Contents

HSR-Supplement No. 24 (2012) – Konrad H. Jarausch: Contemporary History as Transatlantic Project. The German Problem 1960-2010

On the occasion of Konrad H. Jarausch’s 70th birthday, this supplement of Historical Social Research presents a retrospective of the work produced by this German American historian.

His introductory reflections review an unusual transatlantic career, beginning with a German Abitur, continuing to American training, leading to an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina, but returning to Germany with the directorship of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. The autobiography recounts an amazing trajectory of topical and methodological development from the political history of the Fischer-controversy, via social history of students and professions as well as exploration of quantitative methods, to cultural reflections on methodology and historiography and the writing on unification as well as the GDR, widening to transnational and European concerns. The core of this oeuvre revolves around questions of complicity with the Nazi and SED dictatorships and explanations of the recovery of democracy. What is special about this scholarly life-history is the degree to which it exemplifies the cooperation between American and German scholars which contributed to the emergence and solidification of a critical approach to the German past.

A selection of thirteen out of his more than 250 articles and chapters illustrates the progression of Jarausch’s work over five decades. These texts are in part monographic studies, but in part also essayistic reflections on major issues confronting contemporary historians. These examples are intended to document the chief stages of his intellectual development, but they also consist of pieces which achieved some notoriety in the field and thereby hope to inspire an interest in the rest of his work.

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HSR Vol. 37 (2012) No. 1: Special Issue: Elite Foundations of Social Theory and Politics 
Special Issue:
Jan Pakulski, Heinrich Best, Verona Christmas-Best & Ursula Hoffmann-Lange (Eds.): Elite Foundations of Social Theory and Politics

This special issue of the HSR is dedicated to John Higley in honour of his continued accomplishment as a distinguished scholar and prolific author whose seminal publications on the role of elites in politics and society have contributed to the contemporary revival of elite research. The volume assembles contributions from fourteen authors, ranging from theoretical analyses to empirical studies of elites in old and new democracies. Proceeding from the emergence of elites with the advent of complex societies, the chapters show the wide application of elite theory in understanding social and political developments.

One group of chapters focuses on the continued relevance of three classics of elite theory, Max Weber, Gaetano Mosca, and Joseph Schumpeter, which call into question some unrealistically optimistic assumptions of the theory of democratic elitism and egalitarian socialism. Another group addresses post-communist elite transformations and the formation of transnational elites, and demonstrates the relevance of elite studies for understanding abrupt as well as gradual regime change.

A final group of papers discusses the dynamics of elite-mass relations by comparing the attitudes and behaviours of elites to those of mass publics. In addition to these dedicated contributions, the issue also includes reprints of a selection of John Higley's seminal articles and book chapters.

With contributions of G. William Domhoff, András Körösényi, András Körösényi, Heinrich Best, György Lengyel & Gabriella Ilonszki, Thomas A. Baylis, Anton Steen, Maurizio Cotta, Ursula Hoffmann-Lange, Jean-Pascal Daloz, Gwen Moore & Scott Dolan.

Part II: John Higley - Selected Contributions

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HSR Vol. 36 (2011) No. 4: Special Issue: Conventions and Institutions from a Historical Perspective

Part I: Special Issue:
Rainer Diaz-Bone & Robert Salais  (Eds.): Conventions and Institutions from a Historical Perspective

The French approach of “économie des conventions” (economics of convention, EC) today is one of the most important strands of the new pragmatic turn in social sciences. Here the concept of convention is used to analyze different forms of collective coordination under the conditions of uncertainty, of incomplete rules and of contingent quality definitions. Conventions are pragmatic assumptions that actors make in interacting with others and they assumed these conventions to be shared in situations. Conventions evolve as solutions to problems of coordination. In a society, conventions constitute a repertory of action registers, to which the building of institutions borrows for grounding and stabilizing collective action and cognition.

Today, EC is the only institutional approach in social sciences which was developed in a real cooperation between economists, sociologists, and historians. From a historical perspective the analysis of the emergence and of the change of conventional foundations of social coordination has been proved seminal to historical research in almost three decades.

The special issue of HSR assembles articles of international scholars who apply this approach to historical analysis and demonstrate the conceptual as well as the methodological potential of EC in the field of economic history.

