Repertoires of Comparison: How Common Comparisons Shape Social and Political Life

Comparison is ubiquitous in social life, yet some comparisons are far more common, institutionalized, and influential than others. Building on work in cultural sociology, we call these repertoires of comparison (RoCs). Institutionalized across one or more social fields, RoCs are employed at different levels of society (local, national, global) and across myriad social contexts (sports clubs, city offices, the media). For example, horrific events are frequently compared to the paradigmatic case of 9/11 to assess their gravity, while Greenwich Village long served as a model neighborhood for municipal policymakers. Our aim in this article is to put RoCs on the sociological map. Although such common comparisons have been indirectly analyzed in scholarship on repertoires, symbolic boundaries, orders of worth, and commensuration, we argue that conceptualizing them as a distinct phenomenon is analytically useful. RoCs matter because they: (a) encode and express moral judgments; (b) shape our frames of reference; (c) guide aspirations and aversions; and (d) inform symbolic boundary drawing. We then discuss how RoCs emerge, become contested, and which social factors contribute to their transformation or replacement. We show how RoCs are a fundamental dimension of social and political life and illustrate how this concept can be used to analyze understudied aspects of research on culture and politics.