384 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
methods, and because quantitative methods lend themselves to delineation in a stepwise fashion
much more readily than interpretive ones: The “rigor” of the latter is enacted in the very narrative
format of textbooks and journal article methods’ sections. Many of the social sciences are marked
by a generation gap: Senior scholars, many of them now retiring, even if they chose to pursue
non-interpretive research, were educated in ontological and epistemological questions underpin-
ning methods choices; subsequent generations have been schooled only in computer-based quan-
titative tools, without this methodological base, and have themselves trained newer scholars
similarly. There is a “missing generation” with respect to methodological education. For these
reasons, at least, interpretive researchers need to do a far better job of making our tacit how-to
knowledge in interpretive methods as explicit as possible. We repeat: This is not a call to make
interpretive methods rule driven. We need writings that are more reflexively explicit and trans-
parent about how it is that we do what we do, whether in fieldwork mode or in “deskwork” or
“textwork” modes (Yanow 2000), and we need to continue to develop and make public an articu-
lated set of criteria based in interpretive presuppositions for judging the “goodness” of interpre-
tive research, as argued in chapter 5.
For some methodologists, the problem of contesting approaches is resolved by the use of both
positivist-informed and interpretive methods in a single research context, each one informing the
other.^9 We hope that we have shown through these several chapters that the ontological and
epistemological groundings of interpretive methods are so different from and contradictory to
those of methodologically positivist methods that the two approaches are incompatible, resulting,
all too often, in the kind of subjugation apparent in the NSF report and elsewhere. Indeed, in such
combinations, it is not the same research question that is being engaged: When shifting from one
approach to another, the research question is itself reformulated, although the two formulations
may both be exploring the same topic. In that sense, then, both approaches can be useful in
informing knowledge on the topic of concern, but the research itself proceeds differently in each
case, starting from conceptualizing the character of the knowledge that the researcher is inter-
ested in accessing and that she proceeds to generate. (Such a shift is actually illustrated, by impli-
cation, in the tongue-in-cheek reformulation, above, of Hoffmann’s noodle study from a survey
project to an interpretive one.)
Tools and techniques do not exist in an epistemological or ontological void. Methods are
linked to methodologies, which themselves are understandings of or stances concerning the real-
ity status of what those methods allow us to study and the knowability that we presume about that
world. From a sociology of knowledge and sociology of the professions perspective, demarcating
“qualitative methods” from “interpretive” ones begins to move toward regrounding methods in
methodologies and methodologies in the philosophies of science and social science. Deconstructing
the qualitative-quantitative taxonomy and raising the visibility of interpretive methods within
social scientific research practices takes us further toward the conceptual complexity that marks
the human sciences.ARE THERE, INDEED, INTERPRETIVE “METHODS”? DEBATES
WITHIN INTERPRETIVE EPISTEMIC COMMUNITIESMethodology, then, we understand to be concerned with a set of deliberations within the realm of
the philosophy of (here) social science: epistemological presuppositions, their ontological entail-
ments, and the implications for processes of learning and knowing and claims making. But what
of “method” in discussions among interpretive epistemic communities? Is “interpretive method”
an oxymoron?