Configurational thinking and its respective methodological toolkit has experienced a steep increase in scholarly attention over the last decade. But the methodological family is far from being uniform as a cursory glance into existing scholarship reveals. Here, scholars apply the term ‘configurational’ to different sets of methods from varying traditions (quantitative and qualitative), with different analytic focuses (cross-case or within-case), or linked to specific approaches (set-theory, Boolean approaches). The confusion gets even bigger when we look at the level of defining characteristics of configurational methods where different approaches stress different components or fill the same ones with different meanings.
The Paper therefore takes a step back aiming at a first systematic mapping of methods which have configurational characteristics in common and therefore share a certain family resemblance. The paper strives to achieve a comprehensive mapping via inductive-deductive typological reasoning, which is itself configurative, a) delineating configurative from non-configurative methods, b) differentiating within the family of configurational methods, and c) acknowledging within-methods variations.
