Event Details

Based on Eviatar Zerubavel’s most recent book, this seminar examines a yet unarticulated and thus far never
systematized method of theorizing (“Social Pattern Analysis”) by making the process underlying the practice of
“concept-driven” research more explicit. We often tend to study the specific at the expense of also studying the generic.
To correct this imbalance, Zerubavel examines the theoretico-methodological process by which one can “distill” generic
social patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which one encounters them,
championing “generic” research that is pronouncedly transcontextual in its scope. In order to uncover generic social
patterns, data are collected in a wide range of social contexts. Such diversity is manifested multiple-culturally,
multihistorically, as well as multisituationally by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and
historical periods and a wide range of social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross-contextual
commonality, such research reveals formal “parallels” across seemingly disparate contexts. The seminar examines the
four main types of cross-contextual analogies “generic” researchers use (cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-domain,
and cross-level), disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded
formal equivalences.