Explaining social processes

"Built upon decades of experience at the frontiers of history and social science, Charles Tilly's newest book offers innovative methods and approaches applicable in a wide range of disciplines: politics, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and more. The book covers approaches to analysis ranging from interpersonal exchanges to world-historical changes - economic, political, and social. He shows how a thoroughgoing relational account of social processes, coupled with the careful identification of causal mechanisms, illuminates variation and change in the ways people live at the small scale and the large." Book cover

PART I: Introduction --- Chapter 1: Method and Explanation --- PART II: Concepts and Observations --- Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions in Social Analysis --- Chapter 3: Observations of Social Processes and Their Formal Representations --- Chapter 4: Even Catalogs as Theories --- Chapter 5: Iron City Blues --- Chapter 6: Why Read the Classics? --- PART III: Explanations and Comparisons --- Chapter 7: To Explain Political Processes --- Chapter 8: Means and Ends of Comparison in Macrosociology --- Chapter 9: Terror, Terrorism, and Terrorists --- Chapter 10: Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis --- PART IV: Historical Social Analysis --- Chapter 11: History and Sociological Imagining --- Chapter 12: Historical Analysis of Political Processes --- Chapter 13: What Good Is Urban History? --- Chapter 14: Anglo-American Social History Since 1945 --- Chapter 15: Three Visions of History and Theory --- PART V: Conclusion --- Chapter 16: Epilogue.