68 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
As Mitchell shows in the first epigraph, although they have been treated as universals, these terms
are, in fact, historically situated.
Aside from their substantive dimension, however, the charges are put to rhetorical use in a
gate-keeping fashion designed and/or intended to control the terms of debate and to regulate what
research is going to be accorded the status of science.^1 In methodological writings, methods state-
ments, and reviews of interpretive work, a constricted sense of what it means to be rigorous and
of what constitutes objectivity is being used to dismiss interpretive work as non-trustworthy and
as nonscientific (see C. Lynch 2005). The second epigraph captures a part of this move.
The substantive charges may be engaged by showing either that they misunderstand the char-
acter of the research in question or that the criteria themselves are definitionally problematic. But
substantive explications on their own cannot dislodge rhetorical arguments from their position of
power and control: rhetorical arguments have to be engaged at the level of rhetoric. Their rhetorical
character becomes clearer, however, when the substantive misunderstandings and mischaracteri-
zations are brought into focus, and the rhetorical arguments can then be more fully engaged. This
chapter explores three types of substantive defense against charges that interpretive research is
neither rigorous nor objective—definitional-terminological, procedural, and philosophical-
conceptual—returning to the rhetorical element at the end.
I wish to parse the terms rigor and objectivity not as they have been set out by philosophers,
logicians, or methodologists but, rather, as they are treated or enacted in methods texts and de-
bates. In their adoption from philosophical sources and implementation in research practices and
instructional tools, these two hallmarks of the scientific standing of a research project have taken
on ever more restricted (and restrictive) denotations and connotations as the discussion has be-
come ever more focused on tools and techniques (in what has been referred to as “methodism”) at
a growing remove from characteristics of knowledge processes (and, hence, of “science”). Al-
though there is much to be learned from the philosophy of natural-physical science and social
science, in the context of this analysis an inductive approach that starts from social science prac-
tice and common usage is of greater utility. It is common usage that arms the debate carried out in
the pages of textbooks and methods courses, rather than the more idealized, philosophical discus-
sion, found in philosophy of (social) science books and courses, of principles developed in ab-
straction from the practices of the physical and natural sciences that are thought to apply both to
them and to the human sciences.^2 And it is practice that informs the procedural rebuttal. Knowing
how rigor and objectivity are used in common discourse—as seen, for example, in methods text-
books and dictionary definitions—grounds the discussion in ways that starting from philosophy
cannot; and such grounding in practice contexts is important because these practices are what
enact and perpetuate epistemic communities and their boundaries. Parsing the meanings-in-use
reveals the ways in which interpretive work is, in fact, rigorous in a philosophical sense and how
its subjectivity need not be seen as non- or anti-scientific.PARSING RIGOR AND OBJECTIVITYOne of the challenges that interpretivist researchers (and qualitative ones as well) often encounter
is the claim that their scholarship is neither rigorous nor objective. Such charges include faulting
interpretive researchers for lacking fully formulated hypotheses before beginning field research,
hypotheses that identify dependent and independent variables, posit their relationship, and indi-
cate how they are to be measured—in short, all the elements that characterize a prospectus for a
quantitative research project.^3 The “goodness” of hypotheses, variables, measurement, and other
techniques and tools rests, conceptually, on questions of rigor and objectivity. The two terms exist