What Do You Mean By That? In Search of Conceptual Consistency

"One of the themes for the 10th Biennial Conference of the IASCP calls for methodological innovation and introspection under the heading 'Contemporary Analytical Tools and Theoretical Questions.' The theme encourages the use of methods that are relatively new to the study of common property (e.g., game theory) or have been developed relatively recently (e.g., qualitative comparative analysis based on Boolean algebra). It also promotes the use of multiple methods as a way of triangulating findings. Greater methodological innovation and sophistication offers the potential for considerable analytical progress. Yet methodological innovation can improve analytical leverage only if there is some degree of agreement on concepts. Thus, the full version of this theme encourages 'theoretical syntheses of past work to clarify conceptual issues.' We need conceptual consistency to communicate and make sense of our findings. At the same time, the very existence of conceptual inconsistency can be helpful, in that it prompts the probing of assumptions and meanings associated with the search for conceptual consistency."