Interpretivism

9 Key excerpts on "Interpretivism"

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  Social Theory and Political Practice (RLE Social Theory)

  • Brian Fay(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  how they fit into a whole structure which defines the nature and purpose of human life. In each of these types of explanation, the social scientist is redescribing an act or experience by setting it into progressively larger contexts of purpose and intelligibility, he reveals what the agents are doing by seeing what they are up to and how and why they would be up to that. 4.2 Its conception of theory and practice Just as a positivist social science contains within itself, and is sustained by, a view of theory and practice – the notion of technical control I discussed above – so also interpretive social science is conceptually linked to a notion of theory and practice and is, in fact, partially conceived in terms of this notion. In this section I will first examine its views as to how knowledge from social science is related to human action, and then I will show how these views are defining elements of what constitutes knowledge of social behaviour according to an interpretive social science. It ought to be clear from the account that I have just given that an interpretive social science is one which reveals to people what it is that they and others are doing when they act and speak as they do. It does this by articulating the symbolic structures in accordance with which people in a particular social setting act, by making clear the criteria of rationality in virtue of which certain alternatives were chosen rather than others, and by revealing the basic assumptions which pattern the world in distinct ways. An interpretive social science uncovers the connections which exist between parts of people’s lives, thereby allowing one to see these lives in the whole and enabling one to grasp the significance of particular behaviour in terms of this whole

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  Science and Social Science

  An Introduction

  • Malcolm Williams(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Interpretivism has its philosophical roots in idealism and its methodological roots in hermeneutics. The method of hermeneutics was originally used by biblical scholars in the Middle Ages and involved a search for and interpretation of meaning in scriptures. The translation of biblical texts was made complex by the tendency for them to have been already translated several times before. The hermeneuticist, in order to discover their original meaning, had then to attempt to understand the wider social context within which they were produced (see Bauman 1978; Hughes 1990). An extension of this method to an understanding of history, though advocated by Vico in the seventeenth century, was first adopted by Frederich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century, but its use as a strategy in contemporary social investigation was not widely applied until well into the twentieth century. Rather ironically an important advocate of Interpretivism in social science was Weber, who in his injunction that any explanation must be adequate at the level of cause and meaning advocated a methodological pluralism (Weber [1922] 1947). I will return to Weber in due course.

  The central methodological principle of Interpretivism is that individual actions, utterances and beliefs can only by understood through an act of interpretation, through which the investigator attempts to discover their meaning for the agent. As Daniel Little describes it:

  The goal of interpretation is to make sense of an action or practice – to discern the meaning of the practice in the context of a system of meaningful cultural symbols and representations. (Little 1991: 70)

  As an investigative method interpretation is quite unlike scientific method (or methods). In the latter whilst there is disagreement about what should count as scientific method, there is no shortage of candidates. In Interpretivism things are much vaguer (Little 1991: 72), with the coherence of the account provided by the investigator regarded as the principal criterion of validation. In other words the investigator, like her counter-part in biblical studies, is constrained to make interpretations of interpretations within the context of what is known of the particular culture. The less prescriptive approach shows in the methods of data collection used. Apart from the analysis of pre-given texts (books, film, archive material etc.) interpretivists use two principal methods (Hobbs and May 1993; Bryman 1988: chapter 3) of Participant Observation and Unstructured Interviewing. Often these are combined.

