Abstract—The study of school pupils’ daily habits is of importance for diverse fields such as sociology and education. Previous related work mainly focused on some specific attribute or habit of students, which ignored many important factors and failed to exploit the correlation among habit-related factors. In this paper, we conduct a comparative analysis of school pupils’ daily habits in Germa...

Case studies and ‘‘small-N comparisons’’ have been attacked from two directions, positivist and incommensurabilist. At the same time, some authors have defended small-N comparisons as allowing qualitative researchers to attain a degree of scientificity, yet they also have rejected the case study as merely ‘‘idiographic.’’ Practitioners of the case study sometimes agree with these critics, disav...

Inequality and Prosperity has two aims. One is to deline-ate the ways in which affluent countries differ in their economic institutions and their labour market and social policies. The other is to use macro-comparative analysis to shed some light on the question of whether the pursuit of low inequality is compatible with a healthy economy. The book is highly successful in both respects. It will...

Social media platforms such as Twitter pose new challenges for decision-makers in an international crisis. We examine Twitter’s role during Iran’s 2009 election crisis using a comparative analysis of Twitter investors, US State Department diplomats, citizen activists and Iranian protestors and paramilitary forces. We code for key events during the election’s aftermath from 12 June to 5 August 2...

In this article, I take issue with the conceptual apparatus and methodological prescriptions of comparative historical sociology. I will suggest that its problematic features are longstanding. In consequence, a dominant tendency of the field – that of returning to the ‘classics’ as a means of overcoming deficiencies found in more recent contributions – has the effect of reinforcing what is prob...

This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorizatio...

This paper compares the characteristics of M&A in 1991-2005 across five countries: Japan, France, Germany, the UK and USA. We ask what factors explain the growth of M&A markets across these countries, and what similarities and differences exist in the ways the M&A market operates. We find that the growth of M&A reflects a rather similar combination of sectoral, international, and financial fact...