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Political Science in the United States has focused too much on variable-oriented, quantitative methods and thus lost its ability to ask “big questions.” Stein Rokkan (d. 1979) was an eminent comparativist who asked big questions and provided such qualitative tools as conceptual maps, grids, and clustered comparisons. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), arguably the first social scientist, also asked big questions and provided a universal explanation about the dialectical relationship between nomads and sedentary people. This article analyzes to what extent Ibn Khaldun's concepts of asabiyya and sedentary culture help understand the rise and fall of the Muslim civilization. It also explores my alternative, class-based perspective in Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment. Moreover, the article explores how Rokkan's analysis of cultural, geographical, economic, and religio-political variations within Western European states can provide insights to the examination of such variations in the Muslim world.

Annual general meetings have been variously described as dull rituals for accountability versus entertaining theatre at the expense of accountability. The research analyses director and shareholder participation and dialogic interactions at annual and extraordinary general meetings of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC). The BSAC was incorporated under a royal charter in 1889 in return for power to exploit a huge territory, Rhodesia/now Zimbabwe. The BSAC's administration ceased in 1924/25. Thus, the BSAC had a dual mandate as a private for-profit listed company and to occupy and develop the territories on behalf of the British government.

The article analyses 29 BSAC general meeting minutes, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim minutes between 1895 and 1925. The study adopts manual content analysis. First, the research adopts conversational analysis to analyse director and shareholder turn-taking and moves by approving and dissenting shareholders. Second, the study identifies and analyses incidents of shareholder sentiment from the shareholder turns/moves. Finally, the article assesses how shareholder sentiment changed throughout the period and whether the BSAC's share price reflected the shareholder sentiment.

The BSAC's general meetings were associated with the greater colonial project of building the British Empire. The authors find almost 1,500 incidents of shareholder sentiment. Directors and shareholders take roughly an equal number of turns (excluding shareholder sentiment). Ritual and ceremony dominate director and shareholder turns and moves, while accountability to shareholders was minimal. The BSAC share price spiked in the early years of the project, waning after that. Shareholder sentiment, both positive and negative, reflect the share price behaviour.

A unique database of verbatim general meeting minutes records shareholders' reactions to what they heard in the form of sounding off through cheering, “hear, hears,” laughter and applause (i.e. shareholder sentiment).

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.