Download Readings on Research Design (CT 3/4/00)

Readings on Research Design, 1988-2003 (CT 1/20/04)
For purposes of teaching, I have restricted the bibliography to texts in English. I can supply
plenty of valuable references in other European languages.
1. Knowledge, Explanation, and Method
Abbott, Andrew (2001): Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Binary division,
repeated at many levels, helps explain how sociology – like other disciplines – got into its present
pickles. (2001): Time Matters. On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Golden
Oldies of the Abbott canon.
Alford, Robert R. (1998): The Craft of Inquiry. Theories, Methods, Evidence. New York: Oxford
University Press. “Knowledgeable, reflective, and humane,” reads my blurb, “Robert Alford applies
strong colors with a sure hand as he produces a well-crafted group portrait of sociology’s multiple
personalities.”
Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob (1994): Telling the Truth About History. New York:
Norton. How to defend historical knowledge against the excesses of postmodern skepticism.
Barnes, Barry (1995): The Elements of Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Individualism, functionalism, and interactionism as ways of explaining such phenomena as social classes
and social movements; a superior textbook.
Baron, James N. & Michael T. Hannan (1994): "The Impact of Economics on Contemporary Sociology,"
Journal of Economic Literature 32: 1111-1146.
Bates, Robert H. et al. (1998): Analytical Narratives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The et al.
are Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Barry Weingast, all of whom use rational
choice formalisms to frame complex accounts of political and economic processes.
Becker, Howard S. (1998): Tricks of the Trade. How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing
It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wise trickster Becker chats about social science imagery,
sampling, concepts, and logic.
Bermeo, Nancy (2003): Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. The Citizenry and the Breakdown of
Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Despite the implications of mass society theories to
the contrary, close examination of de-democratization in interwar Europe and postwar Latin America
indicates that the crucial polarizations and defections occur mainly among elites.
Bhargava, Rajeev (1992): Individualism in Social Science. Forms and Limits of a Methodology. Oxford:
Clarendon Press. Finally methodological individualism's philosophical foundations and ambiguities get
the professional scrutiny they deserve.
Blute, Marion (1997): “History Versus Science: The Evolutionary Solution,” Canadian Journal of
Sociology 22: 345-364.
Design: 1
Boehm, Christopher (1996): “Emergency Decisions, Cultural-Selection Mechanisms, and Group
Selection,” Current Anthropology 37: 763-793.
Bonnell, Victoria E. & Lynn Hunt (1999): eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn. New Directions in the Study of
Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Now that we’ve turned, where do we go
next?
Brettell, Caroline B. (2002): “The Individual/Agent and Culture/Structure in the History of the Social
Sciences,” Social Science History 26: 429-446.
Bunge, Mario (1996): Finding Philosophy in Social Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. A
physicist turned philosopher locates philosophical assertions, and blunders, in social-scientific
discourse. See also his (1998): Social Science Under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press and (1999): The Sociology-Philosophy Connection. New Brunswick:
Transaction.
Büthe, Tim (2002): “Taking Temporality Seriously: Modeling History and the Use of Narratives as
Evidence,” American Political Science Review 96: 481-494.
Centeno, Miguel Angel & Fernando López-Alves (2001): eds., The Other Mirror. Grand Theory through
the Lens of Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The editors and distinguished
collaborators rethink the relevance of Alexander Gerschenkron, Barrington Moore, Karl Polanyi, and
other Old Worthies (myself included) to the explanation of Latin American experience.
Chamberlayne, Prue, Joanna Bornat & Tom Wengraf (2000): eds., The Turn to Biographical Methods in
Social Science. Comparative Issues and Examples. London: Routledge. The thrills and dangers of
teetering at the edge of phenomenological individualism.
Coleman, James S. (1990): Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Massive
extension and revision of rational-action analyses over a wide range of social life, complete with
mathematical restatements of major arguments and fresh critiques of the classics.
Collins, Randall (1999): Macro History. Essays in Sociology of the Long Run. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. An ingenious, knowledgeable, talented synthesizer looks at history through Weberian
spectacles.
Cooper, Frederick, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia E. Mallon, Steve J. Stern & William Roseberry (1993):
Confronting Historical Paradigms. Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin
America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Outstanding critics and synthesizers review the
state of their art.
Cooper, Frederick & Randall Packard (1997): eds., International Development and the Social Sciences.
Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ideas,
practices, and consequences of developmental thinking.
Design: 2
Curtis, Bruce (2001): The Politics of Population. State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada,
1840-1875. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Documentation of documentation as a politically
motivated and socially constructed process.
Darrow, David (2001): “From Commune to Household: Statistics and the Social Construction of
Chaianov’s Theory of Peasant Economy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43: 788-818.
Dening, Greg (1992): Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language. Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Mutiny on the Bounty as history and as theater.
Desrosières, Alain (1998): The Politics of Large Numbers. A History of Statistical Reasoning.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. The production and analysis of statistics entails making uniform,
or at least comparable, and therefore rests on the power to impose grids.
Douglas, Mary & Steven Ney (1998): Missing Persons. A Critique of the Social Sciences. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Groupness and gridness, as aspects of culture, provide a way of situating
the isolated individual of today’s prevalent theories within different sorts of social milieux.
Eley, Geoff (2001): “Generations of Social History” in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of European
Social History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Vol. I, 3-30.
Elster, Jon (1989): Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1999): Alchemies of the Mind. Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Handy, graceful inventories of causal mechanisms, centering on individual cognitive mechanisms.
Evans, Richard J. (2001): Lying about Hitler. History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. New
York: Basic Books. A German historian called as an expert witness tells what happens when
Holocaust denial goes to court in an author’s suit for defamation.
Fogel, Joshua A. (2000): ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Berkeley: University
of California Press. When the Japanese army captured the provisional Chinese capital, Nanjing, in
December 1937, Japanese soldiers killed and raped thousands of Chinese residents. Here skilled
historians examine how other historians have described, explained, and interpreted the massacre.
Franzosi, Roberto (1998): "Narrative Analysis, or Why (and How) Sociologists Should Be Interested in
Narrative," Annual Review of Sociology 24: 517-554. (1998): “Narrative as Data: Linguistic and
Statistical Tools for the Quantitative Study of Historical Events,” International Review of Social
History 43, Supplement 6: New Methods for Social History, 81-104. (2004): From Words to Numbers.
