78 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
oneself” in or among the community one is studying, an argument fully rooted in methodological
positivism. (The insider/native-outsider distinction is also no longer sounded as much because
many more “natives” are now studying their own cultures; see Shehata, chapter 13, this volume.)
From an interpretive perspective, by contrast, what is perceived to be lost in this process is the
epistemological purchase (rather than any scientific “purity”) enabled by prolonging one’s “es-
trangement” from the situation under study such that acts, objects, terms, and events continue to
appear unusual or different, thereby continuing to be subjects for inquiry rather than fading into
to the world of taken-for-granted commonplaces.^34 Contemporary thinking focuses more on the
relative advantages and disadvantages to researcher learning of each phase of the stranger-familiar
balance as it changes over time, which also includes a more self-conscious and explicit reflexivity
on the processes and changes entailed.^35
A sociology of the professions view brings into focus a different sort of check on researcher
idiosyncrasy. The presumed isolated independence of individual response ignores both
professional-social and methodological intersubjectivity developed within academic practitioner
communities. Researchers’ analyses are contextualized, shaped, and constrained by various as-
pects of academic practices. The attitude of doubt—the “testability” of traditional research, en-
acted within interpretive research in researcher reflexivity—is embedded in review processes of
various sorts that serve as scientific controls and corrections on more obvious “non-objective”
practices (everything from faulty logic, to the [in]appropriateness of methods to research ques-
tions, to the ethical malpractice of falsifying data). An extended “apprenticeship” in a doctoral
program socializes the new scientist to an epistemic and practice community. These aspects of
professional practice instantiate control mechanisms enacted at various times and in various forms:
critiques of the researcher’s ideas and writing that begin during coursework and continue through
conference paper and journal publication vetting and promotion and tenure reviews. Additional
review mechanisms are built into interpretive research processes (see Schwartz-Shea, chapter 5,
this volume), all of them forms of methodological intersubjectivity designed to ensure that the
researcher is not “proving” what he already “knows.” Situating research within or in relation to an
interpretive community in these ways serves to delimit idiosyncratic interpretations.^36
This procedural point relates to a philosophical point concerning the certainty of truth claims
with regard to the meanings of events, acts, terms, and so on. The character of that certainty lies
in the dual sense in which Kuhn (1970; see also Kuhn 1977) used the term “paradigm” in his
analysis of scientific practices to designate both the framing of knowledge about or approach to a
scientific problem, and the community of scientists sharing that frame. The same intertwined
duality is implied in understandings of the “hermeneutic circle” as meaning both the process of
interpreting texts and the communal character of that process: that modes of interpreting (or
“making”) meaning are developed among a group of people—an epistemic community of in-
terpreters, a circle—acting and interacting together in that process, thereby coming to share in
the understanding of a problem.
Phenomenological analysis suggests that the two are inseparable: the process by which a prob-
lem comes to be framed is the same process that creates the community (of scientists or other
interpreters, variously termed an interpretive community, epistemic community, discourse com-
munity, community of meaning, community of practice or of practitioners, and so on) that frames
it in that way. It is a process of creating intersubjective understandings, in which members come
to share a set of practices, knowledge about those practices, knowledge about one another, about
how to address new situations, and so on. The resulting interpretive or epistemic community
shares a frame, a view of how to approach and interpret new situations (see, e.g., the description
of this process in P. Berger and Luckmann 1966, part II; see also Latour 1987).