STORIES FOR RESEARCH 317MM: I had an interpretive field research moment very early in my academic career, although I did
not know it at the time. As a graduate student in the mid-1970s, I was pursuing a dissertation on
the impact of decriminalization policy, particularly related to public inebriation and substance
abuse, using a quasi-experimental design and interrupted time-series analysis. As I arrived at the
door of a detoxification center in Washington, D.C., to pick up “data” for my impact assessment,
a “client” of this civil commitment policy burst out the door, causing me to tumble down a set of
concrete steps and break my arm. As I tried to get back on my feet, I could see the client running
away and program staff deciding he was too fast for hot pursuit. When I asked the staff why their
client was on the run, they told me in a matter-of-fact way that most people in their program far
preferred jail to the intrusiveness of a detoxification center.
I never forgot that moment; and yet, I went on my way collecting and analyzing intake data
from detoxification centers and local jails. Sometime in the early 1990s, a couple of graduate
students asked me to do a readings course and conference with them on meaning making and
identity. That led to a seminar on “identity, legality, and justice” and a series of assignments
asking students to use intensive field methods in search of meaning making, particularly related
to law, policy, and justice. When I read their papers, I remembered the day when I was leveled by
the client at the detoxification center, wishing I had pursued him to hear his stories about the
streets, the state, and legal reforms. The following chapter is one story about how to chase that
topic as field-intensive interpretive inquiry, but while looking the other way—at those state work-
ers who make everyday judgments about whether and how to engage in hot pursuit of clients.
❖❖❖The work world of cops, teachers, and counselors is a baffling terrain dense with law,
rules, and procedures; bounded by overlapping hierarchical and agency relationships;
populated with the diverse and hard-to-read faces of citizens, clients, supervisors, and co-
workers. It is a world where identity and moral judgments are bound up with the
quotidian work of the state. This is the front line of public service.[S]treet-level work is as much a process of forming and enforcing identities—of both
citizen-clients and street-level workers—as of delivering services and implementing
policy. More than bureaucratic politics, identity politics shape the citizen-client.
—Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno (2003, 8, 153)The interpretive claims in these two epigraphs are intended as straightforward renderings of how
front-line workers make sense of their work and pass judgments on the people they encounter in
doing the everyday work of the state. Taken from our book Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories
from the Front Lines of Public Service, they indicate where our research took us, but not where it
began. At journey’s end, we reached this point of interpretation only after considerable struggle,
questioning, conversation, and argumentation, all revolving around repeated close reading of and
writing about stories told to us by front-line workers.
Descriptions of social research often tell of an orderly progress from literature review to hy-
pothesis forming, data collection, statistical analysis, and findings. Our research, a combination
of intensive fieldwork, story collection, and continuous interpretation, was a different experi-
ence. Rather than following a carefully mapped and well-worn path, our research was more like
meandering in a forest: There were moments of order and clear vision, but we often felt lost due
to the echoes of the many voices we heard and the particularities of our field observations. We did