Mobilization and counter-mobilization processes: From the "red years" (1919-20) to the "black years" (1921-22) in Italy - A new methodological approach to the study of narrative data

Theory and Society

Volumn 26, Issue 2-3, 1997, Pages 275-304

  Franzosi, Roberto ^a  

^a TRINITY COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21744456341     PISSN: 03042421     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1006888810997     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. R. W. Fogel, "The Limits of Quantitative Methods in History,"The American Historical Review 80 (1975): 329-350, 345.
2. P. Spriano, L'occupazione delle fabbriche (Turin: Einaudi, 1964).
3. G. Maione, Biennio Rosso, Autonomia e spontaneitàoperaia nel 1910-1920 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975).
4. The word narrative, of course, conjures up images in the minds of historians of opposed and entrenched scholarly camps, of academic divisions between those who view narrative as the proper way to study history and those who believe that the only way to turn history into a science is by abandoning narrative (after all, a tool of storytelling) and adopting instead formal mathematical/statistical models (see the significant title of Fogel and Elton's book, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
5. That I should propose to use narrative for quantitative purposes ("to go from words to numbers," as I have put it) may end making no one happy or, worse yet, may give the quantitative scholars the feeling of victory, as they manage to turn their opponents' main tool into their own tool; far from me the idea of a "scientific" approach to history devoid of narrative and rhetoric and that of narrative as the exclusive world of storytelling (I take up these issues in two book manuscripts I am currently working on: R. Franzosi, A Trilogy of Rhetoric: The Rhetorical Foundations of Social Science Quantitative Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
6. forthcoming; R. Franzosi,From Words to Numbers: Narrative as Data, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
7. forthcoming; R. Franzosi, "Narrative Analysis," in J. Hagan, editor, Annual Review of Sociology 23, forthcoming.
8. For a review, see R. Franzosi, "The Press as a Source of Socio-Historical Data: Issues in the Methodology of Data Collection from Newspapers,"Historical Methods 20 (1987): 5-16;
9. for another recent example, see S. Tarrow,Democracy and Disorder. Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965-1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).