David E Apter. Handbook of Sociology. Editor: Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan Turner. Sage Publications. 2005.
Introduction
In the not-so-distant past, comparative sociology was considerably more central in the general field of sociology than it is today. The present discussion will review several periods of its more ample prosperity, suggest reasons for the decline and indicate briefly possible future trends. While it appears unlikely that comparative sociology will be restored to the privileged place it held in the past, it remains important not only because of the pivotal role it played in shaping general sociological inquiry, but because to a considerable extent sociology today continues to rework earlier themes. That said, these remarks are not intended as a catalog or survey of comparative research nor a who’s who’ of contemporary practitioners. Rather, in recuperating several intellectual traditions in the field, I want to strike a balance between their logical and methodological tendencies by approaching comparative sociology in terms of several of its more robust paradigms’. Those which were of most concern in the past dealt with such topics as social change, capitalism, socialism, industrialization, modernity and development, that is, the big themes Polyani referred to as the great transformation. Old in terms of comparative theory they remain new in the light of fresh problems (Boudon, 1986b).
Among sociologists who over the years have been both beneficiaries and contributors to these paradigms one might include such figures as Reinhard Bendix, Edward Shils, S.N. Eisenstadt, Seymour Martin Lipset, Neil Smelser, Barrington Moore, Jr, Ralf Dahrendorf, Juan Linz, Theda Skocpol, Craig Calhoun, Anthony Giddens, Rogers Brubaker, David Stark, Karen Barkey, Ivan Szelenyi, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Boudon, Norbert Elias, to name only a few. While they vary widely in approach, all owe intellectual debts to one or more of the major antecedent thinkers who constituted comparative sociology as a field. Most have considered comparative sociology as subject as well as object; that is, reviewed and analyzed what it is they do as they do it. Hence there is a large body of literature on comparative research design, frameworks, conceptual schemes and hypothesis-testing not to speak of broader philosophical concerns.
To the extent that this is so, to consider the condition of comparative sociology requires placing it in context. In this regard, perhaps no single earlier figure continues to have the impact of Max Weber, who remains as virtually the ideal type of comparative sociologist. No one dealt as explicitly and effectively with the gap between structural principles and individualistic modes of action, not least of all in terms of rational and non-rational behavior (Shils and Finch, 1949; see also Brubaker, 1984). Perhaps it is for this reason that Weber continues to be a source of research questions today, establishing both the conditions of possibility for comparative theory and substantive ideas (although the Simmel revival in a context of modernity is also extremely interesting). So much so that Weber remains the standard bearer against whom to judge more contemporary approaches, such as rational choice theory, the new institutionalism and discourse theory.
It is also the case that in the past, when the main paradigms to be discussed here were first applied, they seemed ahead of the facts. That is, they illuminated what conventional knowledge obscured. Today, however, one might say that the facts are ahead of theories. Theories are overwhelmed by contingencies, the unanticipated outcomes of anticipated events undermining the implied determinism of structural and logical outcomes. One could argue that the more this is so the greater the need to probe more deeply into cases, to frame, contextualize and, by examining lower levels of generalization, connect subsystem to system. Indeed, each of the paradigms discussed here did so in one way or other, and according to one or other set of rules of scientific logic. Moreover, they concerned themselves as well with the methodological problems of inquiry, and a spectrum of methodologies, conceptual strategies and statistical techniques.
In the absence of these or other paradigms, theory construction falters. It lags behind methodological innovation. And this is one of the present predicaments facing comparative sociology as a field. This at a time when rules of valid evidence have become more stringent to the point where excessive preoccupation with method makes one suspicious of more interpretative approaches. Yet without appropriate knowledge of historical, contextual and multi-layered factors, causal and technically proficient techniques, not least of all cross-sectional matrices, will produce thin results. Hence the considerable intellectual tension between those favoring historical, descriptive and qualitative analysis, and path-dependent theory construction and those relying on survey, questionnaire, multivariate analysis and other quantitative techniques. It would be comforting to conclude that contemporary comparative sociologists need to be equally at home with both insofar as they involve different styles of thinking. In practice it is not as easy as it sounds (Mahoney, 2000).
Doing so was perhaps easier at an earlier period. Lipset, Dogan (Dogan and Pelassy, 1980), Galtung (1967), Linz (Linz and Stepan, 1978) and others made generous use of the survey and other quantitative techniques and data available. They moved easily between analytic and methodological modes. They could combine depth with statistical knowledge. Someone like Charles Tilly played back and forth between historical analysis and quantitative techniques in, for example, his studies of social mobilization and social movements (Tilly, 1978). Today the requirements of both are greater, as are the difficulties of combining them (Hechter and Levi, 1994).
Despite these difficulties, the aims of comparative sociology remain what they have always been, the principled explanation of similarities and differences, resolution or non-resolution of contradictions and inconsistencies. How to find general meaning in the particular event by means of comparative methods is perhaps another way of putting the matter.
As for context and depth, while there are plenty of sociologists who did and continue to use case materials, and with theoretically interesting comparative results, for examples, Ronald Dore (1973) on Japan, or Andrew G. Walder (1995) on China, it is more and more rare to consider such work as in the main stream of sociological thinking. Societal comparisons around problems of power, authority, stratification, mobility etc. continue but a good deal of work is now specialized rather than comparative, and around topical themes like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language etc. Such specialization has shifted the focus away from a comparative perspective as such.
It is with these thoughts in mind that we turn to five paradigms that we consider useful in describing the field of comparative sociology in its early and better days. We use the term paradigm advisedly, not so much as a corpus of knowledge as a framing discourse—less than a school and more than a theory. This is close to Kuhns original definition of significant paradigms, that is, including an ability to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of inquiry while remaining sufficiently open-ended as to leave a variety of problems for such adherents to solve (Kuhn, 1962). They are also paradigmatic in the sense that they establish general rules and structural principles from which hypotheses can be derived, examined empirically and applied synchronically, diachronically, or both. The common goal is not only a cumulative body of theory but also an underlying logic of outcomes as the basis of theoretical propositions.
Those discussed here share such purposes but they are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. All have given birth to a very theoretically diverse progeny. Over time these paradigms have replaced each other, although their clienteles often overlap. When shifts occur it is less a result of anomalies, or those kinds of theoretical crises leading to the conviction that an alternative is better. They simply go out of fashion.
If it is the case that each reached a certain intellectual high-water mark of influence, in decline all left important residues. Some, like Marx, or better, Marxism, although very much out of favor at the moment, retain a fluctuating significance, indeed, a gift of eternal return. In this sense a good many of the theorists falling under each paradigm (and not only Max Weber) continue to have theoretical influence. Take for example, the renewed emphasis on modernism, a recurrent central concern in all of the paradigms. As a topic it fell out of favor, not so much replaced as critiqued in terms of dependency theory, conflict theory and other approaches which emphasized the socially and politically negative consequences of modernism, particularly in terms of problems of hegemony, imperialism, colonialism and other forms of domination. Similarly with ideas of jurisdiction and space, territoriality and the proprietary notions that went with it. In the latter instance, for example, social space is back as public space, in ways informed by earlier concerns. Habermas retrieves Weber and Parsons. Henri Lefebvre retrieves the sociological Marx (e.g. Lefebvre, 1971, 1986; see also Harvey, 1989), David Frisby (2001) retrieves the modernizing Simmel.
