Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and "Small N's" in Sociology

Case studies and "small‐N comparisons" have been attacked from two directions, positivist and incommensurabilist. At the same time, some authors have defended small‐N comparisons as allowing qualitative researchers to attain a degree of scientificity, yet they also have rejected the case study as merely "idiographic." Practitioners of the case study sometimes agree with these critics, disavowing all claims to scientificity. A related set of disagreements concerns the role and nature of social theory in sociology, which sometimes is described as useless and parasitic and other times as evolving in splendid isolation from empirical research. These three forms of sociological activity—comparative analysis, studies of individual cases, and social theory—are defended here from the standpoint of critical realism. In this article I first reconstruct, in very broad strokes, the dominant epistemological and ontological framework of postwar U.S. sociology. The next two sections discuss several positivist and incommensurabilist criticisms of comparison and case studies. The last two sections propose an understanding of comparison as operating along two dimensions, events and structures, and offer an illustration of the difference and relationship between the two .     

Élite opinion on retirement pensions

This article discusses some of the findings of a European study of the opinions of influential people in welfare. It is divided into five main sections. The first section discusses the aims and the methodology of the study; the second section looks at the issues in pensions as seen by the respondents in the various countries; the third section examines the proposed solutions; the fourth section tries to establish whether political ideology makes a difference in the way respondents perceive the issues and solutions; and the fifth section is the conclusion.     

Has the Internet Increased Trade? Developed and Developing Country Evidence

Developing countries export more to developed, but not other developing countries, when Internet penetration is higher. Although this could be because Internet penetration stimulates exports, it could also be because trade openness encourages Internet use. To test the direction of causation, we allow Internet use to be determined endogenously using countries' regulation of data services as an instrument. The results suggest that access to the Internet does improve export performance in developing countries, although not in developed countries. In other words, improving Internet access in a developing country will stimulate exports from that country to rich countries. (JEL F15 )     

Intercultural Education at the Crossroads of Commerce: The intercultural challenges of electronic technology in a diverse Europe

The rapid development of IT is affecting the delivery of intercultural education both academic and applied, as well as other cultural services. Here we look at the consequences for business and also how this can be extrapolated to the realm of (intercultural) education.     

The Transition to Adulthood for Children with Down's Syndrome

This paper reports on the transition pathways to adult status of 35 young adults with Down's syndrome over a six-year period (1987-93). Despite educational, social and employment legislation aimed at ensuring greater integration into the community, qualitative and quantitative analyses of 'quality of life' outcomes in this group produced a disappointing picture of a narrow range of leisure opportunities, negligible placement in employment, and continuing dependency on parental caregivers in adulthood. Two case studies illustrate how, in the absence of any improvement in opportunities for real integration into the community and in provision of resources to support meeting the special needs of those with learning difficulties, a marginalised group may be being created.     

The “New” World of Prosumption: Evolution, “Return of the Same,” or Revolution?

While strong arguments can be made that prosumption today can be seen as a primal phenomenon and an evolutionary process, the strongest argument is that it involves a revolutionary set of developments producing a dramatically new world of prosumption. While those developments can be seen in both the material and digital worlds (although they augment one another), they are clearest in the digital world, especially the Internet. Among the forces that are creating this new world of consumption are new means of prosumption (e.g., IKEA, massive online open courses, automated teller machines) which are made possible by a variety of new technologies (the computer, the Internet). However, overarching these and other changes is the emergence of a new form of capitalism, “prosumer capitalism.” In addition to exploiting often low‐paid commodified workers, prosumer capitalism increasingly prioritizes the exploitation of largely uncommodified prosumers who are generally unpaid. Prosumers offer the capitalist many other advantages (e.g., no long‐term obligations such as high‐cost benefit programs). There are few, if any, obligations to prosumers with the result that they fit well with today's reigning neoliberal philosophy. The new world of prosumption could have been a more positive development had it not been usurped by capitalist interests.     

Change-points in stochastic ordering

This article studies the problem of testing and locating changepoints in stochas¬tic ordering. We propose a sequential process to detect the changepoints from two multinomial distributions. We also obtain the maximum likelihood estimators of two multinomial probability vectors under the assumption that the cumulative distribu¬tions have a changepoint. Asymptotically unbiased Akaike's information criterion is used to estimate the changepoints of two discrete probability distributions. Finally. we demonstrate our procedure by studying a data set pertaining to average daily insulin dose from the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program and locate the changepoints in stochastic ordering.     

The use of covariate information in the sequential analysis of dichotomous response experiments

A method is presented for the sequential analysis of experiments involving two treatments to which response is dichotomous. Composite hypotheses about the difference in success probabilities are tested, and covariate information is utilized in the analysis. The method is based upon a generalization of Bartlett’s (1946) procedure for using the maximum likelihood estimate of a nuisance parameter in a Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT). Treatment assignment rules studied include pure randomization, randomized blocks, and an adaptive rule which tends to assign the superior treatment to the majority of subjects. It is shown that the use of covariate information can result in important reductions in the expected sample size for specified error probabilities, and that the use of covariate information is essential for the elimination of bias when adaptive assignment rules are employed. Designs of the type presented are easily generated, as the termination criterion is the same as for a Wald SPRT of simple hypotheses.