With articles of Rainer Diaz-Bone, Robert Salais, Alain Desrosières, Claire Judde de Larivière & Georges Hanne, Bert De Munck, Christof Jeggle, Philippe Minard, Jürgen Kädtler and Laurent Thévenot

Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics Contains articles of Karen Henwood, Nick Pidgeon, Karen Parkhill & Peter Simmons, Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams & Arthur P. Bochner, Mary M. Gergen & Kenneth J. Gergen, Franz Breuer sowie Jean Luc Demeulemeester & Claude Diebolt Orders and more information at: hsr@gesis.org
HSR Vol. 36 (2011) No. 3: Special Issue: Change of Markets and Market Societies: Concepts and Case Studies

Part I: Special Issue:
Klaus Nathaus & David Gilgen (Eds.): Change of Markets and Market Societies: Concepts and Case Studies

This special issue brings together historians and sociologists working on markets, fields and market societies. Engaging with positions of the New Economic Sociology and the New Institutional Economics and applying them to the phenomenon of emerging and changing markets, the contributors take up the programmatic demand for an interdisciplinary collaboration between historians and social scientists to study socially embedded markets and the way markets shape societies.

The contributions in the first part of this issue are concerned with conceptual challenges for research into the evolution of markets in fields and the history of market societies. The second section contains case studies on the development of the market for fairly traded coffee, the electric energy exchange in Germany, the book publishing und the music industry as well as the markets for pharmaceuticals and patented innovations in the German Empire, testing the fruitfulness of mainly sociological approaches for the understanding of changing markets.

This Special Issue was published in cooperation with Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology and ©reative Encounters / Copenhagen Business School.


Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics Contains articles of Jens O. Zinn, Gundula Gahlen, Marlen Toch, James E. Oeppen, Andreas Dethloff & Gabriele Doblhammer, Mattijs Vandezande, Koen Matthijs & Jan Kok, Claude Diebolt and Faustine Perrin More informations and orders at: hsr@gesis.org
HSR-Supplement No. 23 (2011) – Wilhelm Heinz Schröder: Collective Biography as an interdisciplinary method in Historical Social Research

Wilhelm Heinz Schröder is one of the initiators of the Historical Social Research in Germany and he has decisively formed its development since the 1970s. He was among others the director of the center of historical social research (of the GESIS), co-president of the working-group QUANTUM, managing editor of the international journal “Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung” and head of the postgraduate ZHSF methods seminar (“Herbstseminar”).

Schröder has academically worked on numerous themes, his research focus was however on the “historical parliamentarism-, elite- and biography research”. Schröder became famous especially through his long lasting large-scale projects on the social democratic members of parliament in the German Reichs- and Landtag. These projects have set scientific scales for both “lexical biography” and “collective biography”.

The HSR Supplement contains 1) an autobiographic essay of the author with impressions on his research-life, in which he emphasizes the collective biography as a forming individual constant; 2) an overview about/on the significance and distribution of collective biography as well as two practical guidelines on the application of research strategies of the (British) prosopography and (German) collective biography; 3) (focused) reprints of 6 selected articles on the large-scale project “Social democratic parliamentatian”. More informations and orders at: hsr@gesis.org
HSR Vol. 36 (2011) No. 2: Special Issue: Fertility in the History of the 20th Century: Trends, Theories, Policies, Discourses

Part I: Special Issue: Josef Ehmer, Jens Ehrhardt, Martin Kohli (Eds.): Fertility in the History of the 20th Century: Trends, Theories, Policies, Discourses.

In this special issue, a pluridisciplinary group of scholars discusses the complex interrelationship among fertility trends, population theories, policies and public discourses. Whereas the three former fields have been intensely studied in demography and its neighboring disciplines, there is still little work on population discourses, and even less that link them to the trends, theories and policies of population. The editors hope to stimulate the scientific debate on this topic, to raise awareness of these interconnections, and to contribute to more theoretical integration.

The special issue is organized in three sections: The first one discusses approaches to the study of fertility across historical periods. The second section concentrates on discourses and politics and their practical impact on reproductive behavior. The third section concentrates on recent trends in fertility, mainly in Europe and East Asia. This special issue originated at a conference in Berlin in January 2010 that was organized by the Working Group A Future with Children: Fertility and Societal Development. The Working Group was established in 2009 by the German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and is funded by the Jacobs Foundation.

Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics Contains articles of Manuel Schramm, Carsten Kaven, Antonio Paolilli / Fabio Police and Claude Diebolt. Orders and more informations at: hsr@gesis.org
HSR Vol. 36 (2011) No. 1: Special Issue: Methods for Qualitative Management Research in the Context of Social Systems Thinking

Part I Special Issue: Patricia Wolf, Jens O. Meissner, Terry Nolan, Mark Lemon, René John, Evangelia Baralou & Silke Seemann (Eds.): Methods for Qualitative Management Research in the Context of Social Systems Thinking

This HSR-Issue offers a Print Version of the FQS Online Edition (FQS 2010, 11/3). The papers follow three thematic threads that seem to be of particular importance to qualitative ma-nagement research from the stance of systems theory. The first of these themes relates to observation, i.e. the observable in management research. The second stream discusses up to date methods and the design of system theoretic studies for application in empirical research. And the third thread highlights the implications of those studies on what was studied, i.e. management in organizations. The presented papers offer a variety of ap-proaches for designing and conducting system theoretic research projects as well as how to present the findings within the respective research field.

The term “social systems” is derived chiefly from the theoretical starting point propounded by Niklas LUHMANN. A key underlying assumption for this special is-sue is our belief that the reluctance of the scientific com-munity to apply LUHMANN’s social system theory in management research boils down to first the relative difficulty readers face when trying to follow his writing and the complexity of the theoretical approach, and, second and more significantly, a missing methodological basis for conducting research grounded in LUHMANN’s social system theory and related theoretical approaches.

A very strong motivation for the composition of the special issue was the – from the perspective of qualitative management studies – under researched field of methods using a social systems approach. The most important driver for reprinting the special issue in Historical Social Research is the insight that social systems research can not be conducted without the knowledge about the historical development of a specific situation and the evolutionary dynamics of social systems. Socially constructed presence is only interpretable and understandable by knowing and reflecting on the development path of an organization, taking its stories and narrations into account. Thus, this issue contributes to extend the methodological understanding of historic social research with relation to organization and management studies.


Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics Contains articles of Rainer Diaz-Bone, Ronald Gebauer und Marcela Veselkova Orders and more informations at: hsr@gesis.org
HSR-Supplement No. 22 (2010) – Philip Jost Janssen: Youth research  in early FRG. Discourses and survey data

“Youth” is a key category for the self image of the early FRG. Youth functions as an object of projection, on which society discusses its own future as a modern mass and media society after 1945. The interdisciplinary youth research in that phase faced the challenge of sociology and transformed through quantification in a fundamental way. With the development of new survey methods and the new “countability” of youth, concepts and images of youth also changed. Quantitative empirical approaches focused on means and metaphors like the "plant youth" disappeared, while the "seismographafic" aspect became dominant.

The paper outlines the methodical controversies of the 50’s and early 60’s, which were strongly connected with Americanization and democratization discourses. And it works out convergences between youth analysis and research programs in sociology, psychology and educational sciences. It is elaborated, that due to new methods the tonality of youth research changed rapidly, and that there are important analogies between youth description and sociological concepts of “Nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft”. A special focus lies on Helmut Schelsky’s analysis of a “sceptical generation”.

In addition, the "historical context analysis" discusses youth profiles of the early FRG, as far as they can be reconstructed from survey data: To what extent does survey data reflect values and political attitudes, as well as activities of the 15-24 old Germans on weekdays and during leisure time? In doing so, the paper evaluates the potential of that particular source type and works out a specific historical access to those historical survey data.

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HSR Vol. 35 (2010) No. 4: Special Issue: The Production of Human Security in Premodern and Contemporary History
Part I: Special Issue: Cornel Zwierlein, Rüdiger Graf & Magnus Ressel (Eds.): The Production of Human Security in Premodern and Contemporary History Since the 1990s the concept of "human security" has been used increasingly in the debates on social and political theory as well as in practical international politics by the UN institutions. Part of its appeal is due to the unusually wide extension of the term covering such diverse objects as classical international security politics, security problems arising from natural hazards and even threats of traffic accidents. The concept is designed to replace the perspective of state security, the so-called ‘Westphalian System’ in which sovereign state actors conduct international politics. Advocates of the human security concept rely on a historical narrative in which the current widening of the notion of security is nothing new. Rather it is conceived of as the revival of older, pre-modern and pre-Westphalian concepts of security. In this scheme, the era of the modern nation-state with its clear distinctions between domestic and foreign, private and state security appears as a historical exception. The contributions of this special issue of Historical Social Research concentrate on the juxtaposition of mainly early modern and of late modern security regimes testing the prehistory of ‘human security’ and ‘human security’ as a heuristical device of intertemporal comparison.
Part II: Mixed Issue
Cliometrics Contains an article of Maria Eugénia Mata

