DOING SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A HUMANISTIC MANNER 383also contribute to its perpetuation over time, as the methods of accessing, generating, and analyz-
ing data are passed on to students, who learn them through studying exemplars of well-regarded
studies in coursework and through subsequent learning-by-doing on-site, both aspects of which
become their own touchstones for teaching the next generation of students.
A generational analysis of academic practices highlights the fact that individuals’ professional
choices are not made in a vacuum. The range of options from which undergraduate and graduate
students choose is not equally available, being, instead, historically and institutionally situated;
interpretive, postmodern, and other turns notwithstanding, positivist ideas still permeate society
and societal understandings of “science.” As Bentz and Shapiro write, “[M]ost of us, before we
knew that there were even such things as epistemology and the philosophy of science, were
indoctrinated into positivism in high school [if not before that—eds.], when we were told there
was something called the ‘scientific method’ based on observation, hypothesis, and verification,
and when we were given the general idea that the march of science and technology is the key to
human progress” (1998, 26). Such understandings of “science” (which, by implication, position
the “humanities” as the “other”) at the high school level have yet other effects. As a parent, one of
us (Schwartz-Shea) has observed that high school students are introduced to crude versions of the
fact/value dichotomy, taught to devalue their own “opinions” and, instead, to value “authorities”
(as measured in grading by the number of citations they use in their papers), and instructed that
the third person is the only legitimate voice in expository writing (an understanding Yanow’s
graduate students continue to enact). High school students seem not to be taught to take them-
selves seriously as people capable of critiquing others’ arguments, much less constructing (or
deconstructing) their own arguments.
Most important, high school students with hermeneutic and aesthetic sensibilities are steered
toward the humanities, because “science” is conceived of in narrow, even stereotypically posi-
tivist terms as an undertaking in which there is no room for those who would play with words
rather than numbers. Such steering further influences selections of majors at colleges and uni-
versities, although, potentially, there is considerable room for readjustments of the meaning of
“social science” at that stage. Such readjustment, however, rarely occurs, because “methods”
classes at the undergraduate level continue to reinforce the same conceptions of science taught
at the high school level, if methods texts are any indication. So steering and self-selection
processes are replicated in college: Behaviorist-influenced, computer-based social science is
unlikely to attract those with hermeneutic or observational talents, at least to the extent that
course work and curricular requirements communicate that abstract, mathematical theorizing
is the most prized and status-rewarding trait. Given those understandings of “science” and asso-
ciated steering and selection processes at the high school and undergraduate levels, those stu-
dents most likely to excel in interpretive methodologies may never enter the social sciences,
and those who do enter them may not find their way to such methods—at least not quickly—
whereas students who “click” with positivist methodologies will be recruited for the social
sciences and will find them without difficulty.
What this sort of analysis makes clear is why the project engaged in this book, the delineation
of interpretive methods, is so necessary. Explicit methods discussions among interpretive re-
searchers have tended to consist of “off-line,” private conversations among peers, focusing on the
trials and tribulations of being “in the field” or “in the archives.” The dearth (until fairly recently)
of explicit, fine-grained delineations of interpretive methodological procedures has created a void
in the education of social scientists to the detriment of the development of interpretive scholarly
communities. We have lost, and continue to lose, the rhetorical battle with quantitative research
in no small part because of the lack of explicit, written delineations of the entailments of interpretive