Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method
针对现代化理论中比较方法的问题，提出一种融入世界历史视角的替代性比较方法，通过历时与共时结合的方式处理时空非均匀性，将比较单元锚定于具体历史过程。
Recent critiques of modernization theory have questioned the comparability of its central organizing concept, the national society. The logic of comparative inquiry requires independent or independent uniform cases and formal quasi-experimental designs for comparative generalization. Global conceptions of social change violate formal comparative requirements, necessitating an alternative form of incorporated comparison, that takes both multipleldiachronic and singularlsynchronic forms. Incorporated comparison is used to conceptualize variation across time and space when time and space dimensions are neither separate nor uniform. The fixed units of analysis employed by modernization and world-system theories yield to an alternative strategy of grounding the analytical units of comparison in the world-historical processes under investigation. Recent studies illustrate this alternative to formal comparison and incorporate comparison into the process of substantive inquiry.