Parties and issues in conflict

Scientific concepts should probably be viewed as expendable resources. They arise, serve their purpose, decline, and pass off the stage. If they overstay their usefulness, they may come to inhibit or impede, rather than stimulate or facilitate, creative thinking and research. The concept of conflict may fall into this category of outmoded concepts; it may have outlived its usefulness. It has no clear-cut referent, being emotion-fraught, value-laden, fuzzy, and equivocal. It confuses analysis.2 We might sharpen our thinking in the behavioral sciences if we discarded it entirely and replaced it with more precise, meaningful, and neutral concepts.8