The five paradigms owe considerably to their European and British origins. These lent American sociology a cosmopolitan quality it otherwise lacked. The latter was to a significant degree an exploration (if not a celebration) of progress’, particularly social Darwinian and evolutionary approaches. Applied to problems of societal change the early paradigms represented a major advance over earlier forms of inquiry, including those ranging from an unabashed curiosity about the exotic to a romantic Rousseauean search for an original noble savage, a Lockean original condition, or using simple cultural, racial and other distinctions to distinguish between ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’. In these terms a ‘Science of Man’, using an evolutionary metaphor drawn from the natural sciences, was a great advance. Attacking mysticism, idealism and religion, it substituted instead a harmonious teleology-social life as a master plan in keeping with or parallel to evolutionary processes.
For Comte, Spencer, Cooley and others modern society was a social process capable of structural innovation and adaption the consequence of which was societal evolution from inferior to superior forms of social life. In Spencer such evolution took the forms of greater diversification and differentiation, resulting in transitions from simple (‘primitive’) to complex organizational forms (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952). At once systemic and developmental, it stimulated inquiries into how, where and under what conditions such evolution occurs.
Similarly, Charles Horton Cooley developed the idea of modernity as progress, the uni-directionality of industrialization and the spread of universalized roles and networks. How to sustain social integration given the disturbances and perturbations of modernizing processes became the prism by means of which economic growth and political authority and control tended to be refracted.
One result of this evolutionary emphasis was the introduction of functionalism into the social sciences. Functionalism made comparison more systemically possible. By using it for comparing very different social systems, observers could augment their understanding of their own society. It also enabled the derivation of universal from the diversity of particulars. It took from biology notions of differentiation, complexity, self-maintenance and the like. But it never lost its original connection to social Darwinism. In this sense one could say that comparative sociology remains close to its evolutionary origins.
Such thinking influenced not only sociology but anthropology, not least of all a host of case studies comparing folk- or community-based societies in terms of the impact of modernity (not least of all in the work of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, S.F. Nadel, Redfield, Egan, Richards, Fallers and many others working in the functionalist tradition of social anthropology). It retains its influence, at least to some extent, in the work of Talcott Parsons.
A second paradigm is represented best by Marx himself as well as in its other Marxisant renditions: revisionist, Trotskyist, Gramscian etc. Dialectical as well as evolutionary, it had a preferred historical teleology, with socialism a last instance on a directional, systemic and purposeful scale demarcating irreversible modal stages—a transcendence from lower to higher material modes. Whatever its guises, Marxism was above all concerned to identify the critical and dynamic components of capitalism as a unique engine of productivity while identifying in ‘systemic’, more general terms the inevitable disarray within it, the cracks occurring willy-nilly as a result of the impact of the productive process itself. By concentrating on the determining, socially necessary and contradictory effects of capitalist productive modes different societies could be characterized in terms of the gaps which grew between the evermore concentrated wealth and power of property owners on the one hand and the expanding significance of the value-producing labor power of workers (plus their growing and presumably superior insight), resulting in class conflict as the state, embodying the bourgeoisie, became polarized, indeed, against society, as represented by the proletariat (Therborn, 1980). As a paradigm Marxism sponsored theories about transformation and revolution, work and alienation and, in more Hegelian terms, conditions under which inversionary and revolutionary ruptures would occur, the consequence of which was the periodic transformation of societies from a lower to a higher productive/societal stage.
For Marx the critical cases to examine were Germany, France and England, with some reference to the United States and to colonial countries such as India as well as Turkey, China and elsewhere. His views about the progressive power of capitalism were made almost embarrassingly clear in The Communist Manifesto. For example, he described capitalism in terms far more glowing than, for example, the more ‘dismal’ economists like Adam Smith. Speculating on its rise in the West, Marx compared it to the more hydraulic bureaucracies of the so-called ‘Asian mode of production’ found in the Turkish or Chinese empires for example. His description of the morally ambiguous transformative effects of colonial capitalism on India are clearly in favor of the first, with only mild regret for the loss of village Indian life and customs.
Of course the so-called historical sociologists were also interested in capitalism and what triggered it. Nevertheless one wonders whether had there not been a Marx there would have been a Weber. In this sense, as a third paradigm, historical sociology takes off from Marx even though its protagonists were hardly enamored of his solutions. It asked all the comparative questions probing deeply into the nature of capitalism itself, the conditions of its emergence: institutions, norms, structural determinants, its relations of power to equity, including core as well as peripheral characteristics of modern corporate society. Within its very generous pantheon are, most significantly, Weber, Durkheim, Toennies, Pareto and Simmel (whom Aron considered the founder of ‘formal’ sociology—a ‘geometry of the social world’). Other, somewhat more peripheral figures included Max Scheler who deplored the elevation in modern society of utility as the last word in rationality, and the equation of market values with ethical truths (Scheler, 1961).
As a group it could be divided into those who like Durkheim reinforced the functional attributes of the organic evolutionists, or Weber, whose emphasis on power and legitimacy was based on a combination of economic organization and existential, indeed phenomenological knowledge. The first influenced the comparative study of religion, its relation to more positivist factors like the division of labor, and in so doing combined structuralism and positivism with the power of belief. The second combined an emphasis on intentionality, economic organization, types of normative legitimacy, bureaucracy, hierarchy and comparative religion.
Just as one might ask about Marx and historical sociology, so too with Weber and Parsons. The Parsonian paradigm, although relatively short-lived, was something of a synthesis of major ingredients from evolutionism in the form of organismic theory, and Weber’s and Pareto’s emphases on non-economic factors in social systems. The most pretentiously ambitious comparative approach, the Parsonian version of functionalism, ‘structural-functionalism’, was more of a ‘conceptual scheme’ than a theory, designed to bring together in one elaborate, all-encompassing framework, three all-encompassing dimensions of social life: culture, social system, behavior (Parsons, 1949). Using these to establish ‘systems-problems,’ structural-functionalism took over functional theory as hitherto employed in anthropology, added psychological and behavioral components and established binary categories for comparing the varying structural properties on the basis of common functional elements in concrete societies, most particularly between less industrial and industrial societies. These binaries could be regarded as sets (pattern variables), forming components of social systems. They could be applied from one concrete society or sub-system to another, and from the most general to the lower levels of the same system. By so doing Parsons colonized ‘organismic’ models of society, with survival, integration, adaptation and self-maintenance tests to determine the minimum set of structural requisites necessary for societies to cope with strains, tensions and change (Alexander, 1983b; Mitchell, 1967).
