Terminological drift signals an unstable concept and unsettled underlying continuum

Evidence

After considering the nature of the positive and negative poles one needs to be clear about the substantive character of the continuum linking the two. Confusion on this point can lead to serious problems down the road. A good example of how this can be problematic is the concept of an (enduring) rivalry (see Diehl and Goertz 2000 and Thompson 2001 for the two most prominent views on the concept of rivalry). The literature on enduring rivalries started in the early 1990s from a concern about the positive pole, long-lasting conflicts like U.S.- USSR, India-Pakistan, France-Germany, and the like. Indicating instability in the concept and the underlying continuum was that different terms were being used. For example, the literature started with “enduring rivalry”; Goertz and Diehl (2000) when talking about the concept preferred “rivalry”4; Thompson (1995) used the term “principal rivalries”; Thompson (2001) adopted the term “strategic rivalries.” — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 223

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: readers can diagnose a field’s conceptual instability by tracking how many competing labels its core term accumulates. The enduring-rivalry debate is a clean worked example.
• XREF: Parallels the “Islamophobia resists fixed definition due to conceptual stretching” note — both treat terminological proliferation as a diagnostic of conceptual trouble.