Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

NEITHER RIGOROUS NOR OBJECTIVE? 67

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CHAPTER 4

NEITHER RIGOROUS NOR OBJECTIVE?

Interrogating Criteria for Knowledge

Claims in Interpretive Science

DVORA YANOW

“Just now we are an objective people,” The Times wrote in... 1851....

“We want to place everything we can lay our hands on

under glass cases, and to stare our fill.”

The word denoted the modern sense of detachment, both

physical and conceptual, of the self from an object-world...

—Timothy Mitchell (1991, 19–20)

[O]bjectivity grew more important as a scientific ideal and also as a practical necessity.

... [P]rofessional social scientists finally based their claims to competence in social
analysis on the authority conferred by scientific methods and attitudes. The value of
objectivity was emphasized constantly in both training and professional practice, until it
occupied a very special place in the professional ethos.... [T]he tension between reform
and knowledge reappeared as a conflict between advocacy and objectivity.
—Mary O. Furner (1975, 322–23)

With few exceptions, most social researchers,

whether they be radical, conservative, or totally apolitical,

try to convince their readers that their research has been objective.

—Stephen Cole (1976, 224)

Interpretive research is often held to evidentiary standards—criteria, such as rigor or objectivity,
that concern the character of material brought in support of a claim——that it cannot possibly
achieve, for two reasons. For one, these expectations often reflect substantive misunderstandings
of the character of the criteria themselves, definitionally, as well as of what interpretive research
entails—what its own procedures are. At the same time, they hold interpretive research to criteria
that contradict its own fundamental presuppositions concerning social realities and their
“knowability.” That is, research deriving from interpretive ontological and epistemological pre-
suppositions is often held accountable to criteria that developed over time out of positivist presup-
positions, which interpretive philosophies long ago rejected as inapplicable to human sciences.