Drawing Out Definitions

Defining social scientific concepts can contribute to scholarly advancement in manyways. Definitions, which we define as a description of a word or phrase using terms forwhich the meaning is well known in the community, can contribute to inclusive discussionby welcoming outsiders, mitigate misunderstandings among insiders, encourage theoriststo commit to the (sometimes surprising) entailments of their theories, and provide startingpoints and new pathways for future research. A necessary feature of definitions is“boundaries” – to define is to bound. But, it is precisely in boundaries that definitions getus into problems: the meanings of words are inherently fuzzy and changing;exceptionless definitions are elusive. We elaborate a process of “definition work” whichis inherently “community work.” The process recognizes that meaning is a dynamic andfuzzy community property and uses theory visualizations – specifically, property spaces,schematic networks, and dynamic spanning trees – as definition tools to explore thisfuzziness, while also communicating definitions along with their indeterminacy.