72 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
walls, the process entails reading and rereading and reading again—musing, in an abductive^8 way
(Locke, Golden-Biddle, and Feldman 2004)—until, in the light of prior knowledge of the theo-
retical literature or the empirical data, or both, something makes sense in a new way. The experi-
ence feels like parts of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle suddenly fitting together; but it is no easier
to describe how the brain “processes” those pieces of cardboard and makes sense of their con-
cavities than it is to describe how one “sees” metaphoric or categorical or semiotic meaning—we
still cannot see inside the black box that is the brain at work making judgments or imagining
analytic associations (something not unique to interpretive analysis).^9
A different way of engaging the “non-rigorous” charge is philosophical. What the procedural
focus misses is the philosophical context in which rigor has a particular, technical meaning: that
of logic and its deliberations concerning the character of truth.^10 In classical logic, rigor concerns
the precision of syntax. In this context, rigor would be defined more formally as containing pre-
mises from which conclusions may be derived logically—that is, in which the structural syntax of
a set of statements is sufficiently precise as to produce a cogent argument, where “cogent” means
well-grounded, convincing, persuasively relevant, appealing to the intellect or to powers of rea-
soning (see The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. 2000; Webster’s
Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1998; Dictionary of the History of Ideas 2003).^11
In this sense, then, research is rigorous, definitionally, to the extent that its arguments are
constructed logically—that is, where conclusions are adequately supported by the evidence that
is presented, such that the reader is persuaded of the cogency of the argument.^12 There is nothing
inherent in the character of interpretive research that would prevent it from being rigorous in this
sense. Indeed, the rigorousness of the presentation of the argument—its analytic rigor—is one of
the criteria against which interpretive research is judged within its own epistemic communities.^13
This understanding of rigor links to one of the central issues in interpretive methodology, the
character of the text produced by the researcher reporting on her analysis. There is a perception
that ethnographic and other interpretive scholarship should be undertaken only by “good” writ-
ers. Good interpretive writing can be as engaging as good fiction, sometimes with turns of phrase
as beautiful as those found in some poetry.^14 But one might say the same about good political
theory. What readers are responding to, I believe, is the character of the expositional logic, along
with the “music” of the text (word choice, phrasing, sentence rhythm, and so on). Here is analytic
rigor: the crafting of a sound argument, in which observations build upon observations, sentences
upon sentences, paragraphs and sections upon themselves, until the logic of the whole compels
reason to say, Ah, yes, this makes sense as an explanation! And the choice of words and their
combinations in sentences, and the combinations of sentences in paragraphs, contribute to this
meaning-making process: As Aristotle suggested long ago, rhetorical persuasion appeals to the
feelings and to one’s sense of rightness in addition to one’s sense of logic.^15 Such an understand-
ing of rigor supports the contention in interpretive methodologies that writing itself is an integral
part of the researcher’s analytic method (see, e.g., Richardson 1990).On ObjectivityWe commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is
speaking.... I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere
account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some
such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived
sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1939 [1854], 14)