ABSTRACT
We have also maintained that traditional case study research has not adequately attended to historical work. Yin (2014), we believe, drew too stark a distinction between present and past in suggesting that the phenomenon of central concern be “contemporary” because he contended that “events extending back to the ‘dead’ past” cannot be studied through interviews and observations (p. 24). Other advocates of case study methods have also largely ignored historical elements. Although observation and interviewing are often very useful research methods, we aver that sense-making by researchers studying contemporary phenomena should include comparisons across contemporary sites and scales, and over time. We have seen repeatedly in the cases explored in this volume that actants who appear similar in some ways are enlisted in social networks, especially policy networks, to different degrees and move into and out of them at different historical moments; it is the temporal study of these changing assemblages across sites and scales that we mean by tracing the transversal.
