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, brings together a set of essays that focus upon mobilization structures and strategies, political opportunities, and cultural framing and ideologies. The essays are comparative and include studies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Their authors are amongst the leaders in the development of social movement theory and the empirical study of social movements.

Vision and Method in Historical Sociology

Vision and Method in Historical Sociology
Author: Theda Skocpol
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 1984-09-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1316582213

Some of the most important questions of the social sciences in the twentieth century have been posed by scholars working at the intersections of social theory and history viewed on a grand scale. The core essays of this book focus on the careers and contributions of nine of these scholars: Marc Bloch, Karl Polanyi, S. N. Eisenstadt, Reinhard Bendix, Perry Anderson, E. P. Thompson, Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Barrington Moore, Jr. The essays convey a vivid sense of the vision and values each of these major scholars brings (or bought) to his work and analyze and evaluate the research designs and methods each used in his most important works. The introduction and conclusion discuss the long-running tradition of historically grounded research in sociology, while the conclusion also provides a detailed discussion and comparison of three recurrent strategies for bringing historical evidence and theoretical ideas to bear upon one another. informative, thought-provoking, and unusually practical, the book offers fascinating and relevant reading to sociologists, social historians, historically oriented political economists, and anthropologists - and, indeed, to anyone who wants to learn more about the ideas and methods of some of the best-known scholars in the modern social sciences.

Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences

Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences
Author: Donatella Della Porta
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2008-08-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1139474596

A revolutionary textbook introducing masters and doctoral students to the major research approaches and methodologies in the social sciences. Written by an outstanding set of scholars, and derived from successful course teaching, this volume will empower students to choose their own approach to research, to justify this approach, and to situate it within the discipline. It addresses questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of social science, and proceeds to issues of methodology and research design essential for producing a good research proposal. It also introduces researchers to the main issues of debate and contention in the methodology of social sciences, identifying commonalities, historic continuities and genuine differences.