DOING SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A HUMANISTIC MANNER 385Addressing this question requires definitional delineations. Many interpretive researchers for
whom “method” means “technique” answer in the affirmative. For them, interpretive work has no
techniques, and proudly so, like ethnography, which (according to many of its practitioners)
“insists that it lacks a cut-and-dried technique” (Gellner and Hirsch 2001, 2). In their shared
commitment to flexibility, to being able to respond and adapt to the needs of the circumstance,
which makes them (at times seemingly endlessly) iterative, interpretive research processes bear
not the slightest resemblance to the so-called scientific method, which lays out its procedural
steps in a most linear, non-recursive, “rigorous” fashion. If “method” means “first this, then that”
at a level of specificity that can be established before one begins the research, interpretive work
decidedly has no method.
For others, and we count ourselves among them, a research method is a way of treating data
such that others can understand where the data—which are generated, not “given”—came from
and what sort of character they have as evidence for claims making. This is what distinguishes
research from fiction writing: Interpretive researchers, unlike novelists, undertake an explicit
and conscious effort to produce an understanding that is a faithful rendering of lived experi-
ence. Interpreting words or acts or objects in a scientific fashion may be an act of creating
meaning, but it is not an act of imagination ex nihilo. In this sense, interpretive work is as
method-ical as any other.
Procedural delineation also makes claims-making rationales transparent. Conversational in-
terviewing has identifiable steps and procedures and attitudes, as Soss (chapter 6) and Schaffer
(chapter 7) show, and these are recognized as accepted practices by members of the interpretive
research community. Participant-observation similarly has recognized and accepted procedures
and sensibilities. Indeed, the heart of McHenry’s (chapter 10) critique of the Banks dataset is that
its categories are insufficiently grounded in lived experience, generated as they were without
benefit of an ethnographic sensibility and its practices (discussed by Pader in chapter 8); McHenry
does not go so far as to claim that the Banks data are acts of imagination. The wealth of proce-
dures available for analyzing word and other genres of data in an interpretive way, illustrated in
part III of this book, similarly reveal their grounds for claims making.
Some within interpretive epistemic communities may argue that procedural delineation stifles
scholarly creativity. We see no evidence for such concerns in the contributions here. Rather than
shutting down researchers’ imaginative processes, as some fear it would, more explicit delinea-
tion of procedural entailments, in our view, invites those searching for new ways of addressing
research questions to consider interpretive methods, precisely because of the greater understand-
ing of their range and scope that results. Methods delineations offer novices guidance and wel-
come newcomers into communities of practice that may otherwise appear inaccessible; they need
not limit experienced practitioners’ imaginative innovativeness.
We have yet another reason to argue for interpretive methods, and it is an explicitly and con-
sciously rhetorical, and hence political, move—and one that joins our science studies perspective
and motivates us to argue, as well, for the scientific character of interpretive work. To yield the
language of “methods” is to yield the terrain of science. Given the social standing that attaches to
science in contemporary society, we are loath to abandon that domain—not because of status loss
to ourselves or our colleagues, or our work, but because doing “science” still supports truth claims
in a way that doing humanities does not. The claim to scientific status in Western societies still
carries significant societal weight, commanding respect and, at times, funding that supports re-
search as well. Interpretive research adheres to what we see as the two central characteristics of
science overall, systematicity and an attitude of doubt or testability.^10 In maintaining that inter-
pretive science is a science, we seek to expand the terms of engagement—to encourage dialogue