On the eve of the ?cultural revolution? that is associated with the year 1968, nine authors submitted their chapters on Germany to Henry Kissin ger. He had organized meetings at Harvard, the final outcome of which would be an anthology on the Federal Republic. At the time of the mee tings, Henry Kissinger had been a quiet colleague within the Institute for International Affairs, living down a controversial reputation as an adviser to the late John F. Kennedy. He had been a proponent of the notion of a limited nuclear war, and this was at that time and for a long time to come not popular in intellectual circles. But Henry Kissinger was on his way back as part of the entourage of the then presidential-hopeful Rockefeller. As the manuscripts were acquiring a thin coat of dust, Henry Kissinger advanced to the position of a special adviser on foreign policy and defense to Richard Nixon?the first step on his way to historical fame as the ?Met ternich? of the United States, and the architect of the Camp Davies agree ments. The anthology was never published. It would have indeed been inop portune if not outright embarassing had Henry Kissinger's name been associated with some of the views in the anthology. The public might have taken the editorship of a now active politician as a stamp of approval for all that the two covers of the book were to include. Thus, Alfred Grosser in his chapter ?The Paradox of Foreign Policy? credited Marxism with fa cilitating Western Germany's European identification. Karl Kaiser in ?Germany at the Crossroads Problems of a Policy on Reunification? advocated a stance that was later the core of Willy Brandt's ?Neue Ost politik?. Understandably as it may have been, the burial of the manus cripts by tacit neglect was nevertheless a pity. I still consider Klaus Ep stein's ?The Cultural Situation?, using the broad understanding of Culture that we associate with the term ?Kulturleben?, the best treatment of the topic?and one in which the political significance of developments there was characterized. And Wolfgang F. Stolper's and Karl W. Roskamp's ana lysis of economic policy in post-war Western Germany convincingly de monstrated the gap between a coherent theory on Sundays and a pragmatic practice during workdays.

This article (first published in 1968) deals with the following problems of cross-cultural research: change in the identification of problem areas; question meaning and problems of verbal communication; equivalence of in dicators; the respondent as a unit in design and analysis; the usage of ?culture? in cross-cultural surveys; adminstrative and diplomatic problems; and some social effects of com parative social research. 1. Progress as a new problem identification A review of publications based on cross-cultural surveys makes it at first ap pear doubtful that there has been definite progress in research methodology and practice.1 Published research certainly does not show a neat pattern of conti nuous ascent to ever higher levels of methodological sophistication. However, I hope to show that nevertheless such progress exists in a specific although somewhat frustrating way. In surveying surveys, one can point to some technological innovations. I think, however, that the major progress has been to increase the awareness of the real sources of difficulties. In this way, the use of surveys in cross-cultural comparisons influences our understanding of research techniques and metho dology in general. This is then my main theme: progress as changes in the awareness of problem areas, as the spreading realization that an earlier identi fication of the sources of difficulties was much too simple. Up to this day, the difficulties encountered in cross-cultural comparisons tend to be perceived as problems of research technology. However, it is now increasingly realized that the main problems are methodological in the more limited sense of this term. * Originally published in: Stein Rokkan, ed., Comparative Research across Cultures and Nations, Paris/The Hague: ISSC/Mouton 1968, pp. 176-209. We are grateful to the first editors for kindly permitting us to republish this article. 1 Compare S. Rokkan, S. Verba, J. Viet and E. Almasy, Comparative Survey Analysis (Paris, Mouton, 1968).

Was als „sozialer Wandel“ erklärt werden soll, hat sich im Verlauf von etwa zweihundert Jahren fortwährend verändert. Vom Entstehen und Vergehen von Hochkulturen, vom Wandel bei schriftlosen Gruppierungen, der Identifizierung vorgeblich evolutorischer Reihen bis hin zu vermeintlichen Entwicklungsgesetzen der Industriegesellschaften: nicht nur die Theorien änderten sich, sondern auch der Gegenstand, der zu erklären war. Da kann es nicht „die“ Theorie des sozialen Wandels geben.

Post-Theorien - Sozialer Wandel in Teilbereichen - Die Mesoebene der Gesellschaft im Prozess des Wandels - Der Umbruch im Osten als unverstandenes Lehrstuck - Sozialer Wandel unter den Bedingungen der Modernitat - Welche Aussagen uber Wandel sind in den Sozialwissenschaften moglich?

Mitten in eine Stimmung des „anything goes“ hinein ereignete sich einer der großen Umbrüche der Geschichte: die Implosion des Ostblocks. Hier braucht nicht erläutert zu werden, dass die Sozialwissenschaften von diesem Ereignis weitgehend überrascht wurden. Die Fähigkeit zur Prognose, die zur Frühzeit des Faches in der amerikanischen Soziologie als das entscheidende Kriterium behauptet wurde, ist für Teilbereiche von Sozialsystemen und für kürzere Zeiträume durchaus gegeben, aber für Gesellschaften insgesamt wenig entwickelt. Das kann bei einem so komplexen Erklärungsgegenstand wie moderne Sozialsysteme mit intern widersprüchlichen Tendenzen auch nicht verwundern. Immerhin hatten Sozialwissenschaftler durchaus darauf verwiesen, dass die kommunistischen Systeme seit etwa dem Beginn der achtziger Jahren immer mehr an Steuerungsfähigkeit von Seiten der politischen Führung verloren hatten und die ganze Entwicklungsrichtung in eine Sackgasse führte (siehe beispielsweise Scheuch 1991b). Für diese Erkenntnis brauchte aber nicht unbedingt die Soziologie bemüht zu werden.