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DOI 10.1007/s10734-013-9683-z
Comparing university organizations across boundaries
Ivar Bleiklie
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract The article discusses comparative organizational studies, focusing on change in
higher education institutions, and in particular (but not only) on studies that compare
organizations in different national settings. It first presents and discusses different
approaches to comparison based on a couple of typologies that have been developed to
identify different research strategies (cf. Page in Public Adm 73(1):123–141, 1995;
Skocpol in Vision and method in historical sociology. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1980: 356–391). It focuses on comparative strategies, and distinguishes between
different strategies based on how issues of causality and generalizability are addressed. It
illustrates how strategies may be used and combined with examples from comparative
research projects, in many of which the author has participated. The second part deals with
the current status of comparative research in higher education, and argues that a move in
the direction of more rigorous, systematic comparisons is not just a question of quantification, but of conceptualization, and in particular that there is a need for concepts that can
travel in meaningful ways. The experiences of one large comparative project, TRUE, are
drawn upon in order to demonstrate how some of the challenges mentioned above, may be
dealt with.
Keywords Comparative methods Comparative public policy Organization
theory Higher education policy Higher education institutions
I. Bleiklie (&)
Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Box 7802,
5020 Bergen, Norway
e-mail: [email protected]
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Introduction
Any social scientist who has been around for a while, has likely gained some experience
from comparative research, in particular if we include comparisons within as well as across
nation states.1
Considering the advantages of comparative research, there are three major points that
immediately come to mind: The first is the scientific argument that when one increases the
number of units under study, the possibility of generalization increases. Systematic comparison enhances the potential rigor of a study, whether one starts with in-depth comparisons of a few unique cases or hypothesis testing of a large number of cases. The second
advantage is that knowing culturally, politically and institutionally diverse places often
challenges one’s national and local superstitions. This gives a better understanding of the
range of possible variation as to how certain types of social institutions may be organized
and how they operate. It also provides a wider array of concepts and ideas when one
formulates research questions and ways to address them. Thirdly working in multinational
groups on common cross-country comparative projects forces participants to think through
and negotiate their theoretical positions. But most importantly, comparative research often
challenges our conceptual understanding of the topic under study, rendering it sometimes
less meaningful, and thereby challenging us to develop our conceptual understanding and
theories further.
Nevertheless, it is important to be aware of the challenges comparative researchers face.
The greatest challenge is to know what one compares. At a very general level we assume
that higher education institutions can be compared across countries, yet we also know that
these institutions are very diverse and operate within national contexts that are highly
different. Our notions, however, about how such institutions operate are often based on
narrow national experiences of one’s home country or on somewhat abstract models of
salient features of higher education institutions of internationally dominant countries like
France, Germany, UK and the US. These models have historically both served as attractive
ideals and been the best documented in the literature (Ben-David and Zloczower 1991;
Clark 1983, 2006; Rothblatt and Wittrock 1993). Findings about how different systems
actually are organized and work are therefore often interpreted as deviations from a norm
represented by an ideologically dominant system rather than being properly understood in
terms of the functions they have in their actual national contexts. In addition, given the
growing importance of supranational actors, i.e. international actors that are delegated
authority by member states, the role of the nation state as a major driver behind higher
education change cannot be taken for granted in the same way as it used to be. The best
examples of supranational actors in the context of higher education may be the OECD
1
The major topics of this article build on my personal experience from doing comparative research, the
main experiences of which may be summed up briefly like this: I started out with a PhD thesis in which I
undertook a comparative organizational study of two public service organizations in the same city (Bleiklie
1997), followed by several cross national comparisons of biomedical policies in the area of Assisted
Reproduction Technology (ART) (Bleiklie et al. 2004), higher education reform processes (Kogan et al.
2006), changes in university governance arrangements (Paradeise et al. 2009) and currently of changes in
universities as organizations in the collaborative research project Transformation of Universities in Europe
(TRUE), funded by the European Science Foundation (Bleiklie and Michelsen 2013; Bleiklie et al. 2011,
2013, Seeber et al. 2012). While doing comparative research I have drawn heavily on the experiences of
others, and I will also use those experiences to provide additional illustrations of and material for analyzing
different ways of doing comparative research.