A Journey in the Methodology of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The logic of
formalizing representations of verbal material, as seen in one creative scholar’s own research.
Gaddis, John Lewis (2002): The Landscape of History. How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. An outstanding international historian reflects engagingly, if not always persuasively,
on what sets historical analysis apart, and what makes it more like natural science than social science.
Design: 3
Geertz, Clifford (2000): Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. One of our time’s most literate, original, and influential anthropologists
reflects in public about problems of knowledge, including self-knowledge.
Gerring, John (2001): Social Science Methodology. A Criterial Framework. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Concept formation, proposition formation, and research design as practical problems.
Gould, Roger V. (2003): ed., General History and Historical Sociology.. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Controversy over the proper place of general models (and the right sorts of general models) in
historical analysis.
Green, Donald P. & Ian Shapiro (1994): Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory. A Critique of
Applications in Political Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. To what extent have the models of
Arrow, Downs, and Olson received empirical confirmation in political science? Not much. For plenty of
heat and some light in a followup discussion, see Jeffrey Friedman, ed., The Rational Choice
Controversy. Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996
Grusky, David B. & Jesper B. Sørensen (1998): "Can Class Analysis Be Salvaged?" American Journal of
Sociology 103: 1187-1234.
Hacking, Ian (1999): Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. What’s at
issue in debates over social construction? Philosopher-critic Hacking tells us wittily.
Hamilton, Richard F. (1996): The Social Misconstruction of Reality. Validity and Verification in the
Scholarly Community. New Haven: Yale University Press. How and why unsubstantiated or clearly
incorrect theses such as Weber’s linking of capitalism to Protestantism and Foucault’s account of
prisons come to be widely accepted.
Hawthorn, Geoffrey (1991): Plausible Worlds. Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social
Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. How explanation requires counterfactuals, but
counterfactuals are always indeterminate.
Heckhausen, Jutta & Pascal Boyer (2000): eds., “Evolutionary Psychology: Potential and Limits of a
Darwinian Framework for the Behavioral Sciences,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 6, entire
issue. Instead of the usual hyperbole, a relatively balanced treatment.
Hedström, Peter & Richard Swedberg (1998): eds., Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to
Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. If simple description, empathetic
interpretation, black boxes, or covering laws won't do, what will? Social mechanisms!
Hoyle, Rick H., Monica J. Harris & Charles M. Judd (2002): Research Methods in Social Relations. Fort
Worth: Wadsworth. Seventh edition of a classic textbook – originally by Marie Jahoda, Morton
Deutsch, and Stuart Cook – that introduced generations of graduate students (including me) to the
practicalities of social research.
Design: 4
Hug, Simon & Dominique Wisler (1998): "Correcting for Selection Bias in Social Movement Research,"
Mobilization 3: 141-162.
Immerfall, Stefan (1992): "Macrohistorical Models in Historical-Electoral Research: A Fresh Look at
the Stein-Rokkan-Tradition," Historical Social Research 17: 103-116.
Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus (2002): “Rethinking Weber: Towards a Non-individualist Sociology of World
Politics,” International Review of Sociology 12: 439-468.
Katz, Jack (2001): “From How to Why. On Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography
(Part 1),” Ethnography 2: 443-473. (2002): “From How to Why. On Luminous Description and Causal
Inference in Ethnography (Part 2).” Ethnography 3: 63-90.
King, Barbara J. & Stuart G. Shanker (2003): “How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance? The
Dynamic Nature of African Great Ape Social Communication,” Anthropological Theory 3: 5-26.
King, Gary (1997): A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem. Reconstructing Individual Behavior
from Aggregate Data. Princeton: Princeton University Press. If you adopt the method of bounds,
weight units for population size, and then do your regressions, it turns out that you can arrive at
excellent estimates of individual-level numbers and correlations.
King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane & Sidney Verba (1994): Designing Social Inquiry. Scientific Inference in
Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Although it still slides from time to time
into treating qualitative analysis as a poor cousin of quantitative analysis, the book provides a superior
introduction to the logic of social inquiry.
Kontopoulos, Kyriakos M. (1993): The Logics of Social Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Tortuous but reflective review of ways to conceptualize social structure, from reductionist to
holistic.
Kuper, Adam (1999): Culture. The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. A
shrewd ethnographer traces anthropology’s path through culture, and vice versa, with an acid pen.
Laitin, David D. (2003): “The Perestroikan Challenge to Social Science,” Politics and Society 31: 163184.
van Leeuwen, Marco H.D. & Ineke Maas (1996): “Long-Term Social Mobility: Research Agenda and a
Case Study (Berlin, 1825-1957),” Continuity and Change 11: 399-433.
Lewin, Shira (1996): “Economics and Psychology: Lessons for Our Own Day from the Early Twentieth
Century,” Journal of Economic Literature 34: 1293-1323.
Lichbach, Mark I. & Adam B. Seligman (2000): Market and Community. The Bases of Social Order,
Revolution, and Relegitimation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Dialogue between
a rationalist and a culturalist shows why neither strict market nor strict community analyses explain
social reordering.
Design: 5
Lichbach, Mark Irving & Alan S. Zuckerman (1997): eds., Comparative Politics. Rationality, Culture, and
Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. What's the best three traditions -- rationalist,
culturalist, and structuralist -- can do for comparative politics, and how might we synthesize that best?
Lieberson, Stanley & Freda B. Lynn (2002): “Barking Up the Wrong Branch: Scientific Alternatives to
the Current Model of Sociological Science,” Annual Review of Sociology 28: 1-19.
Link, Bruce G. & Jo Phelan (1995): “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Journal of
Health and Social Behavior (Extra Issue), 80-94.
Little, Daniel (1991): Varieties of Social Explanation. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social
Science. Boulder: Westview. (1998): On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Microfoundations,
Method, and Causation. New Brunswick: Transaction. Rational choice Marxism confronts practical
problems in area studies, comparative politics, and elsewhere.
Lloyd, Christopher (1993): The Structures of History. Oxford: Blackwell. Sophisticated, systematic,
philosophical survey of conditions for valid historically grounded social science.
