Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

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386 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES


rather than to walk away from methodologically positivist challenges to its scientific claims.
Along with other interpretive methodologists and researchers, we yield much of the desire to
predict and control upon which positivist science rests its claims; but we still contend that inter-
pretive perspectives offer a path to understanding in a systematic, methodical way.
This line of thought addresses another aspect of the argument against interpretive “methods”:
The language of “methods” positions the work in the realm of social science, whereas (according
to proponents of this view) the tenets of interpretive philosophy place its applications outside
science entirely, better situated within the realm of the humanities. Although we agree with the
tenor of this claim—understanding it as an argument that interpretive research can never meet the
standards of methodologically positivist research and its normative scientific method—we main-
tain that interpretive work can be, and is, scientific, if “science” is understood as a systematic
mode of observing and explaining within an attitude of doubt. At the same time, although we are
among those who recognize that interpretive empirical research and theorizing in the humanities
have affinities, even to the point of overlapping at times (especially when dealing with close
readings of texts, and, by extension, of acts and objects rendered as texts), we still see quite
clearly distinctions between the two when it comes to writing and reading practices (aside from
the data access, generation, and analytic processes to which this book is devoted).
Those boundaries emerged rather strongly in the course of assembling chapters for this book.
The writing practices of scholars in empirical fields—urban planning, legal studies, international
relations, comparative government, public policy, public administration, environmental studies,
etc.—who are engaged in interpretive analyses resemble each other much more closely than they
do the writing practices of those doing feminist, social, or political theory, even when both camps
are concerned with close readings of texts. It is not just a matter of different vocabularies: The
“high theory” of feminist theoretical analyses of, say, Hannah Arendt or Jürgen Habermas has
become more familiar and increasingly more accessible to those doing empirical research; so
terminology is not the dividing line.
Rather, the distinction seems to concern different orientations toward making and supporting
different sorts of truth claims. “Empiricals” typically write for empirically oriented readers; even
when marshalling abstruse theories, they maintain an orientation toward grounded social realities
and practices, and this produces a much more “grounded” text: The organizational structure is
more stepwise and report-like, and the writing may appear (especially to a “theorist”) to be more
direct, less nuanced, less “sophisticated.” “Theorists” reason and write in a different cultural
style; their work tends to be more concerned with conceptual meanings and less with workaday
practices of lived experience. Interpretive empirical research, then, must negotiate the somewhat
fungible boundary between the social sciences and the humanities, reading and talking across it
while situating the work on the science side. We still are, in a way, two cultures, although perhaps
no longer quite in the sense meant by Snow.^11
Interpretive studies are increasingly found at major social science conferences, in the pages of
mainstream journals, and in textbooks and curricula. The depth and breadth of the philosophical
underpinnings of interpretive approaches are becoming more widely known, and scholars in-
creasingly understand that interpretive work is supported on its own merits, rather than merely
in relation to methodological positivism. As a consequence, interpretive research methods for
accessing, generating, and analyzing data such as those discussed in parts II and III of this book
are themselves becoming better understood and judged according to their own presuppositions,
rather than against positivist scientific criteria for validity and reliability that they cannot meet.
Reclaiming “science” for interpretive methods is, then, both substantively and politically an
important project.
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