Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [179]
Williams, Cindy, ed., Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System (2004)
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1
The key objective of the important book by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Making (New York: Free Press, 1986), is to suggest various ways in which policymakers can avoid relying on a single historical analogy. However, these authors do not address the question of how the lessons of a number of cases of a given phenomenon can be cumulated to provide a differentiated theory. For a more recent statement on the need to derive “lessons” from historical experience, see William W. Jarosz with Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The Shadow of the Past: Learning From History in National Security Decision Making,” in Philip Tetlock et. al., Behavior, Society, and International Conflict, Volume 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 162-189.
2
In Harry Eckstein’s terminology, an ideographic atheoretical explanation was converted into a “disciplined configurative” study. An early explicit example of this procedure was contained in Gabriel Almond, Scott Flanagan, and Robert Mundt, eds., Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies in Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 22-28.
3
Alexander L. George,