The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry

Abstract

Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore, Jr. have typically been concerned with understanding societal dynamics and epochal transformations of cultures and social structures. Attention to historical sequences is indispensable to such understanding. Obviously, though, not all investigations of social change use explicit juxtapositions of distinct histories. We may wonder, therefore: What motivates the use of comparisons as opposed to focussing on single historical trajectories? What purposes are pursued-and how-through the specific modalities of comparative history?Certain areas of scholarly endeavor in contemporary social science have given rise to methodological reflection even more sophisticated than the substantive applications of the methods in question, but this has certainly not been the case for comparative history. Despite the steady application of variants of this approach to macrosocial topics such as revolutions, religious evolution, political development, economic "modernization," patterns of collective violence, and the rise and fall of empires, there have been remarkably few efforts to explore the methodological aspects of comparative history as such in any systematic fashion.' What is more, the most

Employment and Caring in British and Norwegian banking: an exploration through individual careers

“…Skocpol and Somers 1980). It may be suggested that there are useful parallels to be drawn between historical case comparisons and the 'gender systems' approach to the study of gender relations (Crompton 1999a: 203ff).…”

“…Kohn 1987). Other researchers have focused more on the difference between cases, or the contrast of contexts (Skocpol and Somers 1980), in order to understand divergent historical developments. Besides the work of gender systems researchers (see above) one might also mention here the debates deriving from Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990).…”

“…Comparative case oriented research has also been used to develop causal explanations (Skocpol and Somers 1980, Ragin 1987, Pickvance 1995. These approaches have been developed out of J. S. Mill's logics of scientific explanation which include the 'method of agreement' , the 'method of difference' , and the 'indirect method of difference' (Mill 1961).…”

Explanation in Historical Sociology: Narrative, General Theory, and Historically Specific Theory

“…Tilly (1984) emphasized the operationalization of quantitative sociological research and analytic methods for historical use; he engaged in important comparative studies, but he also warned against overreliance on a comparative strategy. Skocpol (1979;Skocpol and Somers 1980) placed a distinctive stress on comparison. While Skocpol's (1979) cases happened to be historical, her analytic method was less distinctively so.…”

Olle Törnquist and John Harriss (2016) Reinventing Social Democratic Development. Insights from Indian and Scandinavian Comparisons

“…The cases for the analysis of social democratic development were selected according to the comparative method of "contrasted contexts" (p. 6), as introduced by the historians Skocpol and Somers (1980). This already indicates the editors' and authors' orientation towards an analysis of historical processes.…”