Globalisation and social policy:Delineating the independent variable problem
Quantitative comparative research, particularly in the form of pooled time series cross-sectional regression, has been scrutinised ever since it first contributed to the comparative analysis of social policies.Thereby, model specifications and operationalisations of dependent and independent variables have largely been influenced by in-depth studies representing small samples of European cases.As data quality and availability for Asian countries is improving, there is an immediate temptation to ease the ”small-N problem” of quantitative comparative research by expanding country samples.Equally, there is a temptation for researchers to revert to well-established theories in the Western literature to explore Asian countries.This paper critically assesses the limitations of both approaches.It will do so by tracing the origins of the most important theoretical traditions accounting for the impact of globalisation on social policies in Western context.It shows Western theories of social policy development vis-a-vis growing world and capital market interdependence are hardly able to represent trajectories of Asian countries.The paper, therefore, calls for a new and independent surge of in-depth case studies of Asian countries to inform a new round of more comprehensive, truly comparative, deductive research in the future.
Stefan Kühner
Social Policy University of York
国内会议
广州
英文
262-262
2011-08-26（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）