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HSR Vol. 35 (2010) No. 3: Focus: Integration or Exclusion: Former National Socialists in the GDR 

Part I Focus:
Dietmar Remy & Axel Salheiser (Eds.): Integration or Exclusion: Former National Socialists in the GDR

Not only West Germany saw the social rehabilitation of former members of the NSDAP after 1945, nominal Nazis also got their chance in the GDR. Due to the omnipresent state myth of anti-fascism, disclosed brown shadows of the past could put careers at risk anytime, but submissive loyalty to the young socialist state and its leadership could balance the scales. Honest autobiographical information was demanded from all cadres – and the fallacies of a misled Third Reich youth (or needed members of the old intelligentsia) were likely to be forgiven in order to appeal to their gratitude. However, simply keeping silent turned out even more successful a strategy in many cases: the general exculpation of the populace and the anti-fascist propaganda made serious checks and Stasi investigations inopportune for the Communist regime.

This focus of Historical Social Research addresses the ambiguous relation of integration and exclusion of former National Socialists in East Germany and the discourse of exculpation. Besides case studies on a variety of institutions and statistical analyses of their personnel, three general questions are discussed: What was state party SED’s actual strategy regarding former members of the NSDAP and NS perpetrators and to what extend did this strategy change over time? How many former National Socialists could embark on socialist cadre careers in the GDR? And how many of them could get away with lies about their past?

Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics

Contains articles of Johannes Marx, Michael Bang Petersen & Svend-Erik Skaaning, Volker Müller-Benedict, Ingvill C. Mochmann & Sabine Lee, Katalin Morgan, Dimitry Zhukov & Sergey Lyamin, Somyanetra Munshi, Thi Hong Van Hoang and Marcela Veselkova
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HSR Vol. 35 (2010) No. 2: Transitions – Transformations: Trajectories of Social, Economic and Political Change after Communism
Special Issue Heinrich Best, Katharina Bluhm, Michael Fritsch & Rainer K. Silbereisen (Eds.): Transitions – Transformations: Trajectories of Social, Economic and Political Change after Communism Anniversaries are normally somewhat arbitrary pretexts for putting important events and short-term developments into historical perspective. This was different with the 20th anniversary of the downfall of European communism and the transition of state socialism into market economies and representative democracies in 1989. The years 2008/2009 saw a crisis of international financial markets that shattered the system of a truly global capitalism established in the aftermath of 1989. Most of the contributions united in this Special Issue of Historical Social Research were presented and discussed at the 2009 Jena conference on Transitions – Transformations: Trajectories of Social, Economic and Political Change after Communism. The contributions 1) deal with a retrospective stock-taking of twenty years of social and economic transformation after the end of European communism and 2) take a look at the years of post-communist transformation as a prehistory of transition between stages in the development of global capitalism. The contributions focus on the impact of rapid social and institutional change on personality development and economic activities. This view into the psycho-social (Personality Development and Social Change) and economic (Varieties of Capitalism in Central Eastern Europe After EU Accession & Business Dynamics in the Transformation Process of Post-Socialist Societies) foundations of the great post-communist transformation is complemented by a look at the elites (Elites after Transition) involved in shaping and directing these developments. Orders and more informations at: hsr@gesis.org

HSR Vol. 35 (2010) No. 1 – Special Issue: Global Communication: Telecommunication and Global Flows of Information in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

Part I: Special Issue Roland Wenzlhuemer (Ed.): Global Communication: Telecommunication and Global Flows of Information in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century
In the middle of the nineteenth century, electric telegraphy emerged as the first fully-fledged system of telecommunication. The global flow of dematerialized information carried by a network of submarine and overland telegraph lines challenged the established relationship between time and space (or at least so it seemed) and detached human interaction from co-locality or proximity. By bringing geographically distant and socio-culturally diverse places in touch, telecommunication technologies helped to manifest a placeless global sphere and co-shaped globalization processes. They can do so because they directly affect the very constituents of globalization: global exchanges, movements, transfers, flows. For instance, the telegraph changed the nature of news reporting; it impacted on business and administrative language (and via this detour ultimately on language in general); it separated the global flow of short and decisive information from that of more profound background information; and, of course, it created new asymmetries and divides due to the uneven structure of its network and other access barriers. In short, the telegraph and later the telephone transformed the nature of many forms of global interaction and introduced a new logic, new actors, new places and new practices to this realm. This volume seeks to highlight the complex role of telecommunication and its networks in nineteenth-century globalization processes—a role that has often been reduced to furthering imperial control and international business. The contributions in this special issue do not ignore these two traditional perspectives but primarily seek to illuminate new and previously understudied aspects of the relation between telecommunication and globalization. Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics contains articles of Michael Ruddat & Marlen Schulz, Alvaro S. Pereira, Antonio Tena Junguito and Tapas Mishra, Cluade Diebold, Mamata Parhi & Asit Ranjan Mohanty. Orders and more informations at: hsr@gesis.org