Mahoney, James (1999): "Nominal, Ordinal, and Narrative Appraisal in Macrocausal Analysis," American
Journal of Sociology 104: 1154-1196. (2000): “Strategies of Causal Inference in Small-N Analysis,”
Sociological Methods and Research 28: 387-424. (2000): “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,”
Theory and Society 29: 507-548.
Mahoney, James & Dietrich Rueschemeyer (2003): eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social
Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heavies of the field weigh in on a controversial
question: what’s the point?
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow & Charles Tilly (2001): Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Why and how to rethink explanations of political struggle.
Merton, Robert K. & Elinor Barber (2004): The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Serious (word)play concerning the evolution, application, and social
scientific significance of the concept.
Miller, Dale T. (1999): “The Norm of Self-Interest,” American Psychologist 54: 1053-1060.
Mitchell, Timothy (2002): Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of
California Press. Shrewd observations on Egyptian technical and economic change coupled with a
sustained critique of any social science relying on self-contained entities, intentional actions, and/or
coherent social forces.
Mohr, John (1998): “Measuring Meaning Structures,” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 345-370. (2000):
ed., “Relational Analysis and Institutional Meanings: Formal Models for the Study of Culture,” special
issue of Poetics 27, nos. 2 & 3.
Design: 6
Mohr, John W. & Roberto Franzosi (1997): eds., “Special Double Issue on New Directions in
Formalization and Historical Analysis,” Theory and Society 28, nos. 2 & 3.
Molho, Anthony & Gordon S. Wood (1998): eds., Imagined Histories. American Historians Interpret the
Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press. America-based historians (not all, by any means, Americanborn) examine histories throughout the world.
Monkkonen, Eric H. (1994): ed., Engaging the Past. The Uses of History Across the Social Sciences.
Durham: Duke University Press. History, anthropology, economics, sociology, political science, and
geography, reflectively and critically reviewed.
Morawska, Ewa & Willfried Spohn (1994): "'Cultural Pluralism' in Historical Sociology: Recent
Theoretical Directions," in Diana Crane, ed., The Sociology of Culture. Emerging Theoretical
Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell.
Motyl, Alexander J. (1999): Revolutions, Nations, Empires. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sustained, demanding, often witty brief for well formed concepts as necessary (but not sufficient)
conditions for effective theorizing about revolutions, nations, and empires.
Munck, Gerardo L. (1998): “Canons of Research Design in Qualitative Analysis,” Studies in Comparative
International Development 33: 18-45.
Oliver, Pamela E. & Daniel J. Myers (1999): “How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location,
and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events,” American Journal of Sociology 105:
38-87.
Olzak, Susan (1989): "Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action," Annual Review of Sociology
15: 119-141.
O’Meara, J. Tim (2001): “Causation and the Postmodern Critique of Objectivity,” Anthropological
Theory 1: 31-56.
Padgett, John F. & Christopher K. Ansell (1993): "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 14001434," American Journal of Sociology 98: 1259-1319.
Podolny, Joel (2003): “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Symbols: A Sociologist’s View of the Economic
Pursuit of Truth,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 92: 169-174.
Ragin, Charles C. (1994): Constructing Social Research. The Unity and Diversity of Method. Thousand
Oaks, California: Pine Forge. Sensible, readable introduction to the choices confronting empirical
researchers. (2000): Fuzzy-Set Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. How to make
complex partial similarities and differences work for rather than against explanation.
Ragin, Charles C. & Howard S. Becker (1992): eds., What is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social
Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. To ask "What is a case?" is to ask how any systematic
evidence of general propositions can exist.
Design: 7
Reskin, Barbara F. (2003): “Including Mechanisms in Our Models of Ascriptive Inequality,” American
Sociological Review 68: 1-21.
Rule, James B. (1997): Theory and Progress in Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
How, if at all, does systematic knowledge of social processes advance?
Sawyer, R. Keith (2003): Group Creativity. Music, Theater, Collaboration. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates. A canny participant observer looks at interpersonal communication and influence in
the creative process.
Schweingruber, David (2000): “Mob Sociology and Escalated Force: Sociology’s Contribution to
Repressive Police Tactics,” Sociological Quarterly 41: 371-389.
Shapiro, Gilbert & John Markoff (1998): Revolutionary Demands. A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de
Doléances of 1789. Stanford: Stanford University Press. A massive, concrete introduction to content
analysis of complex documents, not to mention a major source for study of the French Revolution.
Smith, Bonnie G. (1998): The Gender of History. Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. With academic installation of history, a remarkable division opened up
between male professionalism and female amateurism.
Smith, Dennis (1991): The Rise of Historical Sociology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Why
there's still some hope for the enterprise.
Smocovitis, Vassiliki Betty (1996): Unifying Biology. The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary
Biology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The Neo-Darwinian synthesis and debate taken as a
serious, consequential work of art.
Steinmetz, George (1999): ed., State/Culture. State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. Why and how to incorporate culture into macropolitical analyses.
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1991): "The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing About Mechanisms in
Social Science," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21: 367-88. (1997): “On the Virtues of the Old
Institutionalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 1-18.
Stokes, Gale (2001): “The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories,” American
Historical Review 106: 508-525.
Thaler, Richard (2000): “From Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens,” Journal of Economic Perspectives
14: 133-141.
Tilly, Charles (1997): “Means and Ends of Comparison in Macrosociology,” Comparative Social Research
16: 43-53. (1998): Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. An attempt (so far not
very successful) to introduce relational thinking into a highly individualistic field. (2001): “Historical
Analysis of Political Processes” in Jonathan H. Turner, ed., Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York:
Design: 8
Kluwer/Plenum. (2001): “Mechanisms in Political Processes,” Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21-41.
(2002): “Event Catalogs as Theories,” Sociological Theory 20: 248-254. (2002): Stories, Identities, and
Political Change. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. A huddle of writings on the subject(s) from
1989 to 2002.
Turbin, Carole, Laura L. Frader, Sonya O. Rose, Evelyn Nakano Glenn & Elizabeth Faue (1998): "A
Roundtable on Gender, Race, Class, Culture, and Politics: Where Do We Go from Here?" Social Science
History 22: 1-45.
Udehn, Lars (1996): The Limits of Public Choice. A Sociological Critique of the Economic Theory of
Politics. London: Routledge. The (very serious) weaknesses of economic models for political processes.
