方法对比

	Typological Theory	类型学分析
领域	Political Science	田野方法
方法族	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
起源年份	2005	Late 19th century (Montelius ~1885); extended broadly through 20th century
提出者	Alexander L. George & Andrew Bennett; Colin Elman	Oscar Montelius (seriation/typology in archaeology); formalized across disciplines through 19th–20th c. comparative humanities
类型	Configurational theory-building method for case studies	Classificatory / interpretive method
开创性文献	George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262572224	McKern, W. C. (1939). The Midwestern Taxonomic Method as an aid to archaeological culture study. American Antiquity, 4(4), 301–313.
别名	Typological theorizing, Explanatory typologies, Typological theory building, Configurational typologies	typology construction, artifact typology, type analysis, classificatory typology
相关	4	6
摘要	Typological theory is a configurational approach to theory building in which the researcher specifies types — distinct combinations of the values of explanatory variables — and develops contingent generalizations about the outcomes associated with each combination. Codified by Alexander George and Andrew Bennett and refined by Colin Elman's explanatory typologies, it organizes cases into the cells of a property space defined by the interaction of variables, using case studies to populate and refine the types. It embraces causal complexity by treating combinations, not isolated variables, as the units of explanation.	Typological analysis is a systematic method for grouping objects, texts, legal categories, or social phenomena into defined types based on shared attributes. Originating in archaeology and linguistics, it is now widely applied across the humanities and social sciences to impose analytical order on diverse corpora, trace historical change, and enable meaningful comparison across cases or cultures.