Just a brief note before signing off this am.  I am reading the posts that

Bear, Helmut and Tom have written......

Tom, your text sounds interesting.  Does your book discuss different

approaches to qualitative research (i.e., grounded theory, etc.)?

Therese

While a concern for the general is certainly one part of the programme of Sostris [see below for details on Sostris], it is not the only one. We were also concerned to develop and protect our 'news of difference'. A consequence of the assumptions we make about 'constant mutation' in a truly historicised understanding of the 'socio' is that our grounded theory has to use very general concepts, yes, but it must be above all a grounded theory using such general concepts to grasp and convey historical differences, unique configurations. 

From our point of view, therefore, classic Grounded Theorising subsumes particular cases too quickly under trans-historical generalities, and this is true even at the level of the micro-interactions that it favours (for example different cases of nursing care in the USA).  At the level of the macro-structural features (different organisations of health regimes and hospitals for the elites and for the residuum in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Sweden, the USA, and the UK) it tends to have little to say.  Classic grounded theory neglects such a macro-structural level, yes, but even if it didn't, it would try to find common features rather than explain historically the historical differences between regimes.

We  follow the methodology of inductive inference from particulars established within the 'grounded theory' protocols but,  in contrast to the  eagerly-generalising   and interaction-focused approach of Glaser and Strauss, in our Sostris approach we make more 'European' assumptions of structural and cultural constraints, and have, we think, in the first place,  a stronger orientation to 'the specificity and uniqueness of cases' . We do not want the richness of cases to be lost by being simply displaced by and being hidden behind formal trans-historical generalities (universal theoretical propositions).

Burawoy -- and see Ragin 1987 --  in his chapter on the extended case method already cited,  provides a useful summary of  this point: and that of the historical (genetic, biographical) focus of research that 'historicises the socio':

"..... The extended case method constructs genetic explanations, that is, explanations of particular outcomes. An example would be Weber's analysis of the historically specific constellation of forces, including the motivational component provided by the Protestant ethic,  which gave rise to Western bourgeois capitalism. A generic strategy looks for similarity among disparate cases, whereas the genetic strategy focuses on differences between similar cases. The goal of the first is to seek abstract laws or formal theory, whereas the goal of the second is historically specific causality (Burawoy 1991: 281)"

One of the goals of our research is to be able to return to the particular historical cases, and the particular historicised 'social', from  which we began, but a  'return' enriched by the experience of the 'constant comparative method' intrinsic to Grounded Theory. There is generalising from case-comparisons, yes,  and the 'reconstruction' of theory that occurs there, yes,  but there is also what might be called re-particularising as well. The development of higher-order and more general arguments that does not take the understanding of other particular cases any further -- or makes them less intelligible -- fails by the test of 'value-added' (in this discourse, 'value'  is the degree of case-understanding of several cases). 

The  'constant comparative method',  which Glaser and Strauss identified as the key component in their approach, points both to the generalising, universalising, project of formal grounded theories (which, perhaps unfortunately, is the name by which their approach became known)  but also to the 'return to the concrete case' (that variety of  an actualised  historical possibility) in which they were less interested but in which we are more interested.

Burawoy remarks, in respect of an earlier sociology, the Chicago school, that "the search for transhistorical laws obscured real history, the seismic shifts in the political and social landscape of the 1920s and 1930s (2000: 12)". We could say that, if the danger of the historian is that he is so keen to return to his particular case that he only leaves it for thinking more conceptually and generally for too short a time,  the danger for the sociologist is that they are so keen to rise to the level of generalities and universalities that they are too quick to leave the concrete historical cases, and too reluctant to return to them.