Van de Mieroop, Marc (1999): Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History. London: Routledge. Thus
proving that Mesopotamian history, for all its air of positivism, offers ample space for disputes over
explanation and knowledge.
White, Harrison (1992): Identity and Control. A Structural Theory of Social Action. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Brilliant, erratic, exasperatingly abstract synthesis.
Williams, David R. & Chiquita Collins (1995): “US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health:
Patterns and Explanations,” Annual Review of Sociology 21: 349-386.
Wong, Bin (1997): China Transformed. Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press. How to think about Chinese history other than as not-Europe.
2. Exemplary Recent Monographs
Abbott, Andrew (1988): The System of Professions. An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. Struggles for turf as a spur to professionalization. (1999): Department &
Discipline. Chicago Soicology at One Hundred. Chciago: University of Chicago Press. A serious critical
history of a consequential intellectual enterprise.
Alexander, Gerard (2002): The Sources of Democratic Consolidation. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press. Conditions under which conservative elites resist or tolerate democratization in Spain and
elsewhere.
Amenta, Edwin (1998): Bold Relief. Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social
Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Why the US mounted an unprecedented program of work
and relief during the 1930s, then quickly abandoned its world leadership in that regard during the
1940s.
Aminzade, Ronald (1993): Ballots and Barricades. Class Formation and Republican Politics in France,
1830-1871. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The emergence of an industrial working class
promoted popular republicanism that differed in important ways from its bourgeois cousin.
Design: 9
Ansell, Christopher K. (2001): Schism and Solidarity in Social Movements. The Politics of Labor in the
French Third Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Organizational schism occurs, Ansell
argues with ample evidence, when communal groups move toward closure.
Ashforth, Adam (1990): The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa.
Oxford: Clarendon Press. How South African authorities and academics constructed and imposed
racial categories.
Auyero, Javier (2000): Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita.
Durham: Duke University Press. Acute ethnography + refined political science = new light on patronage
politics. (2003): Contentious Lives. Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for
Recognition. Durham: Duke University Press. Hard lives, hard times, and political involvement
intertwine.
Baily, Samuel L. (1999): Immigrants in the Lands of Promise. Italians in Buenos Aires and New York
City, 1870 to 1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. How the social contexts and internal organization
of migration affected coping patterns of migrants in San Francisco São Paulo, Toronto, and (especially)
Buenos Aires and New York.
Ballinger, Pamela (2003): History in Exile. Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Simultaneously 1) a careful ethnography of constructed memory
among persons of claimed Italian descent who stayed in or left Istria when Yugoslavia took over the
region and 2) a sustained reflection on ethnography, identity, and historical memory.
Barkey, Karen (1994): Bandits and Bureaucrats. The Ottoman Route of State Centralization. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. How the Ottoman Empire's special forms of political power made the
conjunction of bandits and bureaucrats less contradictory than European experience would suggest.
Bearman, Peter S. (1993): Relations into Rhetorics. Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England,
1540-1640. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Changing networks of kinship and patronage as a
key to political transformation.
Beissinger, Mark (2001): Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Event analysis goes big time, and proves illuminating.
Binder, Amy J. (2002): Contentious Curricula. Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public
Schools. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Two different ways by which outsiders make an
impression on public school programs, and educational professionals blunt that impression.
Bratton, Michael & Nicolas van de Walle (1997): Democratic Experiments in Africa. Regime Transitions
in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. What produced protest,
democratization, and/or democratic consolidation in Subsaharan Africa between 1990 and 1994?
Breman, Jan (1996): Footloose Labour. Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Thirty years of perceptive ethnography in Gujarat produces a fresh, if often
appalling, view of landless labor.
Design: 10
Broadbent, Jeffrey (1998): Environmental Politics in Japan. Networks of Power and Protest.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Interaction among national political structure, Japanese
culture, and local environmental struggles.
Brubaker, Rogers (1992): Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. Sustained comparison from the 17th century onward brings out the difference
between "inclusive" French and "exclusive" German principles of citizenship as a function of state
formation.
Bryan, Dominic (2000): Orange Parades. The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. London: Pluto
Press. Ethnography and history combine to cast light on how tradition changes in response to
negotiation.
Burawoy, Michael & János Lukács (1992): The Radiant Past. Ideology and Reality in Hungary's Road to
Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fieldwork and theory converge in an inside-outside
view.
Centeno, Miguel (2001): Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America. University Park:
Penn State University Press. Balances shrewdly between identifying distinctive properties of Latin
American national patterns, on one side, and integrating Latin American histories into international
comparisons, on the other.
Charrad, Mounira M. (2001): States and Women’s Rights. The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. The extent to which a newly independent regime
freed itself of reliance on existing tribal power (most in Tunisia, least in Morocco) strongly affected
the prospects for the establishment of independent and individual women’s rights.
Clemens, Elisabeth S. (1997): The People’s Lobby. Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest
Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. How connected
clumps of farmers, workers, and other fairly ordinary citizens acquired voice through popular
associations.
Cohen, Lizabeth (1990): Making a New Deal. Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. By what means, and with what effects, the Second Industrial Revolution,
the Depression, and the New Deal altered workers' lives.
Cohn, Samuel R. (1993): When Strikes Make Sense -- And Why. New York: Plenum. Coalminers' strikes
under the French Third Republic illuminate general conditions for effective striking.
Collier, Ruth Berins (1999): Paths toward Democracy. The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe
and South America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bold, yet careful, comparison of multiple
political transitions.
Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi (1999): The Native Leisure Class. Consumption and Cultural Creativity in the
Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Instead of blathering about globalization and
Design: 11
transnationalism, this artist-ethnographer shows what actually happens as Ecuadoran weavers hook into
the international economy.
Conley, Dalton (1999): Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America.
Berkeley: University of California Press. Racial inequality explained by black-white differences in
wealth.
Davis, Mike (2001): Late Victorian Holocausts. El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
London: Verso. Climatic shifts made them possible, but the imposition of world market connections
made them lethal.
DeVault, Marjorie (1991): Feeding the Family. The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. What careful interviewing can uncover concerning gender
divisions of labor in households.
