ABSTRACT
Expansion of property spaces makes is possible to ‘discover missed combinations and
suppressed assumptions, and to identify important cases’ (Elman 2005: 294).Oneway
of doing this is to take the existing dimensions in the frame of the property space as a
point of departure, and try to identify more properties for one or more of them,
thereby expanding thematrix. Anotherway is to search formore dimensions and thus
going into the field that the property space covers inmore detail. In cases inwhichwe
are playing about with two or more property spaces, we can test the possibility of
combining them into a single one, thereby expanding each one of them. In social
science,we are usually studying phenomena that change; to take this into account, we
need ways of expressing processes, and in connection with property spaces, this is
often done by inserting arrows, symbolising directions of changes. A final possibility
of expanding property spaces is to transform dimensions or properties into scales,
measuring degrees of intensity, range, scope and so on. We will discuss examples of
all these ways of expanding property spaces in order to theorize as well as theoretical
risks connected to them, but we will start by going back to the classics of property
space construction.
