ABSTRACT
This final chapter poses three unifying questions in order to push forward the contributors’ aims of developing a pragmatic approach to peoples’ comparative competences. Firstly, what are the different social or cultural factors that might drive peoples’ inclinations to compare in specific directions? In other words: are there cultures of comparison? Secondly, how and why do particular strategies of comparison correspond to recognisable emotions and affective dispositions? Finally, what does it mean to explicitly deny the possibility of comparison, by insisting on uniqueness or incomparability? In assessing how the chapters gathered here might offer an answer to these questions, acts of ‘reframing’ emerge as an integral component of the social life of comparison and key vehicle for the expression of agency.
