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.

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?

Design: 1

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.

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.

Design: 2

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.

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

Design: 3

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.

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.

Design: 4

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: 163-184.

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.

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.

Design: 5

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.

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, American-born) 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, 1400-1434," 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

Design: 6

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.

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: Kluwer/Plenum. (2001): “Mechanisms in Political Processes,”

Design: 7

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 Univer-sity 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.

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.

Design: 8

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. Cam-bridge: 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.

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.

Design: 9

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 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.

Design: 10

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.

Fitch, Kristine L. (1998): Speaking Relationally. Culture, Communication, and Interpersonal Con-nection. New York: Guilford. Ethnography of conversation among middle-class Colombians that forms and transforms interpersonally grounded identities. Don’t miss the (inter)personal epi-logue.

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.

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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 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

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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, 1867-1914. 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 significant on-the-average differences in preparation among African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asians.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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