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The diversity of social forms both regionally and historically calls for a paradigmatic reassessment of concepts used to map human societies comparatively. By differentiating “social analytics” from “explanatory narratives,” we can distinguish concept and generic model development from causal analyses of actual empirical phenomena. In so doing, we show how five heuristic models of “modes of social practices” enable such paradigmatic formation in sociology. This reinforces Max Weber’s emphasis on the irreducible historicity of explanations in the social sciences.

Explanatory narrative.

A paradigmatic consolidation of generalizing concepts, modes of social practices, ideal-type concepts, and generic models presents a range of “theoretical tools” capable of facilitating empirical analysis as flexibly as possible, rather than cramping their range with overly narrow conceptual strictures.

To render social theory as flexible for practical field research as possible.

Develops a way of synthesizing diverse theoretical and methodological approaches in a highly pragmatic fashion.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Sociologists have paid little attention to what people mean when they call themselves “professionals” in their everyday talk. Typically, when occupations lack the characteristics of self-control associated with the established professions, such talk is dismissed as desire for greater status. An ethnography of speaking conducted among several technicians’ occupations suggests that dismissing talk of professionalism may have been premature. The results of this study indicate that among technicians, professional talk highlights dynamics of respect, collaboration, and expertise crucial to the horizontal divisions of labor that are common in postindustrial workplaces, but have very little to do with the desire for occupational power.

Using a general model of corruption that explains and accounts for corruption across professions and institutions, this chapter will examine how certain practices in the media, especially in areas where journalism, advertising and public relations regularly intersect and converge, can be construed as instances of corruption. It will be argued that such corruption, as in the case of cash-for-comment scandals, advertorials, infomercials, and infotainment, as well as public relations media releases disseminated misleadingly as journalistic opinion, is regular, ubiquitous, and systematic.

The research question we address in this paper is whether the effort invested by the internal auditor in the firm is associated with better firm performance. Our measure of effort is the number of audit hours invested in the firm, and firm performance is measured by the likelihood of a restatement of the firm's financial results. This study is the first to analyze this question, an endeavor made possible by a difference in disclosure requirements regarding internal audit effort between the US and Israel. Our analysis is conducted using hand-collected data on firms traded on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) during the period 2010–2014. We expect that auditor effort is negatively associated with the likelihood of restatements of the firm's financial results. Indeed, our findings support this hypothesis. We also consider the association between restatements and two audit committee characteristics – the degree of independence and the degree of expertise of its members. However, these associations are not upheld by the data.

The difficulties that MR poses for comparativists were anticipated 40 years ago in Sidney Verba's essay “Some Dilemmas of Comparative Research”, in which he called for a “disciplined configurative approach…based on general rules, but on complicated combinations of them” (Verba, 1967, p. 115). Charles Ragin's (1987) book The Comparative Method eloquently spelled out the mismatch between MR and causal explanation in comparative research. At the most basic level, like most other methods of multivariate statistical analysis MR works by rendering the cases invisible, treating them simply as the source of a set of empirical observations on dependent and independent variables. However, even when scholars embrace the analytical purpose of generalizing about relationships between variables, as opposed to dwelling on specific differences between entities with proper names, the cases of interest in comparative political economy are limited in number and occupy a bounded universe.² They are thus both knowable and manageable. Consequently, retaining named cases in the analysis is an efficient way of conveying information and letting readers evaluate it.³ Moreover, in practice most producers and consumers of comparative political economy are intrinsically interested in specific cases. Why not cater to this interest by keeping our cases visible?

Migrant workers are often concentrated in segments of the labour market characterised by low-paid and insecure work and which fall outside of the traditional ‘web of rules’ providing workers with protections. Institutional experimentation provides an opportunity to rectify this. This chapter examines the reasons why migrant workers are often subject to exploitation and marginalisation in the labour market. It then analyses the roles of the three main actors with the capacity to protect and improve migrant workers’ labour market position: governments, trade unions and community organisations. It proposes a ‘co-regulation’ approach based on collaborative institutional experimentation between these actors as the most effective way to address the exploitation and marginalisation of migrant workers.