18 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
stand in for, to represent, their embedded meanings. The point is clearest in Goffman’s (e.g.,
1959, 1974) and Mead’s (1934) writings and in the notion of a study of “symbolic interaction,”
developed in their work.
The representational character of this relationship is at the heart of studies of and arguments
concerning language: Are words “transparent” in their meaning, that is, do they equate to what
they signify—does the word-meaning reside in the object—or is meaning more a matter of con-
sensus? Foucault (1970, chapter 2), although not customarily grouped with interpretive philoso-
phers, is helpful here. He locates the shift away from seeing words as the mirrors of their signifiers
in the passage from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth: “in the sixteenth century, one asked
oneself how it was possible to know that a sign did in fact designate what it signified; from the
seventeenth century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified” (42–43).
This is a significant shift, from the analysis of equivalence to the analysis of meaning. The meth-
odological importance lies in the shift in understanding of what it means to interpret symbolic
referents. Is one “divining” the preestablished meaning of a sign, much as Joseph interpreted the
meaning of the cupbearer’s, baker’s, and Pharaoh’s dreams (Genesis 40–41) or as a palm-reader
divines the lines on a hand? This would indicate that meanings reside in the objects denoted by
signs, that meanings are out there waiting to be “discovered”—hence, the methodological lan-
guage of “findings.” Or are things signified to be understood as (in contemporary language)
“constructed” meanings? Foucault drew the distinction in this way:
Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make the signs speak and
to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call the totality of the learning and skills that
enable one to distinguish the location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs,
and to know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology; the sixteenth century super-
imposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of similitude.^31 (1970, 29)
The hermeneutic symbolic relationship is a dynamic one: each referent to or use of or engage-
ment with an artifact is an opportunity to maintain and reinforce, or revise and change, its under-
lying meaning (Yanow 1996, 2000). Arguing that meanings cannot be apperceived or accessed
directly, but only through interpreting their artifactual representations, leads to the basic methods
of accessing sources of data used in interpretive analyses: observing (with whatever degree of
participation), a conversational mode of interviewing, and the close reading of documents. These
engage the concrete specificities of acts, language, and/or objects—artifacts embodying and ex-
pressing the more abstract value, belief, and affective meanings.
For example, casual talk in common everyday encounters rarely explores meanings explicitly.
One might strike up a conversation with someone in the grocery store and infer what she values or
believes or what is meaningful to him from the words spoken, the tone of voice, and other ele-
ments of nonverbal communication, including dress, bearing, gestures, and facial expressions.
The point holds for corporate entities as well: Organizations’ or governments’ beliefs or values
are seen as conveyed not only in their written policy statements but also in their nonverbal
communication, such as their acts or the acts of their agents (see Lipsky [1980] on street-level
bureaucrats being perceived as representing agency policy), or in the programs and spaces
designed and/or used for implementing policies (see, e.g., Stein 2004, Yanow 1996). In this
vein, Hopf (2002) built an argument about Soviet and post-Soviet identity, at two moments in
time, through what might be called a hermeneutic reading of newspapers, popular magazines,
high school textbooks, and the like, as well as official state documents. He treated these arti-
facts as the embodiments of contemporaneous, collective identity elements, reading them as
expressive of those collective meanings.