PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 23researcher’s expert role from technical-rational subject-matter expertise to process expertise, in
knowing how to locate and access local knowledge and make it the subject of reflection, publicly
discussable. It is a radically democratic move within the presently dominant conceptualization of
organizational, policy, and other expert-based analyses.
In sum, scientific practices that focus on meaning and meaning making in specific situational
contexts and on processes of sense making more broadly are informed by interpretive philoso-
phies and presuppositions. They are concerned with understanding the lifeworld of the actor in
the situation(s) being studied, but they also reflect on the problematics of (re)presenting that
lifeworld and those meanings, including the role of the researcher as an actor in doing so, and
they engage the role of language and other artifacts in constructing and communicating meaning
and social relationships in that lifeworld. Research begins from the presupposition that social
reality is multifold, that its interpretation is shaped by one’s experience with that reality, and that
experiences are lived in the context of intersubjective meaning making. The researcher engages
these meanings through various methods that allow access to actors’ meanings. Interpretation
operates at several levels: that of the situational actor and/or the researcher experiencing and
interpreting an event or setting; of the researcher interpreting conversational interviews with situ-
ational actors and situation-relevant documents and extending those interpretations in preparing a
report; and of the reader or audience interpreting the written or oral report. In this view, all knowl-
edge is interpretive, and interpretation (of acts, language, and objects) is the only method appro-
priate to the human, social world when the research question concerns matters of human meaning.
NOTES
The ideas developed in this chapter build on earlier work, including a chapter focused on organizational
studies as an interpretive science (Hatch and Yanow 2003). My thanks to Mary Hawkesworth and to Peri
Schwartz-Shea for their close critical readings of earlier drafts. All errors of interpretation remain my own.
- Geertz imagines an exchange in which the muscles of the tradesman’s eyelid contract. How should
this contraction be understood, he asks: was it an involuntary twitch, or was the tradesman signaling some
meaning through an intentional wink? He uses this to illustrate the point that we need much more information—
about the character of the events, the persons, the times, and so on—in order to be able to interpret which it
was or to consider that it might have had other meanings altogether. This “richer,” fuller description is what
he characterizes as “thick” description. - For these reasons, I avoid talking about the “nature” of the subject of study: From an interpretive
ontological perspective there is nothing “natural” about our topics of investigation. Whereas this term (the
“nature” of something) may seem like a dead metaphor and my point, a minor linguistic quibble, I believe
that source meanings do tend to ride in on the backs of words, even when that knowledge is tacit. I thank
Davydd Greenwood for drawing my attention to the metaphoric character of this term. - This is itself a delimiting statement: It posits that some subjects of study are more usefully ap-
proached through interpretive methodologies and their attendant tools of analysis than others. The dividing
line rests with the presuppositions brought to a “research question” by the scientist: Questions about the
same research subject may be formulated differently, depending on the epistemological and ontological
orientations of the researcher (and, of course, on her education and training—connections that may well be
interrelated; see the discussion of presuppositions in the book’s introduction). I put “research question” in
quotation marks because it has become clear to me that different methodological camps understand this
phrase differently. Whereas projects influenced more by methodological positivism treat this phrase literally
—for them, a research question is a full-blown statement, a hypothesis—for interpretive researchers, the
“question” is more commonly a topic, a puzzle, or a tension that draws their attention, often because of some
prior, possibly experiential knowledge that informs their curiosity and suggests that this is an area worthy of
research attention. This difference in approach is manifested also in research designs: Interpretive research
designs more commonly begin with what might best be called hunches, rather than with hypotheses.