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issuing recommendations regarding higher education policies to its member states and the
EU and its institutions engaged in European higher education and research programs. A
second challenge is the danger that successful researchers will start repeating past successes rather than letting systematic questioning lead the way in the development of their
research spurred by a range of different motives ranging from convenience to constantly
changing research objects.
In this article I argue that if the issue of research strategy is reduced to the question of
the number of cases under study, the equally important question of conceptual clarity as a
precondition for fruitful comparative research is likely to be obscured. I start by distinguishing between and discussing different approaches to comparison based on a couple of
typologies that have been identified in comparative research (cf. Kogan 1996; Page 1995;
Skocpol 1980: 356–391). I first discuss the choice of comparative strategy as a question of
how one addresses issues of causality and generalizability. Then I discuss some of the
opportunities and challenges facing comparative higher education research. I look at how
comparative research methodology may help developing higher education as a research
field, before I focus on challenges related to conceptualization and what Sartori (1970)
called ‘‘conceptual stretching’’. In this part I use some examples from the comparative
project Transforming Universities in Europe (TRUE) to provide one illustration of the
development of the conceptual understanding of state-university relationships and of
universities as organizations. These examples are used to comment on two types of
challenges to comparative higher education research that have been pointed out by the
editors of this issue. The first consists in the challenges facing the nation state as a major
agent of change in higher education. The second is the changing nature of universities as
organizations in the light of 30 years of attempts by reform politicians to change universities into more proactive, strategic actors with stronger leadership and managerial
structures.
Approaches
The typology of approaches to comparative research that I shall outline in the following is
partly based on the typology presented by Kogan (1996) and applied in the three country
comparative study of higher education reforms in England, Norway, and Sweden published
in the book Transforming Higher Education (Kogan et al. 2006). The typology in turn was
based on Page’s (1995) distinction between: single country studies, juxtapositions, thematic comparisons, and causal explanations. The other typology that has inspired the
typology I will use here was presented by Theda Skocpol in her analysis of research
strategies in historical sociology, where she distinguished between: meaningful interpretation of single cases, identifying causal regularities, and grand theories (Skocpol 1980:
356–391). The typologies are somewhat different, but the common idea behind both of
them is to identify different ways of dealing with issues of causality and generalizability. I
will address comparative strategies from the same vantage point: as different ways of
dealing with these two issues. I borrow from both typologies and distinguish between
meaningful interpretation of single cases, juxtapositions, thematic comparisons, identifying
causal regularities, and grand theories.
The choice of strategy may be perceived as a matter of scientific principle. According to
this position, the best strategy is one that is instrumental in realizing the scientific ambition
of identifying general causal mechanisms and their effects in order to arrive at generalizable statements about regularities in social life. Based on the ‘‘opposite’’ presumption
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that the social world is so complex and ambiguous that it is impossible to identify causal
mechanisms that can be formulated in manageable theoretical statements, the alternative
position is that the best strategy is to provide ‘‘thick’’ descriptions of single cases in order
to develop as deep understanding as possible of individual and unique cases.
Choice of strategy may also be understood as a question of degree of scientific
development based on the assumption that a scientific field, once it is established, starts out
with ‘‘thick’’ description in order to formulate questions, that later may be developed into
assumptions and testable propositions. As the field ‘‘matures’’ scholars will gradually
develop a better theoretical understanding of it and gradually be able to develop more
powerful and simple assumptions of causal mechanisms that may be systematically tested
and refined as the field progresses towards a gradually more advanced scientific stage.
A pragmatic strategy would take the position that choice of strategy depends on the
research problem one wants to address. If the research aim is to map and identify basic
characteristics of a case that one has little advance knowledge about—let’s say a higher
education system that has not been described by researchers before—then the strategy
should be to describe the case at hand as thoroughly as possible. The single country study
therefore presents itself as the best strategy. However, as it turns out, in practice the choice
is not just between ‘‘thick’’ description and testing of general hypotheses. A range of
strategies present themselves that varies in terms of the extent to which they provide broad
contextual knowledge and in terms their ambitions with regard to generalization. If one has
some notions about the major characteristics of a higher education system and how it
compares with other systems, then a juxtaposition of two or more systems may represent a
reasonable way to bring out differences that demonstrate possible diversity across systems.
