Established in 2003
Recognized as Working Group in July 2010.
President
Willfried Spohn, Göttingen University, Germany,
willfried.spohn@sowi.uni-goettingen.de
Vice-President
Wolfgang Knoebl, Georg-August-University,
Göttingen, Germany
Secretary-Treasurer
Manuela
Boatca,
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany,
manuela.boatca@fu-berlin.de
Board Members
Said
Arjomand, USA
Johann P. Arnason, La Trobe University, Australia
José Mauricio
Domingues, IUPERJ, Brazil
Ewa
Morawska,
University of Essex, UK
Elisa
Reis, Brazil
Victor
Roudometof,
University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Ulrike M.M.
Schuerkens, France
Björn
Wittrock, SCASS, Sweden
The aim of the working group is to further and develop
the approaches, investigations and methodologies in historical
and comparative sociology in the direction of an international,
transnational and global sociology. Historical and comparative
sociology, on the basis of classical-sociological traditions,
has developed as a well-established and innovative sociological
area particularly in the American Sociological Association,
has been recently replicated in the European Sociological
Association but has not yet found its appropriate place
in the International Sociological Association. The aim of
the working group on comparative and historical sociology
is to fill this institutional void in the ISA with its particular
commitment to an international and global sociology.
Sociology from its very beginning has been a historically
and comparatively oriented discipline, aiming at understanding
and explaining social change in the evolving modern societies.
At the same time, there have been theoetical and methodological
tensions between rather social-scientific approaches within
sociology oriented to the general features of modern societies
and rather cultural-scientific approaches oriented to the
specific historical trajectories and configurations of modernizing
societies.
In 19th and early 20th centuries classical European
sociology, these tensions went through the various national
sociologies crystallizing in diverging as well as converging
orientations between sociology and history. In post-World
War II American sociology as a synthesis of European sociology,
evolutionist-functionalist modernization theory and research
became the internationally predominant social-scientific
sociological paradigm focussing on the general features
of world-wide modernization processes. As a reaction to
it, historical and comparative sociology re-emphasized the
historical variation, developmental contingency, and cultural
differences of modernization processes and re-oriented research
to the historical micro- and meso-foundations of the varying
macro-processes.
In the context of accelerating world-wide
modernization and globalization processes and the accompanying
development of international, transnational and global sociology,
historical and comparative sociological approaches argue
for the multiplicity of modernity, modernization and globalization
processes and related historically and culturally grounded
inter-civilizational, international and transnational sociological-comparative
research.
From this perspective, the working group will focus particularly
on the following topics of a historically and comparatively
oriented international global sociology:
1. In a sociological-theoretical orientation: historical-comparative
sociology, global sociology and social theory; multiple
modernity or modernities; historical-comparative sociology,
theories of social change, and multiplicity of social change
regarding varying traditions and modernization processes
in Western and non-Western societies; multiple modernities
and globalization(s); Euro-centrism, Orientalism and post-colonial
studies.
2. In a methodological orientation: comparative methodology
between generalizing, trans-cultural positivist and individualizing,
cultural-relativist orientations , inter-civilizational
hermeneutics or the civilizational and historical contextuality
of sociological concepts; qualitative and quantitative research
methods in a transnational and inter-cultural orientation.
3. In an analytical comparative-civilizational and historical-sociological
orientation: research on the manifold socio-economic, political
and cultural dimensions of multiple modernization processes;
the impacts of the inter-civilizational historical foundations
in these dimensions (Empires, transnational economies, world
religions) on nationalization and globalization; as well
as their micro-, meso-, macro- and global linkages, interrelations
and interactions.
WG02 Newsletter
vol. 3, 2009 [ pdf file, 147 KB]
vol. 2, 2008 [ pdf file, 110 KB]
vol. 1, 2007 [ pdf file, 101 KB]
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