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Deals with the fundamental question of what should be the unit of analysis in trade theory, which has been driven in part by difficulty in determining the analytical status of the EU; is intra‐EU trade international or domestic trade? Presents models of the economic determinants of the number of nations (Sect. 1) and the optimum size of nations (Sect. 3). Also addresses the issues of which partners will be selected for RTAs (Sect. 2) and of sub‐regional zones that cover regions of more than one country but not the entire national economies (Sect. 4), as well as other geographical issues.

Chapter 6 elaborates how studies of unsettled polities have implications for the identity and boundaries of political science. The discipline has been portrayed as a master discipline and also a carrefour, a meeting place for a variety of disciplines. Arguably, it cannot rely on other disciplines, organization theory included, to provide theoretical frameworks for making sense of political organization. It has to develop its own theoretical foundations, based on key properties of politics, governing, and public administration as specific organized activities. The challenge for institutionalists is to specify the areas of applicability for an institutional approach. Key questions are: under what conditions is it likely that ‘institution’ will work fruitfully as the unit of analysis and have significant explanatory power compared to competing units of analysis? What are important political institutions and under what circumstances is governing through institution building and polity formation likely to be an important democratic process?

Chapter 11 concludes the discussion of Manifesto Project procedures by showing how they fit into the general field of textual content analysis. In contrast to most approaches MARPOR aims at summarizing and reporting the whole contents of the documents it is concerned with. This accounts for the very wide use of the estimates for a variety of theoretical and other purposes. The fundamental procedure of counting (quasi-)sentences into policy categories and calculating the relative emphases each document produces a descriptive summary. This contrasts with a positional on confrontational approach which assigns each statement a ‘pro’ or ‘con’ value. Doing so leads to an interpretation rather than a straight description of the document, which introduces more subjectivity into the estimates and narrows their scope. Examples of the flexibility of the estimates e.g. in terms of internal party policy change, are given as a way of tying down general points.

This essay is an antipodean reflection on the unique contribution provided by this collection on European perspectives on white collar crime. The structure is framed around identifying units of analysis; the challenges of comparative work; orientation towards the study of white-collar crime and the multiple facets to collaboration. Within this framing the essay highlights the need to attend to boundaries of concern relevant to a specific piece of research and linkages within those boundaries (for example between an activity and a place) in order to tease out how broader context shapes, and is shaped by, the dynamics at the centre of the study. This attention can allow different research projects to learn from their similarities and differences in effective ways. The multiple benefits in collaboration also require careful attentions: shared aims may be important to collaboration, but are not essential. Further, a prioritisation of shared goals can gloss over the way they can be shaped to in particular ways and towards specific ends that may undermine the position and scholarship of some. There are other approaches, such as agonistic collaboration, can provide mutual benefit to collaborative scholarship without the need for tight agreement over aims.

This final chapter summarizes the major propositions and findings of the book. It reviews the units and strategies of analysis employed throughout the empirical chapters (non-ethnic units; disentangling ethnic from non-ethnic processes); recapitulates that the boundary making approach assumes a principally open outcome of group formation processes, including the emergence of non-ethnic and non-racialized forms of categorization and association; and it reviews the major hypotheses explored empirically: that inequality along ethnic lines leads to social closure and cultural difference; that a consensus on the location and meaning of boundaries enhances their politicization and social closure along these divides. The chapter concludes by pointing out future areas of research: to understand long-term boundary dynamics from a truly comparative point of view; to investigate how inequality along ethnic lines emerges and disappears; and how precisely ethnic and other forms of boundary making relate to each other beyond the acknowledgment of their co-existence, as in the “intersectionality” approach.

Chapter 11 extends issues of aggregation and lumpiness to legal doctrines that embed discontinuities or cliff effects. It begins with the observation that law often generates all-or-nothing outcomes. For example, judicial decisions are often binary in nature (one party wins entirely and the other loses entirely). Much turns, then, on the “thresholding” processes that the law uses to generate these on-off results. Questions of aggregation play a decisive role: Should a lapse of attention that causes an accident be viewed in isolation, or as part of a larger pattern of behavior? Should machines with known error rates be evaluated based on their aggregate performances? When should allegations of misconduct be stored in "information escrows" for future corroboration? "Unit of analysis” questions also arise in areas of law that require individuation (for purposes of counting up instances of an occurrence or behavior) or denominator definition (defining the base against which to assess actions). The “denominator problem” in regulatory takings analysis, which requires courts to assess the burden that the government has placed on an owner, is a well-known example. Similarly structured problems surface in other areas, including constitutional law, intellectual property, and antitrust.

The book concludes with takeaways for policymakers, lawyers, academics, and anyone else who is interested in understanding and leveraging the lessons of lumpiness. Lessons include recognizing discontinuities and nonlinearities in the structure of problems, questioning the unit of analysis, managing menus, seeing the strategic possibilities in bundling and segmentation, rethinking standardization of options, comparing competing complementarities, and identifying the ways in which different aggregation and division problems interact. Issues of lumpiness and divisibility touch nearly every corner of human experience, offering countless opportunities for configuration entrepreneurship.

