The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Making Use of the Past: Time Periods as Cases to Compare and as Sequences of Problem Solving
Abstract
This article examines methodological issues that arise when using information from one historical period to illuminate another. It begins by showing how the strengths and weaknesses of methods commonly used to compare institutions or regions reappear in comparisons between times. The discussion then turns to alternative approaches. The use of narrative and of path dependency to construct explanatory sequences are strategies that strike a welcome balance between causal generalization and historical detail. But these approaches typically fail to identify either the causal mechanisms or the trajectories that link events in different eras. These gaps can be filled by rethinking sequences of events across periods as reiterated problem solving. Successive U.S. industrial relations regimes since 1900 are used to illustrate this methodological strategy.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
North, D. C. (1990) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511808678 · Cited by 32,691
Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics
Pierson, P. (2000) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/2586011 · Cited by 8,094
Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms
Hall, P. A., & Taylor, R. C. R. (1996) · Political Studies · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.1996.tb00343.x · Cited by 6,796
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China
Skocpol, T. (1979) · Cambridge University Press · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511815805 · Cited by 5,408
Insights and Pitfalls: Selection Bias in Qualitative Research
Collier, D., & Mahoney, J. (1996) · World Politics · doi:10.1353/wp.1996.0023 · Cited by 658
Temporality, Events, and Explanation in Historical Sociology: An Introduction
GRIFFIN, L. J. (1992) · Sociological Methods & Research · doi:10.1177/0049124192020004001 · Cited by 207
Two methods in search of science: Skocpol versus Trotsky
Burawoy, M. (1989) · Theory and Society · doi:10.1007/bf00147158 · Cited by 152 · cited 2×
“Ever since Galton’s critique of Tylor in the late 19th century, methodologists have pointed out that Mill’s experimental logic is inappropriate for proving historical explanations (Lieberson 1987; Burawoy 1989).”
Background
Cited by
Path dependence in historical sociology
Mahoney, J. (2000) · Theory and Society · doi:10.1023/a:1007113830879 · Cited by 3,469
McAdam, D., & Scott, W. R. (2005) · Social Movements and Organization Theory · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511791000.003 · Cited by 516
Triggering Change: Towards a Conceptualisation of Major Change Processes in Farm Decision-Making
Sutherland, L.-A., Burton, R. J. F., Ingram, J., Blackstock, K., Slee, B., & Gotts, N. (2012) · Journal of Environmental Management · doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2012.03.013 · Cited by 260
Strategies of Causal Assessment in Comparative Historical Analysis
Mahoney, J. (2003) · Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511803963.011 · Cited by 260
COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS AND KNOWLEDGE ACCUMULATION IN THE STUDY OF REVOLUTIONS
Goldstone, J. A. (2003) · Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511803963.003 · Cited by 207
Metadata
- Authors
- Haydu, J.
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1998-09
- Volume
- 104
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 339-371
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- OpenAlex
- W1987726350
- Cited by
- 378
- References
- 7
- FWCI
- 8.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Making Use of the Past: Time Periods as Cases to Compare and as Sequences of Problem Solving. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/210041
- The paper
- Haydu, J. (1998). Making Use of the Past: Time Periods as Cases to Compare and as Sequences of Problem Solving. American Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1086/210041
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
