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Wundt's Völkerpsychologie (VP) is an exceptional case in the history of psychology. Outlined in 1863 in the second volume of Vorlesungen über Menschen- und Thierseele (Lectures on the Human and Animal Soul), VP was finally published 37 years later in 10 volumes during the last 20 years of the author's life. The work was characterized by an ambitious program of multimethod and transdisciplinary research. This article explores the intellectual and contextual reasons for the early successes and failures of VP. We analyzed n = 264 articles published in the German press and n = 220 books, reviews, and articles published in scientific journals that explicitly cited the 10 volumes between 1900 and 1920. VP received considerable criticism from linguists and philologists, who claimed that its results were of little practical use for their research. The first volumes of VP were criticized for their abstract character and psychological indifferentism; on the other hand, positive reviews emphasized their attempt to systematize and give a philosophical order to the individual investigations of philology, linguistics, comparative history, religious studies, and so on. The normative-methodological role that VP tried to play in relation to the other historical sciences was significantly criticized, and this was a determining factor in its diminishing impact over time. Some of Wundt's hypotheses were philosophically at odds with the project of German cultural imperialism that was being developed at the time and with which most of his intellectual enemies agreed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses new quantitative data to systematically test established arguments concerning the origins of party strength in 11 West European countries between 1870 and 1939. Through time-series cross-sectional analyses and using a wide range of sources, I investigate the role of the development of parliamentarism, suffrage extension, civil society, and the adoption of proportional representation. I further theorize that the development of parliamentarism and suffrage had an interactive effect because the legislative strength of a party affected its electoral strength, and vice versa. The main findings are that the development of parliamentarism most consistently helps explain party strength and that suffrage extension also was important, and I find support for an interactive effect of the two. A qualitative illustration of the Dutch development offers further support. Thus, the study provides a general explanation for the historical origins of a key component of West European parliamentary democracy, its strong parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to raise some questions about temporal comparisons and analogies in the writing of history. The article has four parts. The first one shows that historical discipline, conceptual history and language itself can scarcely be conceived of in the absence of comparisons, implicit or explicit, between events, processes and individuals. The second section provides a few samples of the sources of inspiration of some recurrent temporal parallelisms in the Western tradition. The third identifies two key moments in the history of modern Europe when temporal analogies assumed particular importance. These two periods – two turns of the century (16th century and 18th century) – correspond to transitional phases between successive stages in the development of Western historical consciousness. The article ends with a brief reflection on the usefulness and limits of temporal analogies in the writing of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces four articles that form a special issue of Politics & Society titled "Right-Wing Activism in Asia: Cold War Legacies, Geopolitics, and Democratic Erosion." The articles focus on Japan, South Korea, and Thailand. These three Asian countries present important cases to generate critical comparative insights about the patterns of Far Right mobilization, for their geopolitical histories provide common ground while institutional variations set distinctive conditions. Most importantly, all of them were shaped by the particularly sharp conflicts of the Cold War in the region, and the articles in this issue demonstrate how this legacy has generated illiberal conditions in these countries today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychiatry and politics Kilroy-Marac stresses the political significance that Collomb's Fann school of transcultural psychiatry had in post-independence Senegal. Moreover, even though histories of francophone and anglophone African psychiatry are rarely analysed within the same framework - and both Kilroy-Marac and Pringle largely stick to their respective national frameworks - a comparative reading of these two books can help tease out some of the most important themes, concerns, and concepts in the historiography of the decolonisation of psychiatry. Moreover, his depoliticised understanding of "culture" as a concept in psychiatric theory and practice possibly made it even easier for some of his opponents to criticise his innovations, and to argue that the Fann school of transcultural psychiatry did not really reflect on its links to colonial psychiatry, or on Collomb's own position within the old colonial system. As Pringle demonstrates, psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals were complex and ambiguous actors in local and national politics before and after 1962 - psychiatry was 'no straightforward tool of "social control" wielded by the colonial government' and could be subversive of colonial authority, while the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that psychiatrists could be deeply involved in political conflicts and divisions ([10]: 83). [Extracted from the article]

The origin of historical sociology can be traced to Max Weber's theory of modernization, which is an appropriate approach for studies in Japan. However, the Japanese image of 'historical sociology' is not that of a comparative history based on social scientific interests but is a history closer to cultural and social history and the history of ideas with an emphasis on descriptive research. This originates from the high degree of freedom given to the use of sources in the historical study of collective consciousness. Accordingly, it was easy to accept the impact of the linguistic turn. Subsequently, Japanese historical sociology evolved into discourse-historical research, media-historical research, and constructionist-historical research. In recent years, historical research on social issues and quantitative historical sociology have become increasingly popular. Historical sociological research has been differentiated into various separate sub-disciplines so it is difficult to identify a cohesive historical sociology as a field. However, the tradition of a high degree of freedom in terms of the use of sources continues to provide a stimulus for historical sociological studies in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with the social and institutional paradigm, countries with similar cultures, such as Italy and Spain, may show similar trends in the development of accounting research. This article develops a Comparative International Accounting History perspective, which