WE CALL IT A GRAIN OF SAND 377rows—might very well prove fatal to what it is that makes interpretive approaches so fertile to
begin with.
Some of the chapters in this book are sensitive to this threat and strive to avoid the sterility that
often accompanies a deductive approach to criteria. Their authors draw on actual practices em-
ployed by interpretivists and speak from a bottom-up and experiential, rather than top-down and
deductive, perspective. The potential advantage of this practice-centered approach lies, I think, in
its acceptance of fluidity and change, in its openness to new criteria and techniques for under-
standing how humans make meaning. It resists and subverts the calcification of any one list of
criteria into what Yanow (chapter 4, this volume) describes as “an external authority [that] dis-
tances us from these problems [of human judgment] and eliminates the messiness that is part of
being human; [an external authority that] maintains the illusion of human perfectibility and scien-
tific ‘progress’” (p. 83, this volume). The challenge, then, is to discuss interpretive criteria in
ways that enable human judgment, rather than in ways that disable it by erecting yet another
inhuman external authority to which an epistemic community can blindly appeal. Beginning from
a practice-centered point of view is a solid beginning, but I wonder if it, too, might not be capable
of inadvertently generating that external authority that it seeks to avoid.
The second dilemma facing those who seek to answer the charge that interpretive approaches
lack criteria is what Schwartz-Shea (2004) calls the reclaim or invent quandary. Should
interpretivists counter their critics by reclaiming terms like “rigor” and “objectivity,” or should
they seek instead to free themselves from these terms and invent a new vocabulary more appro-
priate to their endeavor? Each tactic has its own potential strengths. In reclaiming rigor for inter-
pretive approaches, for example, Yanow (chapter 4, this volume) demonstrates how improvisational
theater can serve as a metaphor for ethnographic field work, opening up understandings and
practices of rigor in ways that liberate researchers from its stepwise, inflexible connotations.
And at the same time that several chapters show how interpretive practices carry potential to
reclaim existing terms like “rigor” and “objectivity,” others suggest that the interpretive orienta-
tion might also fruitfully develop its own unique vocabulary of judgment. One example of this
involves including the use(s) of research as relevant to how it is judged. Indeed, as an approach
that gives unapologetic priority to the meaning making of its subjects, the interpretive orientation
does appear to be uniquely situated to strengthen the voices and visibility of those who often go
unheard and unseen, raising the provocative question of whether particular research approaches
lend themselves more readily to particular kinds of political and moral concerns. Also by way of
developing alternative vocabularies for judgment, some interpretive approaches seek to substi-
tute for management techniques the telling and listening-to of stories. This emphasis on storytelling
over and against management also seems potentially subversive, for if every story must have a
teller, then interpretive approaches have the capacity not only to bring new voices to the policy-
making table, but also to transform entirely the terms of the conversation.
The reclaim or invent quandary, then, is not a binary one. In seeking to find their own voice, to
tell their own story, interpretive approaches in the social sciences must both reclaim and invent,
and must do so in ways that open up rather than close down possibilities for inquiry.
Ultimately, if interpretive approaches are to flourish, they must do so not only by the cogency
of their rebuttals to critiques leveled against them by other approaches, but also by the attractive-
ness and persuasiveness of what they contribute. A serious omission in much graduate education
is a sustained conversation about that black box that every researcher at one time or another must
confront: How do I get/find/have a good idea? Our training as social scientists is increasingly
preoccupied with techniques useful for analyzing ideas once they come into existence; the birth
of creative, new, and risk-taking ideas is seldom addressed. Like young children who have yet to