HSR Vol. 34 (2009) No. 4 – Special Issue: Premature Death: Patterns of Identity and Meaning From a Historical Perspective / Vorzeitiger Tod: Identitäts- ûnd Sinnstiftung in historischer Perspektive
Part I: Special Issue Thorsten Halling, Silke Fehlemann & Jörg Vögele (Eds.): Premature Death: Patterns of Identity and Meaning From a Historical Perspective Infant mortality, accidental death, suicide, death by fatal disease or in war action: premature death has many different faces. What do all these phenomena have in common? The present studies in this special issue investigate how different ways of dealing with premature death can serve to find out how constitutive societal values are established. The scandalizing of certain forms of untimely death and the patterns of meaning demonstrate that certain groups of a population or certain ideals in society are estimated more valuable than others. Establishing patterns of meaning by offering generalised identification was ap-plied for example to compensate the traumatic experience of a soldier's death. Although the process of dying itself has often been marked by signs – e.g. farewell letters of a person committing suicide or a suicide attacker – explaining the background to posterity, these signs can be misunderstood or modified by those who recognize them. The present anthology is an interdisciplinary approach by scholars of history, art history, cultural sociology and cultural anthropology, medicine and philosophy to discuss these questions. The first part focuses on how the lifespan of different population groups is established and evaluated in a societal context. The second part investigates the way the families and the nursing staff of patients in critical condition as well as these patients themselves deal with untimely death. The third part observes the conducting and the representation of premature death and dying. The fourth part deals with the actual experience of mass mortality, mourning and its commemoration after the war. All articles are in German except for one. Part II: Mixed Issue
Cliometrics
contains articles of Claude Schwob, Patrizia Margani & Roberto Ricciuti,
Rainer Metz and Michael Grömling.
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HSR Vol. 34 (2009) No. 3 – Special Issue: Social Bookkeeping Data: Data Quality and Data Management / Soziale Buchführungsdaten: Datenqualität und Datenmanagement
Part I: Special Issue
Nina Baur (Ed.): Social Bookkeeping Data: Data Quality and Data Management

Social bookkeeping data (also called public administrational data, quantitative/standardized process-produced/process-generated data, mass data or mass files) are one of the oldest sources of information used both in historical and in social research. While they resemble survey data in many ways, they also raise specific methodological problems: In contrast to research-elicited data, data production is not controlled by the researcher. Instead, societal and institutional filters influence a) which data are produced and how they are produced (production bias), and b) if and how data are stored (selection bias).
Accordingly, in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been an intense discussion on data quality and data management of public administrational data in German historical social research, namely in HSR. While the use of mass data has increased in recent years due to paradigm shifts both in methodology and theory, due to new developments in IT and due to increased accessibility of these data types, the methodological debate strangely lacks behind this development. This special issue thus aims at re-opening the discussion on social bookkeeping data and linking it to modern methodological discourse (particularly in survey and mixed methods research).
Starting from different stages of the research process, authors ask, what can happen there with and to data and samples? Which problems can arise? Can they be avoided? If not, how should they be properly handled? Do these problems arise for all sources, or are they specific to some sources? Major methodological issues to be tackled are (a) data lore and measurement quality; (b) data selection and sampling problems; (c) archiving and statistical programmes and (d) data preparation.

