268 ANALYZING DATA
an instrumental means through which to achieve our ends. As such, they are “transparent”
—blind people do not feel their sticks vibrating in the palms of their hands, they experience
the terrain ahead of them directly as rough, as a result of their stick-assisted “way” of
investigating it in their movement through it. (Shotter 1993b, 21; emphasis in original)Combinations of resources, then, function as instruments that reveal the world in particular
ways. When applied to scholarship, this insight requires an acknowledgment of the ideal-typical
character of scholarly accounts of the world. Such an acknowledgment, if made in an active and
ongoing manner, helps to prevent scholars from becoming entrapped by their narratives. Such
entrapment would lead to a misrepresentation of the world revealed by scholarly prosthetics as
though it were real in the sense of existing outside of all social practices of interpretation (Heidegger
1962 [1927]). As Max Weber argued in his famous (and often misunderstood) essay on “‘objec-
tivity,’”^7 ideal types areformed through a one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and through bring-
ing together a great many diffuse and discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent
concrete individual events, which are arranged according to these emphatically one-sided
points of view in order to construct a unified analytical construct [Gedanken]. In its con-
ceptual purity, this analytical construct [Gedankenbild] is found nowhere in empirical real-
ity; it is a utopia. (1999a, 191; emphasis in original)Ideal types are pragmatically useful rather than “true” or “false” (M. Weber 1999a). Inasmuch
as the first criterion of an ideal type is its pragmatic and analytical character, we can begin by
tossing out claims to have accurately apprehended the essence of the situation under investiga-
tion. This means, among other things, that no single scholarly account of a situation can be mis-
taken for a “definitive” or “final” word on that situation (Shotter 1993a). Instead, scholars should
focus on what their particular theoretical specifications actually do in practice and what kind of
world they help to produce. Scholars cannot avoid their responsibility for the values embedded in
particular ideal-typical conceptual prosthetics and must therefore self-consciously exercise re-
sponsibility in selecting their analytical tools.
But the prosthetic character of combinations of cultural resources applies just as much to
claims made on the Bundestag floor about the direction of postwar German reconstruction as it
does to claims made by researchers about how and why that reconstruction effort took place in
the way that it did. In both contexts, cultural resources deployed in the course of claims making
reveal the world in a specific way and afford certain courses of action and not others.^8 Both the
social actors under investigation and the scholarly researcher conducting the investigation exer-
cise agency to the extent that the social contexts in which they are situated are not conceptualized
as being fully closed and determinate. “Conceptualization” is central here precisely because terms
like “agency” and “context” are themselves prosthetics, revealing the world in specific ways and
not in others. “Preserving agency” therefore means generating accounts that leave room for the
indeterminacy, creativity, and contingency of social action.
In adopting a broad understanding of methodology as “a concrete practical rationality”
(Flyvbjerg 2001), rather than a narrow understanding that would collapse methodology into mere
“method,” the preservation of agency appears as a methodological issue. Methodology is complicit
in the production and reproduction of the world. Focusing on this complicity and conducting
research from within it, as it were, involves a commitment to “reflexivity”: an awareness of how
the habits and experiences that one is bringing to bear on a situation shape and construct that