COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL METHODS
Sociology 814, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Spring 2009

Syllabus

Class Meetings:

150 Hamilton Hall, 9:00-11:30 a.m., Fridays, January 16, 2009-April 24, 2009 (except March 13 and April 10).

Instructor:

Professor Charles Kurzman. Telephone: 962-1241. E-mail: kurzman@unc.edu. Office hours: 227 Hamilton Hall, 11:30-12:30 p.m. Fridays, and by appointment.

This course will address methodological issues that social scientists face in qualitative comparative-historical studies, using an interdisciplinary set of readings. The course will begin with prescriptive debates, beginning with John Stuart Mill in the 19th century and continuing to the present. The course will then examine several classic works in comparative-historical analysis, such as Barrington Moore's famous book, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). In the final segment of the course, students will present and discuss methodological plans for their own research. Course assignments include written notes responding to each reading and a 2,000-word project proposal in lieu of a final research paper (see course requirements below).

Mini-lecture notes: Practical Magic for Comparative-Historical Social Science.
Readings are available on Blackboard.

Schedule:

Part 1. Recipes for Comparative-Historical Research

Week 1.

John Stuart Mill, "The Chemical Method," from A System of Logic [1843], 8th edition (London, England: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), pp. 573-578. Reading question: Which method does Mill prefer for research in social science: the direct method of difference, the indirect method of difference, the method of agreement, the method of concomitant variations, or the method of residues? (This is a trick question.) Cheat sheet.

Week 2.

Charles Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 13-43. Reading question: Which of Mill's methods does Ragin pursue? Questions from outside the reading: What is the difference between Ragin's "configurational analysis" (also known as "qualitative comparative analysis," or QCA) and "correlational analysis"? How does Ragin resolve the objections that Mill had to this sort of approach? Cheat sheet.

Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 198-206. Reading question: Which of Mill's methods does King/Keohane/Verba's "matching" procedure match? Definitions: unit homogeneity (causal processes work the same in all cases, pp. 91-94); conditional independence (no endogenous or reverse effects, pp. 94-95).

Week 3.

Theda Skocpol, "Emerging Agendas and Recurrent Strategies in Historical Sociology," in Skocpol, editor, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 356-391. Reading question: What advice does these influential practitioner seem to offer to newcomers to the field of (comparative-)historical social science?

Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, "Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology," in Adams, Clemens, and Orloff, editors, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1-72. Reading question: What advice do these influential practitioners seem to offer to newcomers to the field of (comparative-)historical social science?

Week 4:

James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, "Comparative Historical Analysis: Achievements and Agendas," in Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, editors, Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3-38 and one substantive chapter of your choosing.

Mini-lectures on research design:
What is comparative-historical social science?
The audience.
Information retrieval.
Comparison is inevitable. History is inevitable. Comparative-history is inevitable.
How many cases should I study?
Can I select cases based on the things I already know or care the most about?

Part 2. Great Examples of Comparative-Historical Research

Week 5: Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1966).

Week 6: Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Week 7: Georgi M. Derluguian, Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Week 8: Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Week 9: Christopher R. King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay, India: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Week 10: Philip Nel, "Transition through Erosion: The Round Table in Poland and South Africa." In Ursula van Beek, editor, South Africa and Poland in Transition: A Comparative Perspective (Pretoria, South Africa: HSRC Publishers, 1995), pp. 227-256; and Seymour Martin Lipset, "Historical Traditions and National Characteristics: A Comparative Analysis of Canada and the United States," Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 113-155.

Week 11: Michèle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Chaps. 1, 4, 5; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), Chaps. 1, 4, 6, 7.

Mini-lectures on analysis:
What makes a classic?
Reflexive versus virtuosic methods.
Disciplinary differences.
The fraud of induction.
Fancy names for common-sense methods.
Values, politics, and research methods.

Part 3: Student Research Proposals

Weeks 12-14.

Presentation of research proposals-in-development by students in the course. Please upload a draft of your proposal to our Blackboard site (in the "Student Research Proposals" folder) one week prior to your class discussion.

Mini-lectures on practicalities:
Scheduling the unschedulable.
Human-subject protection.
Getting funded.
Getting good anecdotes.
How do I know when I've gathered enough research material?
Do not transcribe.
Qualitative data analysis software.

Mini-lectures on writing:
If I am right, who is wrong?
Outlining.
What's a good example: ideal-types versus representatives?
Anecdotes vs. descriptive evidence.
Don't cite websites unless you are studying websites.
How many cases should I study?
Can I select cases based on the things I already know or care the most about?

Course Requirements:

1) Attendance and Participation (20% of final grade)

Attendance means on-time arrival (at the scheduled hour); participation means the contribution of insightful comments on the basis of the assigned readings. If you cannot make it to class, please let me know in advance. You are allowed to miss one class during the semester; after that, absences count 1 point each. You are responsible for material covered and due in classes that you miss.

2) Weekly Reading Notes (20% of final grade)

Reading notes on the week's readings are due by e-mail before the beginning of each class. These notes, approximately 600 words per book, should include (a) the full bibliographic citation of the work, (b) the main points of the reading, including summaries of each chapter; (c) definitions of major concepts and methods and examples of their use in the text, (d) significant quotations and items that you find interesting; (e) your reactions/questions/critiques/linkages with other authors/etc. (these analytical notes should be set aside from the descriptive notes via brackets or some other technique). Always give page references throughout; these notes will serve as your customized index to the reading. The notes will be graded 2 points each if complete and turned in on time, 1 point if incomplete or one class late, and 0.5 points if more than one class late. Please submit these notes by e-mail - not as an attachment, but by pasting the text into the body of your message. See a sample of my reading notes.

3) Research Proposal, due by e-mail before the last class session. The proposal should be approximately 2000 words in length and should propose an empirical comparative-historical test of some substantive hypothesis from your home discipline. The proposal should comprise (i) Title: a short and descriptive title; (ii) Summary: a 150-word paragraph summarizing the entire proposal; (iii) Literature: a 600-word discussion of the literature on the hypothesis you propose to test; (iv) Case Selection: a 250-word justification of your case selection; (v) Method: a 1000-word discussion of methodology, concluding with your preliminary findings and a discussion of how various anticipated findings would reflect on your hypothesis; and (vi) References: a list of references cited in the paper. As with the reading notes, please submit these papers by e-mail - not as an attachment, but by pasting the text into the body of your message. See sample papers in a similar format from another course.

http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/Soc814.html, last updated April 3, 2009.