Thematic comparisons move one step further in trying to structure the comparison in
advance by starting out from a common set of questions to examine a small number of
cases for comparability and similarity in what George and Smoke (1974) called ‘structured,
focused comparison’. When one aims at identifying causal regularities, the ambition to
generalize is clearly expressed, but at the same time circumscribed by the clear delimitations of the time span and space about which one generalizes, e.g. the causes of the
massification of higher education in North America and Europe in the latter half of the
twentieth century. Finally grand theories are trying to arrive at general scientific laws.
Regular associations between causal factors and effects—e.g. the hypothesis that growth of
higher education invariably follows from economic growth—may serve as an example of
such a theory. From a pragmatic point of view, a range of strategies are in principle
available. Although the ambition to generalize may be the long term goal of many scholars,
most of them would recognize that conditions for developing and testing grand theories
rarely are present.
While I tend to agree with the pragmatic approach, I also believe that generalizing as far
as realistically possible is an important and worthwhile ambition at the heart of scientific
activity. The field of higher education research is a relatively novel and small field of social
science. It has been dominated by rather descriptive studies with limited theoretical
ambitions and few attempts to contribute significantly to the development of specific social
science disciplines. However, the field, although still small, has grown, new generations of
scholars generally better prepared than their predecessors are entering the field and the
conceptual understanding and empirical knowledge is considerably more developed than it
was 15–20 years ago. New generations of better trained scholars should also benefit
comparative research by supplying the field with more researchers who are trained in using
the whole range of approaches and techniques available to social scientists. This might
imply that we could see a movement from what Ragin (1987) called a ‘case oriented’
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towards a ‘variable-oriented’ approach or from single country studies towards more systematic forms of comparisons such as thematic comparisons and attempts at identifying
causal regularities. Rather than recommending that one should leave thick description as a
research strategy, I recommend using more systematic comparative strategies in addition.
Before developing this discussion further I will try to give the reader a better understanding
of the different strategies by providing some examples of studies that may represent each
one of them.
Single country studies
Studies that focus on single countries can be classified as comparative inasmuch as they add
to knowledge by specifying what marks off one higher education system and its institutional
arrangements from another. While such studies may provide rich contextual data and ‘thick
description’, they are not necessarily a-theoretical. The development of specific concepts
may provide opportunities for ‘theoretical generalization’ that contribute to more general
knowledge of higher education systems and institutions. One example of such a study is
Musselin’s (2004) account of the relationship between reform policies, organizational
change within universities, and systemic change in what she conceptualized as the French
‘university configuration’. The study is primarily of changes within a single country, but at
the same time it emphasizes characteristics that set the specific country in question off against
other countries. Finally, it offers a conceptual understanding of how national specificities
play out in reform processes that are often interpreted as variants of international reform
ideologies. Furthermore, the fact that one-offs are available in the literature opens up the
possibility for comparisons by providing secondary material for further comparative studies.
One example of this is offered by Musselin and Paradeise (2009) where the French experience is analyzed in a more explicit comparative context. Many edited collections of essays on
a range of countries that are published are further examples of this kind of material.
Juxtaposition
Studies that focus on two or a few cases may bring out salient characteristics of each case,
without systematically clarifying common topics, let alone dimensions, along which they
are compared. Examples of this type of studies may be comparisons of ‘university models’
that focus on particular characteristics that are perceived as typical of each system and thus
focus on different sets of peculiarities rather than systematic variation. Introductory or
concluding chapters summarizing the different national experiences presented in the edited
volumes of the kind mentioned above provide examples of juxtaposition.
The approach followed by Paradeise et al. (2009) in their study of changes in university
governance in seven European countries combines juxtaposition and thematic comparisons. The bulk of the book presents seven national case studies of governance changes, and
makes a clear choice to use the method of juxtaposition as illustrated by the following
statement in the theory chapter of the book: ‘‘On purpose, the internal structure of the
chapters is not harmonized. It should rather reflect the specificity of each case and its main
characteristics rather than try to respect common issues’’ (Ferlie et al. 2009:18). Nevertheless, the purpose is also to develop a systemic analysis of commonalities and differences
regarding university governance in the seven countries. This is done in several ways. First,
the national reform processes are analyzed by asking to what extent two theoretical
‘‘narratives’’, New Public Management and Network Governance can explain the findings
in the national chapters. In addition two ‘‘tracer’’ issues, research funding and doctoral
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education, were followed in each of the national chapters. Furthermore two chapters following the national case studies compare systematically the countries across a common set
of thematic questions analyzing convergence with respect to the rise of managerialism and
diversity in the choice of policy instruments among the seven nations and their implications for university-state relationships.