Dezalay, Yves & Bryant G. Garth (2002): The Internationalization of Palace Wars. Lawyers, Economists,
and the Contest to Transform Latin American States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. How
experts in law and/or economics got involved in national struggles for power in Chile, Mexico, Brazil,
and Argentina.
Diani, Mario (1995): Green Networks. A Structural Analysis of the Italian Environmental Movement.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. How organizations connect and coordinate in social-movement
mobilization and, for that matter, demobilization.
Dirks, Nicholas B. (2001): Castes of Mind. Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Colonizers, power holders, reformers, and nationalists create a new set
of understandings, ideologies, and practices referring to a unifying reality that never existed.
Downs, Laura Lee (1995): Manufacturing Inequality. Gender Division in the French and British
Metalworking Industries, 1914-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Skilled historical
reconstruction of differences by country and gender.
Duneier, Mitchell (1992): Slim’s Table. Race, Respectability, and Masculinity. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. Perceptive reports on hanging out in and around a Hyde Park cafeteria segue into a
critical discussion of previous attempts to portray ghetto social lives. (1999): Sidewalk. New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. What social life and conversation are like, and to some extent why, among
New York street people.
Edelman, Marc (1999): Peasants Against Globalization. Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica. Stanford:
Stanford University Press. How to use theory as a scalpel rather than a bludgeon.
Ertman, Thomas (1997): Birth of the Leviathan. Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. How forms of local government and the timing
of war affected the organization of states.
Design: 12
Fitch, Kristine L. (1998): Speaking Relationally. Culture, Communication, and Interpersonal Connection.
New York: Guilford. Ethnography of conversation among middle-class Colombians that forms and transforms interpersonally grounded identities. Don’t miss the (inter)personal epilogue.
Fogel, Robert William (2000): The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. Technological change poses moral and political problems to which religious
innovation responds. Conflict, and new approaches to inequality, ensue.
Franzosi, Roberto (1995): The Puzzle of Strikes. Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perhaps the most successful marriage of econometric analysis
and historical treatment of industrial conflict ever consummated.
Freedman, Paul (1991): The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Imposing servitude by force in a time of monarchical weakening; throwing it off by
peasant rebellion in a time of monarchical strengthening.
Freeland, Robert F. (2001): The Struggle for Control of the Modern Corporation. Organizational
Change at General Motors, 1924-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hard slogging in
company archives establishes that – pace Alfred Chandler and Alfred Sloan himself – the “Sloan Model”
of hands-off management actually involved strenuous bargaining with division chiefs.
Gallo, Carmenza (1991): Taxes and State Power. Political Instability in Bolivia, 1900-1950. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press. At last someone sees -- and very brightly -- the significance of the interplay
between taxation and class structure for political conflict.
Gamson, William A. (1992): Talking Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. How fairly ordinary
people frame political discussion, and what the media have to do with it.
Gershuny, Jonathan (2000): Changing Times. Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. What aggregated time diaries from twenty countries tell us about alterations
in human daily activities since 1960.
Glenn, John K. III (2001): Framing Democracy. Civil Society and Civic Movements in Eastern Europe.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. In Poland’s exit from socialism, religious organizations figured
centrally; in Czechoslovakia, theater groups and intellectuals. How, why, and with what consequences?
Glete, Jan (2002): War and the State in Early Modern Europe. Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden
as Fiscal- Military States, 1500-1660. London: Routledge. The three countries, according to Glete,
synthesized markets, hierarchies, and networks into newly efficient forms of organization.
Goldstone, Jack A. (1991): Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of
California Press. Sweeping comparison and connection of 16th- to 18th-century revolutions, with
glances forward to our own time.
Goodin, Robert E., Bruce Headey, Ruud Muffels & Henk-jan Dirven (1999): The Real Worlds of Welfare
Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panel studies of the US, Germany, and the
Design: 13
Netherlands from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s assess the relative success of different welfare
systems in promoting efficiency, equality, integration, stability, autonomy, and poverty reduction.
Goodwin, Jeff (2001): No Other Way Out. States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweeping and analytically ambitious comparisons of revolutions
during (and at the end of) the Cold War.
Gould, Roger V. (1995): Insurgent Identities. Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the
Commune. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. How changing network structure affected the
interests, identities, and social relations on the basis of which Parisians rebelled . . . or, for that
matter, failed to rebel. (2003): Collision of Wills. How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The late great analyst of political processes treats escalation as
an outcome of relational jockeying.
Gowa, Joanne (1999): Ballots and Bullets. The Elusive Democratic Peace. Princeton: Princeton University
Press. Once you allow for Cold War alliances, democracies are just as likely to fight as are other
states.
Graham, Laurie (1995): On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu. The Japanese Model and the American Worker.
Ithaca: ILR Press. A clandestine participant observer documents the clash between Japanese systems
of control and American workers’ techniques of resistance.
Greenfeld, Liah (1992): Nationalism. Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
How elite ideas of the nation formed and changed in England, France, Germany, Russia, and the United
States.
Gross, Jan T. (2001): Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. The chilling story of how (but not so much why) half a village’s
people murdered the other half during the summer of 1941.
Grossman, Andrew D. (2001): Neither Dead Nor Red. Civilian Defense and American Political
Development During the Early Cold War. New York: Routledge. The Cold War, in Grossman’s account,
produced an unprecedented strengthening of the American state’s preemptive powers.
Gurr, Ted Robert (2000): Peoples Versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century. Washington:
United States Institute of Peace Press; revised edition of 1993 Minorities at Risk. Communal groups
and their struggles on a world scale, 1945-1999
Guthrie, Doug (1999): Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Guthrie spent a year studying Shanghai firms, then compared their
adoptions of new organizational forms and practices.
Hacker, Jacob S. (2002): The Divided Welfare State. The Battle over Public and Private Social
Benefits in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The extensive private provision
of social benefits in the U.S. helps explain the country’s unusual profile of public benefits and the
character of struggles over social provisioning.
Design: 14
Hage, Jerald, Robert Hanneman & Edward T. Gargan (1989); State Responsiveness and State Activism.
An Examination of the Social Forces that Explain the Rise in Social Expenditures in Britain, France,
Germany and Italy 1870-1968. London: Unwin Hyman. More authoritarian regimes intervened earlier,
yet working class mobilization did make a difference.
