Explaining Social Processes

Tilly (sociology, Columbia U.) offers his expertise in analysis of a variety of primary sources, ranging from the shortest of conversations across the back fence to world-wide historical changes. He sticks to the meta-level, explaining concepts, observations, explanations, and comparisons so they are applicable to the full palette of social sciences, describing systems and transactions in social analysis, observations of social processes and their formal representatives, event catalogs as theories, and the relevant literature and schools of thought, then works though political process and the means and ends of comparisons in macro-sociology. He then examines historical social analysis, including the relations of history and sociological imagining and the growth of Anglo-American social history since 1945, closing with three visions of history and theory. The result is a concise, compact and portable methodology along with a very good explanation of his own success. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)