There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century social sciences to change urban conditions and populations, and appears today in international school assessments and professional education.…

Explanatory typologies have recently experienced a renaissance as a research strategy for constructing and assessing causal explanations. However, both the new methodological works on explanatory typologies and the way such typologies have been used in practice have been affected by two shortcomings. First, no elaborate procedures for assessing…

The use of controlled comparisons pervades comparative historical analysis. Heated debates have surrounded the methodological purchase of such comparisons. However, the quality and validity of the conceptual building blocks on which the comparisons are based have largely been ignored. This article discusses a particular problem pertaining to these…

This article compares the welfare services for adults with an intellectual disability in three European countries: England, Norway and Sweden. The purpose of the comparison is to develop an understanding of the welfare state and institutional contexts of the country-specific policies and to develop a critical analysis through a comparative method…

Since 1933 marked the end of autonomous and democratic women's associations, historiography tends to neglect the study of feminist voices under National-Socialism. This paper looks at one of "völkisch" feminist movement's leaders, writer and journalist Sophie Rogge-Börner (1878-1955), whose claims for gender equality were rooted in…

When it comes to analyzing problems of mobility, most studies of the post-Soviet era have cited random and unconnected data with respect to the Soviet era, on the principle of comparing "the old" and "the new." The authors have deemed it possible (although based on material that is not fully comparable) to examine the late…

In Austria, activities for teaching about and remembering the Holocaust have concentrated mainly on National Socialism and its atrocities. Austria's history of political anti-Semitism goes back to the 19th century, however, and has been widely and publicly acknowledged. It has always been linked to nationalistic tendencies that are still present…