Hanagan, Michael P. (1989): Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Demography and class in tight interaction.
Harding, Susan Friend (2000): The Book of Jerry Falwell. Fundamentalist Language and Politics.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Biblical realists have their own languages, practices, and
identities.
Hechter, Michael (2000): Containing Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Nationalism as a
collective action problem to be explained, or at least elucidated, through game theory.
Helleiner, Eric (2003): The Making of National Money. Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Only during the 19th century did states anywhere start trying to
impose uniform national currencies, and they did so for political advantage rather than economic
convenience.
Heller, Patrick (1999): The Labor of Development. Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in
Kerala, India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Working-class mobilization, channeled by communist
parties, fostered a redistributive but relatively democratic form of capitalism.
Herbst, Jeffrey (2000): States and Power in Africa. Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Strong) geographical influences on African state formation.
Horowitz, Donald L. (2001): The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Although
it is astonishing in this day and age to witness a revival of essentially invariant natural history (rather
than analysis of variation and its mechanisms), the sophistication, documentation, comprehensiveness,
and social-psychological sensitivity of this treatment sets it apart from all its predecessors.
Huber, Evelyne & John D. Stephens (2001): Development and Crisis of the Welfare State. Parties and
Policies in Global Markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nine welfare states closely compared
1980-2000, in a search for factors (especially political factors) that promote expansion and
contraction of social provisions.
Ikegami, Eiko (1995): The Taming of the Samurai. Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern
Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Two histories intertwine: the creation of a viable
Tokugawa state, the subordination of warriors into servants of that state.
Jarman, Neil (1997): Material Conflicts. Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg.
How competing militants have acted out their claims to priority since the 17th century.
Design: 15
Joseph, May (1999): Nomadic Identities. The Performance of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. A former Tanzanian Asian reports and reflects on how migrants act out their
relations to states.
Kalb, Don (1997): Expanding Class. Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The
Netherlands, 1850-1950. Durham: Duke University Press. Although anti-reductionist and very attuned
to culture, Kalb takes class seriously.
Kaufman, Jason (2002): For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deeply documented skepticism about the democratic benefits of
America’s intense but exclusionary voluntary associations.
Keister, Lisa A. (2000): Wealth in America. Trends in Wealth Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Wealth inequality greatly exceeds income inequality in the US, and results from
somewhat different causes. Lots of data and a sophisticated simulation model help us understand why.
Kerber, Linda K. (1998): No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies. Women and the Obligations of
Citizenship. New York: Hill & Wang. Through well-told stories extending from the American Revolution
to the present, Kerber follows legal conflicts between principles of equality and restrictions on
women's relations to the state.
Knoke, David (1990): Organizing for Collective Action. The Political Economies of Associations. New
York: Aldine de Gruyter. National studies of the United States yield information about how voluntary
associations attract members and win victories.
Koopmans, Ruud (1995): Democracy from Below. New Social Movements and the Political System in
West Germany. Boulder: Westview. Skeptical about the newness of new social movements, Koopmans
traces their relations to changing political opportunities.
Kosto, Adam J. (2001): Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia. Power, Order, and the Written
Word, 1000-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enumerations of regional lords’ powers
reveal a process of feudal political consolidation.
Kriesi, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak & Marco Giugni (1995): New Social
Movements in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
How change and variation in political opportunity structure shapes social movements in Switzerland, the
Netherlands, France, and Germany.
Kryder, Daniel (2000): Divided Arsenal. Race and the American State During World War II. New York:
Cambridge University Press. How World War II facilitated mobilization of black workers and soldiers,
yet baffled their quest for equal treatment.
Lachmann, Richard (2000): Capitalists in Spite of Themselves. Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions
in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. Various power-holders struggle with each
other and, under some conditions, generate capitalist property relations.
Design: 16
Laumann, Edword O., Robert T. Michael, and John H. Gagnon (1994): The Social Organization of
Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. NORC uses its
formidable survey machine to map variation in sexual experience and practices.
Lawrence, Jon (1998): Speaking for the People. Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 18671914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Material from Wolverhampton and elsewhere shows why
and how it is risky to infer that elected parties mirror social classes.
Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998): Russia's Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Under the Soviet system, networking was indispensable. Since
1990, it remains valuable, but its uses and contexts have changed.
Levi, Margaret (1997): Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. How
senses of a regime’s fairness or unfairness affect citizens’ collaboration with military conscription.
Lin, Jan (1998): Reconstructing Chinatown. Ethnic Enclave, Global Change. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. This study of New York City is notable here for embedding accounts of industrial
conflict in urban political economy.
López-Alves, Fernando (2000): State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810-1900. Durham:
Duke University Press. Instead of wringing his hands about failures of 19th century Latin American
states to match European models or retreating into mysteries of their culture, López-Alves boldly
places Latin American state formation in historical and comparative perspective.
Maier, Pauline (1997): American Scripture. Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf.
How a lot of people fashioned the Declaration under pressure of time and political circumstance, after
which a lot of Americans turned it into a sacred text.
Mallon, Florencia E. (1995): Peasant and Nation. The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Why, despite widespread popular mobilization and claims for national
participation during the 19th century, peasants acquired a place in Mexican but not in Peruvian national
politics.
Mamdani, Mahmood (2001): When Victims Become Killers. Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in
Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Detailed investigation of how people kill across
boundaries established between incessantly renegotiated political identities.
Markoff, John (1996): The Abolition of Feudalism. Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French
Revolution. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. From 1789’s statements of grievances
to the map of peasant struggles during the next four years, Markoff brings massive evidence to bear
on the interplay among mass action, expressed opinion, and revolutionary processes.
Massey, Douglas S., Camille Z. Charles, Garvey F. Lundy & Mary J. Fischer (2003): The Source of
the River. The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. The first phase of an ambitious longitudinal study documents
Design: 17
significant on-the-average differences in preparation among African Americans, Latinos, Whites,
and Asians.
Massey, Douglas S. & Nancy A. Denton (1993): American Apartheid. Segregation and the Making of
the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Extensive geographic segregation undergirds
other forms of inequality.
McAdam, Doug (1988): Freedom Summer. New York: Oxford University Press. How northern students
got into southern activism, and more generally how anyone gets involved in movement politics.