  The technique of participant observation requires the investigator to partially, or wholly immerse herself in the culture of those she investigates. This might be within an ‘alien’ culture, such as that investigated by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1979) in Bali, or more ‘familiar’ cultures such as the inner city (see for example Hobbs 1988; Robins and Cohen 1978; Whyte 1943). The participant comes to understand (it is claimed) the culture from the point of view of an agent within that culture. There are no firm prescriptions for the collection of data, or what kind of data are collected. The investigator uses whatever is best or possible (notebook, tape recorder or just memory) and records those things that help to build a coherent picture of the culture that faithfully captures the meanings of its participants. Likewise the unstructured interview (confusingly sometimes called the focused interview), though possibly guided initially by some questions from the interviewer, is intended to allow those investigated to develop their perspective (Bryman 1988: 47). No hypothesis is being tested, standardisation of the interview (questions, format etc.) is unnecessary, the aim simply being ‘to make sense of an object of study’ (Taylor 1994: 181). This can perhaps be likened to a stranger who turns up to a tennis game. What is going on, in terms of the rules or the point of the game, is made intelligible to her by someone who already understands the game. In this way Interpretivism is rather like everyday life in that we make adequate sense of events, sufficient to be able to recapitulate them, or act upon them.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse

  • David Grant, Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, Linda L Putnam, David Grant, Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, Linda L Putnam(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Interpretivism AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN There is a broad range of theoretical approaches within the interpretive tradition, with varying ontological and epistemological positions (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). However, a key unifying factor is their focus on achieving a meaningful understanding of the actors’ frame of reference, what Weber (1922) referred to as verstehen . In Weber’s view, this ability and desire to achieve an in-depth, first-order understanding was what distinguished the social from the natural sciences. Meaningful understanding is often contrasted with explanation (Ricœur, 1991), the search for causal, law-like deterministic regularities that is to be found in the positivist tradition – a tradition based on the methodology of the natural sciences. This simple contrast, however, does not do justice to the potential for meaning-ful understanding and explanation to operate in a complementary manner. Interpretivism should not be equated with subjectivism. This perspective is based upon the misconception that Interpretivism lacks ‘objectivity’ and instead affords primacy to the idiosyncratic meanings of single actors with no necessary relation to a more shared, intersubjective and verifiable reality. If Interpretivism were to assume more subjective properties, this would suggest a potential for unlimited interpretations of observations and textual data, with no means of verification or validation. Such a characterization is at the heart of Denzin’s (1983) criticism that interpretivists reject generalization since each instance of observed social interaction is unique and social settings are complex and indeterminate. Interpretive understanding does not, however, mean a degeneration to subjec-tivism, unlimited interpretations and the inability to make any sort of generalization, 7 Interpretivist Approaches to Organizational Discourse Loizos Th. Heracleous

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  Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory

  • Kenneth Tucker(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In other words, the appropriate criteria for deCiding whether the actions of these two men were of the same kind or not belongs to religion itself. 19 44 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL THEORY The criteria by which one interprets the above two actions cannot rest merely on methodological conventions. The standards for deciding that the two acts belong to the same class of phenomena arise from an understanding of the subject studied, and a comprehension of the observer's relationship to the subject, rather than from a general methodological postulate. These have the following closely related implications for an interpretive study of society: 1 The strict separation of observer and observed cannot be main-tained. Explanation is not achieved through a process analogous to physical or natural processes, but is concerned instead with the explication of meaning. The imagery characteristic of an interpretive science is one of participation in/with the object of study. 2 The creation of meaning has an intersubjective basis. Meanings are created and reproduced through the interaction of individuals in daily life; subjective understanding is constituted in an intersub-jective context which varies between cultures and historical eras. 3 Knowledge cannot be severed from the social context in which it originates. All knowledge, whether scientific or commonsensical, derives from the intersubjective nature of social life. Though all of the interpretive approaches share these criticisms of the natural science model, their respective analyses proceed along different paths. Symbolic interactionism focuses on the interpretive processes that people use to construct a meaningful social world. Phenomenological theory, represented by Schutz, attempts to construct an objective, replic-able social science similar to that desired by Weber. Schutz undertakes this task in part through criticizing Weber's understanding of subjective meaning, the ideal type, and Verstehen.