Part II: Focus
Ingvill C. Mochmann, Sabine Lee & Barbara Stelzl-Marx (Eds.):
Children Born of War: Second World War and Beyond

As in every other war, during and after WWII children were born whose parents belonged to opposite sides of the conflict. Being the child of the “enemy” or of occupation forces, be they friendly or adversarial, has influenced the lives of the children born of war and occupation up until now. Many have been exposed to stigmatisation and discrimination. Now in their fifties and sixties, some have started looking for their roots only recently, thus trying to break the wall of silence that has surrounded them for several decades. Most of them have been concerned with this “stain” of their mixed parentage for their whole lives, often without being able to exchange their experiences with others of similar background. This holds not only for enemy children, but also for children from allied forces such as American soldiers in Britain or Soviet soldiers in Austria and Germany, all of whom seem to have experienced similar difficulties and have been exposed to comparable discrimination.
Regardless of the dimension and social impact of the tens of thousands of children born of war, this topic has so far found little attention in academia, particularly when compared to other aspects of WWII research. Even in German speaking countries with their greater exposure the phenomenon of children born of war, the interest in the topic has been limited. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were serving in the Wehrmacht all over Europe during WWII and in the post-war decade American, British Soviet and French troops were occupying Germany and Austria.
As a result the German dimension of this topic is significant. In order to make the contributions accessible to the broader German speaking audience, who may again be important knowledge providers, the contributions in this HSR focus are in German except for a summary article on children born of war during the Second World War and beyond. Two articles examine the situation of the children fathered by German soldiers and local women in occupied territories, in Denmark and the Netherlands. The other two articles analyse the situation of children fathered by American soldiers and local women in Germany and Britain and children of Soviet soldiers and local women in Germany and Austria. Orders and more information at: hsr[at]gesis.org
HSR Vol. 34 (2009) No. 2 – Special Issue: Counterfactual Thinking as a Scientific Method
Part I: Special Issue
Roland Wenzlhuemer (Ed.): Counterfactual Thinking as a Scientific Method Counterfactual thinking is a common occurrence in everyday-life situations. What if I had bought a ticket before boarding the bus? What if I had not gone to the rock concert and never met my partner? On first glance such counterfactual thoughts appear to be nothing more than a sentimental and all too human trait. What practical use is there in thinking about alternatives of the past that have never been realized? It is, therefore, no surprise that counterfactual thinking in a scientific context has for a long time been eyed suspiciously. Can it have any analytical value to systematically think about things that have never happened and surely will never happen? While some academic disciplines such as law, economics or philosophy have answered this question in the affirmative and have employed counterfactuals as a matter of course, others – such as history or political science – have been particularly critical of the practice that has often been perceived as void of any methodological validity or analytical value.
In the last two decades, however, psychological research has demonstrated that counterfactual thinking in everyday life is more than a sentimental pastime and has clearly discernable analytical uses for the thinker. This volume brings together contributions from a variety of different disciplines and seeks to illustrate how counterfactual thinking can, indeed, be useful from a scientific perspective. It builds on the results of recent psychological research and the experiences that researchers in disciplines such as law or economics have made with counterfactual thinking. The volume ultimately seeks to highlight the common analytical ground between counterfactual thinking in everyday life and in academic contexts – particularly in the field of historical research.

Part II: Mixed Issue
Articles, Cliometrics contains articles of Rainer Diaz-Bone, Bernt Schnettler and Jürgen Raab, Ralf Bohnsack, Annette Vowinckel, Carlo Ciccarelli and Stefano Fenoaltea.

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HSR Vol. 34 (1/2009) - Nina Baur (Ed.): Linking Theory and Data: Process-Generated and Longitudinal Data for Analysing Long-Term Social Processes
Theory and data are closely linked in empirical research: Data are the main source for building and testing theories, and without theoretical focus, it is impossible to select and interpret data. Still, the relationship between theory and data is only rarely discussed and, if so, only on a general level. Focussing on process-oriented and longitudinal research questions, the authors of this special issue contribute to this discussion by elaborating some data types that can be used for analyzing long-term social processes. For each specific data type, it is important to ask about their specific characteristics and how this effects interpretation. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this data type? For which kind of theoretical and thematical research question are these data suitable? Where and how can these data be sampled and collected? What specific problems in sampling, interpretation and validity do arise in longitudinal research, and how can they be solved?

The contributers address these questions from a broad range of theories (as different as Rational Choice Theory, Figurational Sociology, Biographical Research, Discourse Theory and Cultural Theories) and by either re-analyzing research-elicited data (e.g. interviews, surveys) or by using process-generated data (e.g. ego-documents, popular literature, military records, genealogies, newspapers, television commercials and web-based process-generated data).
We offer the new HSR to all private orderers for a special price of € 12 (delivery included; invoice enclosed). Orders and more information at: hsr[at]gesis.org