Theme‐Driven Social Analysis: Three Approaches

In this article, I present three strategies for building cultural and historical analyses that are driven by broadly relevant social themes rather than particular cases. Each of these strategies represents a different way to approach “concept‐driven sociology,” focusing the researcher on robust and deep‐seated social and cultural forces that underly and shape various actions, events, and experiences occurring at different times and places. Such a thematic analysis requires bringing together multiple cases that illustrate a common social phenomenon despite their substantive differences, while also highlighting those differences and interpreting each case to reinforce the analysis of the general theme at hand. After discussing the relevance of form, process, and culture to thematic analysis, I draw on previous and ongoing research to outline three strategies: (1) formal analytic abstraction, (2) the configuration of analytic subtypes from a master theme, and (3) transcendent historical analysis. While thematic analysis involves illustrating how several otherwise different cases cohere around a common theme, and thus highlighting important similarities among them, I conclude by discussing why we must also take deep analytic dives into the cases we study in order to enhance our understanding of the theme that ties them together.