An Ideal type (n.) is a hypothetical construct intended to allow any particular case to be illuminated as a deviation from a general type. For example, individual bureaucratic organizations may not exactly match the elements in the ideal type of bureaucracy but the blunt, abstract instrument can help bring to light particular things.
The Ideal type (n.) is a methodological device concerned with making abstract or pure, mental models of social phenomenon (like capitalism, or democracy in China, or 'this-worldly ascetic protestantism'). Like any etymologist's model of a bug, an ideal type is an imaginative portrait, an iconic extreme which accentuates or exaggerates, stretching features to their logical essences to aid in concrete, pragmatic, intelligible and understandable analysis by enabling comparison and classification between empirical situati
An Ideal type (n.) is any analytical construct (e.g. Bureaucracy) which acts as a measuring rod to ascertain similarities as well as deviations in concrete cases.
An Ideal type (n.) is formed by the one-side accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent, concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.
An Ideal type (n.) is intended to do nothing other than make explicit the procedures by which social scientist go about formulating general, abstract concepts such as 'the pure competitive market', the 'church-set typology', 'bureaucracy', etc.