The chapter reviews the development of cultural theory in social and cultural anthropology. A theory of culture is offered that is derived from a synthesis of the individual-collective/mental-behavioral/macro-micro/thin-thick divisions discussed in the overview and that have confounded cultural researchers. The theory of culture proposed also considers cultural models as the unit of and for the analysis of culture.

After a measurement methodology has been chosen, the design of poverty measures—whether unidimensional or multidimensional—require a series of normative choices. These choices relate to the space of the measure, its purpose, unit of identification and analysis, dimensions, indicators, deprivation cutoffs, weights, and poverty line. The normative contribution is not simply philosophical; it has a practical aim: to motivate action. This entails reasoned assessment of multiple considerations including feasibility, technical and statistical strength, ease of communication, and legitimacy. This chapter describes each of these normative choices in the context of multidimensional poverty measurement design. It clarifies the implications of each choice, illustrates interconnections between them, and outlines alternative ways that these choices might be understood, made, and justified.

This section covers the first steps of a the Machine Learning Life Cycle Model; how to specify a business problem, acquire subject matter expertise, define prediction target, define unit of analysis, identify success criteria, evaluate risks, and finally, decide whether to continue a project. Focus is on who will use the model, whether management is supportive, whether the drivers of the model can be visualized, and how much value a model can produce.

This chapter offers a brief discussion of a draft paper by Daniel Ortiz, focusing on whether individuals or communities should be the unit of political and social analysis. It is hazardous to discuss this in terms of individual ‘sovereignty’. Better analyses of the relation between individual and group are available, and talk of sovereignty systematically obscures the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’.Nor is the category of ‘contradiction’ very appropriate for considering, even clearly normatively, that relation. Some observations are offered about Duncan Kennedy, Dworkin, Richard Rorty, and Whitman's pantheism and apparent optimism about reason and spirit.

This chapter develops in detail the methodological research strategy followed in the study. It describes the connection between concepts and analysis. Most of the evidence used for assessing party vibrancy in Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica came from in-depth interviews with party leaders and an extensive reading of relevant primary and secondary sources on these parties’ and countries’ political and organizational histories. The chapter discusses the basic procedures used in the interview research and the relationship between unit of observation and unit of analysis. The chapter discusses in detail how each of the causal factors was assessed using the interviews, and how their presence or absence was determined, based on the qualitative evidence collected.

Measurement of health inequalities unfair health inequalities or health inequities to be more precise is central to any research and policy efforts to address health inequalities. Health inequality information presented before us is of value only if we measure health inequalities reflecting our moral considerations and in a way useful for policy-making. Among the many important issues related to the measurement of health inequalities, the choice of group or individual inequalities is fundamental. Should we measure and compare the average health of groups, such as the poor vs. the rich (group inequality), or the health of each individual in the population (individual inequality)? In this chapter I clarify choices that underlie these two approaches. I argue for the development of an alternative, general analytical approach, a summary measure of health inequalities with the following three features: (1) packaging offering three types of policy-relevant information (overall health inequality, overall health inequity, and bivariate health inequities) at once, (2) transparency clearly separate descriptive (inequality) and normative (inequity) steps, and (3) flexibility enabling users to choose and incorporate different definitions of health inequity. I recommend future research agenda for such a summary measure include considerations for policy application and exploration of values, what people think about health inequalities.

Part I covers three conceptual and methodological changes necessary to understanding face-to-face dialogue. Chapter Two describes a change of focus from individuals to interactions: The minimum unit of analysis is face-to-face dialogue itself. Reductionism does not require the smallest possible unit (e.g., an individual) but rather the smallest unit that still preserves the phenomenon of interest. Two individuals’ mental processes or characteristics are not their face-to-face dialogue; the focus must be on what happens between (not within) individuals. Because perception is a constructive process, observers can only see what they have learned to see, which is often individuals. It is therefore necessary to develop an alternative focus that facilitates seeing reciprocity in interaction. Each of the potentially relevant scholarly disciplines (e.g., linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociology, conversation analysis, social psychology, communication research) provides both barriers and paths to seeing and studying face-to-face dialogue, so interdisciplinary research is often advantageous.

A “Mendelian” executive is proposed as an image of strategy-making that lies intermediate between the grand strategist suggested by rational choice approaches and a Darwinian process of random variation and market-based differential selection. The Mendelian executive is capable of intentional design efforts in order to explore possible adjacent strategic spaces. Furthermore, the argument developed here highlights the role of intentionality with respect to selection processes within the organization, and the culling and amplification of strategic initiatives. The firm is viewed as operating an “artificial selection” environment in contrast to selection as the direct consequence of the outcome of competitive processes. Examining the nature of the processes generating these experimental variants and the bases of internal selection, and how these selection criteria may themselves change, is argued to be central to the formation of strategy in dynamic environments.