COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL METHODS
Sociology 814,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Spring 2011
Syllabus
Class Meetings: 151 Hamilton Hall, 2:00-4:30 a.m., Tuesdays.
Instructor: Professor Charles Kurzman.
Telephone: 962-1241. E-mail: kurzman@unc.edu. Office hours: 227 Hamilton Hall, 11:30-12:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 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 this 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: Philip S. Gorski, Disciplinary Revolutions
(Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Week 8: Mounira Maya Charrad, States and Women's Rights
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Week 9: H.V. Savitch and Paul Kantor, Cities in the International Marketplace
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Week 10: Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production
(London, England: Verso, 1985).
Week 11: Paul Robbins, Lawn People
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 2007).
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. 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 February 1, 2011.