McCall, Leslie (2001): Complex Inequality. Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy. New York:
Routledge. Analyzing wage differences by occupation, race, and gender across American labor markets
in 1979 and 1989, McCall finds that the three modes of inequality vary in partial independence of each
other, and display characteristically different patterns as a function of dominant local economic
activities.
Montgomery, David (1993): Citizen Worker. The Experience of Workers in the United States with
Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. What American experience tells us about the (very) contingent relationship between markets
and democracy.
Moodie, T. Dunbar (1994): Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration. Berkeley: University of
California Press. South African miners seen close up through historical records and interviews.
Moore, Barrington Jr. (2000): Moral Purity and Persecution in History. Princeton: Princeton University
Press. Why and how monotheism encourages the faithful to treat outsiders as impure and therefore
worthy of extermination.
Moore, R. Laurence (1994): Selling God. American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York:
Oxford University Press. The interplay of capitalism and religious entrepreneurship.
Morrill, Calvin (1995): The Executive Way. Conflict Management in Corporations. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. The internal culture and politics of a dynamic firm.
Muldrew, Craig (1998): The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early
Modern England. New York: St. Martin’s. Max Weber confounded: how the 16th century’s increasing
reliance on credit promoted a politics of reputation.
Murmann, Johann Peter (2003): Knowledge and Competitive Advantage. The Coevolution of Firms,
Technology, and National Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coevolutionary
processes help explain the surprising rise of Germany to dominance of the synthetic die industry
and related chemical enterprises.
Newman, Katherine S. (1999): No Shame In My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ethnography and extensive interviews of inner city hard-working
poor residents counters stereotypes of alienated, culturally deprived minorities.
Design: 18
Nightingale, Carl Husemoller (1993): On the Edge. A History of Poor Black Children and their
American Dreams. New York: Basic Books. What biography and ethnography can do to enrich social
analysis.
Nirenberg, David (1996): Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages,
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Close studies of attacks on Muslims and Jews in 14th century
Aragon show why religious violence was never simply religious or simply violent.
Olzak, Susan (1992): The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. Event analysis and competition theory combine to grip struggles in American cities, 1877-1914.
O’Neill, Joseph (2001): Blood-Dark Track. A Family History. London: Granta. Brilliantly, a novelist
decodes his family’s involvement with nationalism and civil war in Ireland and Turkey.
Orr, Julian E. (1996): Talking About Machines. An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca: ILR Press.
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a photocopy repair specialist?
Paige, Jeffery M. (1997): Coffee and Power. Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Barrington Moore reviewed, revised, but not entirely refuted in a
close comparative study of political change.
Parr, Joy (1990): The Gender of Breadwinners. Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns,
1880-1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Women, power, and the local economy.
Parsa, Misagh (2000): States, Ideologies, and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of Iran,
Nicaragua and the Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. How centralized, exclusive,
interventionist states generate revolutionary resistance to their programs.
Pattillo-McCoy, Mary (1999): Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In what ways, and why, relatively prosperous black Chicagoans run
risks their white neighbors don’t face.
Paules, Greta Foff (1991): Dishing it Out. Power and Resistance among Waitresses in a New Jersey
Restaurant. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. How participant observation reveals what surveys
don’t.
Perry, Elizabeth (1993): Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor. Stanford: Stanford
University Press. Chinese workers' conflicts subjected to the sort of social analysis the last few
decades of work on Europe and North America have accustomed us to.
Peterson, Anna L. (1997): Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion. Progressive Catholicism in El
Salvador’s Civil War. Albany: SUNY Press. Popular resistance to tyranny as imitatio christi.
Pierce, Jennifer L. (1995): Gender Trials. Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Gendered careers examined with exemplary care.
Design: 19
Pomeranz, Kenneth (2000): The Great Divergence. China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. What’s wrong with thinking of Western Europe as
uniquely qualified for rational industrialization, and what’s right about making big, big comparisons.
Putnam, Robert D. (2000): Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York:
Simon & Schuster. Stirring, if contestable, documentation for withdrawal of Americans from politically
relevant social participation.
Robinson, John P. and Geoffrey Godbey (1997): Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use
Their Time. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Using time diaries to
document changing patterns in American’s daily activities.
Ross, Ellen (1993): Love and Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918. New York: Oxford
University Press. Sophisticated historical reconstruction.
Roy, Beth (1994): Some Trouble with Cows. Making Sense of Social Conflict. Berkeley: University of
California Press. What does it mean to say you are "Muslim" or "Hindu" in a Bangladeshi village, and to
fight about it? Beth Roy uses people's recollections and reconstructions of a 1954 conflict to reflect
lucidly on identity and collective action.
Roy, William G. (1997): Socializing Capital. The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. How, contrary to standard efficiency accounts, finance
capitalists used a device invented for the production of public goods to seize control over
manufacturing industries.
Rubin, Jeffrey W. (1997): Decentering the Regime. Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán,
Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. Mexican politics looks a lot less hegemonic from the local level.
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens & John D. Stephens (1992): Capitalist Development
and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. How industrialization generated uncontainable
popular demands, thereby opening the way to democracy.
Ryan, Mary P. (1997): Civic Wars. Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the
Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Formation and transformation of
contentious publics in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco.
Sandoval, Salvador A.M. (1993): Social Change and Labor Unrest in Brazil since 1945. Boulder:
Westview. Politically informed, statistically based, deft in connecting the two.
Sanjek, Roger (1998): The Future of Us All. Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. The politics of racial change in Elmhurst-Corona, Queens, 1960s to 1990s
Saxenian, Annalee (1994): Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route
128. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Two different ways of organizing industry produce
contrasting sets of relations among firms.
Design: 20
Schaffer, Frederic C. (1998): Democracy in Translation. Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar
Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. What ideas, practices, and institutions Senegal's French and
Wolof speakers invoke by talking of their cognates for the word "democracy".
Schneider, Cathy Lisa (1995): Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press. Careful investigation of social ties among activists reveals the organizational
bases of resistance to an authoritarian regime.
Silberman, Bernard S. (1993): Cages of Reason. The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the
United States, and Great Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Why, pace Max Weber, very
different sorts of bureaucracies formed in these four countries.
Singerman, Diane (1995): Avenues of Participation. Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of
Cairo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Under a repressive regime, government-influenced
consumption becomes politically volatile, and interpersonal networks become crucial political channels.
