English Social Sciences Social Science, Sociology, Ethics, etc.

Hello. I'm a EN>FR translator and hope it's ok for me to post here, as my problem at this stage is not so much to find a translation, but rather to understand.

I was hoping native English speakers might be able to help me grasp the meaning of "in some formulations" in the following sentence (which comes from an article about a book on the relationships between social sciences and imperialism/colonialism):

In France, the Durkheimian school found in the empire a diverse landscape on which to develop comparative analyses, **in some formulations** turning civilization from a hierarchical into a pluralistic notion, but without necessarily questioning the militaristic and administrative structures that created the empire in the first place.

Indeed, Durkheim was among the first ones to talk about civilizations in the plural, however this "in some formulations" remains quite mysterious.

Thank you very much.