382 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
place within the broader context of the sociology of the professions, and this conversation’s im-
plications for the conduct of research impinge upon disciplinary practices, including questions of
the continuity of professional communities and their practices through new and coming genera-
tions of scientists.
To begin with, these spheres of research activity—the accessing, generating, and analysis of
evidence—have been conceptually curtailed and directed by the research and analytic methods
available in training programs and accepted by practitioner communities. If, for example, cost-
benefit analysis or rational choice theory or participant-observation is the available and accepted
tool, that is what sociologists or planners or policy analysts are trained to do. By “accepted” we
mean that the method is the basis of papers delivered at associational meetings and published in
mainstream journals, thereby developing expectations for professional training and, hence, be-
coming the subject of textbooks and the focus of graduate school and other curricula, not to
mention faculty positions defined and applications evaluated by search committees. Science studies
scholars, such as Latour (1987) and Traweek (1988), describe this process in the context of bench
science, physics, and other natural and physical sciences; the larger framework of their arguments
holds for a wide variety of academy-based practices, including the social sciences.
Interpretive communities within an academic context are not just groups that follow similar
reading habits. Reading is a practice; reading, research, and other practices unite epistemic com-
munities and distinguish them from others; and methods, which constitute rules of evidence and
of interpretation, are central elements in these communities of practice. They need to be codified
and specified at times when community norms are not clear or are being challenged.
What concerns interpretive researchers (and others reflecting on this situation) is the danger
that methods-driven research narrows the range of questions that the social sciences can usefully
entertain and explore. In short, if the research question calls for sensitivity to contextually spe-
cific meanings, it is likely to be addressed more usefully by some form of interpretive method
than by a quantitative method. If it is important to the research question to know what the eating
of noodles means to the lives, national identities, or self-constructions of residents of each of
Stanley Hoffmann’s 150 countries (in the second epigraph) for their cultural or administrative
practices, and if this meaning making is to be allowed to emerge from the data themselves (i.e.,
through conversational interviews and/or participant-observation, supported by documentary
evidence, intended to elicit an insider’s understanding of the cultures involved), then statistical
analysis of data gathered through a survey is unlikely to be helpful.^7
The methods “project” that the chapters in this book address has multiple trajectories. Some of
us are engaged in critique: identifying the limits of quantitative methods for helping us say some-
thing about what we want to know (as in Mary Hawkesworth’s chapter 2). Others of us are
engaged in the articulation of interpretive methodological options: what it is that researchers
actually do when we do interpretive (and qualitative) methods—the explicit delineations of re-
search procedures (the chapters in parts II and III).^8 Still others are devoting their energies to a
“sociology of the profession” analysis, examining the gatekeeping role of researchers’ choices of
methods tools in regulating admittance to professional circles and other concerns central to the
field of science studies. This third trajectory analyzes methods issues relative to the generation
and perpetuation of disciplinary practices: the graduate curriculum; graduate training through
theses and dissertations, and committees’ approvals or denials of research proposals; hiring prac-
tices, and subsequent promotion and tenure decisions; writing practices; and publishing and con-
ference section domains and scopes (e.g., Büger and Gadinger 2005; Burawoy 2005; Schwartz-Shea
2003, 2005). Practices in all of these areas contribute to the perception of a discipline either as a
monolithic, methodologically unified entity or as a more methodologically pluralistic one. They