Thematic comparison
Although, studies following quite different approaches can fall under the label of thematic
comparison, the common denominator is what George and Smoke (1974) characterize as
the method of ‘structured, focused comparison’ of cases. This approach relies on a common set of questions to examine a small number of cases for comparability and similarity.
The strategy consists of constructing a set of common questions when neither the empirical
nor the theoretical literature provides the investigator with hypotheses or questions ‘which
are precise, operationally significant, and adequate’. In recent years, higher education
research has seen various examples of this approach.
One example of thematic comparison is the study of reform processes within public
university systems of England, Norway, and Sweden in the last decades of the last century
that was published in the edited volume Transforming Higher Education (Kogan et al.
2006). In the study common questions were directed at different aspects of reform,
focusing on the following themes:
1. Changes in the ideologies of the state.
2. Changes in the mechanisms of government and the salience of central government.
3. Policy formation and the place of government agencies, educational institutions, elites,
interest groups, and actor networks of various kinds.
4. The nature of the reforms created by government.
5. The impacts of the reforms in terms of the academic profession, epistemic identities
and working practices of academics in a range of disciplines, and in a range of
institutions in the three countries.
The study demonstrated not just differences among the three countries, but also how
very similar reform ideologies led to quite different, and partly contradictory reform
measures, e.g. in terms of institutional autonomy which were formulated by different
policy regimes and implemented in quite different ways. However, when it came down to
individual academics there were again clear similarities in the resilience of their identities
and perceptions of academic work.
Identifying causal regularities
Comparative studies aiming at identifying causal regularities are still not very common in
higher education research. The ESF funded TRUE project, studying changes in the
organization of universities in eight European countries, however, may illustrate the
approach. The overall approach is thematic comparison insofar as it delimited a broad
topic: changes in university organizations and the transformation of steering and governance arrangements that regulate them since the 1980s. These changing arrangements are
seen in the context of: (a) national and European policies, governance structures, and
steering arrangements, (b) institutional governance and how it relates to academic work,
academic disciplines, and higher education communities, and (c) development and differentiation of higher education systems. These three aspects were in turn specified in
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terms of eight specific themes which then have been subject to systematic comparison: (1)
Institutional Autonomy, (2) Institutional Governance structures, (3) Institutional Funding,
(4) Academic work and careers, (5) Higher Education Landscapes, (6) National policy
making, (7) European policy, and (8) Policy instruments and implementation. However,
within this broader context causal regularities have been investigated in two contexts.
The first is based on a web survey of 696 academic leaders and managers (response rate
48 %) that is an attempt to clarify the extent to which the 26 universities included in the
study during the last decades had developed into more managerial ‘complete’ organizations
with well-defined identities, strong organizational hierarchies, and a high degree of rationalization (Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson 2000). Then it was asked to what extent the
observed changes can be explained by characteristics of national policies and characteristics
of the universities. Variations were found that demonstrated that characteristics of national
politico-administrative systems and policies as well as of university organizations contributed to explaining variations in organizational ‘completeness’ (Seeber et al. 2012).
The second study of causal regularities within the TRUE project raised the question of
to what extent policy variation measured as reform activity among the eight countries can
be explained in terms of characteristics of the national politico-administrative system.
Although no direct causal mechanisms were identified, the findings indicated that different
political systems present actors with different obstacles and opens up different opportunities for political action. Among the major obstacles that limit reform activity are:
(a) federal structures with many veto points and (b) legalistic political traditions that focus
on legislation, but less on policy tools and implementation. Among the opportunities
offered by politico-administrative structures for relatively high reform activity are the
‘‘strong hand’’, winner takes all logic of Westminster parliamentarianism and traditions of
‘‘steady hand’’ incremental policies offered by more consensual political systems.