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  The Art and Craft of Comparison

  • John Boswell, Jack Corbett, R. A. W. Rhodes(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Humanism, on the other hand, argues that human life differs from the rest of nature because ‘human action . . . is meaningful and historically contin- gent’. The task of the human sciences is an interpretive one in search of meaning. Moreover, the epistemology of the social sciences assumes the knower and the known are independent. Humanism considers the two inseparable, interacting and influencing one another, leading to a ‘fusion of horizons’; to shared interpretations (Lincoln and Guba 1985: 28, 36–38 and Table 1.1; and for thoroughgoing philosophical critiques of naturalism in the social sciences see: MacIntyre 2007; Rorty 1980; Taylor 2010 [1985]; Winch 2002; Wittgenstein (2009) [1953]). These orientations, overdrawn as they are, entail at least four dichotomies. We contrast the naturalist focus on generalisability, isolating variables, causal inferences and refutation with the interpretive emphasis on ‘thick descrip- tion’, ‘webs of meaning’, ‘complex specificity’ and intersubjective objectivity. We argue that this latter approach does not lead to a narrow idiographic approach or ‘mere description’. Decentring The most obvious misconception about the interpretive approach is that it aims only to understand actions and practices, not explain them. A distinction is drawn between the nomothetic search for explanatory laws of the social sciences and idiographic understanding of the interpretive sciences. We join a growing chorus of scholars who push back against this assertion that descriptive work cannot tell a causal story (see also Gerring 2012b, 2017; Wedeen 2009). We concede that when using an interpretive logic of discovery, the causal story is typically told in a different way to the more ‘mechanistic’ account of causation favoured by scholars working from a logic of justification. Still, interpretivists have a clear if different notion of causation.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology

  • William Outhwaite, Stephen Turner, William Outhwaite, Stephen Turner(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  2. The structure of understanding is essentially defined by intentional and value-laden concepts, such as meaning, norm, intention, purpose, value, etc. On the basis of this interrelated set of con-cepts, which are seen as indispensable for an adequate interpretation of social and cultural phenomena, the epistemological uniqueness of understanding in the social sciences is claimed. 3. Social–scientific interpretation, as it is epistemi-cally constrained by intentional or normative concepts, must then be conceived as the reflexive articulation of implicitly presupposed and cultur-ally situated meanings of agents-in-contexts. This argument for the reflexive articulation of inten-tional meanings is to remain in force even when the actual behavior of agents conflicts with the explicitly endorsed meanings and self-understandings.The need to account for meaning-constitution that transcends the intentional understanding of agents grounds a unique form of action -explanation that takes causal and struc-tural factors of the objective context into account. 1 CARTESIAN PROMISES AND PITFALLS: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL GROUNDING OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES From its inception as a general theory of human understanding, the hermeneutic perspective is internally defined by a twofold interest. On the one hand, the academic dis-ciplines dealing with human expressions and actions are supposed to achieve a level of rigor and objectivity that justifies their claim to be human sciences . The human and social sciences are seen in need of a grounding that shows how their theories and interpretations can make a rightful claim to be objective, valid, and adequate to the object. On the other hand, the hermeneutic paradigm is equally driven by the intuition that the way in which understanding occurs in the human sciences is essentially different from the natural sciences.

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  On the Logic of the Social Sciences

  • Jürgen Habermas, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Jerry A. Stark(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  But the postulate of describing and explaining human behavior in terms of controllable sensory observation stops short before the description and explanation of the process by which scientist B controls and verifies the observational findings of scientist A and the conclusions drawn by him. In order to do so, B has to know what A has observed, what the goal of his inquiry is, why he thought the observed fact worthy of being observed, i.e. relevant to the scientific problem at hand, etc. This knowledge is com- monly called understanding. The explanation of how such a mutual un- derstanding of human beings might occur is apparently left to the social scientist. 29 109 6 The Phenomenological Approach What in the empirical-analytic sciences is surreptitiously presup- posed by participants in the research process as the basis of their mutual understanding, is reclaimed by interpretive sociology as its proper domain. The communicative context and the experimenting community of the researchers operate on the level of the inter- subjectivity of the background knowledge articulated in ordinary language. The strict empirical sciences remain within this horizon without questioning it; the task of sociology is to comprehend it by thematizing it. Consequently, sociology cannot separate the language-immanent level of interaction, on which theoretical assumptions are made, discussed, and tested, from the language- transcendent level of facts in the same way the empirical sciences can: the transcendental level is also the level of its data. In the phenomenological approach, the paradoxical implication that Neo-Kantianism saw itself forced to draw arises again. A cultural science like interpretive sociology is concerned with objectivations in which the objectivating subjectivity has renounced transcenden- tal consciousness. Although these facts are symbolically mediated, they are not produced in accordance with logical rules but rather first encountered contingently.