is aimed at comparing accounting history subjects and themes in different countries. This research analyses publication patterns in accounting, understanding emerging topics and fields. It compares the last 20 years of Italian and Spanish accounting journals, developing a content analysis of each issue in the 20-year time frame from 1994 to 2014. Highlighting common trends and insights, this article adds to previous literature that examines publishing patterns of research in accounting journals from a historical point of view. It demonstrates that accounting research is developing beyond the institutional paradigm, showing an internationalisation process and trends consistent with Anglo-Saxon Journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this special issue draw on examples from Californian and Australian history to consider how people have met the challenges of securing adequate water supplies and managing water issues in urban settings. Through studies in which water, an issue that is of universal relevance, is central to the narrative, the collection aims to combine detailed empirical case studies with comparative studies of broader processes. The aim of this introductory article is to identify the scope for comparative histories of Californian and Australian cities, based on historical and geographic features that are common to the two regions, and to consider long-term influences on the ways in which the demand for and supply of water was managed in different cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we revisit the history of accounting for goodwill in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Japan following the conclusions and predictions of Ding, Richard and Stolowy (2008). We aim at verifying whether the four phases of development of the accounting for goodwill between 1880 and 2005 are actually determined by the global change from a stakeholder model of corporate governance to a shareholder model. An extended time frame of analysis (until 2016) is considered in this study, which includes Japan among the country-specific accounting systems investigated. Our findings do not support Ding et al.'s predictions for Japan and demonstrate a disagreement between those countries which consider goodwill as a depleting asset and those which consider goodwill as a permanent asset. This observation might explain better the current debate concerning international harmonization on goodwill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing the general explanatory power of a typological theory on the cross-case level have been devised. Second, rigorous selection procedures for within-case analysis are lacking. Against this background, we introduce a systematic measure that helps researchers assess the explanatory power on the cross-case level, first, within the scope set by a particular typological theory and, second, by investigating the transferability of the theory beyond these scope conditions via an increase in the number of cases. Drawing on recent methodological works on nested analysis, we show how researchers can identify key cases for process tracing based on the cross-case explanatory fit of the typological theory. We illustrate the purchase of our procedures by revisiting seminal studies from the field of comparative historical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of controlled comparisons pervades comparative historical analysis. Heated debates have surrounded the methodological purchase of such comparisons. However, the quality and validity of the conceptual building blocks on which the comparisons are based have largely been ignored. This article discusses a particular problem pertaining to these issues, that is, the danger of creating false historical analogies that do not serve to control for relevant explanatory factors. It is argued that this danger increases when we use composite (thick) concepts that are aggregated via a (loose) family resemblance logic. It is demonstrated that this problem seriously affects the way the concept of feudalism has entered comparative historical analysis. On this basis, an alternative conceptual strategy—centered on teasing out the core attributes of thick and loose concepts—is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a template for understanding and analyzing racialization as a paradigm. Further, this template is applied to the North American case – an important one because it has endured and spread across the globe despite the enormous weight of scientific evidence against it. The fallacy of race (and in particular the North American Anglo-origin variant) endures for two reasons. First, social agents seeking to gain or maintain power and control over paradigm-relevant resources benefit from reinvesting in pseudoscientific racial paradigms. Second, new science proving the fallacy of race is ignored because ignoring new paradigmatic science is in fact the way normal science operates. Thus, a paradigmatic analysis of race may help to explain why current social science approaches to the demise of racial thought may be ineffective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historical monograph addresses a gap in the extensive scholarly research literature devoted to comparative advertising—especially that which contrasts the advertised product, service, or brand with an identifiable competitor—by exploring advertisers' explanations for its appeal as a tactic throughout the previous century. Prior historical research confirms advertisers have long been aware of and greatly concerned about the unintended consequences of what they often called excessively competitive and combative advertising. Moreover, despite some thirty-five years of systematic scholarly research, two research teams recently concluded that the state of empirical knowledge regarding its effectiveness remains "equivocal." By synthesizing the extensive theoretical and empirical research literature on comparative advertising and interpreting those findings from a historical perspective, this monograph offers uniquely significant insights into modern advertising's history, theory, and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customarily, studies of urbanization in early British America have concentrated on its northern mainland seaports. This article moves beyond a thirteen colonies perspective to define and explore a Greater Caribbean urban world, with Charleston, South Carolina, at its most northerly point. In particular, the authors’ comparison of the internal dynamic of Charleston and Kingston, Jamaica, reveals an urban world that was no more dominated by the demands of the plantation sector than the northern seaports were beholden to their agricultural interiors. Significantly, however, these rich internal urban economies relied on, and were profoundly shaped by, the institution of slavery. In light of these findings, the authors thus characterize this Greater Caribbean urban zone as constituting one strand of urbanization in a larger British Atlantic world that experienced an overall expansion and diversification of the urban form across the early modern period. Most specifically, Charleston and Kingston achieved a growth rate and an economic complexity comparable to other English-speaking towns through their embrace of enslaved people and their labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Putnam argued that the different levels of social capital between the North and the South of Italy originated in the Middle Ages. In the North of Italy, the existence of a dense network of medieval towns gave rise to horizontal ties and collective action. Conversely, in the South of Italy, the authoritarian Norman rule generated hierarchical relationships and the absence of collective action. This article proposes an alternative explanation for the lack of social capital in the South of Italy using a comparative perspective. The analysis is undertaken in two steps: 1) testing the socio-economic determinants of social capital in 85 European regions; 2) performing a comparative historical analysis between deviant – that is, South of Italy and Wallonia – and regular – that is, North East of Italy and Flanders – cases. These cases are selected by looking at the residual of the regression model. The results suggest that medieval history does not explain the lack of social capital in the South of Italy. On the contrary, the historical legacy mitigates the negative effect of inequitable income distribution, low labour market participation and weak national cohesion on social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

History is conventionally imagined and narrated in the context of the nation, relating its stories and shaped by its imaginaries. To the extent the latter are selectively re-encoded into seemingly wider scales or spaces of historical narration, projects such as global history may be said to be oxymorons. Historians in the post-colonial world have also long been aware of the nation’s shadow even in purportedly transnational projects emanating from the North, yet many remain similarly in thrall to the nation. In surveying the various levels at which histories have attempted to be narrated purportedly beyond the boundaries of nations, this article argues for a more consciously layered awareness of our multiple historical locations. Life unfolds at multiple levels and spaces between which exist complex overlays, tensions, conflicts and connections. Besides the conventions and expediencies of scholarship, often in practice historians too, will feel impelled to privilege one or another level or locus for their stories. However it is important to be aware of the reasons and limitations of such choices, and that no level or locus of analysis can credibly claim to subsume all others, or render them redundant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Amid a resurgence of interest in histories of scientific fieldwork and in the geographies of the Cold War, this paper presents a comparative history of field practice across the distinct epistemic traditions of geography, archaeology, and folklore. The paper follows the intellectual practices of three research teams attempting to `rescue' Gaelic culture from the development of a missile-testing station in the Scottish Hebrides. The aims of the paper are fivefold: to extend insights from the histories of scientific fieldwork to understand the production of social knowledge, to consider the coconstitution of fieldwork and the region, to expand recent histories of geography in the mid-2Oth century, to draw out the lingering significance of the `salvage paradigm' in geography and other social sciences, and to reconceptualise this salvage fieldwork as a way of constructing social life as much as rescuing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can political scientists best uncover historical causation without committing infinite regress? This article introduces a revised framework for historical analysis that can help systematically capture the deepest causal factors in political development. It improves on the familiar "critical juncture" framework by specifying the precise causal or noncausal status of the "antecedent conditions" preceding critical junctures. After disaggregating antecedent conditions into four logical types, the authors argue that scholars should be especially mindful of critical antecedents: factors or conditions preceding a critical juncture that combine in a causal sequence with factors operating during that juncture to produce divergent outcomes. Through analytic reviews of a wide array of major works, the authors illustrate how critical antecedents can clarify causal claims and enhance knowledge accumulation in comparative politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I address the problem of the usefulness of the notion of American exceptionalism by examining the views of a number of classical theorists concerning the peculiarities of American history, emphasizing particularly its religious background. Ultimately, I follow Aristide Zolberg in arguing that there are as many 'exceptionalisms' as there are cases under examination, and that the proper mode of studying these questions is unavoidably comparative and historical. Comparative historical analysis is the only means of determining what is typical and what is distinctive (not 'deviant,' the invocation of which concept would inappropriately imply some sort of 'norm'). Here, however, I will in the main compare only implicitly, highlighting particular features of American historical development while suggesting how these differ from other relevant cases, in an effort to make sense of how the United States can be at once a leading defender of human rights and a leading violator of such rights, as well as a vision of a prosperous future for many that at the same time is marked by striking and increasingly large inequalities of wealth and income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If cross-cultural researchers hope to contribute to cultural evolutionary theory, methods must be developed to describe and explain cultural processes. The distinction made by Boas between historical and comparative methods limited scholarly interest in the analysis of patterned historical change. Numerous techniques have been developed to draw diachronic inferences from synchronic ethnographic data, with varying degrees of success. The use of archaeological and historical data to draw diachronic inferences similarly has had mixed results but requires fewer assumptions and allows a more direct comparison of cultural change. Shifting the unit of analysis from the culture to the event allows events to be compared with one another. A case study from the evolution of numerical notation systems shows the potential of rigorous diachronic methodologies to complement synchronic ones. Although synchronic analysis is highly useful for studying correlations between traits, diachronic analysis is far better for analyzing processes of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research in the context of education history. The author stresses that research remains focused essentially on schooling to the exclusion of other social influences and agencies purposefully designed to change behavior. The increasing use of concepts from the social sciences and the persistent concern with education in 19th century affect the study of rhetoric. According to author, there are two perspectives on the topic of milieu which should be more commonly reflected in the work of historians of education: One concerns the cultural setting, the other the professional climate of opinion.