The final paradigm to be mentioned, world system theory, is the most dependent on wide-ranging comparisons over time, and is more a variant of social institutionalism—a kind of structuralism that owes a good deal to Marx, Durkheim and Weber (Alexander, 1982). Concerned with economics-driven change over the longue durée, among the key figures in Europe it includes two sociological historians, Fernand Braudel and Marian Malowist, and in the United States, Immanuel Wallerstein. It was the latter who developed further the original particularly Braudelian emphasis on the circulation of trading patterns, inventions and particularly the geography of what is today called globalization, by means of diachronic studies of ‘world systems’. An adaptation of dependency theory but with a broader historical sweep, it emphasized the significance of hegemonic relations between centers and peripheries, the origins of the former, their universalizing propensities and totalizing effects, not least of all for the consolidation of a European-centered world economy. Dominant factors are innovation, technology, invention, their impact on trade and markets, their social effects and their impact on the changing relations of power (Wallerstein, 1974, 1980, 1989).
The ideas embodied in these five paradigms have left an indelible mark on comparative sociology today. The evolutionary tradition and Parsonianism emphasized social differentiation, complexity, adaptation and equilibrium, concepts still relevant in systems theory, organization theory, the analysis of institutions, networks, etc. Both Marxism and world system theory emphasized the negative effects of what today is called globalization and growing disparities of wealth and power both between metropoles and peripheries but within countries as well. The historical sociologists pointed out what is just beginning to become respectable among economists, the importance of non-economic factors in limiting the scope of market rationality, the sentiments, residues and ophelmities (rather than optimalities) of Pareto. There is renewed interest in the role of religion in social life (shades of Durkheim), while new concerns with leadership and elites, hierarchy and authority, and differences in legitimization between legal rational and other forms, bring a good many of Weber’s concerns back into currency. Similarly with Simmel’s interest in the balancing consequences of asymmetrical conflict (Frisby, 1986). In each case comparison was central both as a means to theory construction and as a testing ground for hypotheses.
In contrast to comparative politics, with its emphasis on the state, comparative sociology is on the whole concerned with how power is dispersed, its multiple sources, how it derives from relationships in civil society, and in private life from family to groups, cultural, business, labor, religious, and from voluntary associations as well as formal institutions. Indeed, the closer to formal institutions, and particularly the state, it is, the more indistinguishable is comparative sociology from comparative politics (e.g. Badie and Birnbaum, 1983; Linz, 2000).
One does not want to limit comparative sociology to the five paradigms. There were many others that had considerable significance although were perhaps not quite paradigmatic. One good example is the Frankfurt School, so important in German and European comparative sociology, with its concern with the different faces of rationality, culture and power, according to whether a system was capitalist, socialist, or fascist. Its protagonists, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and others had a considerable ‘aura’ effect within sociology even though it can hardly be said to have affected mainstream American sociology.
Whatever else that can be said about it, and regardless of its present condition as a field, as will be shown here, comparative analysis remains relevant as a way of deriving principles of social life from the comparative study of explicit cases, cultures, societies and social systems. In some respects the contrast between the five paradigms is less in terms of theories than the ends that their theories favor. Each has a preferred teleology, a definition of public well-being, and underwrites moral claims to prophylactic or improving ends by references to scientific inquiry. Insofar as such ends remain as relevant so theory in the context of comparative sociology will continue to matter.
Whatever else might be said about them, in their day these paradigms sponsored a wide range of comparative research. While they may have appeared to have outlived their usefulness this is by no means the case. To a considerable extent their once innovative contributions have entered the mainstream of sociology with respect to such diverse matters as class, elites, roles and other social formations, and industrialization, bureaucratization, nationalism, belief systems, etc. even as they have become divorced from their origins and become sociological commonplaces. Some ideas have, at least in their original forms, became obsolete. Few sociologists today take evolutionary notions seriously in the way of a Comte, Spencer and Cooley or regard social life according to evolutionary stages of human knowledge (at its higher end enabling sociology itself as a superior kind of understanding), save perhaps socio-biologists or ethologists. As for the possibilities of finding sociological truths or establishing a science of society, the aim might be accepted while the practice would strike most of today’s sociologists as immodest.
Yet if the historical sociologists—and here one might also include Maine, Austen, Sombart, Mosca, Michels and Ostrogorski, in addition to Weber, Durkheim, Toennies, Pareto, Simmel, the basic binaries they all used for comparison (such as primitive’‘modern’, status/contract, pre-industrial/industrial, etc.), or Weber’s types of authority, Toennies’s Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinctions, Durkheim’s mechanical or organic society, as well as the constructed ideal or modal typologies they favored (and that in their moment seemed so insightful)—lack sufficient nuance from today’s perspective, becoming overkill categories for the nature of the phenomena they are supposed to examine, it is also the case that their obsolescence has resulted in contemporary typologies that are more descriptive than theoretically fruitful.
As to Parsonianism, which in its day represented a high-water mark in paradigmatic construction, certainly the most architecturally elaborate and ambitious of comparative schemes, by elevating the more or less heuristic functionalism of such anthropological figures as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown into a form of structuralism-functionalism, the effect was to make comparison totally unwieldy. It required one to exhaust each higher level of generalization before moving to lower levels and in terms of multiple combinations of the same pattern variables’. These, organized in sets and multiple combinations, were used empirically to compare systems, and also to evaluate them in terms of their propensities towards equilibrium as social steady states (Parsons et al, 1953). The instrumental purpose was to identify and remove sources of strain and facilitate adaption. If in theory it was remedial, the actual research practice became too difficult; the relationships between functional equivalents and requisite variables (functional requisites) necessary for unit maintenance and adaptation becoming simply unmanageable (e.g. Parsons and Shils, 1951). In short, there was no way to refine and operationalize the system. Hence the bias for order’ over conflict. Not surprisingly efforts to revive it by Jeffrey Alexander and others have not been successful (Alexander, 1983b). But it should be added that Parsons continues to show up in Habermas and other theorists concerned with the role of system in social analysis.
As for world system theory, it never became as central to comparative sociology as the others. But insofar as it emphasized the relations between centers on peripheries, their hegemonic influences, not least of all in terms of imperialism and colonialism, it remains, as with Marxism, a way of interpreting patterns of major social change using economic and technological factors among others. Perhaps its heavy reliance on history, both descriptively and as evidence, went too much against the grain of sociology itself (which on the whole remains largely anti-historical).
Max Weber and the Spirit of Sociological Comparison
If the paradigms have declined, paradoxically enough Weber retains his stature. One might call him, without too much exaggeration, the godfather of comparative theory (Alexander, 1983a). Insofar as modernism is considered a function of capitalism, Weber’s original questions continue to be pertinent. Why did capitalism occur when it did? Why in Europe and not somewhere else?
What are the moral equivalents to the Protestant ethic in other beliefs which might serve to induce the kind of this-worldly asceticism Weber saw as socially essential in order to maintain the disciplined and saving graces of capitalist development, especially in its early stages? If historical processes include more strategic variables than class, what else is relevant in accounting for differences between economic factors, utilitarian individualism and collective behavior? Above all, what are necessary and sufficient conditions for adapting to inputs of modernity, particularly economic but cultural as well in various settings, and in terms of social discipline, civic responsibility, citizenship, work and commitment? Such matters are as important today as when Weber dealt with them.
