Comparative Organizational Analysis across Multiple Levels: a Set-theoretic Approach

As social structures, organizations are inherently multilevel, and levels issues pervade organizational analysis. The comparative study of organizations therefore implies comparisons across both units and levels of analysis. Yet, the field of comparative study has mostly developed independently from theories focusing on understanding organizational phenomena at multiple levels (e.g., Rousseau, 1985). To some extent, this separation reflects methodological differences; many comparative studies have followed a case study approach, whereas studies focusing on multiple-level theories have largely followed a variable-based approach. However, the separation comes with considerable costs. In particular, the lack of a clear framework for understanding cross-level configurations presents a challenge for a comparative approach that aims to understand differences in observations of a given phenomenon across two or more levels. In this chapter, we aim to offer such a framework for multilevel comparisons by drawing on the Comparative Method and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as developed by Ragin (1987, 2000, 2008). Our goal is to