The Transformation of Community

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COMMUNITY 364 ﬁve assistants, addressed the effects on Muncie of certain events during the period between 1925 and 1935, some of which were economic boom times, a thirty-seven percent population increase, and the emergence of the Great Depression. The Lynds’ fundamental questions in the later study addressed the persistence of the social fabric and culture of the community in the face of the ‘‘hard times’’ and other aspects of social change, the stability of community values concerning self-reli- ance and faith in the future when confronted by structurally-induced poverty and dependence, whether the Depression promoted a sense of com- munity or undermined community solidarity by introducing new social cleavages, and the out- comes of latent conﬂicts observed in the mid- 1920s (Lynd and Lynd 1937, p. 4). The conclusion reached by the Lynds was that the years of depression did little to diminish or otherwise change the essentially bourgeois value structure and way of life in Middletown, and that in almost all fundamental respects the community culture of Middletown remained much as it did a tumultuous decade earlier: ‘‘In the main, a Rip Van Winkle, fallen asleep in 1925 while addressing Rotary or the Central Labor Union, could have awakened in 1935 and gone right on with his interrupted address to the same people with much the same ideas’’ (Lynd and Lynd 1937, p. 490). Although this remark seems to reﬂect some amount of disappointment on the Lynds’ part that Middle- town’s bourgeois value system and class structure remained so unchanged in the face of widespread and unprecedented destitution, the Lynds still remained convinced that the Middletown family was in jeopardy, as evidenced by (among other things) an ever-widening generation gap. The Lynds’ apprehensions concerning the survival of the American family were (and are) in keeping with the popular belief concerning the decline of the American family as its socialization functions are assumed by other formal social institutions external to the family. The Middletown III study undertaken from 1976 to 1978 by Theodore Caplow, Howard M. Bahr, and Bruce A. Chadwick, attempted to close- ly replicate the methodology of the Lynds. Howev- er, their ﬁndings were at odds with the more pessimistic predictions of the Lynds. In contrast to the Lynds’ foreboding in 1935 and popular soci- ology since that time, Caplow and his associates contend that Middletown’s families of the 1970s have ‘‘increased family solidarity, a smaller genera- tion gap, closer marital communication, more re- ligion, and less mobility’’ (Caplow et al. 1982, p. 323). The conclusions derived from the third Mid- dletown studies also reject similar assumptions concerning consistent linear trends in equaliza- tion, secularization, bureaucratization, and deper- sonalization consistent with the relentless ‭Gemeinschaft‬ to ‭Gesellschaft‭ theme (Bahr, Caplow, and Chadwick‬‬ 1983). Although many of the Lynds’ predictions con- cerning the social transformation of Middletown failed to pan out as history unfolded, their work and remarkable powers of observation remain unparalleled in many respects. Of equal impor- tance, the early Middletown studies helped to inspire such other works as ‭Street Corner Society‬ and the Yankee City studies, and they remain the standard by which all other community studies are judged. The largest scale community study undertak- en remains W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City, pub- lished in a ﬁve volume series from 1941 through 1959 (W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lund, ‭The‬ Social Life of a Modern Community‭ 1941; W. Lloyd‬ Warner and Paul S. Lund, ‭The Status System of a‬ Modern Community‭ 1942; W. Lloyd Warner and‬ Leo Srole, ‭The Social Systems of American Ethnic‬ Groups‭ 1945; W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, ‬The Social System of the Modern Factory‭ 1947; and W.‬ Lloyd Warner ‭The Living and the Dead‬ 1959). The Yankee City project was undertaken by Warner and his associates in Newburyport, Massachusetts during the late 1930s. Warner, an anthropologist, attempted to obtain a complete ethnographic ac- count of a ‘‘representative’’ American small com- munity with a population range from 10,000 to 20,000. To accomplish this task, Warner’s staff (numbering in the thirties) conducted aerial sur- veys of Newburyport and its surrounding commu- nities, gathered some 17,000 ‘‘social personality’’ cards on every member of the community, gath- ered data on the professed and de facto reading preferences of its citizens, and even subjected plots of local plays to content analysis (Thernstrom 1964). Warner’s conception of Yankee City was that of a stable, rather closed community with a social structure being transformed in very negative ways COMMUNITY 365 by the latter stages of industrialization. According to Warner’s vision of Yankee City, the loss of local economic control over its industries through a factory system controlled by ‘‘outsiders’’ disrupt- ed traditional management—labor relations and communal identiﬁcation with local leadership. Moreover, the factory system was seen by Warner as promoting an increasingly rigid class structure and decreased opportunities for social mobility. In particular, Warner’s discussion of the loss of local economic control through horizontal and vertical afﬁliation, orientation, and delegation of authori- ty seems to have offered a prophetic glimpse into the future for many American communities. Although the Yankee City study produced a voluminous ethnographic record of an American city that has remained untouched in scale, Warner found little support for his contention that the ethnographic portrait of Newburyport produced by the Yankee City series could be generalized to other small American communities. Moreover, Warner’s contention that social mobility is re- duced by industrial change was not supported by the quality of his data and was less true in Warner’s time than it probably is today. Other critiques of Warner’s Yankee City study primarily concern his nearly exclusive reliance on ethnographic infor- mation as the basis for all measures of social structure and his disdain for historical data (Thernstrom 1964). Both Gerald Suttles’s ‭The Social Order of the‬ Slum‭ (1968) and William Whyte’s ‭Street Corner‬‬ Society‭ (1943) provide sociology with unparalleled‬ ethnographic accounts of neighborhood social structure and communal life in urban environs. Suttles’s work focuses on the territorial relation- ships, neighborhood social structure, and commu- nal life among Italian, Latino, and African Ameri- can inhabitants of the slums of Chicago’s Near West Side in the 1960s. Whyte’s ‭Street Corner Socie-‬ ty‭, based on Whyte’s residence in a Chicago Italian‬ slum district a generation earlier, provides sociolo- gy with an understanding of the complex and stable social organization that existed within slum neighborhoods conventionally believed to have epitomized social disorganization. Whyte’s obser- vations and keen insights concerning small group behavior are pioneering contributions to that area of sociology. Both studies, in method, theory, and substance are classic examples of Chicago School sociology. More contemporary community stud- ies, while they draw heavily on Chicago School sociological traditions in theory and method, have as their primary concern aspects of community that relate to poverty, juvenile delinquency, and violence. For example, Robert Sampson and his colleagues conducted a large-scale study of Chica- go neighborhoods that linked subjective deﬁni- tions of neighborhood with social cohesion and violence inhibiting actions on the part of neigh- bors (Sampson 1997a, 1997b). Theoretically, Sampson’s work draws heavily on Robert Park’s conception of the social cohesion that exists within the ‘‘natural areas’’ of the city that are deﬁned by both physical and sentimental boundaries (Park 1925), while methodologically Sampson and his colleagues employed the classic Chicago School preference for ﬁeld observation—albeit with the modern advantages of a video camera located within a slowly moving van in place of the shoe leather sociology of their predecessors. COMMUNITY IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIAL REFORM Efforts to enhance the social context of human existence continuously take place at all levels of social organization, from the microcontext of the nuclear family to the macrocontext of relation- ships between nation-states. No unit of social or- ganization has received more attention in theories and activities linked to social reform than the human community, however it is deﬁned and measured. Community in the context of social reform is typically viewed or employed in one of the following four ways: as a unit of analysis for the purpose of broad generalization, as a critical medi- ating inﬂuence between the organization of mass society and individual outcomes, as a speciﬁc tar- get of social reform efforts, or as a symbolic con- ception of whatever is ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘wrong’’ with society at large. The use of rural and urban communities as the basis for reform-motivated generalization emerged in the United States during the Progres- sive era, when social activists afﬁliated with Chica- go’s famous settlement house, Hull House, and the newly formed Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago shared a common geographi- cally-rooted conception of social science and con- cern for the living conditions of Chicago’s urban COMMUNITY 366 poor (Sklar 1998). ‭Hull House Maps and Papers,‬ published in 1895, provides a remarkably detailed description of the lives and living conditions with- in Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods based on the ﬁeld research of university students and full-time residents of Hull House. In fact, the beginnings of Chicago School sociology were clearly rooted in the methods if not the concerns of Hull House social reformers, despite the fact that as women they were excluded from holding academic ap- pointments until the creation of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1907 (Muncy 1991). In later years, small towns and neighborhoods within larger towns became a common unit of analysis as community studies conducted by the federal Children’s Bureau tried to assess the inci- dence and causes of infant mortality. The ﬁrst of these studies, conducted in Johnstown, Pennsylva- nia in 1913, was the earliest scientiﬁc study of the incidence of infant mortality by social class, educa- tion, occupation, and speciﬁc living conditions conducted in the United States (Duke 1915). Re- form-driven community studies since then have addressed such social issues as child labor, juvenile delinquency, education, industrial working condi- tions, and adequate housing. Although single com- munities are still used by social reformers as a basis for broad generalization, such studies are enor- mously expensive to conduct, often of limited use for generalization, and altogether less frequent with the availability of national survey data. Despite the conceptual ambiguities involved, the geographically-bounded community (e.g., cen- sus tract, city ward, resident deﬁned neighbor- hood) is generally viewed by liberal and conserva- tive social reformers alike as the critical mediating social context between the well-being of individu- als, the effective functioning and stability of fami- lies, and society at large. Robert Hauser and his associates identify such factors as the physical infrastructure, the quality and quantity of neigh- borhood institutions, the demographic composi- tion, and the degree of ‘‘social capital’’ present as measurable aspects of neighborhoods that are critical to the well-being of children and families (Hauser, Brown, and Prosser 1997). The concept of social capital, introduced by James Coleman, refers to the beneﬁcial normative context that arises in some neighborhoods based on the social ties among neighboring households and local in- stitutions (Coleman 1988). In this vein, Robert Sampson demonstrates that neighborhoods with evidence of more social capital are more effective in inhibiting adolescent delinquency (Sampson, 1997b). Speaking from the opposite perspective of social disorganization, William Julius Wilson (1987, 1996), and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993) emphasize the deleterious effects on the normative context within communities created by such macrolevel exogenous factors as economic restructuring, concentrated poverty, and racial segregation. A related concern is the extent to which increased spatial stratiﬁcation by social class may be promoting neighborhoods and larger com- munities, which function as distinct social worlds with ever more divergent values and opportunity structures (Massey 1996). Efforts to effect social reform at the communi- ty level have a long tradition of sentiment, failure, and mixed success. There are a variety of reasons for failure, not the least of which is that communi- ties, like individuals, both mirror and are shaped by complex exogenous social processes. Contem- porary issues include conceptual differences in the measures used for community, the fact that com- munity effects on individual outcomes are difﬁcult to isolate and often weaker than popular theory would suggest (Plotnick and Hoffman 1999; Brooks- Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997), and the limiting effect of macrolevel processes on community-level reform efforts (Wallace and Wallace 1990; Halpern 1991). Recent efforts at community-level social reform have placed more emphasis on under- standing the unique social context within a target community before applying social prescriptions that appear logically appealing or may have worked elsewhere. For example, David Hawkins and Rich- ard Catalano, in their work on juvenile drug and alcohol abuse, focus on a community assessment process that considers the risk and protective fac- tors that are unique to each community before deciding upon speciﬁc community-level interven- tions (Hawkins and Catalano 1992). SOCIAL THEORY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF COMMUNITY Every generation of sociologists since the time of Durkheim have concerned themselves with the social transformation and meaning of community in the face of industrial change and urbanization. COMMUNITY 367 Roland Warren (1978) describes the modern so- cial transformation of community as a change of orientation by the local community units toward the extracommunity systems of which they are a part, with a corresponding decrease in community cohesion and autonomy (Warren 1978, pp. 52– 53). Warren identiﬁes seven areas through which social transformation can be analyzed: division of labor, differentiation of interests and association, increasing systemic relationships to the larger so- ciety, bureaucratization and impersonalization, transfer of functions to proﬁt enterprise and gov- ernment, urbanization and suburbanization, and changing value. Bender (1978) proposes that the observations by various community scholars at different points in historical time, each suggesting that theirs is the historical tipping point from community to mass society, contradict linear decline or an interpreta- tion of history that stresses the collapse of commu- nity. He suggests that a ‘‘bifurcation of social experience’’ or sharpening of the distinction be- tween ‭Gemeinschaft‭ and ‬Gesellschaft‭ realms of social‬‬ interaction is a more accurate interpretation of the historical transformation of community than that provided by the linear ‭Gemeinschaft‭-to-‬gesellschaft‬ framework. Barry Wellman and Barry Leighton (1979) suggest that there are three essential arguments concerning the fate of community in mass society: community ‘‘lost,’’ community ‘‘saved,’’ and com- munity ‘‘liberated.’’ The community ‘‘lost’’ argu- ment emerged during the Industrial Revolution, as traditional communal modes of production and interaction gave way to centralized, industrialized sources of production and dependence. Accord- ing to this hypothesis and its variations, the inti- mate, sustained, and mutually interdependent hu- man associations based on shared fate and shared consciousness observed in traditional communal society are relentlessly giving way to the casual, impersonal, transitory, and instrumental relation- ships based on self-interest that are characteristic of social existence in modern industrial society. The classic essay in the community ‘‘lost’’ tradition is Louis Wirth’s ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’’ (1938). Wirth’s eloquent essay presents a perspective of urban existence that continues to capture sociological thinking about the emergence of a heterogeneous urban mass society character- ized by a breakdown of informal, communal ways of meeting human need and the rise of human relationships that are best characterized as ‘‘large- ly anonymous, superﬁcial, and transitory’’ (Wirth 1938, p. 1). Another important contribution in the decline of community tradition is the ‘‘community of limited liability’’ thesis (Janowitz 1952; Greer 1962). According to this thesis, networks of hu- man association and interdependence exist at vari- ous levels of social organization, and there are social status characteristics associated with differ- entiated levels of participation in community life (e.g., family life-cycle phase). The idea of ‘‘limited liability’’ poses the argument that, in a highly mobile society, the attachments to community tend to be based on rationalism rather than on sentiment and that even those ‘‘invested’’ in the community are limited in their sense of personal commitment. In direct contrast to the community ‘‘lost’’ perspective, the community ‘‘saved’’ argument sug- gests that communities and communal relation- ships continue to exist within industrialized bu- reaucratic urban societies as people are increasingly motivated to seek ‘‘safe communal havens’’ (Wil- liam and Lieghton 1979, p. 373). For example, Bahr, Caplow, and Chadwick (1983), forty years after the Lynds’ ‭Middletown in Transition‬ study, failed to ﬁnd the singular trends in bureaucratiza- tion, secularization, mobility, and depersonaliza- tion that would be predicted from a linear decline of community hypothesis. Their observation of Middletown in the 1970s was more consistent with the perspective proposed by Robert Redﬁeld (1955); that both urban ways and folkways coexist within contemporary small towns and cities: ‘‘In every isolated little community there is civilization; in every city there is the folk society’’ (Redﬁeld 1955, p. 146). The community ‘‘liberated’’ argument con- cedes and to some extent qualiﬁes key aspects of both the community ‘‘lost’’ and community ‘‘saved’’ perspectives. While it acknowledges that neigh- borhood-level communal ties have been weakened in the face of urbanization, it argues that commu- nal ties and folkways still ﬂourish, albeit in alterna- tive non-spatial forms. The community ‘‘liberat- ed’’ argument suggests that the spatial dependence of communal ties have been replaced by ease of mobility and communication across boundaries of COMMUNITY 368 both geographic and social distance. Although the community ‘‘liberated’’ argument preceeded the development of the Internet and cyberspace ‘‘chatrooms’’ by decades, it emphasizes the role of communication technology in the creation of such future manifestations of community and in that sense was strikingly prophetic. Despite the fact that the decline of community or the community ‘‘lost’’ perspective continues to hold broad appeal (e.g., Robert Putnam’s ‘‘The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,’’ ‭The‬ American Prospect‭, Winter, 1996), the empirical‬ evidence for a real decline in community is far from conclusive. A time trend analysis of national surveys concerning the persistence of community in American society by Avery Guest and Susan Wierzbicki (1999) suggests that while traditional intra-neighborhood forms of socializing have slow- ly declined over the past two decades, they have been largely replaced by communal ties outside the local neighborhood. Moreover, Guest and Wierzbicki’s ﬁndings also suggest that spatial ‘‘with- in neigborhood’’ communal ties continue to be important to a large segment of the population. Their ﬁndings imply that the major questions about the place of community in mass society should not be about whether communal forms of relationships will continue to exist, but rather under what conditions and in what form. REFERENCES Bahr, Howard M., Theodore Caplow, and Bruce Chadwick 1983 ‘‘Middletown III: Problems of Replication, Lon- gitudinal Measurement, and Triangulation.’’ ‭Annual‬ Review of Sociology‭ 9:249–258.‬ Bender, Thomas 1978 ‭Community and Social Change in‬ America‭. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Universi-‬ ty Press. Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Greg Duncan, and Lawrence Aber 1997 ‭Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences‬ for Children, Volume I‭. New York: Russell Sage‬ Foundation. Caplow, Theodore, Howard M. Bahr, Bruce A. Chadwick, Reuben Hill, and Margaret Holmes Williamson 1982 Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Conti- nuity‭. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.‬ Coleman, James 1988 ‘‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.’’ ‭American Journal of Sociology‬, 94 (supp): S95–S120. Duke, Emma 1914 ‭Infant Mortality: Results of a Field Study‬ in Johnstown, P.A., Based on Births in One Calendar Year‭. U.S.D.L. Children’s Bureau Publication No. 9.‬ Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Greer, Scott 1962 ‭The Emerging City: Myth and Reality.‬ New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Guest, Avery, and Susan Wierzbicki 1999 ‘‘Social Ties at the Neighborhood Level: Two Decades of GSS Evi- dence.’’ ‭Urban Affairs Review‬ 35: forthcoming. Halpern, Robert 1991 ‘‘Supportive Services for Families in Poverty: Dilemmas of Reform.’’ ‭Social Service Re-‬ view‭ 65 (3):343–365.‬ Hauser, Robert, Brett Brown, and William Prosser 1997 Indicators of Children’s Well-Being‭. New York: Russell‬ Sage Foundation. Hillary, George A., Jr. 1955 ‘‘Deﬁnitions of Community: Areas of Agreement.’’ ‭Rural Sociology‬ 20:111–123. Janowitz, Morris 1952 ‭The Community Press in an Urban‬ Setting: The Social Elements of Urbanism‭. Chicago:‬ University of Chicago Press. Jencks, Christopher and Susan Mayer 1996 ‘‘The Social Consequences of Growing Up in a Poor Neighbor- hood.’’ In Lynn Le and McGeary MGH, eds., ‭Inner-‬ city Poverty in the United States‭. Washington D.C.:‬ National Academy Press. Lindeman, E. C. 1930 ‘‘Community.’’ In Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., ‭The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences‬. New York: Macmillan. Lynd, Robert, and Helen Lynd 1929 ‭Middletown: A Study‬ in American Culture‭. New York: Harcourt, Brace and‬ Company. ——— 1937 ‭Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural‬ Conﬂicts‭. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.‬ Massey, Douglas 1996 ‘‘The Age of Extremes: Concen- trated Afﬂuence and Poverty in the Twenty-First Century.’’ ‭Demography‬ 33 (4):395–413. ——— and Nancy Denton 1993 ‭American Apartheid:‬ Segregation and the Making of the Underclass‭. Cam-‬ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. McMillan, David and David Chavis 1986 ‘‘Sense of Com- munity: A Deﬁnition and Theory.’’ ‭Journal of Commu-‬ nity Psychology‭ 14:6–23.‬ Muncy, Robyn 1991 ‭Creating a Female Dominion in Ameri-‬ can Reform 1890–1935‭. New York: Oxford Universi-‬ ty Press. Park, Robert 1925 ‘‘The City: Suggestions for the Inves- tigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environ- ment.’’ In Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, eds., ‭The City‬. Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press. COMPARABLE WORTH 369 Plotnick, Robert and Saul Hoffman 1999 ‘‘The Effect of Neighborhood Characteristics on Young Adult Out- comes: Alternative Estimates.’’ ‭Social Science Quarter-‬ ly‭ 80 (1):forthcoming.‬ Putnam, Robert 1996 ‘‘The Strange Disppearance of Civic America.’’ ‭The American Prospect‬. Winter, 1996: 34–48. Redﬁeld, Robert 1955 ‭The Little Community‬. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sampson, Robert 1997a ‘‘Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efﬁcacy.’’ Science‭ 277:918–925.‬ ——— 1997b ‘‘Collective Regulation of Adolescent Mis- behavior: Validation Results from Eighty Chicago Neighborhoods.’’ ‭ Journal of Adolescent Research‭ 12‬‬ (2):227–244. Sklar, Kathryn 1998 ‘‘Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890’s.’’ In Helene Silverberg, ed., ‭Gender and American Social‬ Science: The Formative Years‭. Princeton, N.J.: Prince-‬ ton University Press. Suttles, Gerald 1972 ‭The Social Construction of Communi-‬ ties‭. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.‬ ——— 1968 ‭The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and‬ Territory in the Inner City‭. Chicago: The University of‬ Chicago Press. Thernstrom, Stephen 1964 ‭Poverty and Progress‬. Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wallace, Roderick, and Deborah Wallace 1990 ‘‘Origins of Public Health Collapse in New York City: The Dynamics of Planned Shrinkage, Contagious Urban Decay, and Social Disintegration.’’ ‭Bulletin of the New‬ York Academy of Medicine‭ 66:391–434.‬ Warner, W. Lloyd 1959 ‭The Living and the Dead: A Study‬ of the Symbolic Life of Americans‭. New Haven: Yale‬ University Press. ———, and J.O. Low 1947 ‭The Social System of the Modern‬ Factory: The Strike, A Social Analysis‭. New Haven: Yale‬ University Press. ———, Paul S. Lund, and Leo Srole 1963 ‭Yankee City.‬ New Haven: Yale University Press. Warner, W. Lloyd, and Leo Srole 1945 ‭The Social Systems‬ of American Ethnic Groups‭. New Haven: Yale Universi-‬ ty Press. Warner, W. Lloyd, and Paul S. Lund 1941 ‭The Social Life‬ of a Modern Community‭. New Haven: Yale Universi-‬ ty Press. ——— 1942 ‭The Status System of a Modern Community.‬ New Haven: Yale University Press. Warren, Roland 1978 ‭The Community in America‬. Chica- go: Rand McNally. Wellman, Barry, and Barry Leighton 1979 ‘‘Networks, Neighborhoods, and Community: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question.’’ ‭Urban Affairs‬ Quarterly‭ 14 (3):363–390.‬ Whyte, William Foote 1943 ‭Street Corner Society: The‬ Social Structure of an Italian Slum‭. Chicago: University‬ of Chicago Press. Wilson, William 1996 ‭When Work Disappears: The World‬ of the New Urban Poor‭. New York: Knopf.‬ ——— 1987 ‭The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the‬ Underclass, and Public Policy‭. Chicago: University of‬ Chicago Press. Wirth, Louis 1938 ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life.’’ ‭Ameri-‬ can Journal of Sociology‭ 44:1–24.‬ Zimmerman, Carle C. 1938 ‭The Changing Community.‬ New York: Harper and Brothers. G‭UNNAR A‭LMGREN‬‬ COMMUNITY HEALTH See‭ Community; Comparative Health-Care Sys-‬ tems; Health Promotion and Health Status; Medical Sociology. COMPARABLE WORTH ‘‘Comparable worth’’ is one approach to increas- ing pay equity between jobs done primarily by women and minorities and those done primarily by majority men. It refers to equalizing compensa- tion for jobs requiring comparable levels of effort, skill, and responsibility. The concept of compara- ble worth deﬁnes ‘‘equal work’’ as ‘‘work of equiva- lent value,’’ a broader concept than limiting ‘‘equal work’’ to meaning the ‘‘same work.’’ Comparable worth uses job-evaluation methods to establish equivalencies of different jobs in order to identify and correct disparities in pay between jobs held primarily by women and minority men and jobs held primarily by nonminority men. It is worth noting that the term ‭pay equity‬ is often used in conjunction with discussions of comparable worth; it usually refers not only to comparable worth but also to other approaches to achieving equity and justice in wages. Pay equity is the best subject heading or ‘‘key word’’ to use when doing further research on the topic of comparable worth. COMPARABLE WORTH 370 Proponents of using comparable worth to es- tablish pay equity argue that 1) at least some part of the lower wages in female-dominated jobs and occupations is due to pay discrimination against women, and 2) job evaluation systems can deter- mine the equivalency of different jobs and thus identify the jobs and occupations where this form of discrimination exists. The issue of comparable worth arose in re- sponse to obvious differences in the rewards for jobs held primarily by women and those held primarily by men—even when those jobs required the same or similar levels of education, skill, and responsibility. Advocates of comparable worth and pay equity argue that these wage differences are based on historical and current discrimination in the setting of wages for jobs held primarily by women and minorities. That is, jobs in which workers are primarily women and minorities have been, and remain, systematically undervalued rela- tive to equivalent jobs held by majority men. This undervaluation depresses the wages in jobs done by women and minorities relative to the wages for jobs historically performed by white men. Thus, discrimination is embedded in the current wage structure of jobs (Remick 1984; Marini 1989). Continued job and occupational segregation by sex, combined with the continued systematic undervaluation of jobs held by women and minori- ties, is thereby a cause of continued inequality and a form of labor market discrimination. The argument that discrimination is the basis for the inequality of wages between men’s and women’s jobs is not new. In the 1922 presidential address to the British Association of Economists, F.Y. Edgeworth spoke on ‘‘Equal Pay to Men and Women for Equal Work.’’ Edgeworth outlined three major conclusions regarding wage inequali- ty between men and women. First, that men and women work in different jobs, albeit jobs that often require similar levels of effort and skill. Second, that jobs held by women are paid far less than those held by men. Third, that removing overt discrimination would be unlikely to equalize wages for men and women fully (Edgeworth 1922). The ﬁndings of recent empirical studies have gen- erally supported these three conclusions. There is considerable evidence demonstrat- ing that men and women work in different occupa- tions. Comparisons of occupational segregation by sex in the United States since 1900 show that levels of segregation have been persistent through the 1960s and 1980s (Gross 1968; Jacobs 1989). During the 1980s more than half of the workers of one sex would have had to change occupations in order to equalize the distribution of men and women across all occupations (Jacobs 1989). Re- searchers using more speciﬁc job titles within ﬁrms have found that almost no men and women work together in the same job in the same ﬁrm (Bielby and Baron 1986). On average, women continue to earn substan- tially less than men. Women earned 62 percent of what men earned in 1975 and just over 75 percent of what men earned in 1995 (Figart and Kahn 1997). The concentration of women in low-paying, female-dominated occupations has been found to account for a substantial portion of this income difference. The amount of the income gap be- tween men and women explained by the sex segre- gation of occupations varies from 25 percent to over 33 percent across many studies of this issue (Sorensen 1986; Figart and Kahn 1997). The re- mainder of the difference between men’s and women’s average earnings is due to other factors, such as differences in the overall skills and experi- ence individual men and women bring with them to the labor market. Empirical studies have examined whether the gap in wages between female-dominated and male- dominated occupations is based on differences in the occupations with regard to the skills required or the work environments. Treiman and colleagues (1984), in an evaluation of the effects of differ- ences in characteristics of male and female occu- pations on wages, found that ‘‘about 40 percent of the earnings gap between male- and female-domi- nated occupations can be attributed to differences in job characteristics and 60 percent to differences in the rate of return on these characteristics.’’ That is, he found that the premium paid for skills in male-dominated occupations was higher than that paid for the same skills in female-dominated occu- pations. Other research has conﬁrmed the ﬁnd- ings that speciﬁc skills (such as dealing with the public) or requirements (such as having a high school diploma) increase wages more in a male- dominated occupation than in a female-dominat- ed occupation (McLaughlin 1978; Beck and Kemp 1986). Other possible explanations for differences COMPARABLE WORTH 371 in wages between male-dominated and female- dominated occupations—such as that female-domi- nated occupations have greater nonmonetary com- pensations (such as vacation, sick leave, ﬂexibility in working hours) (Jencks, Perman and Rainwater 1988) or that they are more accommodating to intermittent careers (England 1982)—have not been supported by empirical studies. The conclusion of J.S. Mill in 1865, as quoted by Edgeworth in 1922—‘‘The remuneration of the peculiar employments of women is always, I be- lieve, greatly below that of employments of equal skill and equal disagreeableness carried on by men.’’—is similar to the conclusion reached by the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences committee report in 1981: ‘‘[Such] differential earnings patterns have existed for many decades. They may arise in part because women and minority men are paid less than white men for doing the same (or very similar) jobs within the same ﬁrm, or in part because the job structure is substantial- ly segregated by sex, race, and ethnicity and the jobs held mainly by women and minority men pay less than the jobs held mainly by non- minority men’’ ‭(Treiman and Hartmann‬ 1981, p.92). The evidence is fairly conclusive that occupa- tional-level wage discrimination exists—that is, that skills and requirements are less well rewarded in jobs held primarily by women than they are in jobs held primarily by men. Comparable worth advo- cates argue that applying job-evaluation methods is a viable method for reducing this form of wage discrimination. This is clariﬁed in Helen Remick’s proposed working deﬁnition of comparable worth as ‘‘the application of a single, bias-free point factor job evaluation system within a given estab- lishment, across job families, both to rank-order jobs and to set salaries‘‘(1984, p.99). Job-evaluation methods are well established and have been used for decades to establish equivalencies across jobs. Actual methods of job evaluation differ, but the usual approach is to start by describing all jobs within a given organization. Next, a list of important job requirements is devel- oped and jobs are rated on each requirement. For example, one requirement could be the use of mathematics. In this case each job would be rated from ‘‘low’’ (e.g. addition and subtraction of whole numbers) to ‘‘high’’ (e.g., the use of differential equations). Most job-evaluation methods include job requirements such as level of education, skills, level of responsibility, and the environment in which the work is performed. Some job-evaluation methods also include such characteristics of job incumbents as average education, training, and experience. More complex job-evaluation systems also consider how jobs rank with regard to fringe beneﬁts (e.g. sick leave), hours (e.g. shift work), training and promotion opportunities, hazards, autonomy (e.g. can leave work without permis- sion), authority (e.g. supervises others), and or- ganizational setting (e.g. organizational size) (see Jencks et al. 1988). After each job is rated and given a certain number of ‘‘points’’ for each re- quirement, the points are then added into an overall ‘‘score’’ for each job. These scores are then weighted based on the importance assigned to a particular job attribute. Each job then receives a total number of points based on all of the appropiate factors in order to compare the value to the ﬁrm of different jobs. These composite scores are then used to rank jobs in order to help determine appropriate wages (Blau and Ferber 1986). This makes it possible to compare wages paid for jobs with very different—but comparable—content. In addition to considering the training and work requirements for jobs within the ﬁrm, systems of job evaluation often also take into account whatev- er information is available on prevailing wages for different types of labor. The use of job evaluation is neither new nor unusual, and currently job evaluation is often used to determine pay scales by governments and by many businesses. Job evalua- tions are primarily used when employers cannot rely on the market to establish wages. (See Spilerman 1986, for a discussion of the types of organizations that determine wages based on nonmarket mecha- nisms.) Employers must determine wages, for ex- ample, when positions are ﬁlled entirely from within an organizational unit (e.g. through promo- tion of an existing workforce) or when they ﬁll jobs that are unique to a particular ﬁrm. In these cases, ‘‘going rates’’ for all jobs are not always available in local labor markets. There are at least two critical limitations to using job-evaluation methods in establishing com- parable worth. First, it is difﬁcult to eliminate the effects of past practices on the identiﬁcation and the weighting of important job characteristics. COMPARABLE WORTH 372 Existing job-evaluation schemes have been criti- cized for undervaluing, or not even considering, the skills and abilities that are emphasized in some female jobs (Beatty and Beatty 1984; Stienberg 1992). For example, at one time the coding in the job-evaluation system used in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles rated the primarily male occu- pation ‘‘Dog Pound Attendant’’ as requiring a higher level of complexity with regard to working with data, people, and things than the primarily female occupations of ‘‘Nursery School Teacher’’ and ‘‘Practical Nurse’’—which were rated as hav- ing minimal or no relationship with data, people, or things (Miller et al. 1980). Second, because job- evaluation methods are used within a particular ﬁrm or organization, they do not address wage inequalities ‭across‭ ﬁrms or organizations. This par-‬‬ ticularly limits the scope of comparable worth because, with the exception of governments (which often employ individuals across a wide range of occupational categories), most organizations are staffed by individuals in a relatively narrow span of occupations. For example, jobs in the textile and poultry-processing industries, usually held by wom- en, and jobs in the lumber industry, usually held by men, could have the same overall scores in terms of job characteristics. However, because these jobs are usually not in the same organization, it is unlikely that job-evaluation methods could be used to equalize wages for these jobs. Comparable-worth methods have been used in a number of legal actions in attempts to increase the equivalencies of wages for jobs held primarily by women and those held primarily by men. The outcomes of these cases have been mixed (see Remick 1984; Heen 1984; Steinberg 1987; and Figart and Kahn 1997 for reviews and discussions of cases). In the United States, the right of ‘‘equal pay for equal work’’ is provided by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. An important legal action based on the premise of comparable worth was the Supreme Court ruling in the ‭County of Washington‬ v Gunther‭, 452 U.S. 161 (1981). This ruling re-‬ moved a major legal obstacle to comparable worth as the basis of equalizing wages. Although it did not endorse the comparable worth approach, it did rule that a man and woman need not do ‘‘equal work’’ in order to establish pay discrimination under Title VII (Heen 1984). Subsequent lower court rulings have not resulted in clear-cut deci- sions regarding comparable worth, and at present it seems unlikely that, in the United States, court decisions will mandate the comparable-worth ap- proach. Legal and legislative actions based on comparable worth and pay equity also have emerged in countries other than the United States. Canada included a provision for equal pay for work of equal value in the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 (see Cadieux 1984; and Ontario Pay Equity Commission 1998). The implementation of this legislation has resulted in signiﬁcant decisions regarding the need to increase wages in female- dominated occupations—both in private industry and in the government. However, the implementa- tion of these decisions has not been without difﬁ- culty. For example, the government and the gov- ernment-workers union of the Northwest Territories were, in early 1998, in disagreement with regard to whether the evaluation system used by the govern- ment to establish comparable worth was biased (Government of the Northwest Territories 1998). Despite its limitations and difﬁculties in im- plementation, the concept of comparable worth as a basis for pay equity remains important in public policy initiatives. The National Committee on Pay Equity (1999), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (1999), and other organizations provide information and sup- port for advocates of comparable worth. As one approach to increasing pay equity, comparable- worth applications have the potential for identify- ing and correcting one of the most persistent bases for the disparity between earnings for majority men and earnings for women and minorities. REFERENCES Beatty, R. W., and J. R. Beatty 1984 ‘‘Some Problems with Contemporary Job Evaluation Systems.’’ In H. Remick, ed., ‭Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimina-‬ tion: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities‭. Phila-‬ delphia: Temple University Press. Bielby, W. T., and J. N. Baron 1986 ‘‘Men and Women at Work: Sex Segregation and Statistical Discrimina- tion.’’ ‭American Journal of Sociology‬ 91:759–99. Blau, F. D., and M. A. Ferber 1986 ‭The Economics of‬ Women, Men and Work‭. New York: Prentice-Hall.‬ Cadieux, Rita 1984 ‘‘Canada’s Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value Law.’’ In H. Remick, ed., ‭Comparable‬ Worth and Wage Discrimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities‭. Philadelphia: Temple Universi-‬ ty Press. COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 373 Edgeworth, F. Y. 1922 ‘‘Equal Pay to Men and Women for Equal Work.’’ ‭The Economic Journal‬ 32:431–56. England, P. 1982 ‘‘The Failure of Human Capital Theo- ry to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation.’’ ‭Journal‬ of Human Resources‭ 17:358–70.‬ Figart, Sarah M., and Peggy Kahn 1997 ‭Contesting the‬ Market: Pay Equity and the Politics of Economic Restruc- turing‭. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press.‬ Government of the Northwest Territories http:// www.gov.nt.ca/Executive/Pay_Equity, last edited April, 1998. Gross, E. 1968 ‘‘Plus ça change.‭ ‬.‭ ‬. ? The Sexual Struc- ture of Occupations Over Time.’’ ‭Social Problems‬ 16:198–208. Heen, M. 1984 ‘‘A Review of Federal Court Decisions Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.’’ In H. Remick, ed., ‭Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimina-‬ tion: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities‭. Phila-‬ delphia: Temple University Press. Jacobs, J. A. 1989 ‘‘Long Term Trends in Occupational Segregation by Sex.’’ ‭American Journal of Sociology‬ 95:160–73. Jencks, C., L. Perman, and L. Rainwater 1988 ‘‘What is a Good Job? A New Measure of Labor-Market Suc- cess.’’ ‭American Journal of Sociology‬ 93:132–257. Kemp, A. A., and E. M. Beck 1986 ‘‘Equal Work, Une- qual Pay: Gender Discrimination Within Work-simi- lar Occupations.’’ ‭Work and Occupations‬ 13:324–347. Marini, M. M. 1989 ‘‘Sex Differences in Earnings in the U.S.’’ In W. R. Scott, ed., ‭Annual Review of Sociology‬, vol. 15. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews. McLaughlin, S. 1978 ‘‘Occupational Sex Identiﬁcation and the Assessment of Male and Female Earnings Inequality.’’‭American Sociological Review‭ 43:909–921.‬‬ Miller, Ann R., D. J. Treiman, P. S. Cain, and P. A. Roos 1980 ‭Work, Jobs, and Occupations: A Critical Review of‬ the Dictionary of Occupational Titles‭. Washington, D.C.:‬ National Academy Press. National Committee on Pay Equity, http://www.femi- nist.com/fairpay.htm, as of February, 1999. Ontario Pay Equity Commission, http://www.gov.on.ca/ LAB/pec/acte.htm, last modiﬁed December 28, 1998. Remick, H. (ed.) 1984 ‭Comparable Worth and Wage Dis-‬ crimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Reali- ties‭. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.‬ ——— 1984 ‘‘Major Issues in ‭a priori‬ Applications.’’ In H. Remick, ed., ‭Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimi-‬ nation: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities‭ 99–‬ 117. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sorensen, E. 1986 ‘‘Implementing Comparable Worth: A Survey of Recent Job Evaluation Studies.’’ ‭Ameri-‬ can Economic Review Papers and Proceedings‭ 76:364–367.‬ Spilerman, S. 1986 ‘‘Organizational Rules and the Fea- tures of Work Careers.’’ ‭Research in Social Stratiﬁca-‬ tion and Mobility‭ 5:41–102.‬ Steinberg, Ronnie, et al. 1985 ‭The New York State Compa-‬ rable Worth Study: Final Report‭. New York: Center for‬ Women in Government. Treiman, D. J., and H. I. Hartman 1981 ‭Woman, Work‬ and Wages: Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value‭. Washing-‬ ton, D.C.: National Academy Press. U.S. Bureau of the Census 1987 ‭Male-Female Differences‬ in Work Experience Occupation and Earnings: 1984‭.‬ Current Population Report P–70, no. 10. Washing- ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. ——— 1986 ‭Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1987,‬ 107th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Print- ing Ofﬁce. N‭ANCY E. D‭URBIN‬‬ B‭ARBARA M‭ELBER‬‬ COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS At the dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, access to health-care services, their cost and quality consti- tute key social, political, and economic issues for virtually every country in the world. Identifying the conditions under which health-care systems function most effectively has become a vital, albeit elusive, goal. One point is certain: It is impossible to fully understand the dynamics of health-care systems without comparative health-care research. Knowledge of systems other than one’s own pro- vides the observer with multiple vantage points from which to gain a fresh perspective on strengths and weaknesses at home. Studying other systems, including their successful as well as failed health- reform efforts, provides a global laboratory for health-systems development. While some coun- tries have been quick to draw upon the health-care innovations of their neighbors, the United States has been relatively slow to look internationally for health-reform ideas. Fortunately, the proliferation of comparative health-care studies promises that such insularity will be much less likely in the future. The comparative study of health-care systems focuses on two broad types of issues. The ﬁrst COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 374 involves ‭describing‭ the range of health-care services‬‬ in populations or societies, particularly their or- ganization and functioning. By far the most com- mon type of research, descriptive studies, brings together statistical indicators and factual explana- tions about how various national systems operate (van Atteveld et al. 1987). Some of this work incorporates an analytical dimension by categoriz- ing systems in terms of conceptual schemes or typologies. Less attention has been paid to the second type of research, which looks more closely at the dynamics of how health-care systems be- have. The intent in this type of research is to analyze‭ the patterns among system characteristics,‬ especially with the idea of anticipating the out- comes that are likely with speciﬁc types of system arrangements. Still in its infancy, this work promis- es an in-depth yet practical understanding of how health-care can be organized and ﬁnanced to achieve desirable levels of both quality and access. Interest in cross-national studies of health- care systems increased dramatically in the early 1990s as a result of national debates over reorgan- izing American health-care. Rapidly aging popula- tions in many advanced, capitalistic countries, in combination with the expanding scope of high technology medicine, resulted in increased public demand for health-care. At the same time, poverty and other forms of social inequality as well as ineffective societal institutions created major pub- lic health problems in many developing countries, such as hazardous water, inadequate or harmful food supplies, poor air quality, unsafe homes and workplaces, and the swift spread of infectious diseases. In both cases, health-care systems have been severely challenged and often cannot meet the needs of citizens. Because of these problems and also due to enhanced global cooperation, social scientists and policy makers are increasingly turning their attention to the experience of other countries. KEY CHARACTERISTICS FOR THE COMPARISON OF HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS Drawing on the work of Anderson (1989) and Frenk (1994), a health-care system can be deﬁned as the combination of health-care institutions, sup- porting human resources, ﬁnancing mechanisms, information systems, organizational structures that link institutions and resources, and management structures that collectively culminate in the deliv- ery of health services to patients. Within this broad framework, the methodology for comparing health- care systems can vary widely. A standard approach would include some or all of the dimensions out- lined below. The most fundamental comparative dimen- sion is the ‭organization, ﬁnancing, and control‬ of a health-care system. This involves comparing which health services are provided; how they are paid for; how they are conﬁgured, planned, and regulated; and how citizens gain access to them. Among countries with advanced economies, health-care services today look much the same to the casual observer; however, the ﬁnancing arrangements and policy-making mechanisms that underlie them vary widely. The role of government is perhaps the most signiﬁcant organizational variable in interna- tional health-care. All governments, with the nota- ble exception of the U.S. government, accept re- sponsibility for the health-care of citizens (Evans 1997). Some governments take it upon themselves to actually provide health services and, therefore, own their own clinics and hospitals and hire their own physicians and staff—examples are Sweden and Denmark. Within the U.S., the Veteran’s Ad- ministration operates its own healthcare system this way. In a variation of this model, the govern- ment acts as the purchaser (but not the owner) of health-care services, obtaining services from pri- vate providers on behalf of patients, such as in Canada or the reformed health-care system in Britain. In Finland, local governments can pur- chase from either public or private providers. In another model, illustrated by Germany and Japan, the government avoids acting as the major payer, and instead takes the role of an overseer, setting mandates for health coverage, including the type and level of coverage, and regulating the terms of what is largely a private system. Due to economic pressures, national governments in both Germany and Japan provided increasing subsidies to sup- port their systems in the 1990s. It is important also to compare health-care systems in terms of ‭physician characteristics and‬ provider arrangements for primary care and preven- tion‭. The supply of medical personnel (e.g., the‬ number of physicians per unit of population) is a key comparative indicator. Interestingly, there is signiﬁcant variation in the number of physicians in advanced economy nations, ranging per 10,000 COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 375 population from ﬁfty-ﬁve in Italy to thirty-four in Germany to twenty-six in the United States, which is more typical, to seventeen in the United King- dom (Anderson and Poullier 1999). Equally inter- esting is that there is no apparent corresponding variation in the health status of these populations. A more complex issue is how different systems organize and divide medical work between various professions and occupations. In some countries, such as Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands, midwives or nurse midwives have primary respon- sibility for normal prenatal care and childbirth; in others, such as the United States, physicians have responsibility for these tasks and midwives are relatively rare. Practice arrangements between gen- eralist and specialist physicians are another point of comparison. The United States is unique among its peers because primary care physicians working in ambulatory settings also have hospital privileg- es, and, therefore, have the right to admit patients and to treat hospitalized patients. In Britain, Swe- den, Germany, and many other countries, on the other hand, only specialists comprise the hospital medical staff and only they can treat patients there. Hospitals and long-term care arrangements‭ consti-‬ tute another dimension in comparing health-care systems. Countries vary widely in how they use hospitals, as well as in how and where citizens with chronic illnesses and other debilitating condi- tions receive ongoing, nonacute care. Many West- ern countries today are in the process of shift- ing from institutional to community-based care. There are many factors affecting this transition, including whether alternatives to institutional care, such as home health and support programs, are readily available. In countries such as Japan and Germany, that through the 1990s have relied on informal family caregiving arrangements rather than institutions or community-based services, sociodemographic changes (elders living longer as well as changes in the work force participation of caregivers) are producing a long-term care crisis. Health-systems also can be compared accord- ing to the degree to which care is ‭integrated and‬ coordinated‭ between various sectors and levels of‬ services. Systems that have rigid boundaries be- tween ambulatory and hospital services, or be- tween general medical and mental health services and that are so highly specialized that patients are required to transfer among multiple providers, illustrate arrangements where communication across ‘‘borders’’ is vital for optimal patient care. The Nordic countries, in particular, have been highly conscious of gaps in the coordination and continuity of care, and have developed reforms to bridge them. Finland has adopted a model that integrates the basic education of both health-care and social care personnel, a strategy intended to link the biomedical and social aspects of health and health-care at the very beginning of profes- sional education. Perhaps the most common basis for compar- ing countries’ health-care systems is various out- come statistics such as ‭economic characteristics, per-‬ sonnel resources, utilization rates, and population health status measures‭. The proportion of the population‬ covered by government-assured health insurance stands as the indicator with the least international variation. Of the twenty-nine countries analyzed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 1998, governments in twenty- four countries assured coverage to 99 percent to 100 percent of their population. The ﬁve excep- tions were Germany with 92 percent coverage, Mexico and the Netherlands with 72 percent, Tur- key with 66 percent, and the U.S. with 33 percent (Anderson and Poullier 1999). Other indicators in the same report vary widely. In per capita health- care spending, the United States spends just less than $4,000, an amount that is substantially more than for the other nations, which range from Switzerland’s $2547 to Turkey’s $260. Contrary to what one might think, the amount a country spends on health-care is not reﬂected in the longevity of its population. Men in twenty-one countries live longer than do men in the United States (up to an average of 77 years in Japan compared to 72.7 in the United States). Similarly, women in nineteen countries live longer than American women (up to an average of 83.6 years in Japan versus 79.4 in the United States). In fact, relatively few of the high- spending countries appear among those with the greatest longevity. Detailed comparisons of statistical character- istics have limited value when neither issues of measurement nor the contextual meanings associ- ated with each measure are immediately clear. Each country has its own distinctive set of ‭sociohistorical‬ and cultural characteristics‭; these should be consid-‬ ered in comparative research, since they often play an important role in explaining the origin and COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 376 development of health-care systems (Payer 1996). For example, Starr (1982) has posed and explored the question of why the United States ignored national health insurance at the same time most European countries were adopting such programs. National insurance, he argues, was a form of social protectionism and was, therefore, most likely to be enacted by paternalistic regimes such as Germany and only later by more liberal states such as France and the United Kingdom. In addition, the United States’ long history of rejecting national health insurance reﬂects its decentralized government, the relative lack of domestic unrest, and the failure of major interest groups (labor, business, and medicine) to provide support. Regarding the same issue, Steinmo and Watts (1995) contend that the structure of American political institutions creates conditions that work against the adoption of na- tional health insurance. A ﬁnal means of comparing health-care sys- tems is on the basis of ‭speciﬁc problems‬, including assessments of citizen satisfaction (Donelan et al. 1999). Closely related comparisons focus on the various ‭strategies for reform‭ that countries have im-‬‬ plemented in an attempt to address their prob- lems (Graig 1993). Much can be learned by study- ing and comparing which solutions seem to work best for certain types of problems, as well as ob- serving patterns of failure across multiple systems. FRAMEWORKS FOR COMPARING HEALTH- CARE SYSTEMS While it is useful to compare health-care systems on the basis of a series of characteristics, in-depth understanding of the variation in systems requires a more analytical approach. Most frameworks pro- posed by comparative health-system researchers can be characterized as typologies that, though they add a conceptual basis for distinguishing among systems, offer limited analytical complexity or depth. These typologies typically emphasize political or economic criteria, and several of the more complex schemes attempt to integrate the two. Graig (1993) organized the six countries she analyzed on a continuum with public systems (e.g., the United Kingdom) at one end, private systems (the United States) at the other, and mixed or ‘‘convergence’’ systems, such as Japan, Germa- ny, and the Netherlands, in the middle. Roemer (1991) developed a sixteen-cell typology that com- bines political and economic elements, describ- ing systems in relation to government policies (entrepreneurial/permissive, welfare oriented, uni- versal/comprehensive, and socialist/centrally planned) as they intersect with economic condi- tions (afﬂuent, developing, poor and resource rich). These and similar approaches offered by Anderson (1989) and Light (1990) offer descrip- tive distinctions, but do not emphasize the theo- retical basis for the particular category schemes. Mechanic (1996) hypothesizes that health-sys- tems internationally are converging, based on the idea that medicine forms a world culture in which knowledge and health-care ideas are quickly dis- seminated. He proposes six areas of convergence: nations’ concerns with controlling cost and im- proving the efﬁciency and effectiveness of health- care, nations’ realization that population health outcomes are largely a product of circumstances outside the medical care system, nations’ concern and attempts to address inequalities in health outcomes and access to care, nations’ growing interest in patient satisfaction and consumer choice, and the increasing attention nations are placing on the linkage between medical and social factors in health-care, and the struggle all nations are having between technology, specialization, and the need to develop primary care. Field (1980) also theorizes a progression of health-system develop- ment with a scheme placing systems along a con- tinuum according to the extent to which health- care is seen as a social good. He identiﬁes ﬁve system types in order of their progression toward a socialized system: anomic, pluralistic, insurance/ social security, national health service, and social- ized health-care. Elling (1994) takes issue with the notion of ‘‘automatic convergence’’ and with typologies that posit unidirectional evolution or change, pointing out

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that countries are involved in ongoing, dynam- ic class struggles in the development of health- systems. His neo-Marxist framework, inﬂuenced by Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, allows for countries to move back and forth among ﬁve types: core capitalist (e.g., the United States and Germany), core capitalist/social welfare (e.g., Cana- da, Japan, Sweden, United Kingdom), industrial- ized socialist-oriented (e.g., pre-1990s Soviet and COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 377 eastern European systems), capitalist dependen- cies in the periphery and semi-periphery (e.g., Brazil and India), and socialist-oriented, quasi- independent of the world system (e.g., China and Cuba). In 1990, Esping-Andersen (1990) contributed an important theoretical framework to the ﬁeld of comparative welfare states research, that can also be useful in distinguishing among health-care sys- tems in advanced capitalist nations. Esping-Ander- sen conceptualizes all welfare activities, including health-care, as a product of a state-market-family nexus. His typology organizes ‘‘welfare regimes’’ around this nexus, speciﬁcally as it results in the decommodiﬁcation of workers in a country; that is, the degree to which a citizen can obtain basic health and social welfare services outside of the market. In terms of health-care, this would mean a citizen’s ability to access health-care services without having to purchase them ‘‘out-of-pock- et.’’ Esping-Andersen identiﬁes three types of sys- tems: conservative or corporatist, liberal, and socialist or social democratic. In ‭The Three Worlds‬ of Welfare Capitalism‭, he constructs measures of‬ decommodiﬁcation that he applies to data from eighteen nations in order to assess where each nation’s welfare regime ranks according to the three types. Under Esping-Andersen’s scheme, so- cial democratic systems include the Nordic coun- tries and the Netherlands; liberal systems include Canada, Japan, and the United States; and the conservative or corporatist welfare states include France, Germany, and Italy. These placements appear similar to what Graig proposed using a much simpler public-private dimension; however, Esping-Andersen’s methodology is unique in its theoretical approach and because it can be operationalized quantitatively to allow precise dis- tinctions among a large number of nations. Reviewing various health-care system frame- works shows a wide variety of approaches and scholarly emphases. Comparative research is in the process of moving beyond simple typologies to focus on the conditions under which different types of systems emerge and under which they change. This work demonstrates the value of a broad approach, integrating the key aspects that affect the development of health-care systems, including historical, cultural, political, and eco- nomic factors. REVIEW OF SELECTED HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS Comparative international research on health-care systems requires information that is both detailed and current. Obtaining data is complicated by the fact that health-systems throughout the world op- erate in a state of constant ﬂux. These summaries present the most recent information available for the health-care systems of selected countries. Among countries with advanced economies, Swe- den and the United States often occupy opposite extremes when it comes to health-care organiza- tion and ﬁnancing. For this reason, Sweden is the ﬁrst country discussed along with three countries that have similar systems—Finland, the United Kingdom, and Canada—followed next by Germa- ny, Japan, Russia, and China, with additional dis- cussions of France, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Co- lombia, and Ghana. Swedish health-care reﬂects three basic princi- ples: ‭equality among citizens in access to health-‬ care; ‭universality‭ in the nature of services (the idea‬‬ that everyone should receive the same quality of services); and ‭solidarity‬, the concept of one social group sacriﬁcing for another group in the interest of the whole society (Zimmerman and Halpert 1997). Solidarity in this context refers to taxing those who use fewer services at the same rate as those who use more—for example, similar health- care taxation for younger persons or afﬂuent per- sons versus the elderly or the poor). The Swedish health-care system is predominantly a publicly owned and funded system; thus, approximately 85 percent of Swedish health-care is publicly funded, whereas in the United States the public portion is just under 50 percent (Lassey, Lassey, and Jinks 1997). The differences between the two systems are more startling in terms of the growth of overall spending. In the early 1980s, both countries were spending approximately 9.5 percent of their Gross Domestic Product on health-care. By the end of the century, the situation had changed dramatical- ly; in 1999, Sweden was spending 8.6 percent ($1728 per capita) compared to 13.5 percent ($3924 per capita) in the United States (Anderson and Poullier 1999). Populations in the two nations also differ markedly on several basic health status indi- cators. Infant mortality Sweden is four deaths per thousand live births compared to 7.8 in the United States. Swedish men live nearly four years longer COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 378 on average than American men, and Swedish wom- en live two years longer than their American coun- terparts. These favorable statistical indicators com- pel a closer look into how the Swedish health-care system is organized. The Swedish welfare state, including health- care and social services, is one of the most compre- hensive and universal in the world. Health-care in Sweden is the responsibility of the state, which delegates it, in turn, to each of Sweden’s twenty- one county councils (Swedish Institute 1999). Elect- ed ofﬁcials in each county are charged with provid- ing comprehensive health services for residents, and with levying the taxes to ﬁnance them. The system is decentralized; each county by law must provide the same generous common core of serv- ices to all residents, although just how they decide to do it can vary. In the 1990s, Sweden embarked on a series of reforms in order to increase health- care quality and efﬁciency. As a result, Swedish citizens now have greater freedom in choosing their own primary care physicians. The vast ma- jority of these doctors are employed by the county councils to practice in small group clinics and health centers distributed geographically through- out the country. Specialist physicians practice in hospitals where they also see outpatients on both a referral and self-referral basis. The medical divi- sion of labor also includes district nurses, physical therapists, and midwives, all of whom are used extensively to deliver care through local health centers (maternity clinics in the case of midwives). Midwives also work in hospitals where they have responsibility for normal cases of labor and deliv- ery. Sweden’s elderly constitute an increasing pro- portion of the population, creating signiﬁcant chal- lenges for both current and future health and social services. Sweden’s social policy emphasizes that citizens should be able to live in their own homes for as long as possible, meaning that nurs- ing home placement occurs only when absolutely necessary. Services for the elderly may involve as many as ﬁve or six home nursing visits per day in order for the disabled and elderly to remain at home in the community. Swedish citizens are taxed heavily to maintain the quality and level of services they expect; at the same time, they have shown high levels of political support for maintaining their expensive system. In the 1980s, many services were entirely free; howev- er, today there typically is a modest copayment. The copayment for a primary care physician visit, for example, currently ranges from $12 to $17 depending on the county council. For specialist physician visits the copayment ranges from $15 to $31, and for hospital stays it is ﬁxed at $10/day. The Swedish system includes a high-cost ceiling so that, after a person spends approximately $113 out-of-pocket each year, health-care services are free. Medications must be purchased by the indi- vidual until they have reached a threshold of a little more than $100. Prescriptions are then discount- ed until the patient has spent $225, at which point medications become free (Swedish Institute 1999). These amounts have increased somewhat during the 1990s, but due to Swedens already high taxa- tion rate, county councils were hesitant to ask patients to pay more. Reforms during the same period included establishing internal performance incentives or ‘‘public competition’’ (Saltman and Von Otter 1992), a structural arrangement that arguably enabled Sweden to maintain the basic features of its health-care system without large tax or out-of-pocket increases. Some have expressed concern that the system is stretched to its limits. Regardless of which view is correct, the Swedish system requires a healthy economy in order to continue, given continuing cost pressures and an increasingly aged population. The Swedish model of a publicly owned and ﬁnanced health-care system shares common fea- tures with systems in several other countries, in- cluding the United Kingdom, Finland, and Cana- da. The British National Health Service (NHS), like its Swedish counterpart, provides publicly fund- ed, comprehensive health-care to the population, and enjoys a solid base of citizen support, albeit under ongoing criticism. What distinguishes the NHS from health-care systems in other Western countries is its frugality. Characterized by long waiting lists and what Klein (1998) refers to as ‘‘rationing by professionally deﬁned need,’’ Brit- ain runs the cheapest health-care system in Eu- rope, outside of Spain and Portugal. In the early 1990s, the NHS went through a series of dramatic changes, creating ‘‘internal markets,’’ a system of inside competition intended to increase produc- tivity and further decentralize its historically large and unwieldy bureaucracy. These reforms—sever- al of which were adopted by Sweden—reorgan- ized primary care practices and shifted physician payment from ﬁxed salary to capitation. NHS COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 379 hospitals also entered into new arrangements where they have greater structural independence and compete among themselves. In 1997, the British government introduced new proposals that changed course yet again. The direction of the NHS in the twenty-ﬁrst century is unclear (Klein 1998). Finland’s health-care system also is publicly owned, ﬁnanced through general taxation, and decentralized. In fact, Finland operates with more health-care decentralization than Sweden. Since 1993, Finnish funding for health-care has been incorporated into block grants from the national government that are given annually to each of the country’s 455 municipalities, some of which form partnerships for purposes of delivering health- care (Hermanson, Aro, and Bennett 1994). Within the parameters of national guidelines, elected ofﬁ- cials in each of these jurisdictions (similar to the county councils in Sweden) have the responsibility to obtain and deliver health-care services to the population. High standards, a comprehensive ar- ray of services, as well as modest out-of-pocket payments, make the Finnish system comparable to the Swedish system. Canada also provides health- care to its entire population. The Canadian system is administered by the provinces and is ﬁnanced largely by public taxation, roughly three-quarters of which is from the provincial government. While basic services remain constant, some speciﬁc pro- visions of health-care in Canada vary considerably from province to province. Unlike in Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom, Canadian phy- sicians are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Further- more, Canadian primary care physicians act as gatekeepers to specialists and hospitals (much as they do in Finland and the United Kingdom, but not in Sweden). As is the case with all the countries in this group of four, Canadians have extreme pride in their health-care system. They appear resolute in maintaining it, although a number of controversial cost-cutting measures and as yet un- solved problems raise considerable concern about the future (Lassey, Lassey, and Jinks 1997). Germany and Japan, as well as France, have achieved comprehensive and universal coverage (92 percent in the case of Germany) with a model that is closer to that of the United States than the social democratic model of Sweden discussed above (U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce 1991). In all three of these countries, medical care is provided by private physicians, by both private and public hos- pitals, and patients can choose their physicians. Beneﬁts are comprehensive and mandated by the national government, which also regulates enroll- ment, premiums, and reimbursement of providers. In contrast to the four countries discussed earlier, ﬁnancing in Germany, Japan, and France is pre- dominantly private with multiple payers. Workplace- based insurance (ﬁnanced typically through pay- roll deductions) covers most employees and their dependents while other payers cover the remain- der of the population. Patients make copayments for physician visits and hospital stays, ranging from a nominal amount in Germany to as much as 20 percent or 30 percent of the fee in France and Japan. There is national regulation to ensure con- sistency. Coverage and care conditions vary from fund to fund, resulting in greater inequalities of beneﬁts compared to the public systems of Swe- den, Finland, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Arguing that such systems actually help maintain social divisions and inequality, Esping-Andersen (1990) refers to them as conservative or corporatist. Although Germany privately ﬁnances much of its health-care system, the national government plays a strong role. All but the most wealthy of German citizens are required by law to join one of Germany’s 750 insuring organizations, called ‘‘sick- ness funds.’’ In practice, all but about 10 percent of the population opt to join the system, encour- aged to participate by the great difﬁculty of getting back in later on. Sickness funds are private, non- proﬁt organizations that collect premiums or ‘‘con- tributions’’ for each member—half paid by the individual and half by the employer—and, in turn, contract for health services with physician organi- zations and hospitals. One of the biggest problems for the German system is continuing cost pres- sures, exacerbated by the reuniﬁcation of East and West Germany in 1991. The system uses ﬁxed budgets for hospitals and strict fee schedules for physicians, with punitive measures for inordinate increases in volume, to combat the problem. These were tightened in a major 1993 reform that im- posed strict three-year budgets on all major sectors of the system as well as longer-term structural reforms. Early results have been positive (U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce 1994). Japanese health-care follows much the same private, multi-payer model as in Germany, with health-care provided to all citizens through 5,000 COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 380 independent insurance plans. The plans fall into three major groups, each enrolling about a third of the population: large-ﬁrm employees, small- ﬁrm employees, and self-employed persons and pensioners. In the case of the ﬁrst two plans, as is the case with the German sickness funds, the employer pays approximately half of the premium and the employee pays the remaining portion. The similarity to the German system is no accident; Japan has consciously patterned its health-care syatem after Germany’s, dating back to its mod- ernization in the late nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries (Lassey, Lassey, and Jinks 1997). Despite these similarities, Japan’s health-care sys- tem presents some unique and somewhat startling features compared to the other systems dis- cussed here. Compared to other systems with a signiﬁcant private component, the Japanese system costs con- siderably less (Andersen and Poullier 1999). In 1997, for example, per capita health-care spending in Japan was $1741, less than in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and many other Euro- pean countries. Of the nations discussed here, only the austere British system ($1347 per capita) and efﬁciency-conscious Finnish system ($1492 per capita) spent less. Japan’s economical approach to delivering health-care raises two paradoxes. First, the low levels of spending would seem to contradict the fact that Japan currently has the longest life expectancy and the lowest infant mor- tality in the world. In addition, utilization rates in Japan are high, which some would argue indicates a sicker rather than a healthier population. Speciﬁ- cally, the Japanese visit physicians two to three times more frequently, stay in the hospital three to four times longer, and devote considerably more health spending to pharmaceuticals than the other nations discussed here. How can these contradic- tions be explained? Ikegami and Campbell (1999) argue that, in part, the paradox can be explained by the country’s much lower incidence of social problems related to health, such as crime, drug use, high-speed motor vehicle accidents, teen-age births, and HIV infections. Less aggressive medi- cine and lower hospital stafﬁng and amenities also are thought to keep down costs in Japan. Health-care arrangements in nations where the political economy is neither ‘‘advanced’’ nor a stronghold of capitalistic democracy can also be instructive. During the latter part of the twentieth century and until today, both China and Russia have been faced with the monumental challenge of providing health-care with very limited ﬁnancial resources to huge, diverse populations, many of which live under poor social conditions. Their health-care systems, however, are quite different and their current problems reﬂect the distinctive political and economic trajectories of the two coun- tries. Russian health-care at the dawn of the twen- ty-ﬁrst century is a system in crisis. Based on socialist principles of universal and free access, the old Soviet system included a primary care network of local clinics (‘‘polyclinics’’) typically connected to a general hospital, as well as more specialized hospitals. This means that a regional city might have separate hospitals for emergencies, materni- ty, children, and various infectious diseases (Albrecht and Salmon 1992). Funding came directly from the central government until 1993 when a new health insurance law was approved, shifting the source of ﬁnancing to employer payroll deduc- tions. There are major questions, however, as to whether such a system can be effective during the current period of resource scarcity and instability in major social institutions (Lassey, Lassey, and Jinks 1997). Chinese health-care, for most Westerners, evokes images of acupuncture and other forms of Eastern medicine, as well as the idealized ‘‘bare- foot doctors’’ of the 1960s and 1970s, practition- ers with basic medical training who provided pri- mary care in rural areas. In reality, traditional Chinese medicine exists alongside an increasingly dominant Western medical establishment, and the barefoot doctors have all but disappeared. Since new leadership took over the Communist Party in the late 1970s, China has encouraged privatization and decentralization in health-care. By the 1990s, nearly half of all village health-care was provided by private practitioners (Lassey, Lassey, and Jinks 1997). These changes reportedly have been ac- companied by a decline in preventive care and public health efforts in rural areas. At the same time, the situation in urban areas seems to have improved. China’s revolutionary-era network of local and regional clinics and hospitals has been modernized, although resource shortages contin- ue to limit the level of technological advancement. The most signiﬁcant change in China is the grow- ing impact of privatization, which appears to be bringing China many of the same problems that COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 381 have plagued privatized systems elsewhere: lack of insurance coverage, increasing costs, maldistribution of providers, and inequalities in the overall quality of care (Liu, Liu, and Meng 1994). As in the United States, the gap between the health-care received by the rich and that received by the poor is growing (Shi 1993). Huge disparities between the rich and poor are characteristic of Latin America where they constitute a signiﬁcant barrier to universal health coverage. Latin-American health-systems vary con- siderably, reﬂecting socioeconomic differences be- tween countries as well as historical and political contingencies. The Mexican system illustrates many of the obstacles faced by developing nations, wheth- er in Latin America or elsewhere. The Mexican constitution established federal responsibility for health-care in 1917, along with a centralized ad- ministrative tradition that still exists; yet, to date, the two major government insurance schemes cov- er only about 47 percent of the population, with another 7 percent insured privately. Ostensibly, there are programs for the remaining 46 percent of the population, most of whom are low income, but in reality, many low income areas and impov- erished communities are poorly served. Some have argued that a basic health-care infrastructure is in place and that there are sufﬁcient numbers of well- trained health-care professionals available (Lassey, Lassey, and Jinks 1997). They contend that, had it not been for several national crises in the 1980s and 1990s, coupled with a lack of political will, more of the Mexican population would now be covered by the health-care system. Bertranou (1999) has compared Argentina, Chile, and Columbia, all of which have employed various ways to reform health insurance arrange- ments in recent years. Chile’s reforms date back to its military dictatorship in the early 1980s. At that time, private health insurers were allowed to com- pete for worker payroll contributions. There was little regulation of the system which encouraged adverse selection, resulting in signiﬁcant inequi- ties within the system. Even so, approximately 70 percent of the Chilean population today is covered by insurance, compared to 64 percent in Argenti- na and only 43 percent in Colombia. Argentina faces numerous obstacles in reforming its com- plex and confusing system of three types of health- care arrangements (social insurance organizations, private health insurers and providers, and the public health-system). Its goals include universal coverage and a standard beneﬁts package. In the case of Columbia, reform goals are more related to the relative poverty in the country and the fact that large segments of the population cannot af- ford health insurance. Per capita expenditures for health-care in Columbia are 42 percent of what they are in Chile and 20 percent of the expendi- ture level in Argentina. Instead of giving free access to public facilities, Columbia’s reforms in- volve providing vouchers that allow low-income families to join the health organization of their choice. To be successful, all these reform efforts require social equilibrium where governments are able to maintain political and economic stability. The political instability and socioeconomic inequality that have characterized Latin America are also a hindrance to health-care systems in Africa. An even more fundamental problem in Africa, however, is the formidable lack of resourc- es to address overwhelming health-care needs (Schieber and Maeda 1999). Even where clinics, hospitals, and medical personnel exist, there is likely to be a lack of the required equipment and medicines. In Africa as a whole, 80 percent of the physicians live and practice in the cities where less than 20 percent of the population lives. According to Sanneh (1999), this continuing situation sup- ports the prominent role of traditional healers, 85 percent of whom live in rural areas. The difﬁcul- ties encountered by Ghana in implementing a system of primary care illustrate the situation af- fecting many African nations. In 1983, soon after the primary care system was adopted, the govern- ment attempted cost containment by introducing ‘‘user fees’’ in all public health facilities, clinics as well as hospitals. Two years later the fees were increased and, subsequently, a health insurance program was instituted. One must question the practical signiﬁcance of these developments in a country where over half of rural residents and nearly half of those in urban areas live below poverty (Anyinam 1989). These circumstances are a reminder that developing countries contain 84 percent of the world’s population, yet account for only 11 percent of global health-care spending (Schieber and Maeda 1999), making the task of designing strategies for effective health-care deliv- ery in the developing world the true challenge for comparative health-care system researchers. COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS 382 Comparing health-care systems entails a vast array of information, including historical back- ground, cultural patterns and beliefs, geographic considerations, as well as social, economic, and political factors. It involves detailed descriptions of policies and procedures, complex statistical proﬁles, as well as an understanding of conceptual frameworks, theory, and comparative methods. The potential rewards of comparative work, how- ever, balance the challenges. Whether there is convergence in the structure and functioning of health-care systems or not, many of the problems faced by nations in delivering health-care to citi- zens are similar. There are lessons to be learned from comparing health-care systems internation- ally that can only aid in addressing these problems. REFERENCES Albrecht, Gary L., and J. Warren Salmon 1992 ‘‘Soviet Health-care in the Glastnost Era.’’ In Marilyn Rosenthal and Marcel Frenkel, eds., ‭Health-care Systems and their‬ Patients: An International Perspective‭. Boulder, Co:‬ Westview Press. Anderson, Gerard F., and Jean-Pierre Poullier 1999 ‘‘Health Spending, Access, and Outcomes: Trends in Industrialized Countries.’’ ‭Health Affairs‬ 18:178–192. Anderson, Odin W. 1989 ‭The Health Service Continuum‬ in Democratic States: An Inquiry into Solvable Problems‭.‬ Ann Arbor, Mich.: Health Administration Press. Anyinam, C. A. 1989 ‘‘The Social Costs of the Interna- tional Monetary Fund’s Adjustment Programs for Poverty: The Case of Health-Care Development in Ghana.’’ ‭International Journal of Health Services‬ 19:531–547. Bertranou, Fabio M. 1999 ‘‘Are Market-Oriented Health Insurance Reforms Possible in Latin America? The Cases of Argentina, Chile and Colombia.’’ ‭Health‬ Policy‭ 47:19–36.‬ Donelan, Karen, Robert J. Blendon, Cathy Schoen, Karen Davis, and Katherine Binns 1999 ‘‘The Cost of Health-System Change: Public Discontent in Five Nations.’’ ‭Health Affairs‬ 18:206–216. Elling, Ray H. 1994 ‘‘Theory and Method for the Cross- National Study of Health Systems’’ ‭International Jour-‬ nal of Health Services‭ 24:285–309.‬ Esping-Andersen, Gosta 1990 ‭The Three Worlds of Wel-‬ fare Capitalism‭. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universi-‬ ty Press. Evans, Robert G. 1997 ‘‘Going for the Gold: The Redistributive Agenda behind Market-Based HealthCare Reform.’’ ‭ Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law‬ 22:427–465. Field, Mark G. ‘‘The Health-System and the Polity: A Contemporary American Dialectic.’’ ‭Social Science‬ and Medicine‭ 14:397–413.‬ Frenk, Julio 1994 ‘‘Dimensions of Health-System Re- form.’’ ‭Health Policy‬ 27:19–34. Graig, Laurene A. 1993 ‭Health of Nations: An Internation-‬ al Perspective on U.S. Health Care Reform‭. 2nd Ed.‬ Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly. Hermanson, Terhi, Seppo Aro, and Charles L. Bennett 1994 ‘‘Finland’s Health-Care System: Universal Ac- cess to Health-Care in a Capitalistic Democracy.’’ Journal of the American Medical Association‭ 271:1957–1962.‬ Ikegami, Naoki, and John Creighton Campbell 1999 ‘‘Health-Care Reform in Japan: The Virtues of Mud- dling Through.’’ ‭Health Affairs‬ 18:56–75. Klein, Rudolf 1998 ‘‘Why Britain is Reorganizing Its National Health Service—Yet Again.’’ ‭Health Affairs‬ 17:111–125. Lassey, Marie L., William R. Lassey, and Martin J. Jinks 1997 ‭Health-Care Systems Around the World: Character-‬ istics, Issues, Reforms‭. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pren-‬ tice Hall. Light, Donald W. 1990 ‘‘Comparing Health-Care Sys- tems: Lessons from East and West Germany.’’ In P. Conrad and R. Kern eds., ‭The Sociology of Health &‬ Illness: Critical Perspectives‭, 3rd ed. New York: St.‬ Martin’s Press. Liu, Gordon, Xingszhu Liu, and Qingyue Meng 1994 ‘‘Privatization of the Medical Market in Socialist China: A Historical Approach.’’ ‭Health Policy‬ 27:157–174. Mechanic, David, and David A. Rochefort 1996 ‘‘Com- parative Medical Systems.’’ ‭Annual Review of Sociology‬ 22:239–270. Payer, Lynn 1996 ‭Medicine and Culture‬, 2nd ed. New York: Owl Books/Henry Holt. Roemer, Milton I. 1991 ‭National Health-Systems of the‬ World‭, vols. 1 and 2 New York: Oxford Universi-‬ ty Press. Saltman, Richard B., and Casten Von Otter 1992 ‭Planned‬ Markets and Public Competition: Strategic Reform in Northern European Health Systems‭. Philadelphia: Open‬ University Press. Sanneh, Kanja B. A. S. 1999 ‘‘The Role of Traditional Healers in Primary Health-Care: Roadblocks to Health Education in Africa.’’ Unpublished paper. Depart- ment of Health Policy and Management, University of Kansas. COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 383 Schieber, George, and Akiko Maeda 1999 ‘‘Health-Care Financing and Delivery in Developing Countries.’’ Health Affairs‭ 18:193–205.‬ Shi, Leiyu 1993 ‘‘Health-Care in China: A Rural-Urban Comparison After the Reforms.’’ ‭Bulletin of the World‬ Health Organization‭ 71:723–736.‬ Starr, Paul 1982 ‭The Social Transformation of American‬ Medicine‭. New York: Basic Books.‬ Steinmo, Sven, and Jon Watts 1995 ‘‘It’s the Institutions, Stupid! Why Comprehensive National Health Insur- ance Always Fails in America.’’ ‭Journal of Health‬ Politics, Policy and Law‭ 20:329–372.‬ Swedish Institute 1999 ‘‘Fact Sheet on Health Care.’’ Stockholm, Sweden: Swedish Institute U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce 1991 ‘‘Health-Care Spending Control: The Experience of France, Ger- many, and Japan.’’ GAO/HRD–92–9 Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce. U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce 1994 ‘‘German Health- reforms: Changes Result in Lower Health Costs in 1993.’’ GAO/HEHS–95–27 Washington, D. C.: U.S. General Accounting Ofﬁce. Van Atteveld, L., C. Broeders, and R. Lapre 1987 ‘‘Inter- national Comparative Research in Health-Care: A Study of the Literature.’’ ‭Health Policy‬ 8:105–136. Zimmerman, Mary K., and Burton Halpert 1997 ‘‘Health and Welfare Reforms in Sweden: 1990–1996: How Safe is the Safety Net?’’ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society Des Moines, Ia. M‭ARY KO Z‭IMMERMAN‬‬ ‭COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL‬ SOCIOLOGY Explicit analytic attention to time and space as the context, cause, or outcome of fundamental social processes distinguishes comparative-historical analy- sis from other forms of social research. Historical processes occurring in or across geographic, po- litical, or economic units (e.g., regions, nation- states, multi-state alliances, or entire world sys- tems) are systematically compared for the purpos- es of more generally understanding patterns of social stability and social change (Abrams 1982; Skocpol 1984a; Tilly 1984; Mahoney 1999). Three very different and inﬂuential studies illustrate both the kinds of questions comparative-historical sociolgists address and the approaches they use. First is the classic study by Reinhard Bendix ([1956] 1974) on work and authority in industry. Bendix initially observed that all industrial socie- ties must authoritatively coordinate productive activities. Yet by systematically comparing how this was done in four countries during particular historical periods—pre-1917 Russia, post-World War II East Germany, and England and United States during epochs of intense industrialization— he showed that national variation in ideologies of workplace dominance were related to differences in the social structures of the countries studied. Second is the analysis of the historical origins and development of the modern world system by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). Wallerstein took as his unit of analysis the entire sixteenth-century capitalist world economy. Through comparing in- stances of the geographic division of labor, and especially the increasing bifurcation of global eco- nomic activity into ‘‘core’’ and ‘‘peripheral’’ areas, Wallerstein suggested that the economic interde- pendence of nation-states likely conditions their developmental trajectories. Third is the analysis of social revolutions by Theda Skocpol (1979). Skocpol compared the his- tories of revolution in three ancient regime states: pre-1789 France, czarist Russia, and imperial Chi- na, and found that revolutionary situations emerged in these states because international crises exacer- bated problems induced by their agrarian class structures and political institutions. She then but- tressed her causal generalizations by comparing similar agrarian societies—Meiji Japan, Germany in 1806 and 1848, and seventeenth century Eng- land—that witnessed failed revolutions. Each of these inﬂuential studies combined theoretical concepts and nonexperimental research methods to compare and contrast historical proc- esses occurring within and across a number of geographic cases or instances. By using such re- search methods, Bendix, Wallerstein, Skocpol, and many others are following in the footsteps of the founders of sociology. In their attempts to under- stand and explain the sweeping transformations of nineteenth-century Europe, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber all employed and contributed to the formulation of this broad analytic frame (Smelser 1976; Abrams COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 384 1982). Comparative-historical analysis in sociolo- gy—and, as we shall see, debate over how it should be conducted—thus is as old as sociology itself. PURPOSES, PROMISE, ACHIEVEMENTS The analytic power of comparative-historical strate- gies stems from the uniquely paradoxical quality of the perspectives, data, and procedures in com- parative-historical research. On the one hand, his- torical comparisons have the potential to harness and exploit the huge variation in social processes and institutions. Some scholars believe this essen- tial to the development of truly general theory and to transcultural/transhistorical explanation (Przeworski and Tuene 1970; Kiser and Hechter 1991). On the other hand, historical comparisons have the potential to exploit the ‘‘time-space boundedness’’ of social life and its historical ante- cedents and speciﬁcity. Others view this as equally essential to theoretical development and to con- crete, ‘‘real world’’ explanation (Moore 1966; Skocpol 1984b; Tilly 1984; Stryker 1996). Most comparative-historical sociologists capitalize in some fashion on this paradox, ﬁnding diversity in the midst of uniformity and producing regularities from differences. One of the great advantages of historical com- parisons is that they reduce bias induced by cultur- ally and historically limited analyses and interpre- tations of the social world. Social structures and processes in the past were generally quite different from those observed today, and contemporary institutional arrangements and social relations dif- fer substantially across cultures, regions, and states. Patterns of historical change and continuity, moreo- ver, have varied from one country or culture to another. Some scholars, such as Bendix (1963, [1956] 1974), relish this diversity and use historical comparisons to emphasize and interpret the pecu- liarities of each case. Even seeming uniformities across cases may mask important differences, and comparative-historical inquiry may be used to de- tect these ‘‘false similarities’’ (Bloch [1928] 1969). Examination of historical or national differ- ences also can lead to the detection of previously unknown facts that may suggest a research prob- lem or pose a hypothesis amenable to empirical exploration. Marc Bloch ([1928] 1969), for exam- ple, tells of how his knowledge of the English land enclosures led him to discover similar events in France. Comparing histories also aids in the for- mation of concepts and the construction of ‘‘ideal types’’ (Weber 1949; Bendix 1963; Smelser 1976). For example, Weber’s ([1904] 1958) concepts of ‘‘the Protestant ethic’’ and ‘‘the spirit of capital- ism’’ and Wallerstein’s (1974) notion of the ‘‘world system’’ derive from comparative-historical inquiry. Linking apparently disparate historical and geo- graphical phenomena, as Karl Polanyi ([1944] 1957) does when he relates the gold standard to the relative geopolitical tranquility throughout much of the nineteenth century, also is one of the fruits of comparative-historical analysis. New informa- tion, conceptual development and the discovery of unlikely commonalties, linkages, and previously unappreciated differences are necessary for the generation, elaboration, and historical grounding of social theory. The analysis of comparative-historical patterns can allow for more adequate testing of established theory than does study of a single nation, culture, or time period. Plausible theories of large-scale social change, for example, are intrinsically processual and so require historical analysis for a genuine elaboration or examination of their hypotheses (Tilly 1984). Historical comparisons also can be used to assess the generality of putative ‘‘univer- sal’’ explanations for social structure and social action (e.g., functionalism, Marxism). Abstract propositions thought operative across time and space, for example, can be directly confronted through the analysis of parallel cases that should display the same theoretical process (Skocpol and Summers 1980), thereby specifying a theory’s gen- erality and empirical scope. Comparative-historical analysis sometimes is directed toward developing explanations that ex- plicitly are ‘‘relative’’ to space and time (Beer 1963) or that represent historically or culturally ‘‘limited generalizations’’ (Joynt and Rescher 1960). Skocpol’s (1979) analysis of social revolutions in France, Russia, and China, for example, resulted in limited causal generalizations deemed valid for these three cases only. Exceptions to theoretical and empirical generality, moreover, can be con- ceptualized as deviant cases—anomalies or puz- zles. For example, Werner Sombart ([1906] 1976) posed the question ‘‘Why is there no socialism in the United States?’’ precisely because the United COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 385 States, when contrasted to the European experi- ence and stacked up against available explanations for the development of class-conscious labor poli- tics, appeared both historically and theoretically anomalous. To explain such puzzles, the original theory is modiﬁed and new concepts and theories with greater explanatory power are formulated. The improved theory then serves as the new start- ing point for subsequent inquiry, so that cumula- tion of knowledge is facilitated (Stryker 1996). Thus historical patterns are comparatively situat- ed, the ‘‘inexplicable’’ residue of time and place therefore is potentially ‘‘explicable’’ (Sewell 1967), and sociological theory is further developed. ANALYTIC TYPES OF HISTORICAL COMPARISONS Contemporary comparative-historical research practice rests upon diverse, even contradictory, epistemologies and research strategies (Bonnell 1980, Skocpol 1984b, Tilly 1984; Ragin 1987; McMichael 1990; Kiser and Hechter 1991; Grifﬁn 1992; Sewell 1996; Stryker 1996; Mahoney 1999). These can be initially grouped into two basic ap- proaches, labeled here ‘‘analytical formalism’’ and ‘‘interpretivism.’’ Each displays considerable in- ternal diversity, and the two can overlap and be combined in practice. Moreover, they can be syn- thesized in creative ways, thereby capitalizing on the strengths of each approach and reducing their respective weaknesses. The synthesis, ‘‘causal interpretivism,’’ is sufﬁciently distinct as to consti- tute a third approach to the analysis of compara- tive history. Analytically formal comparison.‭ Formal com-‬ parison‭ conforms generally to conventional scien-‬ tiﬁc practice in that causal explanation is the goal. It is therefore generally characterized by the devel- opment and empirical examination or testing of falsiﬁable theory of wide historical scope, by the assumption of the preexistence of discrete and identiﬁable cases, and by the use of formal logical or statistical tools and replicable analytic proce- dures. Historical narration and the ‘‘unities of time and place’’ (Skocpol 1984b, p. 383) are delib- erately replaced by the language of causal analysis. Analytic formal comparison can be used to gener- alize across time and space, to uncover or produce limited causal regularities among a set of carefully chosen cases, and to establish a theory’s scope conditions. There are two major procedural sub- types in this genre, statistical comparisons and formal qualitative comparisons. Statistical analyses‭ of comparative-historical phe-‬ nomena are logically and inferentially identical to statistical analyses of any other social phenomena. Thus, they rely on numerical counts, theoretical models, and techniques of statistical inference to assess the effects of theoretically salient variables, to test the validity of causal arguments, and to develop parsimonious, mathematically precise gen- eralizations and explanations. One important way in which the statistical method appears in com- parative-historical inquiry is in the form of ‘‘com- parative time-series’’ analysis, in which statistical series charting historical change are systematically compared across countries. Charles, Louise, and Richard Tilly (1978) and Bruce Western (1994), for example, ﬁrst use statistical time-series proce- dures to map and explain historical variation in working-class activity within European nations. They then compare, either qualitatively (the Tillys) or quantitatively (Western), these national statisti- cal patterns to detect and explain historical differ- ences and similarities across these countries. The second major use of statistical procedures relies on quantitative data from many social units for only one or a few time points. Emphasis in this ‘‘cross-national’’ tradition (e.g., Chase-Dunn 1979; Jackman 1984; Korpi 1989) is on detecting causal generalizations that are valid for a large sample or even an entire population of countries. Though the results of such studies typically resemble a static, cross sectional snapshot of historical proc- ess, this analytic strategy sometimes is necessitated because complete time-series data do not exist for very many nations, especially those now undergo- ing economic and social development (e.g., Pampel and Williamson 1989). Due both to their data limitations and to their focus on statistical regu- larities and theory testing, cross-national studies typically slight historical processes and homogen- ize cultural differences across cases. The under- standing of cases as real social units deserving of explanation in their own right consequently is sometimes lost (Tilly 1984; Skocpol 1984b; Ragin 1987; Stryker 1996). In the 1990s, however, some cross-national statistical analysts, though continu- ing their search for general patterns, began to COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 386 incorporate a more thorough appreciation of his- tory and cultural difference into their analyses (e.g., Western 1994). Formal qualitative comparison‭, by way of con-‬ trast, views cases ‘‘holistically,’’ as qualitatively dis- tinct and independent units that cannot (or should not) be decomposed into scores on quantitative variables as in statistical analysis. This strategy adopts a ‘‘case-oriented’’ approach that pervades the entire research process (Ragin 1987). The explanation of a few carefully chosen cases, for example, generally is the rationale for and product of the analysis, and explicit strategies have been designed to select proper instances to be com- pared and analyzed (Przeworski and Teune 1970; Frendreis 1983; Lijphart 1971; Stryker 1996). De- tection of causal regularities is often inferred through the application of John Stuart Mill’s ([1843] 1967) inductive canons or ‘‘method of agreement’’ and ‘‘method of difference’’ to comparative data (Skocpol 1984b; Ragin 1987). Using the method of agreement, analysts select cases that have positive outcomes on the phenomenon under study but that differ on putative explanatory conditions. These cases are then compared to see what causal factor they share. Alternative explanations are eliminated if antecedent conditions representing those claims do not occur in all cases with positive outcomes. The ‘‘method of difference’’ is used to guard against false inferences adduced from the method of agreement. Here analysis is conducted with cases instancing both positive and negative outcomes but that are as similar as possible on the putative causal factors. The objective of Mill’s methods is to ﬁnd the one condition that is pres- ent in all positive cases and absent in all negative cases (Skocpol 1984b; Ragin 1987). Mill’s methods are marred because they pre- suppose that one causal factor or conﬁguration holds for all cases with positive instances. Histori- cal patterns displaying ‘‘causal heterogeneity’’ or ‘‘multiple causal conjunctures’’—two or more dis- tinct combinations of causal forces generating the same outcome (Ragin 1987)—are therefore logi- cally ruled out. This shortcoming results from the excessive weight Mill’s canons give negative cases: Because exceptions exist to almost any general process, the inability to ﬁnd causal universals that are doubly conﬁrmed by the twin logics of agree- ment and difference can rule out virtually any nontrivial explanation (Lijphart 1971; Ragin 1987; Mahoney 1999). However, Charles Ragin’s (1987) alternative comparative algorithm—’’qualitative comparative analysis’’ (QCA)—allows for the de- tection of causal heterogeneity in a large number of cases. QCA uses a data reduction strategy root- ed in Boolean algebra to search for similarities among positive instances and to exploit the infer- ential utility of negative cases. Negative or ‘‘devi- ant’’ cases may be explained by, or give rise to, an alternative causal process, but they are not allowed to invalidate all causal generalizations. Ragin ar- gues that QCA’s Boolean logic most closely ap- proximates the mode of reasoning—including the use of logically possible ‘‘historical hypotheticals’’ and ‘‘historical counterfactuals’’—employed by We- ber (1949) and Barrington Moore (1966) in their powerful but less formalized comparative-histori- cal studies. Formal qualitative comparison can provide both historically grounded explanation and theo- retical generalization. QCA is especially useful because it permits multiple causal conﬁgurations to emerge from comparative historical data and largely removes the inferential problems induced by the analysis of a small number of cases of unknown representativeness. Nonetheless, detrac- tors—who otherwise disagree about preferred re- search strategies—believe that formal comparison via either Mill’s methods or QCA often is fraught with hidden substantive assumptions, unable to exert sufﬁcient analytical control over the multi- tude of competing explanations, and compromised by its roots in inductive logic (Burawoy 1989; Kiser and Hechter 1991). Moreover, formal compari- sons rest on a key assumption that is seriously challenged by proponents of holistic interpretive comparison—that the historical cases themselves are not systematically interrelated (Wallerstein 1974; McMichael 1990). Interpretive comparisons.‭ . Interpretive com-‬ parisons are most concerned with developing a meaningful understanding of broad cultural or historical patterns (Skocpol 1984b). Two very dif- ferent comparative logics, ‘‘holistic’’ and ‘‘indi- vidualizing,’’ are used to construct historical inter- pretations. Although neither logic relies extensively on formal analytic procedures, nor is geared to- ward testing theory, interpretive comparisons are not necessarily atheoretical or lacking in rigor. Indeed, concepts and theories, often of sweeping scope and grandeur, are extensively developed COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 387 and deployed, but for the most part as interpretive and organizing frames, or as lenses through which history is understood and represented. Interpretive comparisons often are thought impressive, but sometimes of questionable validity due either to their self-validating logic or to their lack of explicit scientiﬁc criteria for evaluating the truth content of the interpretation (Bonnell 1980; Skocpol 1984b; Tilly 1984; Stryker 1996; Mahoney 1999). Holistic comparisons usually are tied to par- ticular theories and are used when a ‘‘social whole’’ such as a world system (Wallerstein 1974) is methodologically posited. Conceptualizing the en- tire world system in this manner suggests that there is but one theoretical unit of analysis, and that unit is the world system. What are considered to be separate ‘‘units of analysis’’ or ‘‘cases’’ in most comparative-historical strategies are, in the holistic methodological frame, really only interre- lated and interdependent historical realizations of a singular emergent process or social system. Wheth- er nation-states, regions, or cultures, these ‘‘mo- ments’’ therefore are not the discrete and inde- pendent units demanded by analytic formalism. Analysts using holistic historical comparisons in this manner often depend on an ‘‘encompassing’’ functional logic that explains similarities or differ- ences among parts of a whole by the relationship the parts have to the whole (Tilly 1984). Thus, Wallerstein’s (1974) comparisons explain the dif- ferential development of temporally and spatially speciﬁc (though interdependent) economic units in the world system—the core, periphery, and semi-periphery—by their differential positions and roles in the world economy. Such explanations are often circular in their reasoning and always difﬁ- cult to test, but they may serve as useful illustra- tions of the workings of a social whole or of the inner logic of a theory (Bonnell 1980; Skocpol 1984b). Philip McMichael (1990) suggests ‘‘incorpo- rated comparison’’ as an alternative to purge holis- tic comparison of its mechanistic and self-validat- ing logic. Here a kind of social whole is posited, but it does not preexist and regulate its parts, as does the world system. Instead, it is analytically ‘‘reconstituted’’ by conceptualizing different his- torical instances as interdependent moments, which, when cumulated and connected through time and space, ‘‘form’’ the whole as a general but empirically diverse historical process. Thus the very deﬁnition and selection of ‘‘cases’’ becomes the object of theorizing and research and not its point of departure or merely the vehicle conveying data for analysis. Karl Polanyi’s ([1944] 1957) analy- sis of the emergence and decline of laissez-faire capitalism is a compelling example of this form of holistic comparison. Individualizing interpretive‭ analysts use histori-‬ cal comparison to demonstrate the historical and cultural particularity of individual cases. Analysts in this tradition often choose research questions and cases on the basis of their recurrent moral and historical signiﬁcance rather than scientiﬁc representativeness or comprehensiveness. They also tend self-consciously to eschew general theo- ry, quantiﬁcation, and the methodology of causal analysis. Rather, interpretation is grounded in rich historical narration, in anthropological sensitivity to the import of cultural practice, in the culturally embedded meanings in social action, and in the use of persuasive concepts that crystallize or resonate with signiﬁcant social values and themes (Bendix 1963; Geertz 1973; Bonnell 1980; Tilly 1984; Skocpol 1984b). Bendix’s ([1956] 1974) re- search on work and authority in industry is an exemplar of this strategy, and Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) recent study, ‭Hitler’s Willing Executioners‬, is another much more controversial example. Casual Interpretivism.‭ Historical comparisons‬ rooted in ‭causal interpretivism‬ synthesize aspects of both analytical-formal and interpretive-historical comparisons. Inspired in part by Weber’s (1949) formulation of ‘‘causal interpretation’’ (and an- thropologist Clifford Geertz’s [1980] similar idea of ‘‘interpretive explanation’’), this strategy is stamped by explicit causal reasoning, the potential for explanatory generality across comparable in- stances, and the use of methodological procedures allowing for strict replication, on the one hand, and attention to historical narrative, cultural par- ticularity, and subjective meaning, on the other. Causal interpretivism has been most fruitfully developed and applied in the analysis of historical narratives (Sewell 1996; Grifﬁn 1992, 1993; Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Somers 1998). Narratives are ‘‘sequential accounts’’ organizing information in- to ‘‘chronological order to tell stories about what happened. .‭ ‬.’’ and why it happened as it did, and, as such, are ‘‘tools for joining sequentiality, contin- gency, and generalizability’’ (Stryker 1996, p.305, 307). Narrativists conceptualize historical time so COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 388 that it is ‘‘eventful:’’ Any given moment in a histori- cal chain of unfolding sequences is both a reposi- tory of past actions and a harbinger of future possibilities (Thompson 1978). Temporal order and the causal relationships among actions that make up events therefore become the major ob- ject of inquiry in comparative narrative analysis. Narrative focuses squarely on the import of human agency in reproducing or changing socie- tal arrangements, thereby complementing the at- tentiveness comparative-historical sociologists have traditionally given social structural constraints and opportunities (Stryker 1996). Channeling analyti- cal attention in this fashion directs narrativists both to transformative historical happenings (the French Revolution, for instance [Sewell 1996]) and to the development and deployment of decid- edly temporal concepts, such as path dependence, sequential unfolding, temporally cumulative cau- sation, and the pace of social action (Abrams 1982; Aminzade 1992). The structure of action under- pinning particular historical narratives, moreover, can also be strictly compared with an eye toward both showing general patterns across events and individual exceptions to those generalizations (Abbott 1992; Grifﬁn 1993). Dietrich Rueschemeyer and John Stephens (1997), for example, demon- strate how ‘‘eventful time, including the order and sequence of key actions, can both be incorporated into causal generalizations for such large scale processes as democratization and capitalist eco- nomic development and [be] exploited to ascer- tain where those generalizations break down. Comparative narrativists have developed a va- riety of procedures to enhance the theoretical payoff and replicability of their research: (1) event- structure analysis (Grifﬁn 1993), which allows ex- plicit codiﬁcation of reasons for inferences and for cross-level generalization; (2) semantic grammar analysis, which uses linguistic rules to convert text, such as newspaper accounts of strikes In Italy, into numbers for subsequent statistical analysis (Franzosi 1995, 1998); and (3) systematizing electronic means to collect, store, code, and analyze diverse types of historical texts, from newspaper articles to court opinions and legislative hearings (Stryker 1996; Pedriana and Stryker 1997). Robin Stryker (1996) has also developed the useful notion of ‘‘strategic narrative’’ as a guide to case selection in compara- tive-historical analysis: Strategic narrative suggests that some historical events and ways of construct- ing stories will promote theory-building more than will others, thus facilitating cumulation of knowledge. Regardless of precisely how analytical formal- ism is incorporated, unpacking a narrative and reconstituting it as an explicit causal account— that is, comprehending and explaining the logical within the chronological, and the general within the particular—often requires that analysts imagi- natively reconstruct participants’ cultural under- standings (interpretation), as well as systematically harness theoretical abstractions, comparative gen- eralizations, and replicable research methods. In effect, then, analysts explain because they are com- pelled to interpret, and they interpret because causal explanation is demanded (Beer 1963; Grif- ﬁn 1993; Mahoney 1999). METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES AND DIFFICULTIES Though comparative-historical analysis is neither necessarily cross-national or cross-cultural, nor al- ways confronting the same obstacles as narrative history, it does share many of the methodological problems (and solutions) and dilemmas tradition- ally associated with both types of research. These include, among others: (1) deﬁning and selecting comparable analytical units; (2) case interdepend- ence; (3) the nonrepresentativeness of cases; (4) determining conceptual equivalence and meas- urement reliability and validity across time and space; (5) the paucity of data, especially that which is quantitative, over long periods of time, and for newly emerging nations; (6) the selectivity and general unsoundness of the historical record; (7) the use of spatially and temporally aggregated data, and, more generally, the distance between what can be collected and systematically measured and what the theory or research question actually calls for; and (8) fruitful ways to wed historical narration and cultural speciﬁcity, on the one hand, to the development of general sociological theory and cumulative, replicable results, on the other. Some of these difﬁculties especially plague analyti- cally formal comparisons (e.g., the artiﬁciality and interdependence of cases; the paucity of systemat- ic, quantiﬁable data at the proper theoretical level of analysis; and the excessive generality at the cost of important historical and cultural speciﬁcity); COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 389 others haunt with more force interpretive com- parisons (e.g., nonrepresentative cases; analytical looseness and non replicability; and excessive par- ticularity at the expense of generalization and theoretical development). Granting their very real import, these difﬁcul- ties are not normally intractable. As we have shown, methodologically self-conscious comparative-his- torical scholars, both qualitative and quantitative, have devised strategies to: construct and select the most relevant cases for analysis; exploit cross-level data (e.g., within and between nation-states) and make causal inferences across levels of analysis; guard against logically false or self-validating infer- ences; infuse the analysis of historical narrative with greater theoretical and analytical rigor; and increase the number and representativeness of their cases. They have also devised or imported useful ways to ensure maximum measurement equivalence across cultures; sample historical rec- ords; estimate data missing from statistical series and to correct for truncated data; capitalize on case interdependence with new statistical meth- ods; historically ground time-series analysis; etc. (see Bloch [1928] 1969; Carr 1961; Przeworski and Teune 1970; Zelditch 1971; Tuma and Hannan 1984; Skocpol 1984b; Ragin 1987; Kohn 1989; Isaac and Grifﬁn 1989; McMichael 1990; Kiser and Hechter 1991; Grifﬁn 1993; Western 1994; Deane, Beck, and Tolnay 1998). Some problems, admittedly, have no satisfac- tory solution, and nothing can compensate for the utter dearth of valid information on particular happenings or variables. This, though, is hardly different from any other form of social research. The litany of methodological difﬁculties discussed above, in fact, afﬂict all social research. Survey analysts, for example, deal with questionnaire re- sponses of dubious accuracy and unknown mean- ing taken from geographically and temporally lim- ited samples, and scholars working with institutional records of any sort must deal with information collected by institutionally self-interested actors. It is important to recognize that although comparative-historica

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l inquiry is no more ‘‘error- prone’’ or unreliable than are other forms of social research, it often adopts a very different underly- ing ‘‘working philosophy’’ from most theory-driv- en quantitative analysis. Usually in highly deduc- tive and statistical analysis (including comparative strategies), theory construction and theory testing are two clearly deﬁned and quite separate phases of a research program (Kiser and Hechter 1991; Stryker 1996). Segmenting research practice in this way is thought necessary to ensure that hy- pothesis testing produces a fair empirical test, unbiased by prior analysis, or even intimate fore- knowledge of the data. Given these rules and objectives, then, concepts, indicators, hypotheses, and theory are not usually changed in the middle of analysis; that would invalidate the statistical or logical test. In contrast, comparative-historical inquiry that is qualitative and inductive, though often also analytically formal, establishes a continual dia- logue between social theory and empirical evi- dence, so that conceptual abstraction and com- parative history are mutually deﬁned and constructed in reference to each other. In ‭The Protestant Ethic‬ and the Spirit of Capitalism‭, for example, Weber‬ ([1904] 1958) used historical evidence on econom- ic and religious practices and beliefs to reﬁne his ideal types and his hypotheses and, simultaneous- ly, conceptually frame that empirical data to ren- der it intelligible and explicable. Many compara- tive-historical sociologists follow Weber’s general strategy, that is, they start their inquiry with one set of concepts, indicators, or hypotheses, or all three, and end with another, modiﬁed set because they mutually adjust data and theory, ensuring a good ‘‘ﬁt’’ between the two as analysis progresses. In their study of capitalist economic development and democratic political practice in many nations, for example, Rueschemeyer, John Stephens, and Evelyne Huber Stephens (1992) amended their theoretical deﬁnition of democracy, both broad- ening its historical scope and specifying more precisely its meaning, as they moved in their analy- sis from Europe to Latin America. Thus what may look like scientiﬁc ‘‘cheating’’ to a deductive or quantitative scholar is an appropriate, fruitful strate- gy for comparative-historical sociologists whose goals are concept formulation and reformulation, theory construction, and empirical understand- ing, rather than strict hypothesis testing. Analytic rigor does not rest with the mechanis- tic application of technique per se, but, instead, with a systematic and methodologically self-disci- plined stance toward both data collection and analysis and the use of evidence to advance infer- ences. Most comparative-historical scholars adhere COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 390 to explicit decision rules, permitting others to replicate, critically judge, and constructively cri- tique the research. To help ensure the validity and reliability of measures in this sort of inquiry, and while also maintaining the needed ﬂexibility to improve key concepts and measures during the analysis, for instance, Stryker (1996) has shown how researchers can adapt traditional content- analytic coding techniques to capture time and space as explanatory context. Context can be con- ceptualized and measured as a conjunction of ‘‘values’’ on general theoretical constructs, and, at the same time, researchers can develop what she terms ‘‘action coding’’ to construct more system- atically the who, what, when, where, how, and why of action and event sequences. With enhanced systematization—that is, the use of precise con- cepts, measures, and coding techniques, and the clear communication of these—comes enhanced reliability and replicability (Stryker 1996). THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE- HISTORICAL ANALYSIS Jack Goldstone (1997, p. 119) has stated that com- parative-historical inquiry has produced ‘‘many of the greatest achievements of macro-sociological scholarship.’’ At the end of the twentieth century, these achievements were severely tested by a series of interdependent, large-scale social transforma- tions of every bit the historical magnitude and moral signiﬁcance of those motivating sociology’s founders: economic and cultural globalization; the growth of transnational ‘‘super states’’ brought about by strategic military and economic alliances among sovereign nation-states; post-communist marketization and democratization in former So- viet-bloc nations; and armed nationalist struggles and resurgent ethnic conﬂicts. Broad interest in, and need for, illuminating comparative-historical analysis therefore is only likely to increase. The utility of research in this tradition rests more on the creative use of good theory than it does on its methodology. But ‘‘creative use’’ of theory is itself largely a matter of how theory is combined with research strategy. On this score, the future of comparative-historical sociology would seem bright. One encouraging trend is the increasing use of statistical techniques developed explicitly to analyze temporal (Tuma and Hanna 1984; Isaac and Grifﬁn 1989; Abbott 1992; McCammon 1998) and spatial processes (Deane et al. 1998). Time- series and spatial analyses are not always subject to the same limitations as are cross-national statistical analyses, and quantitative spatial techniques are particularly apt given heightened global interde- pendence. Spatial analysis, for instance, can un- cover how historical processes move from place to place (country, region, etc.), and it can ascertain whether structures or practices in one country are diffused into other countries or deterred from entering them (Deane et al. 1998). Another very positive trend that probably will become more widespread is combining and syn- thesizing different kinds of comparative logics. Both Jeffrey Paige (1975) and John Stephens (1980) combined cross-national quantitative analysis of a large number of nation-states with qualitative, case- oriented work on a small, but theoretically strate- gic subset of their cases. Paige combined his statis- tical generalizations with three parallel case stud- ies, ﬁnding differences in the nature of agrarian revolts. Stephens, on the other hand, systematical- ly compared a subset of four countries to show how the historical processes of welfare-state devel- opment differed from one nation to another. He therefore used both generalizing and individualiz- ing comparative logics. Goldstone (1991) followed a similar strategy, combining ‘‘within-case’’ quanti- tative analyses with case-oriented comparisons to show how long-term population growth contribut- ed to state breakdown in the early modern world. Combining diverse comparative-historical approaches in this way, and synthesizing analytical formalism and interpretation in causal interpretivism, yield insights that simply are not possible with any single methodological strategy. Even if the differences among diverse approach- es prove too great to overcome completely—a possibility suggested by the debate over the utility of highly deductive explanatory schemas such as rational choice theory in comparative-historical research (Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Kiser and Hechter 1991, 1998; Somers 1998)—diversity in goals, strategies, and procedures has spurred meth- odological innovation and the cross-fertilization of scholarship from divergent methodological strate- gies (Beer 1963; Rueschemeyer and Stephens 1997; Goldstone 1997). It thereby provides the contin- ued promise of enhanced knowledge and richly COMPARATIVE-HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY 391 textured, multi-voiced portrayals and understand- ings of perennial questions of fundamental hu- man signiﬁcance. REFERENCES Abbott, Andrew 1992 ‘‘From Causes to Events: Notes on Narrative Positivism.’’ ‭Sociological Methods and Re-‬ search‭ 20:428–55.‬ Abrams, Philip 1982 ‭Historical Sociology‬. 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Holly 1998 ‘‘Using Event History Analysis in Historical Research: With Illustrations from a Study of the Passage of Women’s Protective Legisla- tion.’’ ‭International Review of Social History‭ 43:33–55.‬‬ COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 392 McMichael, Philip 1990 ‘‘Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alterna- tive Comparative Method.’’ ‭American Sociological Re-‬ view‭ 55:385–397.‬ Mill, John Stuart (1843) 1967 ‭A System of Logic: Ratiocinative‬ and Inductive‭. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.‬ Moore, Barrington 1966 ‭The Social Origins of Dictatorship‬ and Democracy‭. Boston: Beacon Press.‬ Paige, Jeffrey 1975 ‭Agrarian Revolt: Social Movements and‬ Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World‭. New‬ York: Free Press. Pampel, Fred, and John Williamson 1989 ‭Age, Class,‬ Politics and the Welfare State‭. Cambridge: Cambridge‬ University Press. 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Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.‬ Sombart, Werner (1906) 1976 ‭Why Is There No Socialism‬ in the United States?‭ White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.‬ Somers, Margaret 1998 ‘‘We’re No Angels’’: Realism, Rationality Choice and Relationality in Social Sci- ence.’’ ‭American Journal of Sociology‬ 104:722–784. Stephens, John 1980 ‭The Transition from Capitalism to‬ Socialism‭. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.‬ Stryker, Robin 1996 ‘‘Beyond History vs. Theory: Strate- gic Narrative and Sociological Explanation.’’ ‭Socio-‬ logical Methods and Research‭ 24:304–352.‬ Thompson. Edward P. 1978 ‭The Poverty of Theory and‬ Other Essays‭. London: Merlin.‬ Tilly, Charles 1984 ‭Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge‬ Comparisons‭. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.‬ ———, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly 1975 ‭The Rebel-‬ lious Century 1830–1930‭. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard‬ University Press. Tuma, Nancy, and Michael Hannan 1984 ‭Social Dynam-‬ ics‭. New York: Academic Press.‬ Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974 ‭The Modern World System.‬ New York: Academic Press. Weber, Max (1904) 1958 ‭The Protestant Ethic and the‬ Spirit of Capitalism‭. New York: Scribners.‬ ——— 1949 ‭The Methodology of the Social Sciences‬. New York: Free Press. Western, Bruce 1994 ‘‘Unionization and Labor Market Institutions in Advanced Capitalism, 1950–85.’’ ‭Ameri-‬ can Journal of Sociology‭ 99:1314–1341.‬ Zelditch, Morris 1971 ‘‘Intelligible Comparisons.’’ In I. Vallier, ed., ‭Comparative Methods in Sociology‬,. Berke- ley: University of California Press. L‭ARRY J. G‭RIFFIN‬‬ R‭OBIN S‭TRYKER‬‬ COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS Organizations, as a class, are socially constructed innovations, deliberately designed as solutions to problems. Although some forms of organization, such as churches and armies, have been around for centuries, only since the Industrial Revolution have complex organizations assumed the form people take for granted today. Because they are COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 393 shaped by the contexts or environments in which they are established, contemporary organizations reﬂect the impact of their historical origins in societies characterized by growing afﬂuence and conﬂicts over the control and distribution of wealth. Organizations come in a bewildering variety of forms because they have been explicitly designed to deal with a wide range of problems and because they have emerged under widely varying environ- mental conditions. THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONS Why are complex organizations important? Or- ganizations, which produce goods, deliver servic- es, maintain order, and challenge the established order are the fundamental building blocks of mod- ern societies, and the basic vehicles through which collective action is undertaken. The prominence of organizations in contemporary society is appar- ent when we consider some consequences of their actions. Organizations coordinate the actions of peo- ple in pursuit of activities too broad in scope to be accomplished by individuals alone. Railroads were the ﬁrst large corporations in the United States, arising because small autonomous merchants and traders could not effectively coordinate the pas- sage of long-distance shipments. In the twentieth century, the production of mass-market consump- tion goods, such as automobiles and electric appli- ances, was made possible by the rise of large, vertically integrated manufacturing ﬁrms. Similar- ly, in the public sector, the implementation of government social policies has necessitated the development of large government agencies that process thousands of cases on a universalistic, impersonal basis. The concentration of power in organizations contributes not only to the attainment of large- scale goals in modern societies, but also to some major social problems. When organizations focus on attaining speciﬁc goals, such as making proﬁts for shareholders, they may neglect the side effects or externalities of their actions. Examples include air and water pollution and the careless disposal of unwanted hazardous materials by large manufac- turers. The manufacture of unsafe consumer prod- ucts and instances of large-scale fraud and collu- sion also illustrate the capacity of organizations to do harm as well as good. Increasingly, major tasks in society are ad- dressed not by single organizations but instead by networks of interdependent organizations. Interorganizational arrangements pool the efforts of numerous specialized organizations in pursuit of a common end. For example, automobiles are produced in ‭vertical‬ production networks centered on assemblers that maintain ongoing relationships with multiple tiers of suppliers responsible for the manufacture and delivery of components. Howev- er, in the industrial districts of northern Italy, textile production occurs within ‭horizontal‬ produc- tion networks consisting of small and specialized ﬁrms that employ ﬂexible machinery and tempo- rarily cooperate with one another for particular projects. Cooperation enables them to adapt to changing market demands and to learn from one another. Likewise, services for the severely mental- ly ill are delivered by independent but interrelated agencies providing speciﬁc medical and social servic- es. Many large-scale motion pictures are produced not by self-contained studios, but rather by combi- nations of producers, directors, cinematographers, and other personnel assembled only for the dura- tion of a particular project. Ongoing arrange- ments involving hospitals, doctors, and university laboratories have been created by the National Cancer Institute to coordinate cancer research and treatment. As these examples demonstrate, interorganizational arrangements give organiza- tions the ﬂexibility to address the unique features of speciﬁc cases, while avoiding the rigidities some- times found in very large organizations. DEFINITIONS OF ORGANIZATIONS What are complex organizations? A simple deﬁni- tion is that organizations are goal-directed, bounda- ry-maintaining, socially-constructed systems of hu- man activity. Some deﬁnitions add other criteria, such as deliberateness of design, the existence of status structures, patterned understandings be- tween participants, orientation to an environment, possession of a technical system for accomplishing tasks, and substitutability of personnel (Scott 1998). Goal orientation and deliberate design of ac- tivity systems are distinctive features discriminat- ing between organizations and other collectivities, such as families and small groups. Organizations are purposive systems in which members behave as if they are committed to the organization’s COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 394 goals, although individual participants might per- sonally feel indifferent toward those goals or even alienated from their organizations. Concerted col- lective action toward an apparent common pur- pose also distinguishes organizations from social units such as friendship circles, audiences, and mass publics. Because many organizational forms are now institutionalized in modern societies, peo- ple readily turn to them or construct them when a task or objective exceeds their own personal abili- ties and resources (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Zucker 1988). Organizations have activity systems—or tech- nologies—for accomplishing work, which can in- clude processing raw materials, information, or people. Activity systems consist of bounded sets of interdependent role behaviors; the nature of the interdependencies is often contingent upon the techniques used. Other key elements of organizations, such as socially constructed boundaries, are shared with other types of collectivities. The establishment of an ‘‘organization’’ implies a distinction between members and nonmembers, thus marking off or- ganizations from their environments. Maintaining this distinction requires boundary-maintenance activity, because boundaries may be permeable, and thus some organizations establish an authori- tative process to enforce membership distinctions. For example, businesses have human resource management departments that select, socialize, and monitor employees, and voluntary associa- tions have membership committees that perform similar functions. Distinctive symbols of member- ship may include unique modes of dress and spe- cial vocabularies. Within organizations, goal attainment and boundary maintenance manifest themselves as is- sues of coordination and control, as authorities construct arrangements for allocating resources or integrating workﬂows. These internal struc- tures affect the perceived meaning and satisfac- tion of individual participants by, for example, differentially allocating power and affecting the characteristics of jobs. Control structures, which shape the way participants are directed, evaluated, and rewarded are constrained by participants’ multi- ple external social roles, some complementing, but others conﬂicting with organizational roles. ENVIRONMENTS Organizations, with few exceptions, are incom- plete social systems that are not self-sufﬁcient and thus depend on interchanges with their environ- ments. Therefore, goal setting by owners or lead- ers must take into account the sometimes contrary preferences of organizations and other actors, because activity systems are fueled by resources obtained from outsiders. For example, partici- pants must be enticed or coerced into contribut- ing to the organization’s activities: businesses pay people to work for them, while voluntary nonprof- it organizations may offer more intangible bene- ﬁts, such as sociable occasions. Over the past few decades, organizational so- ciology has gradually expanded its scope to in- clude more of the external elements associated with organizational life. Initially, theorists empha- sized relatively tangible features: environments were seen as stocks of resources (such as raw materials, capital, or personnel) and information. To the degree that resources are scarce or concen- trated in a few hands, organizations are more dependent on their environments and may be vulnerable to exploitation or external control by outsiders (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). To the de- gree that information is dispersed, heterogene- ous, or subject to change, organizations confront problems of uncertainty. Much research has been devoted to under- standing how organizations deal with the prob- lems of dependence and uncertainty that environ- ments pose. Some organizations respond internally, by developing specialized structures and process- es. For example, boundary-spanning personnel are charged with dealing with actors outside the organization, acquiring resources, and disposing of products; they thereby enable others in the technical core to work under more certain condi- tions. Some organizations respond externally, by building bridges that stabilize their ties to environ- ments. They use interorganizational devices such as long-term contracts and working agreements, joint programs or alliances, and interlocking direc- torates (Mizruchi and Galaskiewicz 1993). More recent scholarship has stressed the so- cially constructed, ‭institutional‬ aspects of environ- ments. Organizations must be attentive to these external aspects to acquire and maintain legitima- cy and social standing. Scott (1995) distinguished COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 395 between regulative, normative, and cognitive-cul- tural understandings of institutions. Regulative institutions are external systems of rules, often established by states, to which organizations must conform. External rules may be prescriptive, such as when a law requires that publicly traded corpo- rations have boards of directors with at least three members. Rules may also be proscriptive, such as when regulatory bodies or courts prohibit particu- lar trade practices and ownership patterns. Normative institutions are sets of beliefs and values shared by organizations and their partici- pants about the morally appropriate way in which to organize activities. Professional associations are common sources of normative prescriptions, en- forced through processes such as certiﬁcation. Cognitive institutions are cultural frames or scripts that constitute the social forms seen as natural and taken for granted in a given society. In contempo- rary society, the idea of organizations itself is institutionalized; legitimate pursuit of an activity often requires the formation of an organization because of the widespread belief that this is an efﬁcient, effective, and fair manner in which to proceed (Meyer and Rowan 1977). ORGANIZATIONAL DEMOGRAPHICS The number of organizations in industrial socie- ties is very large. Over ﬁve million businesses with at least one employee existed in the United States in 1998, and there were thousands of governmen- tal agencies, nonproﬁt organizations, and volun- tary associations (Aldrich 1999). Social scientists have developed various schemes to describe the diversity of organizations. For example, the North American Industry Classiﬁcation System (Ofﬁce of Management and the Budget 1997) classiﬁes establishments by their products and the process- es used to make them. Organizations can also be classiﬁed according to their goals or the social functions they serve (Parsons 1960), or on the basis of the prime beneﬁciaries of organizational actions: owners, members, clients, or the general public (Blau and Scott 1962). Another classiﬁca- tion contrasts generalist and specialist organiza- tions and hypothesizes that each type thrives in a different kind of environment (Hannan and Free- man 1989). Industrial societies contain a large number of organizations, with three characteristics of special note. First, the size distribution of businesses and nonproﬁt organizations is highly skewed, with a large number of very small organizations. In 1990, approximately 90 percent of the ﬁve million ﬁrms in the United States with employees employed fewer than twenty people. Over 98 percent em- ployed fewer than one hundred workers (Small Business Administration 1994). Employment sta- tistics were very similar in the European Union (ENSR 1993), with about 93 percent of ﬁrms em- ploying fewer than ten workers, although the ﬁg- ure varied by nation. In 1994, most of the 4.3 million corporations in the United States had few- er than $one hundred,000 in assets, and they accounted for less than 0.3 percent of all corporate assets. Thus, most organizations are fairly vulner- able to environmental forces and must adapt to them or disband. Second, although the number of large organi- zations is small, they have achieved a dominant share of revenues and assets. Business organiza- tions are highly stratiﬁed by size, and large ﬁrms have more resources with which to resist and counter environmental pressures. In 1994, the top 0.002 percent of corporations, each with a quarter- billion or more in assets, held about 83 percent of all corporate assets. In 1992, the ﬁfty largest manu- facturing ﬁrms in the United States accounted for about 24 percent of value added and about 13 percent of employment, and the two hundred largest ﬁrms accounted for 42 percent of value added and around 25 percent of employment (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1996). Third, smaller organizations still employ a relatively large share of all workers. In the United States, about 39 percent of all employees work in ﬁrms that employ fewer than one hundred work- ers. In particular industries, such as agriculture and construction, substantially more than half the work force is employed in organizations with few- er than one hundred workers. In the European Union, ﬁrms with fewer than one hundred work- ers employ about 55 percent of the labor force, although variation across nations is substantial. For example, in Germany and the United King- dom, ﬁrms larger than one hundred employ more than half the labor force, whereas in Greece and Italy, such ﬁrms employ only about 20 percent of the labor force (ESNR 1993). COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 396 Populations of organizations in modern socie- ties are constantly undergoing processes of expan- sion, contraction, and change. Some organiza- tions are founded in a ﬂash of creative energy and then disband almost immediately, whereas others emerge slowly and then last for decades. Some organizations adapt readily to every environmen- tal challenge, whereas others succumb to the ﬁrst traumatic event they face. Sociologists have turned their attention to these vital events surrounding the reproduction and renewal of organizational populations, focusing on three processes: foundings, transformations, and disbandings (Aldrich 1999; Hannan and Freeman 1989). New organizations are established fairly fre- quently, although systematic data on founding rates are available only for businesses. Studies in the United States and other Western industrial- ized nations show that about ten businesses are founded per year for every one hundred business- es active at the start of the year. In the United States, approximately 4 to 6 percent of the adult population in the mid-1990s has engaged in some activities with an intent to start a business, and about half of them actually succeeded in their initial efforts (Reynolds and White 1997). Explana- tions for variations in rates of organizational foundings have stressed the characteristics of op- portunity structures, the organizing capacities of groups, and strategies adopted by entrepreneurs as they take account of opportunities and resourc- es available to them (Aldrich and Wiedenmayer 1991). Societal demands for special-purpose organi- zations increased with urbanization and with eco- nomic, political, and social differentiation, while the resources required to construct organizations grew more abundant with the development of a money economy and the spread of literacy (Stinchcombe 1965). The spread of facilitative legal, political, and other institutions also played a major role, by creating a stable, predictable con- text within which entrepreneurs could look for- ward to appropriating the gains from organiza- tional foundings. Occasional periods of political upheaval and revolution stimulate foundings by freeing resources from previous uses, and thus massive changes occurred in the organizational populations of Eastern Europe in the 1990s. For example, centralized health care systems were dis- banded with the demise of state socialist regimes, and there is a good deal of ﬂux in the organizations within this sector (Mechanic and Rochefort 1996). Transformations occur when existing organi- zations adapt their structures to changing condi- tions. The issue of how frequently and under what conditions organizations change has provoked some of the most spirited debates in organization- al sociology. Strategic choice-theorists have ar- gued for managerial autonomy and adaptability, whereas ecological and institutional theorists have tended to stress organizational inertia and de- pendence. Research has moved away from polariz- ing debates and reframed the question of transfor- mation, asking about the conditions under which organizations change and whether changes occur more frequently in core or peripheral features (Singh and Lumsden 1990). In the 1980s and 1990s, growing awareness of techniques for performing dynamic analyses have produced some useful studies of transformation, such as those on diversiﬁcation, top executive changes, and changes in corporate form (Fligstein 1991). These studies tell us that changes ‭do‬ occur, although they do not report whether rates of change go up or down over an organization’s life cycle. Most of these studies are of the very largest business ﬁrms, for which data are publicly avail- able, and not for representative samples. If all newly founded organizations lived forev- er, the study of organizational change would be conﬁned to issues of founding, adaptation, and inertia. Research has shown that organizations disband at a fairly high rate, however, and a sizable literature has grown up on organizational mortali- ty (Baum 1996; Singh 1990). Organizations can cease to exist as separate entities in two ways: by completely dissolving—the process by which the vast majority of organizations disband—or by be- coming part of a different entity through merger or acquisition. Throughout the 1990s, between two and six thousand mergers and acquisitions a year took place, amounting to less than 1 percent of the incorporated ﬁrm population in any given year (Aldrich 1999). For example, in 1994, merg- ers and acquisitions involved about one-tenth of one percent of all corporate assets. By contrast, between 1976 and 1984, the annual rate of dissolu- tion in the business population of the United States was about 10 percent (Small Business Ad- ministration 1994). COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 397 Age and size are the strongest predictors of how long an organization will survive. Young or- ganizations disband at a substantially higher rate than older ones; a conservative estimate is that only half of new organizations survive more than ﬁve years. Internally, new organizations depend upon the cooperation of strangers who must be taught new routines, some of which are unique to particular organizations (Stinchcombe 1965). Ex- ternally, new organizations must penetrate niches in potentially hostile environments, overcoming competitors and establishing their legitimacy with potential members, customers, suppliers, and oth- ers. Survival beyond infancy is easier when an organization adopts a form that has already been institutionalized and is widely regarded as legiti- mate and proper (Zucker 1988). Population ecolo- gists have given special attention to the density of an organizational form—the number of organiza- tions of a given kind—in their analyses of vital rates. Density is thought to be an indicator both of the acceptance or legitimacy of a form (which raises foundings and decreases disbandings) and of the number of competitors attempting to sur- vive within a given environmental niche (which reduces foundings and increases disbandings). The life chances of an organization initially increase— though not smoothly—as density rises, and then decrease as competition intensiﬁes. SOURCES OF INTERNAL DIVERSITY AMONG ORGANIZATIONS All models of organizations as coherent entities can be reduced to two basic views. The systemic view sees organizations as social systems, sustained by the roles allocated to their participants, whereas an associative perspective treats organizations as associations of self-interested parties, sustained by the rewards the participants derive from their association with the organization (Swanson 1971). These two views each have a venerable heritage in the social sciences. Despite subtle variations, all perspectives on organizations ultimately use one or both of these models. Institutional, functionalist, and ecological per- spectives rely on a systemic model, viewing organi- zations as relatively coherent, stable entities. Such models emphasize the activity systems in organiza- tions that are deliberately designed to accomplish speciﬁc goals. Formal structures of organizations, including a division of labor, authority relation- ships, and prescribed communication channels, are treated as fulﬁlling a purposeful design. For example, an institutional approach emphasizes member socialization and other processes that make the transmission of shared meanings easier. Ecological models usually treat organizations as units that are being selected for or against by their environments, and thus assume that organizations cohere as units. Interpretive and more micro analytic views rely more on an associative model, leading to the expectation that organizations are constantly at risk of dissolution (March and Olsen 1976). For example, in the interpretive view, the reproduc- tion of organizational structure depends on par- ticipants resubscribing to, or continually negotiat- ing, a shared understanding of what they jointly are doing. Some cultural theories of organization emphasize the different, conﬂicting views that co- exist within one organization (Martin 1992). Views of organizations as marketplaces of in- centives (Dow 1988), bundles of transactions (Williamson 1981), or arenas of class conﬂict (Clegg 1989), are in harmony with the associative view, insofar as they focus on actors’ contributions to sustaining interaction. Indeed, organizational econo- mics views organizations primarily as mechanisms for mediating exchanges among individuals, argu- ing that they arise only when market coordination has proven inadequate (Williamson 1981). One variant on this approach, agency theory, focuses on the relationships between self-interested prin- cipals (such as owners or stockholders) and the self-interested agents (such as workers or manag- ers) engaged on behalf of principals. The self- interests of these actors may be divergent, and hence agency theory examines how systems of incentives, monitoring, and coordination can be designed to align the activities of agents with the objectives of principals, at minimal cost. These complementary views of organizations— the associative and the systemic—highlight the sources of two fundamental problems of social organization, those of differentiation and integra- tion. Some differentiation occurs through the divi- sion of labor among different roles and subunits; for example, employees may be divided into de- partments such as sales, ﬁnance, and manufactur- ing. Differentiation pressures also arise because COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 398 participants sometimes bring widely varying ex- pectations to the same organization. Differentia- tion is thus a centrifugal force threatening the coherence of social units. Integration, by contrast, refers to procedures for maintaining coherence, as diverse roles are linked and activities coordinat- ed to sustain an organization as a coherent entity. Examples of integrative processes include the hold- ing of weekly departmental meetings or the circu- lation of inter ofﬁce memos. Differentiation increases organizational com- plexity because it increases the extent and nature of specialization (Blau 1972). Complexity increas- es with the number of different components, and may be horizontal (tasks spread over many roles or units), vertical (many levels in a hierarchy of au- thority), or spatial (many operating sites). Com- plexity also increases when tasks are grouped by product/market (soap, paper products, or foods) or by function (ﬁnance, production, or marketing). Problems of coordination are present for any activity system, but especially for a complex one. Many concepts used to describe organization struc- ture involve alternative processes used in attempts to achieve integration. One scheme, for example, identiﬁed ﬁve coordinating mechanisms: direct supervision, three forms of standardization, and mutual adjustment (Mintzberg 1983). With direct supervision, or simple control, decision making is highly centralized: persons at the top of a hierar- chy make decisions that lower level personnel simply carry out. This coordination pattern was prevalent in preindustrial organizations, and to- day is especially likely within small organizations (Edwards 1979). Coordination also can be attained through standardizing work processes, skills, or outputs. Work processes may be standardized through for- malization, that is, the development of rules and procedures. Examples include rules for process- ing orders, for assembling and packaging prod- ucts, or for conducting screening interviews for clients. A formalized organization may appear decentralized, since few explicit commands are given, and lower-level participants have freedom in making decisions within the rules. The rules may, however, be so restrictive as to leave little room for discretion. A variant on process stand- ardization is technical control; here, rules and procedures—and thereby coordination and con- trol—are built into the design of machinery, as in an assembly line. Most worker discretion is elimi- nated by the structure of the technical system, and what remains is centralized in the upper echelons of the organization. Standardization of skills involves considerable training and indoctrination of personnel, so that participants will carry out organizational policies with minimal oversight. Organizations employing large numbers of professionals are likely to rely on this coordination strategy (Von Glinow 1988). Pro- fessional participants enjoy considerable autono- my in making decisions, but their prior socializa- tion sets most decision premises for them. By producing products with standard proper- ties, subunits of an organization are able to work independently of one another; if they use each other’s outputs, the standards tell them what to anticipate. For example, large clothing ﬁrms pro- duce massive runs of identical garments, and thus the various departments within ﬁrms know pre- cisely what to expect from one another as they follow daily routines. Similar purposes are served by precise tolerances for parts used in manufactur- ing machinery and information systems designed to permit easy sharing of data within ofﬁces. In small, young organizations, coordination is achieved by the simple mutual adjustment of per- sonnel to one another. This form of coordination is also found in larger organizations working on complex, novel tasks, for which innovation is at a premium, such as consulting ﬁrms or research and development units. In such organizations, the ac- tivities of participants are reciprocally contingent, rather than sequentially ordered as in an assembly line. Formal structural devices have been advocat- ed as ways of facilitating mutual adjustment under complex circumstances, such as integrating man- agers and project teams into matrix-management structures. Standardization, bureaucratization, and for- malization have done much to enable organiza- tions to perform repetitive work efﬁciently. The same phenomena contribute to some well-known organizational pathologies; in particular, these co- ordination devices tend to reduce ﬂexibility. In the 1990s, organizations struggled to develop less rig- id structures for accomplishing work. Efforts to COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS 399 achieve ﬂexibility included reductions in size, ex- pansion of the scope of employee responsibilities through cross-training and broadened job descrip- tions, reductions in layers of management, and maintenance of long-term relationships with sup- pliers as an alternative to vertical integration. Many of these devices rely on strengthening the internal social networks that link an organization’s person- nel as well as the external ones linking it to the environment. Such linkages enable organizations to remain adaptable, cope with market uncertain- ties, and take advantage of opportunities for learning. CONCLUSION Complex organizations are the building blocks of industrial and post industrial societies, enabling people to accomplish tasks otherwise beyond their individual competencies. Organizations also help create and sustain structures of opportunities and constraints that affect nearly every aspect of socie- ties. Sociologists and other social scientists are grappling with a variety of complementary and conﬂicting perspectives on organizations, rang- ing from microanalytic interpretive views to macroevolutionary institutional and ecological views. Regardless of perspective, research on or- ganizations has shown its capacity to interest, in- form, and provoke us, as sociologists investigate these social constructions that ﬁgure so promi- nently in our lives. REFERENCES Aldrich, Howard E. 1999 ‭Organizations Evolving‬. Lon- don: Sage. ———, and Gabriele Wiedenmayer 1991 ‘‘From Traits to Rates: An Ecological Perspective on Organization- al Foundings.’’ In Jerome Katz and Robert Brockhaus, eds., ‭ Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence,‬ and Growth‭, vol. 1, 145–114 Greenwich, Conn.: JAI.‬ Baum, Joel A.C. 1996 ‘‘Organizational Ecology.’’ in Stewart R. Clegg, Cynthia Hardy, and Walter Nord, eds., ‭Handbook of Organization Studies‭ 77–114 Lon-‬‬ don: Sage. Blau, Peter M. 1972 ‘‘Interdependence and Hierarchy in Organizations.’’ ‭Social Science Research‬ 1:1–24. ———, and W. Richard Scott 1962 ‭Formal Organiza-‬ tions‭. San Francisco: Chandler.‬ Clegg, Stewart 1989 ‘‘Radical Revisions: Power, Disci- pline and Organizations.’’ ‭Organization Studies‬ 10:97–115. Dow, Gregory K. 1988 ‘‘Conﬁgurational and Coactivational Views of Organizational Structure.’’ ‭Academy of Man-‬ agement Review‭ 13:53–64.‬ Edwards, Richard C. 1979 ‭Contested Terrain: The Trans-‬ formation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century‭.‬ New York: Basic Books. ENSR 1993 ‭The European Observatory for SMEs: First‬ Annual Report‭. Zoetermeer, The Netherlands: Euro-‬ pean Observatory for SME Research and EIM Small Business Research and Consultancy. Fligstein, Neil 1991 ‭The Transformation of Corporate Con-‬ trol‭. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.‬ Hannan, Michael T., and John H. Freeman 1989 ‭Organi-‬ zational Ecology‭. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Universi-‬ ty Press. March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen 1976 ‭Ambigui-‬ ty and Choice in Organizations‭. Bergen, Norway:‬ Universitetsforlaget. Martin, Joanne 1992 ‭Cultures in Organizations: Three‬ Perspectives‭. New York: Oxford University Press.‬ Mechanic, David, and David A. Rochefort 1996 ‘‘Com- parative Medical Systems.’’ ‭Annual Review of Sociology‬ 22:239–270. Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan 1977 ‘‘Institutional- ized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.’’ ‭American Journal of Sociology‬ 83:340–363. Mintzberg, Henry 1983 ‭Structure in Fives: Designing Effec-‬ tive Organizations‭. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.‬ Mizruchi, Mark S., and Joseph Galaskiewicz 1993 ‘‘Net- works of Interorganizational Relations.’’ ‭Sociological‬ Methods & Research‭ 22:46–70.‬ Ofﬁce of Management and Budget, Statistical Policy Division 1997 ‭North American Industry Classiﬁcation‬ System‭. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Print-‬ ing Ofﬁce. Parsons, Talcott 1960 ‭Structure and Process in Modern‬ Societies‭. New York: Free Press.‬ Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Gerald R. Salancik 1978 ‭The Exter-‬ nal Control of Organizations‭. New York: Harper and Row.‬ Reynolds, Paul D., and Sammis B. White 1997 ‭The‬ Entrepreneurial Process: Economic Growth, Men, Wom- en, and Minorities‭. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books.‬ Scott, W. Richard 1998 ‭Organizations: Rational, Natural,‬ and Open Systems‭, 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:‬ Prentice-Hall. ——— 1995 ‭Institutions and Organizations‬. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. Singh, Jitendra (ed.) 1990 ‭Organizational Evolution‬. Bev- erly Hills, Calif.: Sage. COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY 400 ———, and Charles Lumsden 1990 ‘‘Theory and Re- search in Organizational Ecology.’’ ‭Annual Review of‬ Sociology‭ 16:161–195.‬ Small Business Administration 1994 ‭Handbook of Small‬ Business Data‭. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government‬ Printing Ofﬁce and Ofﬁce of Advocacy, Small Busi- ness Administration. Stinchcombe, Arthur 1965 ‘‘Social Structure and Or- ganizations.’’ In J. G. March, ed., ‭Handbook of Organi-‬ zations‭. 142–193 Chicago: Rand-McNally.‬ Swanson, Guy E. 1971 ‘‘An Organizational Analysis of Collectivities.’’ ‭American Sociological Review‬ 36:607–614. U.S. Bureau of the Census 1996 Selected statistics from the 1992 Census of Manufactures report MC92– S–2 ‘‘Concentration Ratios in Manufacturing.’’ http:/ /www.census.gov.mcd/mancen/download/ mc92cr.sum (21 Jan. 1999) Von Glinow, Mary Ann 1988 ‭The New Professionals:‬ Managing Today’s High-Tech Employees‭. Cambridge,‬ Mass.: Ballinger. Williamson, Oliver 1981 ‘‘The Economics of Organiza- tion: The Transaction Cost Approach.’’ ‭American‬ Journal of Sociology‭ 87:548–577.‬ Zucker, Lynne G. (ed.) 1988 ‭Institutional Patterns and‬ Organizations: Culture and Environment‭. Cambridge,‬ Mass.: Ballinger. H‭OWARD‬ E. A‭LDRICH‬ P‭ETER‬ V. M‭ARSDEN‬ COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY Conformity‭ is a change in behavior or belief toward‬ a group standard as a result of the group’s inﬂu- ence on an individual. As this deﬁnition indicates, conformity is a type of social inﬂuence through which group members come to share similar be- liefs and standards of behavior. It includes the processes by which group members converge on a given standard of belief or behavior as well as the pressures they exert on one another to uphold such standards. ‭Compliance‬ is behavioral conformi- ty in order to achieve rewards or avoid punish- ments (Kelman 1958). Since one can behaviorally adhere to a group standard without personally believing in it, the term is often used to indicate conformity that is merely public rather than pri- vate as well. Compliance can also refer to behavior- al conformity to the request or demand of anoth- er, especially an authority. In an individualistic society such as the United States, conformity has a negative connotation (Markus and Kitiyama 1994). Yet conformity is a fundamental social process without which people would be unable to organize into groups and take effective action as a collectivity. For people to coordinate their behavior so that they can organ- ize and work together as a group, they must devel- op and adhere to standards of behavior that make each other’s actions mutually predictable. Simply driving down a street would be nearly impossible if most people did not conform to group norms that organize driving. Conformity is also the process that establishes boundaries between groups. Through the con- formity process, the members of one group be- come similar to one another and different from those of another group. This, in turn, creates a shared social identity for people as the members of a distinctive group. Given the pressure of ever- changing circumstances, social groups such as fami- lies, peer groups, business ﬁrms, and nations, only maintain their distinctive cultural beliefs and mod- erately stable social structures through the con- stant operation of conformity processes. Perhaps because it is essential for social or- ganization, conformity appears to be a universal human phenomenon. The level of conformity var- ies by culture, however. Collectivist cultures (e.g., Japan) that emphasize the interdependence of individuals show higher levels of conformity than individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) that focus on the independence of individuals (Bond and Smith 1996). Although essential, conformity always entails a conﬂict between a group standard and an alter- native belief or behavior (Asch 1951; Moscovici 1985). For their physical and psychological surviv- al, people need and want to belong to social groups. Yet to do so, they must curb the diversity and independence of their beliefs and behavior. With- out even being aware of it, people usually willingly adopt the group position. Occasionally, however, individuals believe an alternative to be superior to the group standard and suffer painful conﬂict when pressured to conform. Sometimes a nonconforming, deviate alterna- tive is indeed superior to the group standard in that it offers a better response to the group circum- stances. Innovation and change is as important to COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY 401 a group’s ability to adjust and survive as is con- formity. In fact, a nonconforming member can inﬂuence the majority opinion even as the majori- ty pressures the deviate to conform. As Irving Janis (1972) points out in his analysis of ‘‘groupthink,’’ however, conformity pressures can grow so strong that they silence alternative opinions and strangle a group’s ability to critically analyze and respond to the problems it faces. Thus, conformity is a double-edged sword. It enables people to unify for collective endeavors but it exacts a cost in poten- tial innovation. CLASSIC EXPERIMENTS The social scientiﬁc investigation of conformity began with the pioneering experiments of Muzafer Sherif (1936). They beautifully illustrate the easy, almost unconscious way people in groups inﬂu- ence one another to become similar. Sherif made use of the autokinetic effect, which is a visual illusion that makes a stationary pinpoint of light in a dark room appear to move. Sherif asked subjects in his experiments to estimate how far the light moved. When individuals estimated the light alone, their estimates were often quite divergent. In one condition of the experiment, however, subjects viewed the light with two or three others, giving their estimates out loud, allowing them to hear each other’s judgments. In this group setting, individuals gave initial estimates that were similar to one another and rapidly converged on a single group estimate. Different groups settled on very different estimates but all groups developed a consensus judgment that remained stable over time. After three sessions together, group members were split up. When tested alone they continued to use their group standard to guide their personal estimates. This indicates that the group members had not merely induced one another to conform in outward behavior. They had inﬂuenced one another’s very perception of the light so that they believed the group estimate to be the most accu- rate judgment of reality. In another condition, Sherif ﬁrst tested sub- jects alone so that they developed personal stan- dards for their estimates. He then put together two or three people with widely divergent personal standards and tested them in a group setting. Over three group sessions, individual estimates merged into a group standard. Thus, even when partici- pants had well-established personal standards for judging, mere exposure to the differing judgments of others inﬂuenced them to gradually abandon their divergent points of view for a uniform group standard. This occurred despite a setting where the subjects, all strangers, had no power over one another and were only minimally organized as a group. The Sherif experiment suggests that conformity pressures in groups are subtle and extremely pow- erful. But critics quickly noted that the extreme ambiguity of the autokinetic situation might be responsible for Sherif’s results. In such an ambigu- ous situation, participants have little to base their personal judgments on, so perhaps it is not sur- prising that they turn to others to help them decide what to think. Do people conform when the task is clear and unambiguous? Will they yield to a group consensus if it is obvious that the consensus is wrong? These are the questions Solo- mon Asch (1951, 1956) addressed in his classic experiments. To eliminate ambiguity, Asch employed clear- cut judgment tasks where subjects chose which of three comparison lines was the same length as a standard line. The correct answers were so obvi- ous that individuals working alone reached 98 percent accuracy. Similar to the Sherif experi- ment, Asch’s subjects gave their judgments in the presence of seven to nine of their peers (all partici- pants were male college students). Unknown to the single naive subject in each group, all other group members were confederates of the experi- menter. On seven of twelve trials, as the confeder- ates announced their judgments one by one, they unanimously gave the wrong answer. It was ar- ranged so that the naive subject always gave his judgment after the confederates. The subject here was placed in a position of absolute conﬂict. Should he abide by what he knows to be true or go along with the unanimous opinion of others? A third of the time subjects violated the evidence of their own senses to agree with the group. The Asch experiments clearly demonstrated that people feel pressure to conform to group standards even when they know the standards are wrong. It is striking that Asch, like Sherif, obtained these results with a minimal group situation. The COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY 402 group members were strangers who meant little to one another. Yet they exerted substantial inﬂu- ence over one another simply by being in the same situation together. Because of the dramatic way it highlights the conﬂict inherent in conformity be- tween individuals and groups, Asch’s experimen- tal design has become the paradigm for studying conformity. NORMATIVE AND INFORMATION INFLUENCE Sherif’s and Asch’s striking results stimulated an explosion of research to explain how conformity occurs (see Kiesler and Kiesler 1976, Cialdini and Trost 1998 for reviews). It is now clear that two analytically distinct inﬂuence processes are involved. Either or both can produce conformity in a given situation. Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard (1955) labelled these ‭informational inﬂuence‬ and normative inﬂuence‭.‬ In informational inﬂuence, the group deﬁnes perceptual reality for the individual. Sherif’s ex- periment is a good illustration of this. The best explanation derives from Leon Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory. According to the theo- ry, people form judgments about ambiguous events by comparing their perceptions with those of simi- lar others and constructing shared, socially validat- ed deﬁnitions of the ‘‘reality’’ of the event. These consensual deﬁnitions constitute the social reality of the situation (Festinger 1950). Because people want the support of others to assure them of the validity of their beliefs, disagreeing with the ma- jority is uncomfortable. People in such situations doubt their own judgment. They change to agree with the majority because they assume that the majority view is more likely to be accurate. As this indicates, conformity as a result of informational inﬂuence is not unwilling compli- ance with the demands of others. Rather, the individual adopts the group standard as a matter of private belief as well as public behavior. Infor- mational inﬂuence is especially powerful in regard to social beliefs, opinions, and situations since these are inherently ambiguous and socially constructed. Normative inﬂuence occurs when people go along with the group majority in order to gain rewards or avoid unpleasant costs. Thus i

bundet

t is nor- mative inﬂuence that is behind compliance. Peo- ple depend on others for many valued outcomes, such as inclusion in social relationships, a sense of shared identity, and social approval. Because of this dependency, even strangers have some power to reward and punish one another. Asch’s results are a good example. Although a few of Asch’s participants actually doubted their judgment (in- formational inﬂuence), most conformed in order to avoid the implicit rejection of being the odd person out. Studies show that fears of rejection for nonconformity are not unfounded (see Levine 1980 for a review). While nonconformists are sometimes admired, they are rarely liked. Further- more, they are subject to intense persuasive pres- sure and criticism from the majority. FACTORS THAT INCREASE CONFORMITY Anything that increases vulnerability to informa- tional and normative inﬂuence increases conformi- ty. Although there may be personality traits that incline people to conform, the evidence for this is conﬂicting (Crowne and Marlowe 1969; Moscovici 1985). Situational factors seem to be the most important determinants of conformity. Research indicates that conformity is increased by a) the ambiguity or difﬁculty of the task, b) the relative unimportance of the issue to the person, c) the necessity of making a public rather than private response, d) the similarity of group members, e) high interdependence among the group mem- bers, f) the attractiveness and cohesiveness of the group, and g) the unanimity of the majority (see Kiesler and Kiesler 1976; Cialdini and Trost 1998 for reviews). When a task or situation is ambiguous or difﬁcult, it is not easy to tell what the best response to it would be. As a result, much as in Sherif’s experiments, group members rely heavily on each other’s opinions to decide what is best, increasing their susceptibility to informational inﬂuence. When decision-making groups in government or business face complex, difﬁcult decisions where the right choice is uncertain, informational inﬂu- ence increases the members’ tendency to agree and can affect their critical analysis of the situation (Janis 1972). Tastes and beliefs about matters, such as clothing style or music, about which there are no objectively right choices are subject to COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY 403 sudden fads or fashions for similar reasons. Power- ful conformity processes take over as group stan- dards deﬁne for the individual what the ‘‘right’’ clothes or music are. The less people care about an issue, the more open they are to both informational and norma- tive inﬂuence. Without the motivation to examine an issue personally, people usually accept the group standard about it, both because the agreement of others makes the standard seem right and because there are more rewards and fewer costs in going along with the group. Because of such rewards and costs, people are especially likely to go along when their response must be public rather than private. Since people compare their perceptions and views most closely to those of people who are socially similar to them, similarity increases group members’ informational inﬂuence on one anoth- er. Similarity also increases liking and, when peo- ple like one another, they have more power to reward or punish each other, so normative inﬂu- ence increases as well. Because of the increased power of both informational and normative inﬂu- ence, conformity pressures are often especially strong in peer groups. When members are highly dependent on one another for something they value, conformity pres- sure increases because the members have more power to reward or frustrate one another (norma- tive inﬂuence). Similarly, when a group is very attractive to an individual, its members have more power to normatively inﬂuence the individual. Gangs, fraternities, and professional societies all use this principle to induce new members to adopt their groups’ distinctive standards. Also, when a group is very tight knit and cohesive, members’ commitment to the group gives it more power over their behavior, increasing the forces of conformity. The unanimity of the majority in a group is an especially important factor in the conformity proc- ess. In his studies, Asch (1951) found that as long as it was unanimous, a majority of three was as effective in inducing conformity as one of sixteen. Subsequent research generally conﬁrms that the size of a majority past three is not a crucial factor in conformity. It is unanimity that counts (see Allen 1975 for a review). When Asch (1951) had one confederate give the correct answer to the line task, the naive subjects’ conformity to the ma- jority dropped from a third to only 5 percent. One fellow dissenter shows an individual that nonconformity is possible and provides much need- ed social support for an alternate construction of social reality. Interestingly, a dissenter need not agree with an individual to encourage nonconformity. It is only necessary that the dissenter also break with the majority. Another factor that affects conformity is the sex composition of the group. Although the re- sults of studies are inconsistent, statistical summa- ries of them, called meta-analyses, indicate that there is an overall tendency for women to conform slightly more than men (Becker 1986; Eagly and Wood 1985). Sex differences in conformity are most likely when behavior is under the surveil- lance of others. The evidence suggests two expla- nations (see Eagly 1987 for a review). First, sex carries status value in interaction, which creates social expectations for women to be less compe- tent and inﬂuential in the situation than men (Ridgeway 1993). Second, sex stereotypes pres- sure men to display independence when they are being observed. THE INFLUENCE OF THE MINORITY ON THE MAJORITY Conformity arises out of a social inﬂuence process between an individual and the group majority. The inﬂuence process is not always one way, how- ever. As Serge Moscovici (1976) points out, a dissenting group member is not just a recipient of pressure from the majority, but also someone who, by breaking consensus, challenges the validi- ty of the majority view, creating conﬂict, doubt, and the possibility of opinion change in the group. Dissenters sometimes modify the opinion of the majority in a process called ‭minority inﬂuence‬. Re- search shows that for a minority opinion to affect the majority it must be presented consistently and clearly without wavering and it helps if there are two such dissenters in the group rather than one (see Moscovici 1985; Moscovici, Mucchi-Faina, and Maass 1994; Wood et al. 1994, for reviews). A dissenting minority increases divergent thinking among group members that can enhance the like- lihood that they will arrive at creative solutions to the problems the group faces (Nemeth 1986). COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY 404 CONFORMITY AND STATUS Research in the Asch and Sherif paradigms focus- es on conformity pressures among peers. Howev- er, when group members differ in status, it affects the group’s tolerance of their nonconformity. High- er status members receive fewer sanctions for nonconformity than lower status members (Gerson 1975). As long as they adhere to central group norms, high status members’ nonconformity can actually increase their inﬂuence in the group (Berkowitz and Macauley 1961). Edwin Hollander (1958) argues that, because high status members are valued by the group, they are accorded ‘‘idio- syncrasy credits’’ that allow them to nonconform and innovate without penalty as long as they stay within certain bounds. It is middle status members who actually conform the most (Harvey and Consalvi 1960). They have fewer idiosyncrasy credits than high status members and more investment in the group than low status members. Nonconformity can also affect the position of status and inﬂuence a person achieves in the group. Hollander (1958, 1960) proposed that individuals earn status and idiosyncrasy credits by initially conforming to group norms, but replications of his study do not support this conclusion (see Ridgeway 1981 for a review). Conformity tends to make a person ‘‘invisible’’ in a group and so does little to gain status. Nonconformity attracts atten- tion and gives the appearance of conﬁdence and competence which can enhance status. But it also appears self-interested, which detracts from status (Ridgeway 1981). Consequently, moderate levels of nonconformity are most likely to facilitate sta- tus attainment. COMPLIANCE WITH AUTHORITY Reacting to the Nazi phenomenon of World War II, studies of compliance to authority have focused on explaining people’s obedience even when or- dered to engage in extreme or immoral behavior. Compliance in this situation is comparable to conformity in the Asch paradigm in that individu- als must go against their own standards of conduct to obey. The power of a legitimate authority to compel obedience was dramatically demonstrated in the Milgram (1963, 1974) experiments. As part of an apparent learning study, a scientist-experi- menter ordered subjects to give increasingly strong electric shocks to another person. The shock gen- erator used by the subject labelled increasing lev- els as ‘‘danger-severe shock’’ and ‘‘XXX’’ (at 450 volts). The victim (a confederate who received no actual shocks) protested, cried out, and complained of heart trouble. Despite this, 65 percent of the subjects complied with the scientist-experimenter and shocked the victim all the way to the 450 volt maximum. It is clear that most of the time, people do as they are told by legitimate authorities. Uncertainty over their responsibilities in the situation (a deﬁnition of social reality issue) and concern for the authority’s ability to punish or reward them seem to be the principle causes for people’s compliance in such circumstances. Note the comparability of these factors to informational and normative inﬂuence. Situational factors that socially deﬁne the responsibility question as a duty to obey rather than to disobey increase compli- ance (Kelman and Hamilton 1989), as do factors that increase the authority’s ability to sanction. Research has demonstrated several such fac- tors. Compliance is increased by the legitimacy of the authority ﬁgure and his or her surveillance of the individual’s behavior (Milgram 1974; Zelditch and Walker 1984). When others in the situation obey or when the individual’s position in the chain of command removes direct contact with the vic- tim, compliance increases (Milgram 1974). On the other hand, when others present resist the authori- ty, compliance drops dramatically. Stanley Milgram (1974) found that when two confederates working with the subject refused to obey the experimenter, only 10 percent of subjects complied fully them- selves. As with a fellow dissenter from a unani- mous majority, other resisters deﬁne disobedi- ence as appropriate and provide support for resisting. In an analysis of ‘‘crimes of obedience’’ in many government and military settings, Her- bert Kelman and Lee Hamilton (1989) show how such factors lead to compliance to illegal or im- moral commands from authority. Conformity and compliance are fundamental to the development of norms, social organization, group culture, and people’s shared social identi- ties. As a result, research on conformity and com- pliance continues to develop in several directions. Efforts are underway to develop broader models of the social inﬂuence process that can incorpo- rate both conformity and compliance (see Cialdini COMPLIANCE AND CONFORMITY 405 and Trost 1998). These efforts give added empha- sis to people’s dependence on social relationships and groups and address questions such as whether minority and majority inﬂuence work through different or similar processes. Also, new, more systematic cross-cultural research attempts to un- derstand both what is universal and what is cultur- ally variable about conformity and compliance (Markus and Kitiyama 1994; Smith and Bond 1996). REFERENCES Allen, Vernon L. 1975 ‘‘Social Support for Nonconformity.’’ In L. Berkowitz, ed., ‭Advances in Experimental Social‬ Psychology‭, vol. 8, 2–43. New York: Academic Press.‬ Asch, Solomon E. 1951 ‘‘Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modiﬁcation and Distortion of Judgments.’’ In H. Guetzkow, ed., ‭Groups, Leadership, and Men.‬ Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press. ——— 1956 ‘‘Studies of Independence and Submission to Group Pressure: I. A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority.’’ ‭Psychological Monographs‬ 70 (9, whole no. 416). Becker, B. J. 1986 ‘‘Inﬂuence Again: Another Look at Studies of Gender Differences in Social Inﬂuence.’’ In Janet Shibley Hyde and Marci C. Lynn, eds., ‭The‬ Psychology of Gender: Advances Through Meta-Analysis‭.‬ Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Berkowitz, Leonard, and J. R. Macaulay 1961 ‘‘Some Effects of Differences in Status Level and Status Stability.’’ ‭Human Relations‬ 14:135–147. Bond, M. H. and P. B. Smith 1996 ‘‘Culture and Con- formity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch’s Line Judgment Task.’’ ‭Psychological Bulletin‬119:111–137. Cialdini, Robert B., and Melanie R. Trost 1998 ‘‘Social Inﬂuence: Social Norms, Conformity, and Compli- ance.’’ In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, eds., ‭The Handbook of Social Psychology‭, 4th ed., vol. 2.‬‬ New York: McGraw-Hill. Crowne, D. P., and D. Marlowe 1964 ‭The Approval‬ Motive: Studies in Evaluative Dependence‭. New York: Wiley.‬ Eagly, Alice H. 1987 ‭Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A‬ Social-Role Interpretation‭. Hillsdale, N.J.: Earlbaum.‬ ———, and Wendy Wood 1985 ‘‘Gender and Inﬂuence- ability: Stereotype vs. Behavior.’’ In V. E. O’Leary, R. K. Unger, and B. S. Walson, eds., ‭Women, Gender and‬ Social Psychology‭. Hillsdale, N.J.: Earlbaum.‬ Festinger, Leon 1950 ‘‘Informal Social Communica- tion.’’ ‭Psychological Review‬ 57:217–282. ——— 1954 ‘‘A Theory of Social Comparison Process- es.’’ ‭Human Relations‬ 7:117–140. Gerson, Lowell W. 1975 ‘‘Punishment and Position: The Sanctioning of Deviants in Small Groups.’’ In P. V. Crosbie, ed., ‭Interaction in Small Groups‬. New York: Macmillan. Harvey, O. J., and Conrad Consalvi 1960 ‘‘Status and Conformity to Pressures in Informal Groups.’’ ‭Jour-‬ nal of Abnormal and Social Psychology‭ 60:182–187.‬ Hollander, Edwin P. 1958 ‘‘Conformity, Status, and Idiosyncrasy Credit.’’ ‭Psychological Review‬ 65:117–127. ——— 1960 ‘‘Competence and Conformity in the Ac- ceptance of Inﬂuence.’’ ‭Journal of Abnormal and Social‬ Psychology‭ 61:365–369.‬ Janis, Irving L. 1972 ‭Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological‬ Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes‭. Boston:‬ Houghton-Mifﬂin. Kelman, Herbert C. 1958 ‘‘Compliance, Identiﬁcation, and Internalization: Three Processes of Attitude Change.’’ ‭Journal of Conﬂict Resolution‬ 2:51–60. ———, and V. Lee Hamilton 1989 ‭Crimes of Obedience.‬ New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Kiesler, Charles A. and Sara B. Kiesler 1976 ‭Conformity‭.‬‬ 2d ed. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Levine, John M. 1980 ‘‘Reaction to Opinion Deviance in Small Groups.’’ In P. Paulus, ed., ‭Psychology of Group‬ Inﬂuence‭. Hillsdale, N.J.: Earlbaum.‬ Markus, Hazel R., and S. Kitiyama 1994 ‘‘A Collective Fear of the Collective: Implications for Selves and Theories of Selves.’’ ‭Personality and Social Psychology‬ Bulletin‭ 20:568–579.‬ Milgram, Stanley 1963 ‘‘Behavioral Study of Obedi- ence.’’ ‭ Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology‬ 67:371–378. ——— 1974 ‭Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.‬ New York: Harper and Row. Moscovici, Serge 1976 ‭Social Inﬂuence and Social Change.‬ London: Academic Press. ——— 1985 ‘‘Social Inﬂuence and Conformity.’’ In G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., ‭The Handbook of Social‬ Psychology‭. 3d ed., vol. 2. New York: Random House.‬ ———, A. Mucchi-Faina, and A. Maass 1994 ‭Minority‬ Inﬂuence‭. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.‬ Nemeth, Charlan 1986 ‘‘Differential Contributions of Majority and Minority Inﬂuence.’’ ‭Psychological Re-‬ view‭ 93:23–32.‬ Ridgeway, Cecilia L. 1981 ‘‘Nonconformity, Compe- tence, and Inﬂuence in Groups: A Test of Two Theories.’’ ‭American Sociological Review‬ 46:333–347. ——— 1993 ‘‘Gender, Status, and the Social Psychology of Expectations.’’ In P. England, ed., ‭Theory on Gen-‬ der/Feminism on Theory‭. New York: Aldine.‬ COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 406 Sherif, Muzafer 1936 ‭The Psychology of Social Norms‬. New York: Harper and Row. Wood, Wendy, S. Lundgren, J. A. Ouelette, S. Busceme, and T. Blackstone 1994 ‘‘Minority Inﬂuence: A Meta- Analytic Review of Social Inﬂuence Processes.’’ ‭Psy-‬ chological Bulletin‭ 115:323–345.‬ Zelditch, Morris, Jr., and Henry A. Walker 1984 ‘‘Legiti- macy and the Stability of Authority.’’ In E. Lawler, ed., ‭Advances in Group Processes‭, vol. 1. Greenwich,‬‬ Conn.: JAI Press. C‭ECILIA L. R‭IDGEWAY‬‬ COMPLEMENTARITY See‭ Mate Selection Theories.‬ COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY Most sociologists, both professionals and students, now have their own computer with direct access to a printer for writing and to the Internet for elec- tronic mail (e-mail). Beyond the basic tasks of writing and e-mailing are a variety of other com- puter-supported research applications, both quan- titative and qualitative. This article describes how sociologists and other social scientists use these applications and what resources are available. The data and modeling requirements of social research have united sociologists with computers for over a hundred years. It was the 1890 U. S. census that inspired Herman Hollerith, a census researcher, to construct the ﬁrst automated data processing machinery. Hollerith’s punchcard sys- tem, while not a true computer by today’s deﬁni- tions, provided the foundation for contemporary computer-based data management. In 1948 the U. S. Bureau of the Census, antici- pating the voluminous tabulating requirements of the 1950 census, contracted for the building of Univac I, the ﬁrst commercially produced elec- tronic computer. The need to count, sort, and analyze the 1950 census data on this milestone computer led to the development of the ﬁrst high- speed magnetic tape storage system, the ﬁrst sort- merge software package, and the ﬁrst statistical package, a set of matrix algebra programs. Only a decade later many social scientists were exploring ways to use computers in their research. In the early 1960s, the ﬁrst book devoted entirely to computer applications in social science research (Borko 1962) was published. Not only were social scientists writing about how to apply computers, they were designing and developing new software. Some of the most popular statistical software pack- ages, e.g., SPSS (Nie, Bent, and Hull 1975), were developed by social scientists. During the 1980s, universities and colleges began to acquire microcomputers, accepting the premise that all researchers needed their own desktop computing equipment. The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) survey in 1985 (Morton and Price 1986) reported that 50 percent of sociologists had a computer for exclu- sive use. A survey of academic departments sup- ported by the American Sociological Association (Koppel, Dowdall, and Shostak 1985) found that slightly less than half of the sociology faculty re- ported to have immediate access to microcomput- ers. To put these ﬁndings into a more complete perspective, of the approximately 9,000 sociolo- gists in 1985, about 4,500 had their own comput- ers and about 5,200 reported routine computer use. Now, it is hard to ﬁnd a sociologist’s ofﬁce without at least one computer. And in many coun- tries most students in sociology have a computer for writing papers and accessing online resources. Sociology and the Web.‭ The Internet may be‬ one of the largest and probably the most rapidly growing peaceful social movements in history. It is not just a technology, or a family of technologies, but a rapidly evolving socio-cultural phenomena often called ‘‘cyberspace’’ or ‘‘cyberculture.’’ No matter how this phenomena is deﬁned, it is chang- ing the way sociologists conduct their work. By the mid-1990s sociology, like most other academic disciplines, had come to depend upon e- mail. In addition, a rapidly growing number had begun to use the World Wide Web (WWW), com- monly called the Web (Babbie 1996). Bainbridge (1995) claimed that the Web is ‘‘a signiﬁcant medi- um of communication for sociologists, and ex- trapolation of present trends suggests it may swift- ly become the essential fabric of sociology’s existence.’’ In January 1999, the author searched Web sites with the Alta Vista search engine for the word COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 407 ‘‘sociology’’ and found 750,000 instances. Two years earlier a search yielded only 250,000. Soci- ology is indeed rapidly building its presence on the Web. The Internet and the Web are often described as a medium of communication because e-mail, electronic conferencing, online chats (synchro- nous discussion), groupware, and data exchange imply social interaction. Another major metaphor of the Web is that of a database for information search and retrieval. However, new roles are emerg- ing for the Web. For the individual, the Web has become an important ‘‘presentation of self,’’ an opportunity for publishing personal and profes- sional resumes and other such information. For the organization, the Web has become an opportu- nity for advertising, recruiting, communicating with the public, and conducting commerce itself. The rapid proliferation of personal Web sites in the form of various home pages suggests that many now see the Web primarily as a medium for personal and organizational impression management. An appendix to this article provides a number of sources of sociological activity and information on the Internet, especially the Web. Not only does the appendix serve as a resource for information about sociology, but it also portrays the diverse, complex state of the institutionalization of sociolo- gy on the Web. In the next few years the Web and its technolo- gies will offer many new opportunities for con- ducting research. Already there are software pack- ages developed for Web-assisted surveys and other types of data collection. The amount of data accu- mulating on the Web is enormous. And the graphi- cal content of the Web is indeed a challenge to sociologists conducting computerized content analyses. The pace of these new developments will continue to challenge sociologists to not only to stay current with the new tools for research but to conduct research on the rapidly growing cultures of the Internet. Publications on Sociological Computing.‭ The‬ primary source for articles on social science com- puter applications is the ‭Social Science Computer‬ Review‭, a quarterly publication of Sage Publica-‬ tions, Inc., which also regularly offers book and software reviews. Other relevant software reviews periodically appear in such journals as ‭Educational‬ and Psychological Measurement‭, the ‬Journal of Mar- keting Research‭, ‭The American Statistician‭, and Simu-‬‬‬ lation and Games‭. In addition, JAI Press publishes‬ an occasional series volume on ‘‘Computers and the Social Sciences.’’ In the late 1980s, the American Sociological Association (ASA) formed a ‘‘Section on Micro- computing.’’ Over 350 sociologists joined this new section in 1990, making it the fastest-growing new section in the history of the ASA. The section publishes a quarterly newsletter and organizes sessions at annual meetings. In 1993, the section name was ofﬁcially changed to ‘‘Sociology and Computers.’’ A regular newsletter called ‭SCAN‬ (Sociology and Computers: A Newsletter‭) is published‬ by members. Another indicator of growing involvement in computing was the ﬁrst annual conference, ‘‘Com- puting in the Social Sciences,’’ held in 1990 at Williamsburg, Virginia. From this conference emerged a professional association, the Social Sci- ence Computing Association. The ofﬁcial journal of this association is the ‭Social Science Computer‬ Review‭, and they still hold an annual conference.‬ Computer Applications in Sociology.‭ The prac-‬ tice of computing in sociology has evolved rapidly. Computers have been applied to practically every research task, including such unlikely ones as ﬁeld note-taking, interviewing, and hundreds of other tasks (Brent and Anderson 1990). The many di- verse uses of computing technology in social re- search are difﬁcult to categorize because applica- tions overlap and evolve unpredictably. Nonetheless, it is necessary to discuss different categories of appli- cations in order to describe the state of the art of computing in sociology. Since 1987, the Winter issue of the ‭Social Science Computer Review‬ has been devoted to an annual symposium on the ‘‘State of the Art of Social Science Computing.’’ The catego- rization of computer applications in this article reﬂects these discussions. First, some major types of applications are summarized in order of de- scending popularity. Then some of the challenges of computing for sociological research are noted. Writing and Publishing.‭ Once equated with‬ the secretarial pool, word processing now is an COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 408 activity of nearly every graduate student and pro- fessional in sociology. It consists not only of writ- ing but preparing tables, ‘‘typesetting’’ mathemati- cal equations, and resizing objects, such as three- dimensional graphs embedded within text. Social researchers are using such capabilities and moving rapidly toward workstation environments that ob- scure the transition between data analysis and manuscript preparation (Steiger and Fouladi 1990). Not only do researchers use their computers for writing papers, but word processing software plays a central role in the reﬁnement of data collection instruments, especially questionnaires and codebooks, which allows for rapid production of alternative forms and multiple drafts. Trends in text production that blur traditional distinctions between writing and publishing (Lyman 1989) may in the long term have the most impact on what sociologists do. The growing body of articles and books in electronic-text form propel scholarship toward ‭hypertext‬, which is a document system that provides for nonsequential reading of text using links that automatically access other documents. Contemporary word processors con- tain the capacity to easily produce documents in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that are ready for installation as sites on the Web. HTML can contain hypertext links, which with a single click of the mouse can bring up a totally different document from anywhere in the world, making it a truly new form of publishing. There are several major forms of text entry that may also change the nature of writing and publishing. These forms include scanning for opti- cal character recognition (OCR), voice recogni- tion, and automated language translation. The technology for scanning text documents and pro- ducing computer text ﬁles has been in use for some years and requires only a scanning device and OCR software. This technology will continue to improve and its use will yield fewer errors and require considerably less effort in the future. Likewise it is now possible to use voice recog- nition software to automatically transcribe dicta- tion, interviews, and ﬁeld notes into computer text ﬁles. One of the remaining problems in this ap- proach is that all voice recognition software now requires considerable ‘‘training’’ time where the errors made in recognizing a speaker’s word-sound pattern are corrected. The software is thus ‘‘taught’’ to make reﬁned guesses in translating vocalized sounds into electronic text. Even the best voice recognition software now makes a moderate num- ber of errors, so it is not yet a panacea for manual transcription of either the spoken word or audio recordings. It is possible now to ﬁnd software that will translate text into many different languages. How- ever, like voice recognition software, translation software still requires considerable time to manu- ally check, decipher, and make judgments about the text produced by such programs. Future soft- ware may yield signiﬁcantly improved results, au- tomating nearly all of the voice recognition and translation process. Communicating Electronically (E-mail, etc.)‭ .‬ Networks for computer-mediated communication (CMC) continue to expand internationally follow- ing the traditional logistic diffusion curve (Gurbaxani 1990). Electronic networks now supplement most other forms of social communication. E-mail, which is asynchronous or nonsimultaneous, is still the most common form of electronic interaction, but Internet-based, synchronous (simultaneous) ‘‘mail- ing lists’’ and ‘‘newsgroups’’ are also popular, as are ‘‘chat rooms’’ or ‘‘discussion groups.’’ With improvements in transmitting digital audio and video ﬁles on the Internet, it is expected that some new forms of video conferencing will become commonplace. At the turn of the millennium, desktop video conferencing is available ‘‘off the shelf,’’ but suffers from extraneous noise and rough motion. While individual sociologists vary greatly in how they utilize e-mail, nearly all sociologists in economically developed countries depend upon it for certain types of communication. While e-mail messages are generally written in plain text, ‘‘attachments’’ to e-mail now make it possible for formatted documents, even those in- cluding graphics and multimedia, to be shared with others around the world in a matter of min- utes. This remarkable technology makes co-authoring, and other forms of collaboration, far more feasi- ble due to reduced time and cost. As e-mail systems continue to expand, they offer social researchers new opportunities for con- ducting studies using electronic networks. For instance, Gaiser (1997) explored issues of running online focus groups. Online surveys have become COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 409 quite common in various forms: e-mail texts, e- mail attachments, entry forms on the Web, and as programs in external storage devices like diskettes and CD-ROMs. Sampling problems and low com- pletion rates pose the greatest challenges. Ongo- ing methodological investigations will be neces- sary to determine the implications of this new mode of research. Statistics.‭ Hundreds of computer programs‬ and articles have been written to address the needs of statistical computing in social research. Prior to the 1980s, all statistical work was performed on large or medium-size, mainframe computers. But advances in both hardware and software for micro- computers now make it possible to conduct the statistical data analysis of most small or moderate- size research studies on microcomputers. A large share of ongoing social data analysis, like analysis of massive census ﬁles, would never get done without computer technology. For example, one use of LISREL, a computer procedure which ana- lyzes linear structural relationships by the method of maximum likelihood, would consume weeks or months without a computer. Not only does statistical computing save time but it offers unique views of the patterns in one’s data. Without the ability to quickly reorganize data and display it in a variety of forms, social research- ers neglect important patterns and subtle relation- ships within complex data. Some patterns can- not be observed without special software tools. For example, Heise’s (1988) computer program called Ethno gives the researcher a framework for conceptualizing, examining, and analyzing data containing event sequences. In addition, several general-purpose statistical packages offer power- ful exploratory data analysis capabilities with bidirectionality through dynamic data links (Steiger and Fouladi 1990). One type of bidirectionality puts a graph in one window and frequency distri- butions in another, and when the user adjusts the data in one window, it automatically changes in the other. Finding a statistical program tailored to a particular problem or technique is often challeng- ing as the potential ‘‘user community’’ may be quite small. The best sources for such software are the notices and reviews in journals such as the Social Science Computer Review‭, ‭Educational and Psy-‬‬ chological Measurement‭, ‬Journal of Marketing Research‭,‬ and ‭The American Statistician‭. Another important‬‬ source is the annual ‭Sociological Methodology‬ and it’s software list on the Web (http://weber.u.wash- ington.edu/_socmeth2/software.html). Some of the software noted in these sources can be ob- tained at no cost or very low cost. No matter what the cost, one cannot assume that any complex program is free of errors. Thus is it important to run test data and to apply data to multiple pro- grams in order to check for inaccuracies. Accessing, Retrieving and Managing Data. While years ago students and researchers had to use a library or similar institution to gain access to bibliographic data ﬁles, now such services are available from one’s desktop using the Web or external storage units such as CD-ROM or DVD- ROM. Large bibliographic databases including So- ciological Abstracts and Psychological Abstracts are available in these forms, as is a vast amount of data in the form of statistical tables and maps. Now that devices for ‘‘writing’’ onto CD-ROMs have become inexpensive, it is expected that data from even small research projects will be disseminated in this medium. One major development is interactive access to data by means of the Web. A variety of models are used for interactive access to both preformatted text ﬁles and precoded data ﬁles. Among the systems are GSSDIRS from ICPSR at the Universi- ty of Michigan (http://www.ICPSR.umich.edu/ gss), IPUMS at the University of Minnesota (http:/ /www.hist.umn.edu/_ipums), QSERVE from Queens College-CUNY (http://www.soc.qc.edu/ qserve), and SDA Archive from the University of California at Berkeley (http://csa.berkeley.edu:7502/ archive.htm). The software technology for archiving and analyzing social data is less than a half-century old. But it is very plausible to expect many advance- ments in the next ﬁfty years. Interactive data analy- sis sites of the Web hint about what these advance- ments might be. For instance, using the SDA Archive Web site (see http address above), one can get a large crosstabulation table for any three variables in the full General Social Survey of over 35,000 respondents in less time than it takes to type in the variable names. The reﬁnement of such systems faces issues such as how to balance functionality with ease of use, the plausibility of standardizing interfaces for COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 410 many numeric data ﬁles, and the use of gateways between the Web and third-party software such as statistical packages. It will take considerable re- search and development to sort out the feasibility of providing many different analytical facilities in the Web environment. A major challenge is deter- mining the amount and type of data documenta- tion necessary for typical users to get meaningful results in a reasonable amount of time. A consider- able challenge is created when a variety of types of materials are necessary for retrieving useful data- related information. The main types are text, graph- ics, meta databases (data about databases), ﬁelded text/data (such as bibliographic databases), and multimedia (audio and video) clips. Qualitative Computing.‭ Computer-based con-‬ tent analysis began with Stone (1966) and associ- ates, and now plays an important role in the social sciences (Weber 1984; Kelle 1995). A survey of 110 qualitative-oriented researchers found three-fourths regularly used computers (Brent, Scott, and Spencer 1987). Ragin and Becker (1989, p. 54) persuasively claimed that qualitative research using these com- puting tools yields more systematic attention to diversity, for example, by encouraging a ‘‘more thorough examination of comparative contrasts among cases.’’ This type of computing became much more common as researchers combined content analy- sis with other tasks associated with qualitative analysis. Several general-purpose programs for qualitative analysis have been widely distributed (Tesch 1989; Fielding and Lee 1991). These tools make the analysis of large amounts of text more accurate and efﬁcient, and potentially direct the focus of attention to analytic procedures. The general tasks of text entry, code assignment, count- ing, and data organization have been extended to include special routines for improving the quality of coding and code management (Carley 1988). Hesse-Biber, Dupuis, and Kinder (1997) technical- ly extended this methodology to include the man- agement and analysis of audio and video segments as well as text. Simulating and Modeling.‭ Early in the history‬ of sociological computing, Coleman (1962) and McPhee and Glaser (1962) designed computer simulation models and showed how they could be used to identify elusive implications of different theoretical assumptions. Other social scientists followed in their footsteps but the excitement of the pioneers was lost and few simulations and formal computer models were developed in the 1970s. With the emergence of artiﬁcial intelli- gence and other modeling methodologies, social researchers demonstrated renewed interest in for- mal computer-supported models of social process- es (cf. Feinberg and Johnson 1995; Hanneman 1988; Markovsky, Lovaglia, and Thye 1997). New computer simulations for social policy analysis as well as pedagogy or instruction have emerged as well (Brent and Anderson 1990, pp. 188–210). Neural networks combined with other tech- niques of artiﬁcial intelligence and expert systems have excited a number of social scientists (Garson 1990). Neural nets organize computer memory in ways that model human brain cells and their ability to process many things in parallel. Systems that use neural nets are especially good when pattern matching is required, however, the computations require high-performance computers. Computer-Assisted Data Collection.‭ CATI‬ (Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing) is a computing system with online questionnaires or entry screens for telephone interviewers. It has become very common in sociological research, although its impact is not fully understood (Groves et al. 1988). It is used on free-standing PCs, networked PCs, or larger computers. These sys- tems generally, but not always, have the following characteristics: centralized facilities for monitor- ing individual interviewer stations, instantaneous edit-checks with feedback for invalid responses, and automatic branching to different questions depending upon the respondents’ answers. Other major forms of computer-supported data collec- tion include (1) CAPI (Computer-Assisted Person- al Interviewing), the acronym used in survey re- search to refer to face-to-face interviewing assisted with a laptop or hand-held computing device; (2) Computerized Self-Administered Questionnaires (CSAQ), online programs designed for direct in- put from respondents; and (3) data-entry pro- grams to facilitate the entry of data collected manu- ally at a prior time. A related innovation is software built for de- signing online questionnaires. For example, the Questionnaire Programming Language (QPL), de- veloped by Dooley (1989), allows the researcher to COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 411 draft a questionnaire with any word processor. From embedded branching commands within the questionnaire document, the QPL software pack- age simultaneously produces two versions of the questionnaire: one for computer administration and the other for interviewer- or self-administra- tion. An additional bonus of the program is that it automatically produces data deﬁnition commands for SPSS or SAS to use for data analysis. Visualization and Graphics.‭ Many social re-‬ searchers have come to rely on computer graphic systems to produce maps, charts summarizing sta- tistical data, network diagrams, and to retrieve data from GIS (Geographic Information Systems) databases. GIS data contain coordinates to associ- ate a speciﬁc spatial point or area with any attrib- ute, e.g., social density, associated with that point or collection of points. Because of the complexi- ties of these data structures, the integration of these techniques onto sociologists’ desktops has been slow. Another constraint is the paucity of techniques for analyzing such data. Work such as that of Cleveland (1993) for analyzing and visualiz- ing data graphically may increase the utilization of such data by sociologists. In addition, techniques for storing and delivering interactive audio and video by means of the Web may stimulate sociolo- gists to investigate multimedia data containing sounds and moving images. Teaching and Learning.‭ During the 1970s‬ long before the microcomputer, a small group of social science instructors began to explore how to utilize computer technology in teaching (Bailey 1978). Now it has become quite common, and several sociologically-oriented instructional pack- ages are widely used. The most popular have been Chipendale, designed by James Davis (1990), and MicroCase, developed by Roberts and Stark (cf. Roberts and Corbett 1996). These two packages have served as the basis for the exercises contained in at least a dozen published textbooks and workbooks. A variety of instructional approaches and software tools are described regularly in ‭Teach-‬ ing Sociology‭ and the ‬Social Science Computer Review‭.‬ ISSUES AND CHALLENGES The practice of computing in social research has evolved rapidly. Computers have been applied to practically every research task, including such un- likely ones as interviewing, and hundreds of other tasks (Brent and Anderson 1990). This variety of computer applications will continue to evolve with the newer Internet-based technologies. The application of computing to sociology is not without problems. Errors in data and software abound yet rarely do social scientists check their results by running more than one program on the same data. Data and software tend to be very costly, but there are many impediments to the sharing of these critical resources. Better software is needed but graduate students often are discour- aged from programming new software. Nonethe- less, new breakthroughs in computer technology will continue, and major new opportunities will emerge. Many of the advances in sociological com- puting during the next few years undoubtedly will follow the lines of progress already described: hypertext networks; integrated, high performance, graphic data analysis stations; software for com- puter-supported cooperative work; and neural net- works for complex models of social systems. Perhaps the most exciting challenge for the future involves a concert of these innovations directed at the problem of modeling and analyzing vast amounts of social data. One solution would incorporate three-dimensional, multicolored, dy- namic graphical representations of complex social data structures. But new techniques for analyzing these data will require new models of dynamic social structures as well as parallel social processes. Computer representations of these models tend to require extremely fast processing. Access to such models on the Web, supplemented with au- dio and video displays, may evolve into an impor- tant part of the sociologist’s tool kit of the future. REFERENCES Anderson, Ronald E. 1981 ‘‘Instructional computing in sociology: current status and future prospects.’’ ‭Teach-‬ ing Sociology‭. 8,2 (Jan):171–195.‬ ——— 1997 ‘‘A Research Agenda for Computing and the Social Sciences.’’ ‭Social Science Computer Review‬ 14, 1 (Summer):123–134. ———, and Edward Brent 1989 ‘‘Computing in Sociolo- gy: Promise and Practice.’’ ‭Social Science Computer‬ Review‭ 7,4 (Winter).‬ ——— 1991 ‘‘Sociological Computing: An Opportunity Missed?’’ ‭The American Sociologist ‬ 22,11 (Spring):65–77. COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 412 Babbie, Earl 1996 ‘‘We Am a Virtual Community.’’ ‭The‬ American Sociologist‭ 27,1 (Spring):65-71.‬ Bailey, D. (ed.) 1978 ‭Computer Science in Social and‬ Behavioral Science Education‭. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:‬ Educational Technology Press. Bainbridge, William Sims 1995 ‘‘Sociology on the World Wide Web.’’ ‭Social Science Computer Review‬ 13,4 (Win- ter):508–523. Borko, Harold (ed.) 1962 ‭Computer Applications in the‬ Behavioral Sciences‭. Santa Monica, Calif.: System De-‬ velopment Corporation. Brent, Edward, and Ronald E. Anderson 1990 ‭Computer‬ Applications in the Social Sciences‭. New York: Mc-‬ Graw-Hill. Brent, Edward, James Scott, and John Spencer 1987 ‘‘The use of computers by qualitative researchers.’’ Qualitative Sociology‭ 10(3):309–313.‬ Carley, Kathleen 1988 ‘‘Formalizing the Social Expert’s Knowledge.’’ ‭ Sociological Methods & Research‭ 17,‬‬ 2:165–232. Cleveland, William S. 1993 ‭Visualizing Data‬. Summit, N.J.: Hobart Press. Coleman, ‭ ‬J. S. 1962 ‘‘Analysis of social structures and simulation of social processes with electronic com- puters.’’ In H. Guetzkow, H., ed., ‭Simulation in Social‬ Science: Readings‭, 61–69 Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren-‬ tice-Hall. Davis, James 1990 CHIPendale. Zeda Data, 25 Haskins Rd. Hanover, NH. Dooley, Kevin 1989 QPL Data Collection Program. Washington D.C.: Human Resources Division, U. S. General Accounting Ofﬁce. Fan, David 1996 Use of the Press to Predict Time Trends in Public Opinions and Behaviors. Paper presented at the 1996 Conference on Computing for the Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota. Feinberg, William E., and Norris R. Johnson 1995 ‘‘FIRESCAP: A Computer Simulation Model of Re- action to a Fire Alarm.’’ ‭Journal of Mathematical Soci-‬ ology‭ 20, 2–3:257–269.‬ Fielding, Nigel G., and Raymond M. Lee (eds.) 1991 Using Computers in Qualitative Research‭. Newbury Park,‬ Calif.: Sage Publications, Inc. Gaiser, Ted J. 1997 ‘‘Conducting On-Line Focus Groups’’ Social Science Computer Review‭ 15,2 (Summer):135–144.‬ Garson, G. David 1990 ‘‘Expert Systems: An Overview for Social Scientists.’’ ‭Social Science Computer Review‬ 8,3 (Fall):387–410. Groves, Robert M., P. P. Biemer, L. E. Lyberg, J. T. Massey, W. L. Nicholls, and J. Waksberg (eds.) 1988 Telephone Survey Methodology‭. New York: John Wiley‬ and Sons. Gurbaxani, Vijay 1990 ‘‘Diffusion in Computing Net- works: BITNET.’’ ‭Communications of the ACM‬ 33,12 (Dec):65–75. Hanneman, Robert A. 1988 ‭Computer-Assisted Theory‬ Building‭. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, Inc.‬ Heise, David 1988 ‘‘Computer analysis of cultural struc- tures.’’ ‭Social Science Computer Review‬ 6:183–196. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, Paul Dupuis, and Scott Kinder 1997 ‘‘Anthropology: New Developments in Video Ethnography and Visual Sociology—Analyzing Mul- timedia Data Qualitatively.’’ ‭Social Science Computer‬ Review‭ 15, 1 (Spring):5–12.‬ Kelle, Udo 1995 ‭Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analy-‬ sis‭. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, Inc.‬ Kiesler, Sarah, and Lee S. Sproull 1986 ‘‘Response effects in the electronic survey.’’, ‭Public Opinion Quar-‬ terly‭ 50:402–413.‬ Koppel, R, G. Dowdall, and A. Shostak 1985 ‘‘Using computers to teach sociology: A departmental sur- vey.’’ ‭Footnotes‬ 13,8 (November):4. Lyman, Peter 1989 ‘‘The Future of Sociological Litera- ture in an Age of Computerized Texts.’’ In G. Blank, J. L. McCartney, and E. Brent, eds., ‭New Technology in‬ Sociology: Practical Applications in Research and Work‭,‬ 17–32 New Brunswick, N.J.: Markovsky, Barry, Michael Lovaglia, and Shane Thye 1997 ‘‘Sociology: Computer-Aided Research at the Iowa Center for the Study of Group Processes.’’ Science Computer Review‭ 15, 1 (Spring):48–64.‬ McPhee, W. N., and W. A. Glaser (eds.) 1962 ‭Public‬ Opinion and Congressional Election‭. New York: Free Press.‬ Morton, H. C., and A. J. Price 1986 ‘‘The ACLS survey of scholars: views on publications, computers, librar- ies.’’ EDUCOM Bulletin 21,3 (Winter):8–21. Nie, N., D. Bent, and W. Hull 1975 ‭Statistical Package for‬ the Social Sciences‭. New York: McGraw-Hill.‬ Ragin, Charles C. and Howard S. Becker 1989 ‘‘How the Microcomputer is Changing our Analytic Habits.’’ In G. Blank, J. L. McCartney, and E. Brent, eds., ‭New‬ Technology in Sociology: Practical Applications in Re- search and Work‭. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction.‬ Roberts, Lynne and Michael Corbett 1996 ‭Social Re-‬ search Using MicroCase‭. Bellevue, Wash.: MicroCase‬ Corporation. Steiger, James H., and Rachel T. Fouladi 1990 ‘‘Some Key Emerging Trends in Statistical and Graphical Software for the Social Scientist.’’ ‭Social Science Com-‬ puter Review‭ 8,4 (Winter):627–664.‬ COMPUTER APPLICATIONS IN SOCIOLOGY 413 Stone, Philip et al. 1966 ‭The General Inquirer‬. Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Tesch, Renata 1989 ‘‘Computer Software and Qualita- tive Analysis: A Reassessment.’’ In G. Blank, J. L. McCartney, and E. Brent, eds., ‭New Technology in‬ Sociology: Practical Applications in Research and Work‭.‬ New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. Weber, R. P. 1984 ‘‘Computer-Aided Content Analysis, A Short Primer.’’ ‭Qualitative Sociology‬, 7 (½):126–147. Wellman, Barry 1996 ‘‘Computer Networks as Social Networks.’’ ‭Annual Review of Sociology‭ 22.⅔:Annual‬‬ Reviews, Inc. APPENDIX: SOCIOLOGY WEB/ INTERNET SITES These lists of Web and other Internet sites include electronic addresses for some of sociology’s pro- fessional associations and some special interest groups, several resource referral sites giving many additional links, several sites giving access to socio- logical data, and lists of Internet Mailing Lists on ‘‘listservs.’’ The addresses given were all current as of January 1, 1999. While many of the addresses have been stable for several years, there is no guarantee that they will remain accessible. None- theless, these addresses proﬁle sociology’s pres- ence or representation on the Internet, especially the Web, and serve as entry points to sociology- related information in ‘‘cyberspace.’’ PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF SOCIOLOGISTS American Sociological Association (ASA) http://www.asanet.org/ International Sociological Association (ISA) http://www.ucm.es/OTROS/isa/ Midwest Sociological Society http:///www.drake.edu/MSS/ Paciﬁc Sociological Association http://www.csus.edu/psa/ Society for Applied Sociology http://www.appliedsoc.org/ Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction http://www.soci.niu.edu/~sssi/ Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) http://itc.utk.edu/sssp/ SOCIOLOGY INTEREST GROUPS ASA Section on Sociology and Computers http://www.asanet.org/Sections/computer.html (see also http://www.princeton.edu/ _soccomp/links.html) ASA Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work http://www.northpark.edu/acad/soc/oow/ International Network for Social Network Analysis http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/project/INSNA/ ELECTRONIC JOURNALS ON SOCIOLOGY The Electronic Journal of Sociology http://www.sociology.org/ Sociological Research Online (A quarterly ‘‘ref- ereed’’ electronic journal of sociology from the United Kingdom) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/ Current Research in Social Psychology (CRISP) http://www.uiowa.edu/~grpproc/crisp/ crisp.html Journal of World-Systems Research http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html MAJOR SOCIOLOGY DATA SOURCES Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ General Social Survey Data and Information Retrieval System (GSSDIRS) http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/gss Council of European Social Sciences Data Archives (CESSDA) http://www.nsd.uib.no/cessda/europe.html Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) http://www.ipums.umn.edu Social Indicators of Development (World Bank’s data on social effects of economic development) http://www.ciesin.org/IC/wbank/sid- home.html