Beyond the Case: The Logics and Practices of Comparative Ethnography

The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic traditions such as phenomenology, grounded theory, positivism, and interpretivism, use comparison in their works. The contributors connect the long history of comparative (and anti-comparative) ethnographic approaches to their contemporary uses. By honing in on how ethnographers render sites, groups, or cases analytically commensurable and comparable, Beyond the Case offers a new lens for examining the assumptions, payoffs, and potential drawbacks of different forms of comparative ethnography.

Corey M. Abramson, Associate Professor of Sociology, he University of Arizona
Neil Gong, Assistant Professor of Sociology, the University of California, San Diego

Corey M. Abramson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona. His research uses a combination of quantitative, qualitative and hybrid methods to understand how persistent social inequalities structure everyday life and are reproduced over time. His recent comparative ethnography on this topic is The End Game: How Inequality Shapes Our Final Years. Since its release, The End Game has been awarded the 2016 Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association Section (ASA) on Aging and the Life Course, selected for an Author Meets Critic Session at ASA, and featured in national media outlets including The New York Times and The Atlantic. Abramson's current methodological works, including recent pieces in Sociological Methodology and Ethnography, focus on integrating computational techniques to improve the scalability, replicability, and transparency of large multi-site ethnographic projects conducted in accordance with realist principles. His current book project deploys these techniques to examine how the biological, institutional, interpersonal and economic implications of terminal Cancer shape the lives and deaths of people from different backgrounds.

Neil Gong is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego and is currently a Junior Fellow at the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. His research uses diverse empirical cases to study power and social control in modernity, with a specific focus on understanding liberal social order. His forthcoming book project is a comparative ethnography of public safety net and elite private psychi- atric services in community settings, and he has previously researched a no-rules libertarian fight club. His articles have appeared in The American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Theory and Society, and Ethnography.