Coping with Conceptual Pluralism: Reflections on Concept Formation

Abstract

Concept formation is central to our scholarly enterprise, but different purposes, methods, and philosophies give rise to a welter of concepts without a “concept god” to arbitrate between them. We can manage this conceptual pluralism by better appreciating that concepts have messy histories that layer them with different meanings and anchor them to different images or discourses. By paying close attention to the entailments of concepts—their critical properties, dimensions and implications–we can do the boundary work necessary to distinguish concepts while acknowledging how they overlap. Entailments can also be used to think through the choice between whether variables should be continuous or dichotomous and highly elastic concepts can be dealt with by isolating a limited number of shared entailments and then developing a typology to distinguish divergent entailments. These ideas are grounded in an exploration of the meaning of important public administration concepts like collaboration and collaborative governance.

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