Sniderman, Paul M., Joseph F. Fletcher, Peter H. Russell & Philip E. Tetlock (1996): The Clash of Rights.
Liberty, Equality, and Legitimacy in Pluralist Democracy, New Haven: Yale University Press. A large
Canadian survey raises doubts both about the greater political enlightenment of elites and about the
compatibility of all democratic rights.
Solnick, Steven L. (1998): Stealing the State. Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. How the equivalent of a run on the bank turned bureaucrats into kleptocrats.
Spruyt, Hendrik (1994): The Sovereign State and Its Competitors. An Analysis of Systems Change.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Why new forms of state and state system arose in Europe after
1000 AD and why, among them, the hierarchical, territorial form eventually won out.
Stark, David & László Bruszt (1998): Postsocialist Pathways. Transforming Politics and Property in East
Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. How the German Democratic Republic,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and (especially) Hungary moved to new polities and economies.
Steinberg, Marc W. (1999): Fighting Words. Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse
in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. The subtitle conveys the
subject, but not the richness or finesse of Steinberg’s analysis.
Steinfeld, Robert J. (2001): Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. As formally free labor expanded, employers countered by insisting on
contracts and criminal penalties for their violation.
Steinmetz, George (1993): Regulating the Social. The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial
Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Exquisitely tuned to current theoretical discussions,
Steinmetz nonetheless does yeoman work in accounting for regional variations within the empire.
Design: 21
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1996): Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political
Economy of the Caribbean World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. How and why the intensity and
directness of exploitation varied from island to island.
Suri, Jeremi (2003): Power and Protest. Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. Ingenious, if true: routine postwar balance-of-power politics leads to postcolonial
adventure (notably Vietnam), which incites domestic protest, leading national authorities to both
repression and détente.
Suzman, Mark (1999): Ethnic Nationalism and State Power. The Rise of Irish Nationalism, Afrikaner
Nationalism and Zionism. London: Macmillan. Despite some veering into natural history, concise point by
point comparisons with due attention to political context.
Swidler, Ann (2001): Talk of Love. How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sensitive
interviews with 80 people from around San Jose, California lead to reflections on connections between
cultural practices and institutions.
Tarrow, Sidney (1989): Democracy and Disorder: Social Conflict, Political Protest and Democracy in
Italy, 1965-1975. New York: Oxford University Press. Close, empirical, yet theoretically sensitive
analysis of a great protest wave and its ending.
Thorne, Barrie (1993): Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press. How an adult ethnographer goes about documenting gender patterns among fourth
and fifth-grade kids.
Tilly, Charles (1995): Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. A catalog of 8,088 “contentious gatherings” anchors a study of British political change.
Toft, Monica Duffy (2003): The Geography of Ethnic Violence. Identity, Interests, and the
Indivisibility of Territory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Data from Ted Gurr’s Minorities at
Risk project confirm that where a locally predominant secessionist minority demands autonomy yet
both the existing state and the minority regard the territory as indivisible, violent conflict much more
often ensues.
Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald (1993): Gender & Racial Inequality at Work. The Sources & Consequences
of Job Segregation. Ithaca: ILR Press. How much of wage inequality depends on gender segregation
of work? A lot.
Voss, Kim (1993): The Making of American Exceptionalism. The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in
the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Combines a close analysis of KoL history,
notably in New Jersey, with general reflections on American working-class transformation.
Waldinger, Roger (1996): Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in New
York, 1940-1990. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Close comparison of occupational niches and
their absence.
Design: 22
Waldner, David (1999): State Building and Late Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. How and
why "precocious Keynesianism" fettered economic development in Turkey and Syria, while containment
of popular politics served economic development in Taiwan and Korea.
Walton, John (1992): Western Times and Water Wars. State, Culture, and Rebellion in California.
Berkeley: University of California Press. In the small, the struggle between Los Angeles and residents
of the Owens Valley over water rights. In the large, relations among state, frontier, and collective
action.
Western, Bruce (1997): Between Class and Market. Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. How working-class political parties, centralized collective
bargaining, and union-run employment insurance promote union strength.
White, James W. (1995): Ikki. Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. Three centuries of popular claim-making meticulously placed in their political
and economic frames.
Whittier, Nancy (1995): Feminist Generations. The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press. What the experiences of Columbus, Ohio activists can tell us
about continuity and change in social movements.
Williams, Christine L. (1989): Gender Differences at Work. Women and Men in Nontraditional
Occupations. Berkeley: University of California Press. What happens when people get into the
“wrong” occupations.
Williams, Heather L. (2001): Social Movements and Economic Transition. Markets and Distributive
Conflict in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. What social movement organizing can and
can’t do about the deleterious effects of international capital.
Wood, Andrew Grant (2001): Revolution in the Street. Women, Workers, and Urban Protest in Veracruz, 1870-1927. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources. Wood makes Veracruz a lens for viewing both
the local rise and fall of revolutionary activism and the participation of ordinary people in Mexico’s
national political transformations.
Wood, Elisabeth Jean (2000): Forging Democracy from Below. Insurgent Transitions in South Africa
and El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Why and how certain (but only certain)
settlements of popular rebellion promote democratization. (2003): Insurgent Collective Action and Civil
War in El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In this second book, companion to the
first, Wood fashions a surprising synthesis of formal decision analysis, ethnography, and empathetic
reconstruction.
Wright, Erik Olin (1997): Class Counts. Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. National studies of income and employment differences organized to test and
refine Marxist arguments.
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Wrightson, Keith & David Levine (1991): The Making of an Industrial Society. Whickham 1560-1765.
Oxford: Clarendon Press. Long-term reconstruction of change in a mining region.
Yashar, Deborah J. (1997): Demanding Democracy. Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala,
1870s-1950s. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Historically contingent political decisions that
affect property distribution and political control significantly shape prospects for democratization.
Zelizer, Viviana (1994): The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books. Documents the many
ways people resist and reshape the supposedly inevitable consequences of commercialization.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1991): The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. New York: Free
Press. Astute observations of the many ways we continually draw boundaries in order to make sense
of our social worlds.
Zhao, Dingxin (2001): The Power of Tiananmen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Social geography, social structure, and political process interact.
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