It was part of Weber’s genius to raise such questions in three contexts—historical, economic and legal. Separating acquisitive commercialism elsewhere than Europe in terms of the evolution of legal and financial instruments and activities, Weber showed some of the different ways in which rationality and purposive action were channeled if not defined by value orientations. In Europe the most germane interpretive commitments combined discipline as social strategy with widespread individual sacrifice, not least of all the longer view prevailing over the shorter. Contrasting, for example, the individual harshness of a predestination unknown to the predestined, with the meditative piety’ of the Buddhism of India and especially the ‘genteel intellectualism’ of Brahmanism, Weber speculated on the consequence of the latter for a caste which possessed neither the stuff of entrepreneurial commitment nor the competition for virtue as represented in particular by Calvinism (Weber, 1958b: 151). As well, Weber showed how deeply Protestantism contrasted with the Confucian ethic which is not that of a priesthood but rather an ordered convention of laymen, an imperial cosmology originally charismatically endowed and hierarchically enshrined in a bureaucratic Mandarinate order above, while below it was embodied and enshrined in the family unit. Wealth was deified.
In no other civilized country has material welfare been so exalted as the supreme good … Still economic policy did not create the economic mentality of capitalism. The money profits of the traders in the Period of the Warring States were political profits of commissioners to the state. The great mining corvées were used to search for gold. Still no intermediate link led from Confucianism and its ethic—as firmly rooted as Christianity—to a civic and methodical way of life. (Weber, 1951:237-8)
Indeed, the contrast to Puritanism could not be greater.
So too with the ancient Hebrew prophets, who, showing both ecstatic proclivities and a penchant for chasing visions, delivered their prophecies from on high. Unlike early Christianity, the prophets did not think of themselves as members of a supporting spiritual community. On the contrary. Misunderstood and hated by the mass of their listeners they never felt themselves to be supported and protected by them as like-minded sympathizers as did the apostles of the early Christian community. Hence, the prophets spoke at no time of their listeners or addressees as their “brethren”, the Christian apostles always did so’ (Weber, 1952: 292). Not much opportunity here either for collective order and a truly effective social community, nor the individual tested by a predestined fate known less by virtue itself than its fiduciary accomplishment. Rather, the ancient Hebrews suffered from what Weber called the pathos of solitude’, the ‘Deutero-Isaiahic’ vision which has at its center the positive evaluation of self abasement’, and a view of the Messiah not as a redeemer but one who dies in combat (1952: 376-7). Divided between admonishing visions on the one hand and esoteric speculation on the other, there was less space for personal virtue than Jovian suffering. So much for the prefatory tradition among the ancient Hebrews. In none of these societies was a spirit of commercial enterprise lacking, nor entrepreneurial propensities. Nor was there any dearth of highly rationalistic calculating skills. What was missing, for Weber, was the rationalistic ethic supplied by ascetic Protestantism. Without it magical, religious and ethical ideas of duty became barriers to the evolution of such concomitants of modern capitalism as free labor, the rationalization of technique and, above all, an economic view of the survival of the fittest which, if it is a necessary condition for establishing competitive capitalism, could only be acceptable within the larger context of predestined grace (1958a: 24-7, 55). ‘With the consciousness of standing in the fullness of God’s grace and being visibly blessed by Him, the bourgeois businessman, as long as he remained within the bounds of formal correctness, as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his wealth was not objectionable, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling a duty in doing so. The power of religious asceticism provided him in addition with sober, conscientious and unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.’ Finally, ‘it gave him the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret ends unknown to men’ (1958a: 176-7).
As for the second question, whether or not there are or have been genuine functional equivalents which combined both individual commitment and collective belief (which Weber believed necessary), and would be crucial in controlling modernization processes prior to industrialization, while enabling effective authority to be maintained the answer remains open. For modernization theorists generally, the best combination was represented by Japan, its Samurai serving as a mediating Stand, negotiating effectively the conditions and limits of acceptable innovation, especially during the Tokugawa period and early Meiji. Here again, scholars have emphasized the critical role of education as the basis of both a mediating instrument and a transcending rationality. For in Japan, unlike in China, and paradoxically enough if one considers Weber, education combined well with Confucianism, serving to reinforce hierarchy with knowledge, and making possible conditions of authority and control which promoted rather than impeded the spread of those qualities necessary for capitalism, moderating the negative effects of modernization (see Dore, 1965; see also Ikegami, 1995).
What Weber shows better than most is the value of cases for comparison, and comparison as an approach to more general theories. And any number of figures followed in his wake—Bendix, Eisenstadt, Lipset, Apter, Moore—and continue to do so—Linz, Evans, Skocpol, Calhoun, Brubaker and many others.
Perhaps more than any other, it was Bendix who was most faithful to Weber’s methods in using comparative case materials to examine what were crucial differences in the modernization experience and interpreting what political differences the social differences made. For him, as for Weber, the defining and crucial characteristic of modernization theory was embodied not only in the question of how capitalism and democracy first evolved but how they could best be universalized, their values and their institutions reproduced elsewhere no matter how culturally alien the ground. To deal with this question Bendix focused on troublesome cases specifically where authoritarianism had been a consequence of industrialization rather than democracy—Germany and Japan. He also puzzled over the case of India, which in its democracy seemed to challenge a good many assumptions of both the modernization theorists and its antagonists, not least those of a more sociologically naive variety. Indeed, if anyone tried to ‘become’ Weber it was Bendix.
Although never a mere clone of Weber, the central theme he picked up from him was democracy in the special institutional sense of necessary and appropriate instruments and procedures, such as bureaucracies and parties, and substantive principles, legislative accountability, legal rational authority etc. For Bendix, the instrumental, procedural and substantive features of democratic society as these evolved in the West, foreshadow an experience which, with varying degrees of appropriateness, might be mirrored elsewhere. It was this which led him to follow in the historical and comparative tradition of Weber by comparing the evolution of Western institutional politics with Russia, Germany, Japan and India. For Bendix, Weber’s types of authority became system types, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ and how in each case they intersected, collided and became mutually accommodated. Crucial for Bendix was the role education might play in fostering an emergent sense of civic obligation.
Even more deeply influenced by the whole of Weber’s way of thinking was Talcott Parsons, most of whose earlier ideas were scarcely disguised Weberian concepts redeployed both problematically and as well as in the content rather than the form of ‘pattern variables’. Moreover, a line from Weber to Parsons can be drawn that includes a variety of comparative sociologists working in one fashion or other on modernity, as for example in Robert Bellah’s work on religion in Japan which suggested that Tokugawa ‘values’ might be considered as functional equivalents to the Protestant ethic, so central were they in promoting modern devel-opmentalism in that country. Smelser is another example. Where Bellah emphasized the normative, Smelser was more concerned with socio-economic factors associated with the rise of British industrialism, for which analysis he elaborated an explicit comparative framework (Smelser, 1959). Apter, too, especially in his early work combined Parsonian forms of analysis with ideas of legal rational authority, charisma and its routinization, and similar factors to the problem of ‘political institutional transfer’ in an African setting (Apter, 1972). Both Eisenstadt in his work on tradition and modernity, and also on the rise and fall of bureaucratic empires, and Lipset, not least of all in Union Democracy, were inveterate comparativists, moving back and forth between cases as illustrative examples, using general ideas and categories that drew heavily on those of Weber and Parsons in examining the effects of modern bureaucracy on the state and social institutions, but also social variables such as functional specificity and diffuseness, ascription and achievement, universalism and particularism (e.g. Eisenstadt, 1963,1968). Still others, like David Lockwood and John Goldthorpe, used stratification theory and class analysis comparatively in developing a theory of class ‘embourgeoisement’. Other comparativists more indebted to Weber’s notions of legitimacy, bureaucracy, charisma, Sultanism, civic consciousness etc. include Juan Linz, Karin Barkey, Rogers Brubaker and others.
