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In the late 1990’s Tilburg University’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences was in dire straits. The consequences were several rounds of reorganization and budget cuts. The department of social security studies was shut down and the sociological department was first decimated and then reconstructed. From the point of view of sociological research this development proved a blessing in disguise. From inside the faculty several high profile social security researchers, such as Ruud Muffels and Wim van Oorschot, were transferred to the sociology department just as specialists in the methodology of international comparative research, such as Loek Halman and Ruud Luijkx. From outside came Matthijs Kalmijn, a prolific researcher. The new constellation of the sociology department generated considerable benefits in terms of synergy in the field of comparative crossnational research. Several important books (for example, Ter Meulen, Arts and Muffels, 2001; Goul Andersen, Clasen, van Oorschot, Halvorsen, 2002; Arts, Hagenaars and Halman, 2003, Halman, Luijkx and van Zundert, 2005) and a great number of articles in international journals (for example, Kalmijn, 2002; Luijkx, Róbert and De Graaf, 2002; van Oorschot and Abrahamson, 2003; Muffels and Fouarge, 2004; van Oorschot, Arts and Halman, 2005; Halman and Draulans, 2006) were the