The International QCA Paper Development Workshop 2018 has been announced and has released a call for abstracts. The workshop provides a unique opportunity to meet with internationally renowned QCA scholars, get feedback on your research project, and learn about the latest methodological developments in QCA. See https://compasss.org/h/intlqca/upcoming-workshops/pdw/ for details.

New book: The Evaluation of Complex Infrastructure Projects: A Guide to Qualitative Comparative Analysis by Lasse Gerrits (University of Bamberg) and Stefan Verweij (University of Groningen).

Benoît Rihoux and Charles Ragin’s Configurational Comparative Methods has been translated into Chinese. Publisher’s site.

New mailing list: We’ve created a new mailing list for COMPASSS-related announcements. If you’ve been receiving the COMPASSS newsletter, you have automatically been subscribed to the new mailing lists. This is a low-traffic mailing list for the newsletter and other occasional announcements of interest to the CCM community. You may subscribe to the mailing list by clicking on the “Mailing List” button at the top of the page.

For a project titled “ACCORds: Advancing Configurational Comparative Research Methods”, Alrik Thiem has been awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship, funded with 1.4 million Swiss Francs. This project aims to enhance the functionality of configurational methods such as QCA and CNA, to address broader theoretical and epistemological questions, and to develop corresponding software in order to make all advances publicly available to the scientific community. As part of ACCORds, Alrik Thiem is also welcoming suggestions from applied researchers to collaborate on empirical work in any area. More information can be found on Alrik Thiem’s website. We congratulate Alrik on this achievement!

Some reactions to and discussion of the statement regarding the rejection of manuscripts based on QCA solution type have been published by Michael Baugartner, Alrik Thiem, at Dimiter Toshkov’s blog (25 Aug 2017; 4 Sept 2017).

Lotfi Zadeh, the inventor of fuzzy sets, passed away on September 6 at the age of 96. UC Berkeley obituary. New York Times obituary. A retrospective. The classic paper.

The latest issue of Quality and Quantity is a special issue devoted to configurational comparative research methodologies.

It has come to the attention of COMPASSS that some anonymous peer reviewers have rejected empirical QCA manuscript submissions solely or primarily due to the choice of solution type presented. After discussion between the Management Team and Steering Committee, we have adopted the following statement reproving this practice: COMPASSS Statement on Rejecting Article Submissions because of QCA Solution Type.