Recent Trends in Comparative Research
In these regards Weber has a continuing influence in what has been called the new institutionalism, which is less paradigmatic but no less suggestive of theory than the approaches discussed here. It also has its uneasy counterpart in rational choice theory, which, less derivative from Weber, despite the emphasis on rationality, has become central in comparative studies in recent years, both in sociology and political science (Apter, 1991). Still another, which focuses on the relationship between interpretation and social action, is political discourse theory.
The first is able to combine intentionality with economic and social structural variables, and incorporate elements of rational choice theory. Instead of developmental change, or modernization theory as such, the emphasis is on nationalism, identity formation, cultural norms, citizenship and immigration, and the relationships between jurisdiction, affiliation and social displacement more generally. The second, discourse theory, which occupies one end of the spectrum of which rational choice can be said to be the other, deals with symbolic capital, language as power, and above all the narrative interpretation of reality, especially as these contribute to the creation and maintenance of discourse communities, their role in establishing solidary groups, and the relationship of events, their interpretation, narratives and texts, the constituent elements of symbolic capital. Although the first is more widely accepted than the second, both draw on a large body of earlier thought and research, much of it from fields other than sociology itself.
The new institutionalism fits economic, stratification, culture, normative and organizational variables together with historical, multivariate and case types of analysis (e.g. Calhoun, 1992). Nee characterizes it as a conjunction of two converging traditions, the Weberian combination of comparative institutionalism, its emphasis and methodological individualism and rationality in the context of cases and comparisons, and Durkheim’s methodological holism (Nee, 2003; see also Brinton and Nee, 1998; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). The debt to Weber is the greater, not least of all in terms of the analysis of rationality (Brubaker, 1987), but also the relevance of law, philosophy and economics. To the extent that rationality is defined by these forces, incentives are structured and the rules of legitimate social action ordained—rules within which individuals and organizations compete for control over resources with institutions, defined as a web of interrelated norms, formal and informal, government social relationships (Nee, 2003). In contrast to the old institutionalism, with its concern with the configuring power of institutions as ordering mechanisms and instrumentalities shaping choice, the new institutionalism emphasizes purposive action, or what Parsons referred to as goal attainment, intentionality.
The new institutionalism emphasizes context as well as form. The old institutionalism used history and so does the new, but within the framework of path dependency as a mode of framing and contextualizing the limits within which choice can take place, and the limits of rationality, whereby choices can be measured. Hence the new institutionalism places greater emphasis on norms. Like the old, it lends itself to case studies but is better able to employ modern multivariate analysis (e.g. Inkeles and Smith, 1974). It is linked to economic sociology, comparative stratification and organizational theory and network analysis. It also uses elements of rational choice theory while rejecting the latter’s assumption of unlimited relevant information. In short the new institutionalism as a comparative framework can assimilate a variety of fields and tendencies where and when they seem appropriate.
The problem is that for institutions to work they must configure. That is, they need to frame and delimit the range of options to actors as citizens, subjects, producers, or consumers. Embodied in law, custom, tradition and prevailing or dominant sets of norms, they both establish a framework for order and represent it. Hence institutions are not just any groups. Rather, in both civil and political society they combine strategic networks of roles with systems of norms.
And they do not always work. They may fail to work instrumentally. That is, they may not accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish, or do it so partially that one can speak of institutional failures. When they do configure social action we say that the ‘system’ works well. But this is misleading. Institutions are not necessarily systems per se. A system involves sets of interacting variables so that a change in one results in a change in others. In this sense, for example, checks and balances can be said to be more systemic than institutional while separation of powers is less systemic and more institutional.
Similarly, when institutions fail one might say that the dominant norms embodied in them are no longer authoritative. A certain social discipline is weakened. Another way to describe this would be to say that the discourse associated with them loses force. Or antithetical discourses may arise in opposition. Insofar as this is correct, it might be said that discourse theory picks up where institutionalism leaves off.
Discourse theory is by no means as widely recognized as the new institutionalism. It deals with how people talk themselves into acting, define choices and by interpreting events, circumstances and experiences, collectivize them. In short, it deals with the ways in which people construct their social worlds and communities in terms of signs, symbols, language and meaning, and act on those concentrations. By itself it is not a replacement for other approaches; it adds a dimension of interiority to comparative analysis, a depth of a kind that reveals how interpretation leads to social action. It is particularly appropriate for certain kinds of comparative case materials, particularly the study of power, conflict and the formation of social movements. It goes beyond organizational variables in showing how social bonding occurs through narrative and textual exegesis.
Discourse theory, which attends to the uses of language in public space as well as communication and in ways not entirely dissimilar to, say, Habermas’s formulations of discourse in a context of communicative action, is hardly new. Indeed one could trace its pedigree to Plato. Its modern provenance is French structuralism and poststructuralism (Geertz, 1988). It draws heavily on the sociological and linguistic perspectives, to which Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Clifford Geertz, Hayden White, W.T. Mitchell, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Clastres, Mary Douglas, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Edward Said and Jerome Bruner might be said to be contributors. There are, of course, many others.
In terms of comparative sociology, in some of these respects discourse theory can be said to represent a next stage in the study of social knowledge. Here the fit is with recent work by Jeffrey Alexander and others working on the role of performance. It also might be said to be one end of a continuum of which rational choice theory is the other. That is, it emphasizes ways in which interpretive narratives both establish and constitute the conditions for, as well as the modes of, rationality, and how meaning becomes symbolically intensified to the point where it constitutes a form of power in its own right. When, as a form of power, it becomes the basis for and embodied in ‘discourse communities’ the effect on individuals is such that they are persuaded to convey their own discretion over their own lives to the larger community. In turn this enables them to draw down from that community more power, self-esteem etc. than they originally had. If by drawing down more than they put in, actors begin to feel personally enlarged, experiencing both a collective ‘overcoming’ through collective action and a personal transcendence, instrumental and moral, then the result is what might best be called a kind of collective individualism. Many social movements, religious, radical etc., are examples of how this works. Discourse theory thus constitutes an alternative perspective for comparative analysis but one which is growing in importance, and, one might add, not so different from Weber’s ‘this worldly asceticism’. Moreover it is also a response to the limitations of rational choice theory which is, in Ferejohns’s words, thin. It is not without interest that concern with such thinness in some quarters has led to recent efforts to ‘thicken’ rational choice theory by the use of narratives (Bates et al, 1998; see also Bruner, 1991).
