204 ANALYZING DATA
In other chapters in this section, the demarcation between access-genesis and analysis is less
prominent. Instead, chapter narratives enact the iterative, intertwining processes of access, gen-
eration, and analysis, revealing the methodological and theoretical concerns that drive research-
ers toward one decision or another, ultimately yielding logically coherent research products. For
example, in chapter 13, Samer Shehata’s recognition that social class, organizational, and cul-
tural expectations precluded his wearing sandals is simultaneously an evidence-generative and
data-analytic moment. Such intertwining is perhaps most evident in Dvora Yanow’s recounting
in chapter 20 of her experiences with and understandings of architectural space, in which the
bodily experience and its interpretation are of a piece—almost impossible to demarcate into ac-
cess, generation, and analysis stages.
Although such procedural complexity might seem daunting, the chapters draw readers in with
their specificity. Instead of treating the processes involved in any given method in general, ab-
stract terms, chapter authors draw on their own published research to illuminate the expectations,
concerns, and substantive puzzles that framed their research questions, along with detailing the
analytic steps they took and the procedures they used. One criterion for the essays included here
was that they be sufficiently jargon free that someone coming to an analytic method for the first
time would find the ideas accessible without much “foreign language acquisition” struggle. An-
other criterion was that the essays be reasonably transparent to topic-matter and epistemic “out-
siders” so that the methodologies and methods would be accessible without knowledge of, say,
the particularities of public law (Pamela Brandwein’s chapter 12) or the intricacies of the demo-
cratic peace literature (Ido Oren’s chapter 11) or the debates within international studies (Cecelia
Lynch’s chapter 16).
Given the variety of subject matter and the richness of explication, the ten chapters in this
section might be grouped in a number of ways. We draw out four themes, according to which they
are sequenced. Oren’s, Brandwein’s, and Shehata’s chapters (11, 12, and 13 respectively) focus
attention on knowledge claims and knowledge production, highlighting the varied ways in which
context (historical, institutional, organizational, and cultural) structures what scholars claim to
know and how others react to those claims. Jackson’s, Bevir’s, and Lynch’s chapters (14, 15, and
16) investigate human conduct and action as seen through “texts,” whether verbatim transcripts
from Bundestag floor debates, evidence of consensus and conflict in local governance traditions
and conventions, or archival materials of diplomats’ reports and scholars’ historical treatises.
Schmidt’s, Maynard-Moody and Musheno’s, and Ginger’s chapters (17, 18, and 19) also treat
text-based meanings, although they focus less on the historical records of the previous three
chapters and more on acts rendered in textual form—from activists debating language policy to
workplace stories told by public servants about their decision making—or documents that could
themselves be considered actors in the situation, such as reports written by government planners
for evaluative purposes. Finally, Yanow’s chapter (20) “reads” human meaning in the ordinary
landscapes and built spaces of social and political life.PRODUCING AND MAKING CLAIMS TO KNOWLEDGEIn part I, Robert Adcock (chapter 3), sounding a note that might also be found in science studies,^2
reminds us not to take “methods” as if they themselves were ahistorical, acontextual, and thereby
“neutral” in any sense. Like Brandwein (1999) in her analysis of the Supreme Court’s construc-
tion of historical truth, Adcock shows how it is that one understanding of “comparative historical
analysis” has become dominant and widely accepted, although it is not, historically, the only way
“history” and “comparative” analyses have been understood and practiced. In this sense, a reflective