Summary
Contents
Subject index
This innovative introduction to research in the social sciences guides students and new researchers through the maze of research traditions, cultures of inquiry and epistemological frameworks. It introduces the underlying logic of ten cultures of inquiry: ethnography; quantitative behavioral science; phenomenology; action research; hermeneutics; evaluation research; feminist research; critical social science; historical-comparative research; and theoretical research. It clarifies conceptual and intellectual traditions in research, and puts researchers firmly in the investigative saddle - able to choose, justify, and explain the intellectual framework and personal rationale of their research.
Comparative-Historical Inquiry and Theoretical Inquiry
Comparative-Historical Inquiry and Theoretical Inquiry
Comparative-historical inquiry attempts to understand organizations, institutions, cultures, or societies by focusing on unique features that differentiate them from historical predecessors or current alternative structures. At the same time, comparative-historical inquiry may strive to find cultural universals or social, political, or economic patterns across time and geographic distance. Sometimes this search for the unique and the general are part of the same inquiry.
Orientation to Comparative-Historical Inquiry
An exemplar of such inquiry, at the most macro level, is the work of Max Weber. In his General Economic History (1961), Weber identified general features of the modern capitalist economy, the modern “rational state,” and the modern capitalist spirit by comparing modern Western societies with one another and with the ...
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