Abstract
While questions of methodology and research design have received a lot of attention, less is known about theory development in comparative social research. As theoretical objectives and orientations are diverse, theorizing takes many forms, ranging from orienting statements and typologies to different kinds of causal propositions. After introducing different understandings of “theory” and associated types of research questions, the article discusses the interplay between empirical research and theory development in comparative social research. Using examples from different fields of application, I argue that theory development in comparative research can be hampered by placing too much emphasis on general micro-level theories, but also by a lack of theoretical abstraction, that intertwines mechanism sketches with historical and contextual details of the particular macro-level phenomena under investigation. The article calls for a greater focus on meso-level theorizing, as it has the greatest potential to produce theoretical knowledge about contextual variation in causal mechanisms and to motivate the development of theoretical models that are explicit enough to be systematically revised across studies.
Zusammenfassung
Im Vergleich zu der Aufmerksamkeit, die Methodologie und Forschungsdesign erhalten, wurden allgemeine Fragen der Theorieentwicklung in der international vergleichenden Sozialforschung bislang wenig diskutiert. Aufgrund der vielfältigen theoretischen Zielsetzungen und Orientierungen existieren viele Arten der Theoriebildung, von orientierenden Feststellungen und Typologien bis hin zu kausalen Propositionen. Ausgehend von unterschiedlichen Theorieverständnissen und entsprechenden Arten von Forschungsfragen diskutiert der Beitrag das Wechselspiel von empirischer Forschung und Theorieentwicklung in der international vergleichenden Sozialforschung. Anhand von Beispielen aus unterschiedlichen Forschungsfeldern argumentiert der Autor, dass Theorieentwicklung in der komparativen Forschung oftmals durch zwei Tendenzen behindert wird: einerseits durch die Überbetonung allgemeiner Mikrotheorien, andererseits durch den Mangel an theoretischer Abstraktion in Arbeiten, die Skizzen von Mechanismen zu eng mit historischen und kontextuellen Details konkreter Makrophänomene fusionieren. In diesem Beitrag wird dafür argumentiert, bei der Theorieentwicklung einen stärkeren Fokus auf die Mesoebene zu richten. Dies birgt das größte Potenzial, theoretisches Wissen über kontextuelle Variation in kausalen Mechanismen zu generieren sowie die Entwicklung theoretischer Modelle anzuregen, die explizit genug sind, um systematisch über verschiedene empirische Studien hinweg verbessert werden zu können.
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Notes
It should also be noted that new accounts of mechanism-based explanations in analytical sociology place less emphasis on general laws as a necessary ingredient of scientific explanations (for an overview, see Kalter and Kroneberg 2014).
Descriptive sentences are propositions about (singular or non-singular) states of the world, including regularities of covariations.
A fundamental problem of Parson’s reasoning is that it is not possible to scientifically assess the long-term adaptive capacity of societies since we cannot predict future environmental conditions (Granovetter 1979). Moreover, his structural functionalism has been criticized for not being able to understand the causes that lead to particular structures, as well as for ignoring exogenous influences stemming from other societies.
The theory of action to which I myself contributed provides another example: The Model of Frame Selection (Esser and Kroneberg 2015), which highlights the relevance of dual processes and framing for human behavior, does not carry in itself an agenda for comparative research. However, as the examples of Nauck (2007) and Messner (2012) show, one can combine such a theory with explicit meso- and macro-level theorizing to guide and enrich comparative research.
Of course, this heuristic strategy is well known from the macro-micro-macro model, in which these links between these institutional rules and parameters of the interaction model can be classified either as bridge assumptions or conditions of transformation.
In its most basic form, the macro-micro-macro model only requires researchers to provide microfoundations and explicit macro-micro and micro-macro links (Fig. 1 above). In choice-centered research, the micro-micro link often comes down to the explanation of individual behavior based on a theory of action. The determinants of behavior are then related to social contexts, and a more or less complex argument derives macro-level consequences from actors’ choices. Hence, the simple macro-micro-macro model does not require an analysis of meso-level processes and their dynamic interplay with larger contexts.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the late Jürgen Friedrichs, Karl-Dieter Opp, the editors, and other attendees at the SOCLIFE conference on “How should we analyze country differences and what have we learned about them? Analytical strategies and explanations based on international comparative surveys” at the University of Cologne, December 2017, for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this work. My interest in the questions discussed in this article grew out of the colloquium series of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), which exposed me to different styles of comparative research.
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Kroneberg, C. Theory Development in Comparative Social Research. Köln Z Soziol 71 (Suppl 1), 29–51 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-019-00604-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-019-00604-y