Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [204]
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The following discussion draws upon and elaborates materials presented earlier in Alexander L. George, “Case Studies and Theory Development,” paper presented to the Second Annual Symposium on Information Processing in Organizations, Carnegie Mellon University, October 15-16, 1982, and Alexander L. George and Timothy J. McKeown, “Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision Making,” in Robert F. Coulam and Richard A. Smith, eds., Advances in Information Processing in Organizations, Vol. 2 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985), pp. 21-58. For an excellent review of developments in comparative methods, see David Collier, “The Comparative Method: Two Decades of Change,” in Dankwart A. Rustow and Kenneth Paul Erickson, eds., Comparative Political Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 8-11. A revised version of Collier’s article was published in Ada Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline II (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1993).
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The editors of an important assessment of the possible utility of counterfactual analysis note that experimental and statistical methods cannot play an important role in the study of international relations: “There appear to be large classes of questions in the study of global conflict and cooperation for which experimental control is out of the question and statistical control is of limited usefulness.” Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 38.
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Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba term this problem “the fundamental problem of causal inference.” See Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, University Press, 1994) pp. 79-80; 208-210. Charles Ragin and Jeremy Hein emphasize that “most applications of comparative methodology resort to truncated, rhetorical comparison that gives the appearance but have little of the substance of a natural experiment … [the] two-case comparison is limited in its ability to test theories regarding causal regularities.” Charles C. Ragin and Jeremy Hein, “The Comparative Study of Ethnicity,” in John H. Stanfield III and Rutledge M. Dennis, eds., Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993), p. 255.
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See, for example, Arend Lijphart, “The Comparable-Cases Strategy in Comparative Research,” and his earlier “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 65, No. 3 (September 1971), pp. 682-693.
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See, for example, Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” p. 688. For additional discussion of Mill’s methods, see Chapter 11.
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Neil J. Smelser, “The Methodology of Comparative Analysis,” in Donald P. Warwick and Samuel Osherson, eds., Comparative Research Methods (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 52.
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See, for example, Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934). Detailed explications and critical examinations of Mill’s methods are provided by a number of writers. In an early essay, “Intelligent Comparisons,” in Ivan Vallier, ed., Comparative Methods in Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Morris Zelditch provided a constructive, balanced discussion of the possibility of using Mill’s methods as providing “rules” for the design of comparative research. He concluded that such “rules” had limitations and were not sufficient to be used as “mechanical procedures.” Among more recent, detailed critiques of Mill’s methods, see, for example, Brian Barry, “Methodology Versus Ideology: The ‘Economic’ Approach Revisited,” in Elinor Ostrom, ed., Strategies of Political Inquiry (Beverly Hills, Calif.: