Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

646 Stein Rokkan
defy social norms than women: you collect whatever data can be found to
establish indicators of conformity or deviance and proceed to compare scores
for the two sexes. You state that Frenchmen are less likely to submit to majority
pressure than Norwegians: you devise some appropriate test in samples of each
population and compare the data for the two.
In this trivial sense all social science is comparative. But most social science
endeavours are limited to comparisons within single cultural domains, single
societies, single nations. Most important advances in methodology, technique,
and the organization of research have been made within such single settings,
but the findings of such one-site studies have tended to frustrate the theoryoriented
social scientists : what sorts of invariances do they establish? what
would happen if the same procedure were used in a different culture, in a
different social structure, in a different political community ? what models can
be constructed to account for similarities or variations in the results of replications
across distinct research settings?
There are many ways of classifying attempts at cross-site replications, crosssetting
analyses, but there is as yet no established terminology for the mapping
of the many variations in the structure of research enterprises. Cross-site studies
can be organized within a cultural domain, society or politically organized
territory: the typical cross-sectional sample survey is a cross-site study to the
extent that it allows analyses of variations across distinct cultural-socialpolitical
contexts. But this is only the fust of many steps towards the universalization
of social science research operations: the greater the range of cultures,
societies or political systems covered, the greater the challenge to the methodologist,
and the greater the opportunities for theory development. Many social
scientists are reluctant to go all the way: they feel on safer ground within their
one culture, society or nation and favour the development of techniques and the
testing of propositions in that single setting. Others are tempted to go beyond
the one setting but restrict their comparisons to sets of structurally similar
cultures, societies, polities : the Melanesian cultures, feudal societies, the advanced
Western nations, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ democracies. The most ambitious
(or the most foolhardy) comparativists look forward to a universal science of
variations in human institutions and social arrangements and seek to establish
bases for comparisons across all known units, whether elementary cultures,
transitional societies or complex empires and nation-states.
The terms for such attempts at systematic research across several settings
vary with the character of the unit of comparison: in some cases cross-cultural
is preferred, in others cross-societal, in yet others cross-national.
None of these terms has entered the standard vocabulary of the sciences of
man : it is noteworthy that there is no entry for any of them even in the UNESCOsponsored
Dictionary of the Social Sciences. The term cross-cultural gained
currency in the late thirties: it was fust used by the Yale team of anthropologists
in the reports on their endeavours to assemble and code available information
on a range of primitive societies and to analyse the statistical associations
among the attributes of these societies.’ The parallel terms cross-societal and
cross-national were coined later: they were used to describe similar sequences