What discourse theory allows for is in-depth studies that can reveal how language, speech, symbol, metaphors, metonymy, retrievals, projections, myth and logic, as well as other components contribute to building up symbolic density to the point where it constitutes a form of capital. Put in these terms, symbolic capital constitutes a moral fund on which to draw much as money constitutes a fiduciary fund on which to draw. In other words, symbolic capital is analogous economic capital, the two sometimes, as in Weber, mutually reinforcing, and at other times not. Discourse theory then makes choice and rationality far more socially interesting than rational choice notions of ‘rationality’.
As indicated, in the context of sociology discourse theory is particularly useful in studying social groups as discourse communities by means of a narrative construction or reconstruction of reality. Insofar as it reconstitutes rationality and provides an alternative logic to action it validates deviance from social norms. In these regards it enables comparative theorists to examine in concrete terms how fictive truths are produced and become performative. It suggests the importance and role of designated interpreters in narrating experience, generating texts and linking events to both, thereby collectivizing personal histories (Butler, 1996). In this manner, specific circumstances are both located in relation to a retrieved past and translated into critical signifiers that provide logical explanations for future choices. The past becomes ‘real’ in the events of the present. Texts so produced appear to embody truth values; they are widely distributed, or passed around, and begin to take on iconographic properties so as to serve as a source of instruction or a frame of reference for the more general understanding. Symbolic capital, grounded in events, has two components: myth- which reconstitutes experiences validated as theories—and theories that themselves become mythic, (as for example in Leninism or Maoism, or their religious counterparts). As an approach discourse theory is particularly useful in trying to account for how people try to transcend the limitations of their predicaments by reinterpreting the realities of their experience. If and when, as story and narrative, such reinterpretation becomes inter-subjective, capable of forming new codes and tropes, the result is that form of political chemistry which makes for collective individualism. Then, discourse comes to possess performative consequences, changing the world by re-interpreting it.
There are many advantages to discourse theory as an approach to comparison. But it has serious weaknesses as well. It works best in conjunction with intensive case studies in depth. It requires repetitive interviewing. It is not very amenable to operational techniques, survey, path analysis and other statistical methods. It is relativist. It is less concerned with the content of ideologies, the conventional interest of political scientists, than in the structure of beliefs, what forms them and how they become adopted. There is also a bias that over time rationality will triumph over non-rationality; logic over revelation, theory over myth, facts over appearances.
There are other lines of comparative inquiry that have emerged that doubt the validity of large-scale comparative theories and prefer the mobilization of different empirical strategies.
Cases for Comparison
There are a number of comparative sociological studies falling within the category of new institutionalism. A good transitional example is Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), which contrasted transitions from peasant and agrarian societies to either democracy or authoritarian outcomes in England, France, America, China, Japan and India. A second is Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (1979), which, following in Moore’s footsteps, compared France, Russia and China in terms of state structures and the mobilization of mass politics. There is a cluster of comparative work centering around class, nationalism, identity, jurisdiction, citizenship and ethnic and social conflict both theoretical and empirical. Among them are Craig Calhoun’s The Question of Class Struggle (1992), as well as his study of nationalism (1995) and Brubaker’s two volumes Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) and Nationalism Reframed (1996), comparative studies which center on nationalism, civic consciousness and citizenship, not least of all in terms of ‘communities of descent’. Similarly with other books on nationalism, such as Karen Barkey’s Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (1994; see also Barkey and von Hagen, 1997).
Among theoretically informed case/area studies there is indeed a powerful tradition. In terms of an older tradition using organizational variables we have already mentioned Ronald Dore’s landmark studies in Japan (1965, 1973). Among newer case studies with comparative theoretical implications are Roger Gould’s (1995) analysis of protest in nineteenth century Paris, and Andrew G. Walder’s Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (1986; see also Walder, 1995). The latter marks an interesting shift from the kind of concern with capitalism that preoccupied the historical sociologists to the transition from socialism to capitalism, a topic which has stimulated a variety of comparative studies of former communist countries. These include examination of certain central European former socialist states currently wrestling with how to make such a transition, as in the recent work of Ivan Szelenyi and his associates Making Capitalism Without Capitalists (Eyal et al., 1998) and David Stark’s Postsocialist Pathways (Stark and Bruszt, 1998).
As for discourse theory, perhaps because it is the most interdisciplinary of the various paradigms and approaches examined here most of its main practitioners are outside of the field of sociology per se. It has aroused considerable interest among historians, especially those working on France, which is not so surprising given the importance of French theoretical contributions. Here one might mention Le Roy Ladurie’s (1978) extraordinary reconstruction from the records of the Inquisition, of the mentality’ and religious commitments of a community of Cathars subjected to persecution in the twelfth century in what might be considered an exemplary example of a discourse community in which word and text appeared to violate Catholic norms totally. Similarly, his analysis of a semiotics of space in Carnival in Romans (1979), the latter much influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a similar vein, examining the influence of texts on revolutionary ideologies Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre (1984) was influenced by the ideas of Clifford Geertz. Also using France as the case, examining it in terms of virtually every aspect of its social life in terms of retrievals, is Pierre Nora’s monumental Realms of Memory (1992). Another study, Mona Ozouf’s La Fête révolutionnaire (1976), ‘decodes’ the symbolic, celebratory side of revolutionary events. Still another treats culture and text as originating factors in the French Revolution (Chartier, 1992). The list is virtually endless, but perhaps worth noting is that more and more sociological historians apply aspects of discourse theory to case materials from which they generate more general theory, including François Furet, also dealing with France, Jacques Lafaye on Mexico, Jeffrey Wasserstein on China etc.
It is not surprising that discourse theory remains a diverse and loose combination of ideas drawn from many fields and disciplines. It is above all concerned with how people interpret their lives, an operational project, and as well how to interpret the interpretations, a theoretical one. There have been a number of efforts to formalize it for comparative sociological research ranging from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic studies of myth and kinship to the specific study of ideology as in the work of Raymond Boudon (1986a). Among the most important influences in comparative sociology was Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, which, itself a case study of the Kabyle, generated categories of general application to comparative societies such as habitus and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984).
Other comparative studies loosely following one or other tradition in discourse theory include Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation (1995), which uses narrative theory in a context of China, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), James C. Scott’s, Seeing Like a State (1998), which uses multiple cases, as do Jean-François Bayart, L’Illusion identitaire (1996a) and La Greffe de l’état (1996b). My own more explicit formulations of discourse theory derive from specific field studies, as in Against the State (Apter and Sawa, 1984), a study of a protest movement in Japan, and Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Apter and Saich, 1994), a study of the central and defining moment’ of the Chinese communist revolution.
Main Currents in Comparative Analysis Today
It is probably fair to say that while comparative analysis has lost its antecedent paradigms it has gained in methodological proficiency and professionalized data analysis. Two studies stand out, if indeed they do not point the way for the succeeding generation of comparativists. The first follows in a tradition emphasizing state instability, revolutionary change and social protest. Most comparative political sociologists who have analyzed, for example, the English, French, Russian, Chinese, Mexican and other revolutions, their putative descendants in nationalist uprisings, anti-colonial struggles etc., try to develop wide-ranging general propositions about disjunctive transformations, as in the works of Wallerstein, Skocpol, Perry Anderson, Hobsbawm and others who rely on a combination of institutional, class and ideological structural variables. Challenging them are scholars like Jack Goldstone and Bruce Western, two of a growing group of comparativists dissatisfied with highly generalized models of ‘social change’. In his Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, Goldstone, for example, examines crises as precipitants of revolutionary change in a context of state breakdowns in England, France, the Ottoman Empire (with other comparisons interspersed in the analysis), preferring ‘robust processes’ over the deployment of omnibus comparative categories (Goldstone, 1991). Favoring multiple models and approaches and coming close to empirical essentialism, he suggests that
sociology seems to have gotten it backwards. The interminable arguments over whether ‘the social order’ is based on conflict or consensus, on whether ‘social change’ is founded primarily on material or idea factors, and on whether micro’ or ‘macro’ behavior is the fundamental object of sociological concern, reflect this notion that there is a problem of social order that, once solved, will allow all social behavior to be explained and understood. It should be evident by now that no such single solution is possible. (1991: 45)
Preferring ‘case-based method’ Goldstone introduces demographic factors as a way of accounting for the social consequences of economic factors germane to state breakdowns and revolutionary uprisings.
Similarly with Bruce Western. Where Goldstone studies comparative revolutions, Western, in Between Class and Market (1997), analyzes unionization in 18 advanced capitalist countries. He shares Goldstone’s distaste for formalized models and like him favors a problems-oriented approach to comparison. Western, however, relies far more heavily than Goldstone does on statistical analysis and while using institutional materials eschews structural analysis other than in terms of market effects. For Western, whose main hypothesis is that ‘labor movements grow where they are institutionally insulated from the market forces that drive up competition among workers’, examining the relationship between institutional factors, government support and degrees of insulation of workers from labor market competition using a concept of union density as a standard, illustrates the appropriate way to do comparative analysis. In a very convincing use of multiple measures Western is able to account for variations in unionization (Finland the highest and the United States the lowest), primarily in terms of the relationship between political institutions, parties and labor market vulnerability. Similarly with the work of Doug McAdam on political movements, as well as many others (McAdam and Diani, 2003).
These more recent tendencies in political and social comparative analysis, while they emphasize quantitative professionalism and in some respects are quite opposite to more historical, institutional, cultural and philosophical approaches, are hardly immune to institutional factors. However, their treatment of these latter is configuring rather than substantive. For example, in this regard Western’s treatment of comparative labor movements is utterly different from, say, the work of Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (1986), who employ case materials incorporating ideological, cultural and institutional factors in historical settings in the book they edited on Working Class Formation. There unionization is analyzed in terms of radicalization, the nature of the industry, class and political dynamics and what is a more rich and certainly more nuanced way, albeit a less ‘scientific’ treatment.
Nevertheless, it is clear that in showing how, respectively, multivariate analysis can be applied to a historical phenomenon and, in the latter case, to a kind of time series over a 50 year period and without pretending to formal models, Goldstone and Western arrive at striking conclusions. Both are indubitably comparative and it very much appears as if an important, if not the, way of the future points in their direction. Possibly too their successors will be able to incorporate more contextual knowledge, the kind that requires detailed case studies without at the same time diluting the elegance of more precise modes of analysis. Whatever criticism one might have of such elegance, the more it stays away from a specifically Weberian emphasis on case materials, the more its advantage with respect to theoretical closure. The question is what is the cost of such closure.
For some the answer is decidedly that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. This is certainly the case if one values a more scientific approach to comparative studies for its own sake. For others, while one can learn much about revolutions, or determinants of union density, or political movements, in the absence of greater interior understanding and knowledge of the dynamics involved, closure will be chimerical.
A Synoptic Conclusion
These last trends are particularly appropriate to subjects that, in the past, remained mostly outside the concerns of comparative studies, such as problems relating to race, gender, sexuality, immigration etc. Some of these have replaced earlier radical, Marxian and post-Marxian ‘projects’ whose emphases were mainly of the ‘last shall be first’ kind, that is, analysis with inversionary intents, and instead deal more realistically with them in terms of pluralistic accommodation. One might well argue that the more of a praxiology methodologically refined comparative research becomes, the more easily it can absorb other related fields such as economic sociology, political sociology, social movements, stratification etc. But there are also attendant dangers. One, a corollary of advancing American professionalism, is a decline in European intellectual influences. In these regards one might argue that as it becomes universalized American-style social analysis also parochializes the scope of what is being studied, and insofar as this occurs, comparative sociology as a distinct sub-field becomes more marginalized (Dogan, 2000).
Another danger is that more recent approaches relegate the contextual knowledge of area and case studies more and more to the fringes of the enterprise just at the moment where new substantive knowledge is required if only to avoid simplistic interpretations and solutions to major problems. Indeed, the need has never been greater for better understanding of complex social processes based on more specialized cultural knowledge.
This is not to say that reliance on quantitative, mainly distributional, criteria for every variety of variable—class, ethnicity, education, religion, income, occupation, residence (urban, rural etc.), patterns of participation, voting, consumption, the influence of the media, and so on, not to speak of organization variables rather than structural ones—can or should be lessened. Quite the contrary, the problem today is how to ensure a better fit between quantitative operationalization and interpretive understanding. In short, what Quentin Skinner once referred to as ‘grand theory’ should become more important rather than less.
One does not want to overdo this. After all, comparative sociology in the United States was hardly overwhelmed by the intellectual waves that occasionally washed over the field of comparative studies from abroad—interpretive, post-Marxist, semi philosophical. Indeed, the work of European sociologists such as Goldmann, Touraine and others such as Foucault or Baudrillard, all of whom did comparative work themselves and were enormously influential in their intellectual communities, did not make much of a dent in either American or British comparative sociology. There has been far more reservation about using such themes as ‘the other’ or ‘deviant’ and redeeming inversionary figures (homosexuality, the ‘subaltern’, ‘blackness’, ‘orientalism’, prisoners etc.) than what has become the catch-all for more radical social analysis, that is, ‘cultural studies’. Even where there have been comparative studies centering on emancipatory themes relating to gender, race, marginality, colonialism and, indeed, the hegemonic consequences of language, these were not done in particularly self-reflexive ways. To the point where, comparatively speaking in terms of say, anthropology, American sociology remains quite complacent and approving about the hegemony of its professionality, for the most part ignoring the contributions of such central figures as Pierre Bourdieu and his emphasis on the nature of socially constructed forms of power.
If these are questions for debate, their more immediate purpose is to help draw together the main threads of the analysis and to conclude with a brief assessment of where comparative sociology presently stands. Very briefly, the discussion so far suggests four general characteristics of the field as follows.
