80 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
Given, then, that interpretive researchers are and can be neither physically nor cognitively-
emotionally external to what they are studying, but rather are (or claim to get) epistemically
“inside” the subject of study and present “social reality” from the perspective of situational mem-
bers, it seems critical to be able to assess the relationship between members’ knowing and the
researcher’s knowing, including the latter’s active role in constructing and shaping the narrative
that (re)presents that social reality. The researcher is not a transparent conduit and without ana-
lytic agency herself. Indeed, imagining that transparent conduction were even possible would
place research back in the realm of “objective truth” generated by a physically and affectively-
cognitively external researcher and of theories mirroring reality.
The notion of a “faithful” reading, as an aspect of researcher reflexivity, suggests a way of
addressing both sides of this interaction. As Merttens (2004, 27) has written, “An interpretation,
to be useful or sensible, rests upon a notion of faithfulness to the text.” In the context of interpre-
tive research, this would mean, on the one hand, a faithfulness to texts and text analogues—an
engagement with written and spoken texts and narratives, acts, and physical artifacts that grapples
with their intended and experienced meanings. This is, after all, what the field researcher implic-
itly promises on negotiating entry; and it is certainly what situational members look for in reading
research reports (and why so-called member checks are suggested as a way of ascertaining that
the researcher got it “right”).^39 On the other hand, it suggests a faithfulness to the researcher’s
own theoretical and analytic agency, as well. The interpretation is, in other words, both experien-
tially faithful, seeing and portraying the situation as situational actors (including, at times, the
researcher as participant) understood it, and analytically faithful, in keeping with the researcher’s
theoretical and conceptual “priors” and insights.
Two processes are at play here. One is an “intertextuality,” both literal and figurative. Much
in the same way that actual texts interpolate phrases and ideas from other texts, the interpretive
researcher reads analytically “across” the experienced reality of the situation under study
(whether rendered in literal texts or, analogously, in acts and/or physical artifacts, in historical
or current ones), drawing on prior knowledge of terms and concepts and theories that may
usefully inform that reading. Analyses of organizational or policy metaphors (Edelman 1977,
Schon 1979, Yanow 1992a), for example, typically do not find their actors invoking metaphor-
talk to describe their language use.^40 It is the researchers themselves who introduce “meta-
phor” as an analytic device, useful in its ability to enlighten an understanding of the lived
experience being described. One may say, then, that the interpretation is faithful not only to the
words or acts themselves, on the surface of meaning, but also to the “interior” meanings em-
bedded in words and acts that inform and contextualize them, as felt by situational actors and
by the researcher.
The other aspect emerges especially when actor and researcher “faiths” collide. Here is a
reading of the research “text”—whether literal text or the social realities being rendered and
studied as if they were texts—much in the manner of seeing and reading Wittgenstein’s “duck-
rabbit.”^41 As described by Kuhn (1970, 62–65, and chapter 10, esp. 114–15; see also Law and
Lodge 1984, 47–48), with reference also to Bruner and Postman’s work, the interpretive process
is like a gestalt switch: the insight comes in an “Aha!” moment and, once having seen the thing in
that new way, the researcher not only cannot undo that sight, he very often cannot retrace his
steps and reproduce how the insight came about and how the “switch” took place. The researcher
is then faced with explicating, analogously, concerning the situation under study, how those who
live with or in it daily see it as a duck, whereas the researcher sees both duck and rabbit. The sense
that a topic has been rendered “faithfully” typically comes when the researcher can make a case
for both with analytic rigor.