92 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
understanding the interpretive criteria literature. Next, I briefly review two classic texts that launched
the development of this literature. The heart of the chapter then examines the evolving debate on
how best to think about criteria for interpretive research. In the concluding section I return to the
broader framework of epistemic communities and the burden of scholarly judgment.UNDERSTANDING THE INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH GESTALTSpecifying the components of a research gestalt is a tricky business, for no single set of attributes
is shared by all who consider themselves as conducting interpretive research. That said, as the
thought experiment was meant to illustrate, distinctions between research gestalts can meaning-
fully be made, and these differences have significant consequences for applying evaluative crite-
ria to any particular study. These caveats noted, I provide a brief, and necessarily incomplete,
characterization of the interpretive gestalt.
There are two key, interrelated parts of the interpretive gestalt that are essential to grasping it
and understanding how it differs from a variables gestalt. First, a central goal of interpretive
techniques is understanding human meaning making; issues of causality are not necessarily ex-
cluded but are understood much differently by different gestalts (more on this later). Being at-
tuned to meaning making involves a recognition of, and sensitivity to, the ambiguities of human
experience; researchers presuppose that meanings are negotiated and constructed, and they often
deliberately investigate efforts to promulgate or resist particular meanings, at the same time that
they explore the variation of meanings across context—what Soss (chapter 6, this volume) calls
“indexicality.”^4 Additionally, many interpretive researchers emphasize that actors may “know
more than they can tell” (M. Polanyi 1966, 4), what Polanyi termed “tacit knowledge.” Such
knowledge need not be explicitly articulated in order to be used. For example, M.R. Schmidt
(1993) describes grouters’ unstated “feel” for grouting, which made them suspect structural
problems with a dam that went undetected by engineers. Similarly, Flyvbjerg (2001) describes
tugboat operators’ “local knowledge” of a coastline that enables them to bring a large ship into
port. Documenting the existence and use of tacit knowledge and local knowledges helps to
revalue and preserve them in an increasingly rationalized social world (T. Mitchell 1991, J.C.
Scott 1998). A related emphasis in much interpretive research is on the extent to which actors
may not be fully aware of the ways in which taken-for-granted assumptions underlie their
meaning-making activities. By studying the symbols, rituals, stories, and other artifacts through
which actors make sense of their worlds, researchers seek to reveal the intricate, evolving con-
nections between taken-for-granted understandings and human activities and practices. Such
“revelations” can make possible new understandings and evaluations of the status quo, en-
abling human growth and change.
Second, interpretive researchers maintain a sensitivity to the “form” of the data: much of it
is word data from such sources as interviews, documents, observational field notes, and the
like; increasing attention is being given to imagery and sound (Bauer and Gaskell 2002), as
well as to architectural space and objects (Harper 2003; Yanow, chapter 20, this volume).
Some of the data may be in numerical form, although from an interpretive perspective, numeri-
cal data tend to be “read” and treated in different ways than from quantitative perspectives (see,
e.g., Czarniawska-Joerges 1992), and they are not viewed as superior to other forms. Rather,
the distinct forms of data encode and enact diverse human practices, a classic hermeneutic and
anthropological insight. In this sense, numbers and indexes manifest the human propensity to
count and, particularly in contemporary society, the respect accorded the (seeming) precision
of numbers.