22 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
in considerations of power and power relations, as well as privileged speech and silences in col-
lective, public discourses.
Interpretive philosophies have not been without their critics from within the interpretive end
of the epistemological spectrum. Specifically, Frankfurt School critical theorists have charged
phenomenology on ontological grounds with an excessive preoccupation with the Self—a kind
of disengaged contemplation or philosophical navel-gazing—that ignores the impacts on indi-
viduals of institutions and their power. In the critics’ view, phenomenologists (appeared to) be-
lieve that the self-understanding that can emerge from reflection could override power imbalances
and, perforce, lead to change. As they saw it, phenomenological argumentation leads to inatten-
tion to questions of power and even a dismissiveness toward the operative reality of institutional,
and institutionalized, power—an undervaluing of the seemingly objective reality of social
institutions and the problematics of change (see, e.g., Fay 1975). Critical theorists argue that
interpretation’s emphasis on understanding meanings is not enough, that understanding needs to
be anchored to action (Beam and Simpson 1984).
Whereas this criticism may well pertain at the level of the philosophical writings, and espe-
cially the more solipsistic and transcendental ones, it seems less founded when these philosophies
are applied to actual practices—in organizations, for example, or social practices or other empiri-
cal applications of interpretive methods. Once phenomenology, the particular target of such criti-
cism, is brought into the realm of political and other social realities, theorists must, and do, contend
with questions of power in its communal, social, organizational, political, and/or other institu-
tional manifestations. To put the point somewhat differently, DNA science doesn’t tell genes
what to do; but interpretive social science of necessity engages a social world that acts and re-
sponds, to its own meaning making, at least, and potentially to the meaning making of the scien-
tific community; and such action perforce involves interpretive science with issues of power,
institutions, and other engaged concerns. As will be clear in the chapters in parts II and III of this
book, one can find among interpretive researchers a continuum from the more critical to the less
critical (in a critical theory sense; meaning, with greater and lesser explicit attention to and reflex-
ivity about power issues and the social realities of institutions). The critique does not seem appli-
cable to all interpretive research.
In addition, applied to neighborhoods, communities, organizations, states, public policies,
governmental decision making, and other empirical settings, interpretive approaches are argu-
ably more democratic in character than analyses informed by methodological positivism: they
accord the status of expertise to local knowledge possessed by situational actors, not just to the
technical expertise of researchers. Much of the work to date in interpretive policy analysis, for
example (e.g., Colebatch and Degeling 1986; Feldman 1989; C. Fox 1990; Hofmann 1995;
Jennings 1983, 1987; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003; Maynard-Moody and Stull 1987;
Yanow 1996, 2003b), appears to be motivated by a desire not only to explain agency perfor-
mance, but to make it more just, more equitable, more effective. Several theorists (e.g., Dryzek
1990; Hawkesworth 1988; Jennings 1983; Schneider and Ingram 1993, 1997) argue, further,
that interpretive analysis presupposes or requires an ethical commitment to a more democratic
policy process and analysis.
Interpretation as a method, then, is conducted as “sustained empathic inquiry” (Atwood and
Stolorow 1984, 121), in which empathy constitutes an intentional embracing of the other’s mean-
ing. Studying the lifeworld of research site members and the political, organizational, and/or
communal artifacts they embed with meaning, as hermeneutics would argue, entails a decentering
of expertise on the part of the researcher. Accessing local knowledge of local conditions accords
legitimacy to those for whom this is their primary experience, their lifeworld. It thereby shifts the