First, where earlier analysis was concerned, comparisons between preindustrial and industrial societies, the structural and normative differences between them, and transitions from the one to the other, centering on the nature of capitalism, its components of and types of social integration, modern comparative sociology has moved away from gross categories, breaking them into more complex variables, less deep structures or central norms and values and more differentiated combinations more amenable to statistical and survey data. ‘Integration’ has become far less central to analysis and systemic theory has declined in favor of inductive modeling.
Secondly, comparative sociology is itself no longer a preoccupation of a relatively small number of scholars working primarily in research centers and universities in the West or mainly in the United States. There has been a remarkable proliferation of centers of comparative sociology in Latin America, Japan, Africa, China etc., much of it involving research teamwork, and supported by philanthropic as well as governmental organizations inside and outside of universities. One result is that comparative sociology is transformed from an analytical framework of its own into a strategic one enabling both shared research and the diversification of projects. The spread of such centers and the wide-ranging character of their investigations has mobilized ‘local knowledge’ in ways denied to outsiders, while contributing to the kind of deep knowledge (indigenousness as an original ethnography) that relies on statistically grounded sociological methods. This has been particularly the case where comparative analysis focuses on immigration and emigration, ethnicity, religiosity etc., as these intersect with class, gender, race, education, family patterns, urbanism, law, public and private organization, and social pathologies with political violence in the large frame.
Thirdly, the dominance of market economics and the decline of radical and socialist theories of social development has introduced a new emphasis on rational choice, theories of risk, the sociology of the enterprise and connections to social psychology.
Which has, fourthly and finally, in effect universalized comparison in terms of core problems rather than substantive areas, the former including speculation on uneven change, the variable receptivity to modernism (although there continues to be substantial debate over what modernism means in different settings), with emphasis on social instabilities and their political consequences.
Do these four tendencies suggest that comparative sociology in its more original emphasis on institutions, system and process (a tradition that, as we have seen, began with the early evolutionists and extended through both revisionist Marxism and Parsonianism), has more or less disappeared? In some ways yes, it has. Insofar as they were systemic, articulating a logic of modernism, and assuming commonalities of function rather than form, it was possible to deal with comparative societies as such as well as particular components without losing the sense of their wholeness as societies, that is as systems of social structure and cultural entities. Similarly, dialectical modes of analysis, too, despite their alternative emphases, were systemic in their focus on structural contradiction rather than accommodation. But perhaps the very complexity of modern social life has made obsolete the kind of historical/comparative analysis which sees system in large-scale terms, even when employing more finely tuned distinctions than the old ‘traditional—modern’ binaries that in their day purported to generalized conclusions. It is also the case that more problems-centered quantitatively nourished modern modes of analysis have given us a more precise knowledge of social life and its political consequences ‘round the globe’ as it were.
These are real accomplishments. But they open up as many questions as they resolve. Has new knowledge derived from comparative study been widely disseminated and diffused through a more informed and educated citizenry? The answer seems woefully negative. Even more woeful has been the lack of impact on major policymakers in government. Nor has the expropriation of such approaches by the vastly increased number and spread of think-tanks and policy research centers now found all over the globe led to better advice to princes. While data has certainly piled up most citizens know less than before, not only because new sociological knowledge of other people and places remains inaccessible in the measure that it becomes available, but also because frameworks of understanding have become objects of suspicion. This both in terms of society at large, which on the whole remains ignorant of them, or among the significant political elites who largely ignore them, the main sources of advice to princes come from think-tanks whose policy recommendations tend to fit preferred ideologies rather than being grounded in basic research. Indeed, policymakers remain fearful of expert social knowledge because it tends to be politically tone deaf. And, despite the spread of interest in the comparative understanding of other parts of the world, in the United States a general parochialism is built into our firm beliefs in the universality of our own views. Insofar as Americans regard themselves as the measure of all others, the likelihood is that again and again and despite evermore sophisticated methods of analysis, we will continue to be surprised by unforeseen contingencies.
If it remains among the purposes of social science to be able to reduce the contingent by means of the theoretical, to make better and more testable predictive and projective hypotheses by probing more deeply into the intentions, meanings, actualities and ambiguities of political and social life, this analysis suggests a need to go back to the drawing boards. What is required is greater emphasis on fieldwork and field studies (Bates and other proponents of rational choice theory to the contrary) and less on survey analysis. This even though the implications of the work of Goldstone, Western, McAdam and to some extent Tilly and others are that comparative analysis has outlived its ‘paradigmatic phase’, especially since, unlike theories, paradigms are not right or wrong and therefore difficult to assess in terms of adequate or inadequate. Moreover, if, as suggested above, paradigm shifts occur in the social sciences according to fashions, rather than fresh insights, then they are fairly dodgy intellectual instruments for all their pretensions.
All of this is true enough. But what it does not take into account is that the kinds of paradigms discussed above contain not so much specific knowledge but knowledge of the nature of relevance for knowledge. This suggests that comparative sociology needs to redefine on its own terms not only the nature of its knowledge but the contexts in which such knowledge is germane. Focusing on problems is not enough. And, more parenthetically in this regard, neither the new institutionalism nor discourse theory, not to speak of more multivariate forms of analysis, provide structuring paradigms.
It is of course crucial to emphasize problems as the way into comparative research. But it is equally crucial to have a place to stand which effectively grounds whatever the favored theoretical approaches and components. In this sense professional comparative analysis is very much a process of changing the lens on a camera; with each change in the optic, one frames the subject differently. And that holds as true for the old paradigms as well as the newer presumed alternatives.
One can therefore agree on the need for multiple approaches and a problems emphasis. What ought not be excluded is a concern with structural frameworks if not models. It is in providing such materials in the context of interior forms of knowledge that makes Weber still relevant. Yes, evolutionism per se is today not very useful, but systemic tendencies and directionality are. Systems theory is now quaint but it focused on the relationship between general systems and sub-systems, the framework for network analysis. Yes, the Parsonian framework fails as such but several of the principles behind it, social equilibria and its time-space components remain relevant for studies of social integration and mal-integration. Yes, Marxist and world system theories have lost the power of their solutions. Nevertheless, in a globalized world as critiques they remain more important than ever, not least of all in questioning the positive accomplishments of capitalism and reflecting on its negative aspects.
The hero of this story about comparative analysis has, of course, been Max Weber. No scholar dealt with so many central issues more fruitfully in his day and perhaps in ours than he. But if he remains the model comparativist (although he could not and did not himself do fieldwork in ancient Israel, China, or India) one might speculate on what direction he would take us today. Perhaps it would be towards a new synthesis in which modern methodological approaches and field techniques would be applied to case materials to generate more depth, while rigorously framing both in the context of new and more abstract ideal types. What he would no doubt disavow is in part what he himself did, derive his material first from plundering the literature without even a brief visit to the site, or relying on a survey or two. Which leads us to the following very modest conclusion. If it is to renew itself, comparative sociology needs more than ever to become a fieldwork discipline in the true sense—with comparative cases more than mere illustrations for what is known, but instead a source of new ideas, new hypotheses and new theories.