Slippery Paths of (Mis)Understanding? Historically Based Explanations in Social Science

Abstract

This chapter explores why and how — path dependence explanations offers us a useful way to analyze the role of history in social change. However for path dependence, to help us to achieve better understanding we must clearly specify it. For these reasons the emphasis in this chapter lies in differentiating and defining the many approaches all which are now confusingly called path dependence, even when each is based on a different set of assumptions about how the world works, and hence, embody different ontology and give us different ways in which to understand social change and conditions for change (Hall, 2003). In so doing this chapter is taking the challenge issued by Paul Pierson, Kathleen Thelen, John L. Campbell, and Colin Crouch to encourage such a debate (Campbell, 2004; Crouch, 2005; Pierson, 2000a; Pierson, 2000b; Thelen, 2004).

This paper was first written as part of the work with the History Collaborative Research Network of the SSRC program on the Corporation as a Social Institution, and was supported through grant given by the Sloan Foundation. The author would like to thank the participants of the History CRN workshop in MIT — Center for International Studies in April 2002, especially, Doug Gutherie, Daniel Friel, Ajay Mehrotra, Katherine Chen, Rohit Daniel Wadhwani, and Liba Brent; the participants in Harvard’s Center for European Studies Comparative Historical Analysis Lunch series of 2001–2002, especially Hillel Soifer, Fiona Barker, and Shannon O’Neil; Suzanne Berger and Richard Samuels for reading and rereading of this paper and for encouraging him to further develop it in every step of the way; to Peter Perdue, Amos Zehavi, Michal Ben -Josef Hirsch, Brett V. Kubicek, Elizabeth Popp Berman, Cory Welt, and Stephen Van Evera for insightful analysis and useful remarks. Special thanks are also owed to Roy Moxham’s book Tea: Addiction, Explorations, and Empire. All mistakes are solely the author’s.