One of the common statements about the limitations of QCA, from the moment it was launched by Charles Ragin (1987), is that it was a ‘static’ method. This was probably true to the extent that QCA as a technique (the analytic, software-run part of QCA) was not built with an explicit integration of the time dimension. Yet probably the early generations of QCA scholars did manage to bring in the time dimension both ‘upstream’ (casing, model-building) and ‘downstream’ (interpretation) of QCA as a technique. More than two decades later, the field has enriched considerably, and QCA both as a set of techniques (csQCA, mvQCA, fsQCA) with the attached software (TOSMANA, FSQCA, as well as R and STATA) and as a research approach and set-theoretic methodology (Ragin 2008; Schneider & Wagemann 2012 forthcoming). In the process, numerous strategies have been (and are currently being) developed to integrate time more fully time into QCA. This paper pursues two goals. On the one hand, it attempts to provide a first comprehensive mapping of these efforts, along at least three dimensions: (a) the core time-related concept being aimed at (temporal sequence v/s causal sequence v/s process v/s juncture v/s feedback loop, …), (b) the ‘soft’ (more case-oriented and smaller-N) versus ‘hard’ (more variable-oriented and larger-N) exploitation of QCA, and (c) the stage of the QCA protocol on which the main focus is laid (upstream v/s the ‘analytic moment’ itself v/s downstream). On the other hand, based on this typology, it discusses the potential and limitations of each type or ‘family’ of strategies. In conclusion, it discusses the extent to which ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ strategies might prove cumulative (or not?) in the future development and exploitation of QCA.
