INTRODUCTION xxiii2006), but also from outside traditional political science: planning, public law, history, area stud-
ies, public policy, organizational studies, and public administration. These scholars have formal
training in anthropology, urban studies and planning, social theory, and sociology, as well as
political science, and hold appointments in schools, departments, and centers of environmental
and natural resources, landscape architecture and regional planning, public affairs and adminis-
tration, Arab studies, and international service, as well as in more standard disciplinary depart-
ments. The methodological questions they discuss in their chapters, however, are not restricted by
these institutional affiliations and disciplinary boundaries. We asked these authors to reflect on
their own work, to think about how they had done their research and about the interpretive
methodological questions and issues they encountered. Furthermore, we asked them to select
one or more epigraphs from published research, theirs or another’s, that would serve as a touch-
stone for the reflective methodological analysis presented in the chapter. These general instruc-
tions have, we think, produced methodological discussions that are concrete—grounded,
appropriately so, in the lived experiences and struggles of the researchers. We hope, then, that
the book brings some answers to our student, practitioner, and faculty colleagues across the disci-
plines who are themselves seeking direction in interpretive areas. But even more, we hope it
challenges and provokes many more questions as to the character of interpretive social science.
This, then, is the additional impetus for preparing this book, and it is a more personal one coming
out of our concerns for curricular matters and the future of our several disciplines. One of us was
invited a few years ago to meet with a cross-departmental, interdisciplinary group of doctoral stu-
dents at a large Midwestern U.S. university. Their central and very collective concern, despite diver-
gent departmental affiliations and disciplinary dispersions, was how to get “qualitative” dissertation
proposals past their respective committees. What foundations could they use to argue for their work
on “scientific” grounds? And then, could they get jobs? And would they be able to get their work
published? And, anticipating the future, would they be tenurable?
Both of us have heard such questions again and again over the last few years, in postings to
various Listservs, while preparing the Workshop on Interpretive Research Methods in Empirical
Political Science held at the 2003 Western Political Science Association conference, and in quiet
conversations after conference panels and receptions, in countries in Europe, Latin America,
Asia, and the South Pacific, as well as in the United States. In thinking of this book, we have had
those, and many other, students in mind, along with the faculty, journal editors, and practitioners
(policy analysts, for example) who have shared with us similar concerns. For junior faculty, the
problems are publication and promotion and tenure. For senior faculty, it is also the problem of
publication and, at times, contending with departmental colleagues who do not value their work
when it develops in new directions or who do not wish to hire new faculty with interpretive
orientations. For students and faculty alike, the problem is finding a community of scholars with
whom one can have an engaged, empathic, and non-defensive conversation. For many journal
editors, it is the problem of not knowing what the criteria for good “qualitative” research are or of
not knowing who does such work and might be asked to review submissions. For practitioners,
along with students and faculty, it is the problem of fighting what often feels like an uphill battle
against the entrenched and hegemonic powers of quantitative, positivist-informed research de-
signs and criteria.
Furthermore, in conversations with both graduate students and faculty colleagues in recent
years, we have discerned a hesitation, whether out of humility, uneasiness, and/or general reti-
cence, to articulate interpretive philosophical or specifically methodological ideas because they,
themselves, were not formally schooled—they seem to mean “credentialed”—in phenomenol-