Grand theories
If identifying causal regularities is hard to come by as a comparative strategy, grand
theories are even more so. They may be easiest to come by in the literature that seeks to
understand the successful expansion of universities all over the modern and postmodern
world. Early functionalist literature sought to explain the emergence of university systems
and the success of the North American version in terms of general functionalist principles
(Ben-David and Zloczower 1991; Parsons and Platt 1973). Later institutional theories have
been used to explain the success and expansion of universities as a global phenomenon of
modernity as expressed in the following statement by Meyer et al. (2007): ‘‘The institutional point is that post-modern society, much like its modern counterpart, ultimately rests
on faith in science, rationality, and human capability, much like religious understandings’’
(Meyer et al. 2007:197).
In this version of institutional theory, general globally institutionalized cultural
beliefs—about nation states and the central role of higher education in nation state
development—are considered a global script that constitutes the driving force and most
adequate institutional explanation for global higher education expansion.
Conceptual and methodological issues
From a scientific point of view that emphasizes the goal of identifying generalizable
hypotheses about causal mechanisms, an obvious argument in favor of comparative
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research is that the possibility of generalization is improved when the number of units
under study increases. Comparative studies enhance the potential rigor of a study, whether
one starts with in-depth comparison of unique cases or with hypothesis testing of a large
number of cases. The optimist beliefs that characterized functionalist social research in the
1950s and 1960s considered scientific development as a straight forward process and a
function of the differentiation of social structures over time. Accordingly, as the scientific
community gains more knowledge about higher education policies, systems, institutions,
and the processes of change they are undergoing, its members will gradually be able to
formulate testable hypotheses. The different approaches that have been sketched above
can, in such a functionalist perspective, be seen as stages in a progressive development
towards more ‘advanced’ scientific methods that are made possible as our knowledge of
the topics under study increases.
Underlying the functionalist perception of scientific development were more general
assumptions about economic and technological development that were considered the
driving processes of social and political change. Nation states and with them higher
education systems were assumed to become more internationalized and converge towards
one common model.
From a pragmatic perspective, however, it is important to note that the approaches
presented above are not mutually exclusive, and the issue of generalization is not as clear
cut as it is often presented. As it was demonstrated on the preceding pages, single country
studies may be a good starting point for comparisons with other countries, and theoretical
generalizations may be derived that can be used later on larger samples of cases. Thematic
comparisons can be combined with identifying causal regularities that are limited to
specific locations and time periods. These approaches are neither mutually exclusive, nor
as clear cut regarding generalization as it is often presumed. Rather than a steady developmental process from single case studies and thick descriptions towards variable oriented
studies and hypothesis testing on large samples by means of statistical techniques, actual
developments are rather characterized by parallel uses and increasing sophistication of the
whole range of existing approaches, and were one also finds examples of mixed method
approaches. Such approaches may be particularly useful to students of change processes if
one wants to clarify the relationship between structural variables, actor motives, process
mechanism, and outcomes of change processes. The latter is not common, but the TRUE
project may serve as an example The project combined a survey of university leaders and
managers in 26 European universities about their perception of and attitudes toward
governance structures and practices with in-depth case studies of decision processes in
eight universities (within the same sample) in order to understand better the processes
through which change is produced (Bleiklie and Michelsen 2013).2 Another topic which
lends itself to mixed methods is those cases where one wants to study the relationship
between policy processes and how policies are perceived and implemented in universities.
While the number of persons deeply involved at the policy level often is so small that only
personal interviews make sense, the university level is best covered by means of survey
techniques, provided one wants to give a representative picture of a system. In both these
cases the combination of methods canvases a broader set of independent variables that
makes it possible to explain policy outcomes better.
Secondly both development over time and widening the world under investigation raise
the question of the meaning of major concepts used in social science research. In his
seminal article ‘‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’’, Giovanni Sartori wrote
2
See the paper by Seeber et al. (2012).
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that ‘‘…the wider the world under investigation, the more we need tools that are able to
travel’’ (Sartori 1970: 1034). Sartori argued that conceptual definition and clarification is as
important as questions of measurement and quantification in comparative research. He
pointed out that when researchers increase the number of units under study in order to
generalize and arrive at testable hypotheses about causal relationships, they tend to follow
the line of least resistance in conceptual terms by broadening the meaning of the conceptual tools. This, however, is likely to create conceptual issues and validity problems
caused by what Sartori called ‘conceptual stretching’—i.e. extending the range of application of a concept with vague, amorphous, and un-delimited conceptualizations as the
outcome.
