Comparative Quantitative Research on Concepts and Texts
Marharyta Fabrikant tells about her presentations at international sociological conferences in Berlin and Uppsala
Early this summer, Marharyta Fabrykant (an associate researcher of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research) within a few days presented results of her work at the LCSR at the conference “Shifting to Post-Crisis Welfare States in Europe? - Long Term and Short Term Perspectives” in Berlin and then at the 41st Congress of the International Institute of Sociology in Uppsala. She shared her impressions of these events with our website.
The conference on welfare state was organized by the three research centers –NordForsk, NordWel и REASSESS – as a presentation of results of their five-year joint research project. External participants, including myself, were invited for broadening the perspective both on the Nordic welfare state model as such and its research. In my presentation “Wording the Crisis? Comparative Semantic History of the Notion of Welfare State in Central and Eastern Europe” I showed that different types of analogues to the concept of welfare state in Central and Eastern European languages are an important mediator explaining relations between values and specific attitudes towards the welfare state model in the countries of the target region. The idea of country-level specific features of welfare state and the necessity of studying it in comparative perspective appeared relevant to many other panels and plenary sessions. Thus, the Harvard professor Peter Hall, the author of the famous work “Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage”, remarked on the necessary transformation of the welfare state model not only because of the economic crisis, but also in accordance with cross-country differences and global value dynamics, - precisely the target issues of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research.
The 41st Congress of the International Institute of Sociology impressed me with broadness and variety of its agenda, especially after the thematic conference. The first day was wholly dedicated to plenary talks, which allowed participants to update their notions of key issue in the contemporary sociology. Being a researcher of nations and nationalism, I was especially glad to hear Craig Calhoun, the Director of the London School of Economics, claiming that globalization not only made nationalism less important, but generated its new unusual forms that require new, more sophisticated research. My own presentation took place in the end of the second day of the congress at the panel session “Contemporary Historical Textbooks and the Ways of Representation of the Past in the 21st Century”. Alla Marchenko, another associate researcher of the LCSR, Natalia Tregubova, a colleague from the Department of Comparative Sociology at the Saint Petersburg State University, and me made a presentation entitled ”The Game of Time: Reflecting Varieties of Soviet in Post-Soviet Nation-building via Textbooks’ Comparisons”. My part of the presentation was dedicated to the methodology of comparative research of nation-building in textbooks. I gave ground for the possibility of mixed methods design combining qualitative methods, traditionally used in textbook research, with mathematical models of game theory, which I had an opportunity of learning at the methodological summer school in Ljubljana, due to the grant provided by the LCSR. The presentation unexpectedly attracted not only authors of other empirical textbooks research, but also theoretical sociologists.
The issue raised in both presentation is broadening the scope of comparative quantitative research, for instance, its use for studying concepts and texts, and the use of statistical methods and mathematical models for empirical testing of contemporary social theories.