Ragin, Charles C.

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Ragin, Charles C.

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Texas at Austin, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1972; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ph.D., 1975.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Social Sciences Bldg., Rm. 400, Tucson, AZ 85721. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, sociologist, and educator. Northwestern University, associate professor, 1981-85, professor and chair, department of sociology, 1985-88, professor of sociology, 1988-2001; University of Oslo, Norway, professor, 1998-2003; University of Arizona, Tucson, professor of sociology, 2001—. Member of advisory board, Center for Social Research, University of Reading, 2001—. Member of advisory board, Consortium for Qualitative Research Methods, 2001—.

MEMBER:

Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, American Sociological Association (served on numerous committees), American Political Science Association, Social Science History Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Bar Foundation grant, 1983; National Science Foundation grant, 1991; Mellon Foundation Grant, 1995; Ford Foundation grant, 1996; Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA, 1987, 2000-01; Stein Rokkan Prize, International Social Science Council of UNESCO, 1989, for The Comparative Method; Searle Fund grant, 2000-03; Donald Campbell Methodological Innovator Award, Policy Studies Organization, 2001; National Science Foundation Grant, 2003.

WRITINGS:

The Comparative Method: Moving beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

(Editor, with Howard S. Becker) What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method, Pine Forge Press (Thousand Oaks, CA), 1994.

Fuzzy-Set Social Science, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2000.

Contributor to books, including Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, edited by Theda Skocpol, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1984; New Technology in Sociology: Practical Solutions in Research and Work, edited by Grant Blank, James L. McCartney, and Edward Brint, Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, NJ), 1989; Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods, edited by John Stanfield II and Rutledge Dennis, Sage Publications (New York, NY), 1993; The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State, edited by Thomas Janoski and Alexander Hicks, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994; Questioning Geopolitics: Political Projects in a Changing World System, edited by Georgi Derluguian and Scott Greet, Praeger (Westport, CT), 2000; and Necessary Conditions: Theory, Methodology, and Applications, edited by Gary Goertz and Harvey Starr, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, American Sociologist, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Sociological Perspectives, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Forces, International Review of Social History, Health Services Research, European Management Review, and Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change.

Referee for scholarly journals, including American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, TheoreticalPolitics, Social Forces, Social Science History, Sociological Focus, Sociology of Education, American Sociologist, National Science Foundation, Social Science Quarterly, Social Problems, and Sociological Methods and Research.

American Sociological Review, associate editor, 1981-84; American Journal of Sociology, consulting editor, 1984-86, 1992-94; Sociological Quarterly, advisory editor, 1985-87; Sociology for a New Century, series editor; Sociological Methods and Research, associate editor, 1995-98.

SIDELIGHTS:

Charles C. Ragin is a writer, sociologist, and professor who has been widely published in journals and books, writing on topics ranging from comparative methods in sociology, to qualitative and comparative research, to the uses of technology in social science. In Fuzzy-Set Social Science, Ragin adapts concepts and applications of fuzzy logic for use in mathematical analysis within the social sciences, particularly his specialty area of sociology. "Many scholars employ existing methods in useful ways, but few import new approaches from other fields. Charles Ragin does just that," observed Edgar Kiser, writing in the American Journal of Sociology. Ragin applies his methods to the study of complex causal structures of studies with midsized sample ranges, from five to twenty cases, and analyzes them using fuzzy logic.

Fuzzy logic is a part of set theory that applies a grade of membership to components of a set. Usually, membership in a set is true or false, null or full; such a set is considered to be crisp. In a set consisting of liberals, for example, a particular thing either is or is not a liberal. In fuzzy logic, however, sets can be non-crisp; a member of such a set could be a liberal, partially a liberal, entirely nonliberal, or any particular gradation in between. Its grade of membership in any particular set exists along a scale from 0 to 1, with crisp sets lying on each extreme end and fuzzy sets occupying points in between. Ragin explores the multiple applications of these concepts to numerical analysis in the social sciences, and pays particular attention to how fuzzy logic can be used in qualitative comparative analysis, a method he pioneered in the late 1980s.

"Few sociology books make as significant a contribution to both methodology and theory as this path-breaking incorporation of ideas from the mathematics of ‘fuzzy’ sets," stated J.I. Bakker in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology. Ragin's book is "ambitious and innovative and will thus be of interest to a wide range of methodologists and historical sociologists," Kiser remarked. "Altogether, this is a well-written, well-balanced presentation of provocative ideas that no social scientist should ignore," commented Bakker.