xxiv INTRODUCTION
ogy or ethnomethodology or semiotics, and so forth. We note that many of those whose work has
been central to the philosophical critique of the perceptions and/or foundations of the natural and
physical sciences, like Edmund Husserl and Thomas Kuhn, themselves began as scientists—
Husserl in mathematics and physics, Kuhn in physics—coming to their philosophical-theoretical
positions only through reflection on their own fields and the accepted practices of those fields.
This “later-coming” is certainly true of our own intellectual journeys—not that we hold ourselves
in the same ranks as those esteemed scholars—as it is of many of those who replied to our 2002
questionnaire as we attempted to develop a database of interpretive researchers in political sci-
ence: they indicated that they are self-taught, influenced more by their readings or by a chance
comment from a colleague or an adviser than by any particular, formal, doctoral curriculum.
This led us to decide to ask each colleague whose work is presented here to write a short,
personal reflection describing her or his path to the intellectual position articulated in each chap-
ter. These precede each of the chapters, and they indicate the widely divergent lived experiences
through which these scientists have come to their particular practices. What we learn from these
narratives, from responses to that database questionnaire, and from our own experience is that it
is rarely the case (at least among the social scientific circles within which we travel) that any of us
has had formal training—meaning, through degree-focused coursework—in these methods and
philosophies. It is far more common, as noted above, for an interpretive researcher studying
political or organizational action, social movements, or some other topic to develop those inter-
ests and skills out of a dissatisfaction with existing approaches, whether these be the linear ratio-
nal steps of the policy evaluation model that didn’t fit the lived experience of implementing a
national public policy, the clash between rational choice stipulations and the feminist theoretical
explanations that more closely fit personal experience, or the ahistorical presentism of math-
ematical models. Some of us experienced this cognitive dissonance as graduate students; others,
as junior faculty before receiving tenure; and still others, even after tenure. This personal “turn”
tends to be a gestalt shift: Much as one can’t entirely reason one’s way from seeing a duck to
seeing a rabbit,^26 one can’t completely think one’s way from the elegance of mathematical mod-
els to the messiness of ethnographic detail. The fact that the shift happens to different people at
different ages suggests that it is not, or not entirely, a developmental stage, unlike the undergradu-
ate shift from thinking in black and white to adding shades of gray (see Perry 1970).
We take this collective experience in an optimistic vein, indicating that all is not lost if depart-
ments do not require or even offer an interpretive methods course to their graduate students. At
the same time, we mark that curricular neglect or gatekeeping as the negative side of the experi-
ence: It is so much more difficult to travel this route on one’s own, to struggle to find the sources
and fit the pieces of the ideational map together, to locate a community of like-minded scholars,
to feel that one is a “real” health studies scholar or sociologist or policy analyst or organizational
theorist in a department, or discipline, in which interpretive methodologies are not treated as
legitimate ways to do science. Many of the scholars whose work is represented in this book have
done just that, but often with a sense of time lost that might have been saved by some earlier
intervention. It is for others like us that we have prepared this book.NOTES- Our thanks to Robert Adcock for help in identifying several of these.
- Another reason for the preference for “human sciences” is the sense that it is a closer rendering of
the German geisteswissenschaften, as distinct from naturwissenschaften, usually translated as “natural sci-
ences.” Polkinghorne (1983) discusses its translation and meanings extensively in the appendix (283–9).