270 ANALYZING DATA
Consider those approaches that minimize the importance of the hermeneutic circle between
the social actor and the actor’s environment in favor of a focus on the activity of scholarly inter-
pretation. This kind of work tends to disregard the “surface” manifestations of action—the tan-
gible, empirical aspects—in favor of a process by which events are understood exclusively through
terminology provided by a particular abstract theoretical perspective. These abstract categories,
often involving “class” (O’Connor 2001) or “rationality” (Bates 1998; Hardin 1995) or the “func-
tions” fulfilled by particular courses of action (Habermas 1975), permit the scholar to impose a
certain order on the machinations of everyday life, and to reveal a broader significance lurking
around or behind actions like legitimation struggles. Puzzling events thus become comprehen-
sible by being brought under the sway of an abstract typology.^10 Such an approach, however,
virtually eliminates the agency of the social actors under investigation, in that they are understood
to be largely at the mercy of forces of which they may not even be aware.^11
On the other hand, consider those approaches that minimize the importance of the hermeneu-
tic circle connecting the scholarly researcher to her or his subjects in favor of a precise delineation
of the nuances of a system of meaning. The methodological goal of such interpretation is to get an
“accurate” picture of the meanings-in-use of the persons under investigation. Such approaches
presume that “the interpretation of the object-culture is definitive (certain) and the ideal social
scientist investigates his or her subject-matter with a conceptual tabula rasa (passively)” (Bhaskar
1998, 149; emphasis in original). This is equally true of ethnographic practices that concern
themselves with the ways that field notes “ignore, marginalize, and obscure indigenous under-
standings” and “suggest alternative procedures... that avoid such impositions” (Emerson, Fretz,
and Shaw 1995), and of textual analyses that aim to elucidate the “unsaid” meanings that sur-
round what is actually said publicly, or to flesh out the more or less determinate “context” within
which episodes like the Schumacher/Adenauer exchange take place (Foucault 1972). In all of
these cases, the scholarly researcher becomes “entrapped” within her or his narratives, forgetting
that scholarly accounts “are instruments, not depictions” (Shotter 1993a). The scholar stops exer-
cising agency, becoming instead a more or less neutral conduit through which supposedly “objec-
tive” facts about the situation can flow.^12
These single hermeneutic accounts have more space for agency than neopositivist accounts
do, but they force a choice between the agency of the scholar and the agency of the social actors
under investigation. They restrict the domain of agency by utilizing prosthetics that do not pre-
serve both parts of the double hermeneutic.LEGITIMATION: PRESERVING THE DOUBLE HERMENEUTICSo how should one go about making sense of a social situation so as to preserve both hermeneutic
circles simultaneously? The heart of my solution is to select a prosthetic that permits the social
actors under investigation to exercise meaningful agency. For this purpose, a prosthetic that re-
gards public rhetorical deployments as elements in a legitimation struggle is an appropriate choice.^13
Such a prosthetic conceptualizes legitimation as an ongoing process, “a coordinated group of
changes in the complexion of reality... an integrated series of developments unfolding in con-
joint coordination in line with a definite program” (Rescher 1996, 38).
Understood in this way, legitimation—whether that of the researcher or that of the persons
involved in the situation under investigation—is conceptually “local” to particular times and
places. Any particular legitimation struggle produces only a relatively stable justification for a
particular course of action, and not a transcendently or eternally valid one. Instead of more or
less parametric “structures” encompassing and enfolding action, we have spaces of practical