Claude Rubinson
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology, University of Arizona

Dissertation

Research Interests

• Globalization and comparative political-economy
• Art, technology, and culture
• Social stratification
• Research methodology

Publications

• Ragin, Charles C. and Claude Rubinson. Forthcoming. "Comparative Methods." Encyclopedia of Political Science, edited by Bertrand Badie, Dirk Berg-Schlosser, and Leonardo Morlino. London: Sage.
• Franzosi, Roberto and Claude Rubinson. 2009. "Question and Answer (How do you go from QNA to QCA?)" Pp. 137-140 in Quantitative Narrative Analysis by Roberto Franzosi. London: Sage.
• Ragin, Charles C. and Claude Rubinson. 2009. "The Distinctiveness of Comparative Research." The SAGE Handbook of Comparative Politics, edited by Todd Landman and Neil Robinson. London: Sage.
• Rubinson, Claude. 2007. "Nulls, Three-Valued Logic, and Ambiguity in SQL: Critiquing Date's Critique." SIGMOD Record 36(4):13–17.
• Rubinson, Claude and Charles C. Ragin. 2007. "New Methods for Comparative Research?" Capitalisms Compared (Comparative Social Research, volume 24), edited by Lars Mjøset and Tommy H. Clausen. Oxford: Elsevier.

Biography

Claude Rubinson's interests include globalization and comparative political-economy; art, technology, and culture; social stratification; and research methodology. He uses case-oriented, comparative research methods to study the relationship between political-economic decline and cultural expression.

His research program encompasses three projects. The first is the study of the late-19th/early-20th century Arts and Crafts movement that arose with the decline of British hegemony and is the subject of his dissertation. In his dissertation, Claude examines the relationship between production and ideology within Arts and Crafts movement. His analysis of the movement is multilayered: Beginning with an examination of the aesthetics of the craft objects themselves, Claude seeks to explain artistic variation within the movement by examining how political and economic changes at the regional, national, and international levels affected local modes of production ("art worlds"). Claude's second project is the study of the present-day Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement that arose with the decline of American hegemony. Here, he is currently studying the construction and maintenance of niche boundaries among Linux-based operating systems. Applying techniques from social network analysis, Claude finds that Linux organizations exhibit greater levels of specialization than would be expected given the high volatility of the organizational environment. Claude's third project is the advancement of set-theoretic research methodology. He has published numerous papers on the subject, including three on the comparative method with Charles Ragin. With Roberto Franzosi, he is exploring the complementary nature of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Claude published a solo-authored paper on set-theoretic logic and logical ambiguity in the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIGMOD Record, with a second paper currently under review.

In 2008, Claude released a fuzzy-set QCA module for the R statistical system that implements the techniques described in Ragin's (2008) Redesigning Social Inquiry. In 2009, his "Political-Economic versus Cultural Accounts of Changing Artistic Style" won the Raymond V. Bowers Outstanding Graduate Student Paper award. Claude's teaching interests include Culture, Introductory Sociology, Research Methods, Social Stratification, Theory, and World-Systems. While at the University of Arizona, he has taught Introduction to Sociology (SOC101), Culture and Society (SOC419) and Social Inequality (SOC450). For the 2008–2009 school year, Claude organized a series of monthly workshops on qualitative research methods.