I shall not present this argument in further detail, but use it as a starting point for
commenting on the importance of conceptual clarification in higher education comparative
research. This is one of the concerns raised by the editors of this special issue. They point
to the fact that the nation state is almost by definition used as a starting point for comparative higher education research, in spite of the fact that it is challenged by sub-national
governance, supra-national, and trans-national actors and processes. Although this does not
mean that the nation state is irrelevant as a major driver of change and reform in higher
education, it means that we need several types of conceptual clarification in order to
understand the nature of higher education governance. First, we need to look at different
types of state structures (e.g. federal versus unitary) and how authority over and responsibility for higher education is located at national and sub-national levels. Second, we need
to look at how different administrative traditions—whether they are identified as Humboldtian, Napoleonic, Public Interest, Welfare State traditions or simply traditions unique
to individual nation states—affect the nature of state responsibility over higher education.
Third, we need to look at how national, supra-national and trans-national structures and
processes interact (e.g. the many different ways in which nation states implement the
Bologna process). In the TRUE project, concerns about governance structures and the
varying role of the nation state is reflected by the fact that the relationship between state
structures, reform policies, and organizational change in universities is explored systematically, making possible a nuanced analysis of the impact of national policies and university characteristics on changes in governance and steering patterns (Bleiklie and
Michelsen 2013).3
In our study of the impact of national policies we first did a thorough conceptual work in
terms of identifying relevant characteristics of politico-administrative systems that might
bear on higher education reform (Bleiklie and Michelsen 2013). A more nuanced classification of four different administrative traditions made two findings possible. First, we
were able to go beyond the dualism between an Anglo Saxon tradition and a continental,
Humboldtian tradition and a rather vague notion about different policy traditions in
northern and southern Europe. Second, we were able to point out how the different
combinations of variables offer different opportunities for dynamic change processes or
alternatively produces obstacles against change in a systematic way. A previous example
of a comparative study of academic careers in France, Germany and the USA, is provided
by Musselin (2009) where she after conceptually clarifying the analytical focus of the
comparison—criteria of evaluation in academic hiring decisions—is able to give an
innovative and rich comparative analysis of the three countries and the different dynamics
of academic careers.
3
See note 2.
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Furthermore, studying universities as ‘organizations’ raises the issue of what an organization is. This is particularly relevant for the university sector as the study of universities
has made important contributions to organization theory, provided new models of organizations that provided fundamentally new insight into how decentralized organizations
with weakly developed leadership and hierarchical structures may function. In the comparative study of university organizations that TRUE undertakes, the goal is to do a
renewed study of university organizations in the light of the massive attempts university
reformers have made to change them and to see how the observations may lead to new
insight into how modern knowledge organizations are structured and operate today. In light
of these studies of 26 universities in 8 countries, it is demonstrated that universities indeed
are different from ‘the loosely coupled’, ‘organized anarchies’ of the 1960s and 1970s. The
concept of ‘penetrated hierarchies’ has been coined to demonstrate two important characteristics that have emerged.4 One is the general tendency that universities have become
more hierarchical and centralized. The second is the development of new horizontal
relationships, both with respect to how public universities are steered and regulated by the
nation state, but also to how academics participate and make crucial decisions as members
of funding bodies, evaluation panels and on editorial boards that have impact on university
budgets, strategies and academic careers. Memberships on such bodies are often based on
research reputation and network connections that in turn lend authority to these bodies
when they make decisions and recommendations that penetrate the hierarchical decision
structures of individual universities. The comparative approach is important in order to
demonstrate not just that the reconceptualization of universities as organizations is relevant, but also how the different conditions generated by national specificities and organizational peculiarities affect the extent and form in which the changes have taken place.
Conclusion
The major reasons for comparative research today are thus two: The enhanced number of
units one studies makes it easier to generalize and to avoid being trapped by local prejudice
that tends to dominate specific locations. As the field of higher education research grows
and available research based knowledge about an increasing number of countries is
available, it makes sense to move in the direction of more rigorous systematic comparisons. The use of concepts—the application of which often has to be extended to new
locations—may challenge established conceptual understanding and spur theoretical
development in ways that otherwise would not have taken place. Progress in comparative
research is, therefore, not primarily a question of quantification, but of conceptualization of
what one compares, and development of concepts that can travel well.
Acknowledgments The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for useful comments.
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