ABSTRACT
In his 2004 article “What is a case study and what is it good for?,” political scientist John Gerring noted that, though case studies continue to be used widely, researchers “have difficulty articulating what it is that they are doing, methodologically speaking. The case study survives in a curious methodological limbo” (p. 341, emphasis ours). In this book, we respond to that widespread methodological limbo by introducing a promising approach for critical, comparative research-the comparative case study approach-that attends simultaneously to global, national, and local dimensions of case-based research. We contend that new approaches are necessitated by conceptual shifts in the social sciences, specifically in relation to culture, context, space, place, and comparison itself.
