378 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
learn how babies are really made, we tend to treat ideas as if they are dropped in cloth diapers
from the sky by wobbly-legged storks who fly high overhead and bless some while withholding
from others. Yet this failure to educate, ignite, and release the imagination has the potential of
leading to graduate programs—and ultimately entire disciplines of inquiry—that reproduce tech-
nicians rather than create thinkers. And the reproduction of technicians to the detriment of think-
ers can, in turn, clot the arteries that carry those fresh and sometimes subversive lines of sight so
essential to the health and vitality of any field of study. As C. Wright Mills writes in The Socio-
logical Imagination:
Adequate technicians can be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can also
be cultivated; certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of often routine work. Yet there
is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas
that no one expected were combinable—say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and
British economics. There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly
fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks. Perhaps
he is too well trained, too precisely trained. Since one can be trained only in what is already
known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel
against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy. But you must cling to such vague
images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such form
that original ideas, if any, almost always first appear. (1959, 212)
One of the interpretive orientation’s most attractive contributions, I believe, is an environment
especially hospitable to the work of imaginative theorizing, of crafting genuinely new and excit-
ing ideas, of nourishing the “playfulness of mind” so necessary to the goodness of social science.
An openness to messiness; a high tolerance of ambiguity; the intentional cultivation of new lines
of sight through an expansion of literary and experiential resources; the disciplined practice of
maintaining a state of childlike wonder and awe over what one encounters; an intentional reflex-
ive attention to the internal reactions, including the emotional reactions, experienced by the re-
searcher; an appreciation for the way in which a situation always already interacts with the presence
of the researcher and is never revisited in the same way twice; a commitment to keep the research
question in flux and to avoid premature evidentiary closure: These are all trademarks of an inter-
pretive orientation to the human sciences. Which is to say: They are all trademarks of an approach
to the study of social and political life that unapologetically celebrates the human character of the
scientific endeavor.
What does it mean to do interpretive work? The most satisfying answer, I suggest, lies not in
some list or cluster of criteria and techniques, but rather in a recognition and celebration of the
unavoidably human character of inquiry into human meaning making. To do interpretive work is
to be walking on a beach and, stooping with one’s face just inches from the ground, to look and
say not, “It is a grain of sand,” but rather, with Wislawa Szymborska, “We call it a grain of sand.”
And then, to take that grain of sand between one’s fingers, hold it up against the salty spray of the
sea, against the open blue sky, and continue with William Blake:“To see a world in a grain of sand.”NOTESAn earlier version of this essay was presented as comments at the “What Does it Mean to Do Interpretive
Work? Evaluative Criteria and Other Issues” session of the American Political Science Association annual