376 RE-RECOGNIZING INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGIES
I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are
speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what are they saying, but
from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such dis-
course.... If there is one approach that I do reject, it is that which gives absolute priority to
the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act. (1994, xiv)To the extent that poststructuralists retain and extend structuralism’s dismissal of the conscious
subject as the primary frame of reference, seeking instead to excavate the formal elements that
create even the very possibilities and conditions of consciousness, the potential for a major divide
between interpretivists and poststructuralists is strengthened. Conversely, to the extent that
poststructuralists seek to undermine structuralism’s reliance on rigid formal systems with pre-
cisely defined binaries, seeking instead to show the deeply contingent, even constructed, nature of
all systems of thought, the potential bridges between poststructuralism and the interpretive orien-
tation are strengthened. Another way of stating this with reference to Foucault’s work is to say
that the Foucault of The Order of Things underscores some of the key potential differences be-
tween the interpretivist and poststructuralist approaches while the Foucault of Discipline and
Punish underscores some of their potential commonalities.
From the interpretive standpoint, the important question, of course, is not whether this or
that particular thinker should be called interpretivist, but whether an emphasis on the animat-
ing, explanatory role played by belief unnecessarily drives a wedge between interpretive and
poststructuralist orientations. Even if interpretivists define belief broadly to include tacit knowl-
edge, know-how, and even perhaps what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, the constitutive, ex-
planatory role attributed to belief might potentially exclude work that seeks to highlight, for
example, the ways in which action is capable of generating belief rather than vice versa. Might
it not be possible to say that interpretivists hold that actions and beliefs are co-constitutive, and
that it restricts the possibilities for inquiry too much to claim a priori that in every case it is one
that explains the other? Depending on how these issues are negotiated, it is possible that inter-
pretive and poststructuralist approaches have a potentially major fault line running through the
question of human agency. But perhaps it is a fault line that produces occasional earthquakes
that are worth living with, rather than one that results in two completely separate continents.
I turn next to the question of tactics and repertoires of resistance. Some of the chapters in this
book are explicitly devoted to either developing or reclaiming a vocabulary of resistance capable
of enlarging the space for interpretive work within the social sciences. Implicit or explicit in each
of these is the recognition that a common criticism leveled against interpretive work is that it
lacks standards, or that the standards that it does have are somehow insufficient to qualify it as
“true” social science.
There are at least two important dilemmas facing an interpretivist who seeks to counter
these criticisms. The first and most basic is whether or not interpretivists should indeed aspire
to some common set of standards or criteria, some shared template by which work can be
judged. Confronted with continual criticism that one lacks standards, the immediate tempta-
tion is to devise a neat, self-contained list of criteria that rivals the list toted by the other side.
Yet to do this may be to win the battle and lose the war. The danger posed by parallelism here
is not simply that an interpretive list of criteria might end up replacing positivist criteria with
their own synonyms (as Schwartz-Shea, chapter 5, this volume, shows that Lincoln and Guba
[1985] do), but rather that interpretivists attempt to devise any such definitive list at all. The
impulse to “KKV-ize”^4 the interpretive orientation—that is, to force the wild, messy inter-
cropping of criteria and practices that is the interpretive orientation into tamed, mono-cropped