STORIES FOR RESEARCH 319Moody and Leland 1999; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2000, 2003; Oberweis and Musheno
1999, 2001).
The research process included direct observation, in-depth entry and exit interviews, and a
questionnaire, but stories told to us by the street-level workers formed our primary source of data.
In many ways our three years of fieldwork, story collection, and story analysis followed by two
years of book drafting were a process of continual discovery, as we tried to listen ever more
closely to the words of street-level workers. In interpretive research, writing cannot be separated
from analysis. Putting accounts of what is heard and learned in the field into words and subjecting
narratives to critical reflection, including taking your words back to those whose stories you are
telling, is as much a part of interpretation as close readings of the narratives collected in the field.
Through these two, interactive phases of narrative analysis, we gained an interpretive perspective
that is close to that of the workers, a perspective that is distinct from the dominant perspective
represented in the extant literature on street-level decision making.
That perspective will be rendered in the ending of this chapter, but the story line of this essay
is a retrospective pedagogy of choices and constraints that constitute our mode of conducting
intensive field-based, narrative analysis. It is coupled with a practicum of taking this mode of
interpretive inquiry into the field. It concludes with thoughts on the role of discovery, collabora-
tion, and inconclusiveness that interpretive story analysis enables, particularly in the context of
team-based research.
NARRATIVE FIELD RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY
One great advantage of narrative field research is that its rich, variegated, nuanced, and often
conflicting textual information—what Geertz (2000; see also 1995) famously called “thick
descriptions”—simultaneously presents challenges to preconceived ideas and grist for insight.
Narratives retain more of the social world’s complexity than do quantitative renderings of social
life. Our observations and theories are always simplifications; necessary simplifications, but sim-
plifications nonetheless. In narratives the contradictions and tensions of everyday social life re-
main less filtered than is common in quantitative social research. The required discipline for
narrative field researchers is to put aside, at least for the moment, their “expertise” and literature-
based knowledge and to engage in perspective taking and listening to and learning from those we
study (see Fergusen and Musheno 2000). We are not the experts on their worlds; they are.
Like many scholars going into the field, we presumed to know much about our subject matter:
how street-level workers make sense of their everyday work and how their judgments fit into the
work of the state. And, like others doing research on street-level workers, we owed (and owe) our
greatest intellectual debt to Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy (1980; see also 1978). In
particular we had a mind-set about street-level workers as the “ultimate policy makers” who
remake policy as they deliver services and interact with citizens. Like Lipsky and others, we saw
street-level work in the context of policy implementation and considered the fundamental ques-
tion of street-level work to be the application and abuse of discretion. We came to define this
perspective as the “State-Agent Narrative” (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003, chapter 2).
The State-Agent Narrative is told by elites in and scholars of the state; it is embedded in our
formal understanding of our governmental institutions. This narrative portrays our democratic
state as an edifice built on law and predictable procedures that ensure that like cases will be
treated alike. Deviations from law and policy are allowable only if workers adapt law to the
circumstance of cases in a manner that is consistent with policy and hierarchical authority. Such
deviations are defined as “discretionary decision making.” Discretion, accountability, and con-