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  Charles Taylor

  Meaning, Morals and Modernity

  • Nicholas H. Smith(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  5 Interpretation and the Social Sciences

  It is conventional to distinguish two broad tendencies within the philosophy of social science. According to one tendency – sometimes referred to as ‘naturalism’ – the social sciences, in their mature form, are accountable to the same standards as prevail in the modern sciences of nature. For naturalists, the social sciences earn their right to be called ‘scientific’ by producing explanatory theories, ideally with precise predictive power, which admit of exact and unambiguous verification. According to the second tendency – pioneered by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey – the social sciences possess a logic which departs from the natural sciences in fundamental ways. For Dilthey, the discontinuity between natural and social science arises from the fact that the social sciences have to interpret or reach an understanding of their subject-matter. This tendency in the philosophy of social science is sometimes called the Verstehen school. But if Dilthey was the founder of the Verstehen approach to social science, it was modified first by Heidegger, and later by Hans-Georg Gadamer, in a way that refined and radicalized Dilthey’s notion of ‘reaching an understanding’. In recognition of this advance, it is now common to use an expression made famous by Gadamer, ‘hermeneutics’, to denominate a way of thinking about the social sciences as essentially interpretative. It is no exaggeration to say that Taylor has been the most eloquent and influential advocate of the hermeneutic model of social science in the English-speaking world.1

  In fact, Taylor’s defence of hermeneutic social science is a natural extension of his philosophical anthropology. For the central claim of philosophical hermeneutics is that human beings, as Taylor puts it, are ‘self-interpreting animals’. Their self-interpretation – the meaning they have for themselves – is integral to who they are. The first question for the philosophy of social science, then, is ‘how is a science of self-interpreting animals possible?’. What is its structure and what kind of validity does it have? We shall take up Taylor’s treatment of these issues in the first part of the chapter. In the second part, we turn to a cluster of related questions concerning the critical potential of social science. In Taylor’s view, social science is essentially a critical enterprise, whose whole point is to improve upon naïve self-interpretations, to offer justified critical judgements on them. Taylor is thus a vociferous critic of relativism in social science. At the same time, social science must be vigilant to avoid ethnocentrism in its attempt to reach a critical understanding of the self-interpretations of others. In fact, Taylor does not see these two requirements – criticism and the avoidance of ethnocentrism – as incompatible. On the contrary, he tries to show that only critical hermeneutics makes sense of the possibility of a non-ethnocentric science of other cultures and societies. Social scientists – and anyone else for that matter – are able to avoid ethnocentrism just by virtue of their ability to make valid or rational cross-cultural judgements. The chapter concludes with a discussion of this claim.

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  Doing Business Research

  A Guide to Theory and Practice

  • Nick Lee, Ian Lings, Author(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Verstehen is a term from hermeneutics originally, but it is now commonly used to designate the concept of the interpretive ‘understanding’ of an experience. It can be a pretty impressive word to drop if you are talking to the right audience – but make sure to pronounce it right (fehr-SHTEH-ehn), or you’ll end up looking like an idiot (like I did).

  Furthermore, because interpretive approaches view phenomena as inextricably bound up with time and context, one is unable to separate knowledge of a phenomena from its context. Reality should be viewed as a whole, and individual phenomena viewed in relation to that whole (the hermeneutic circle again). Knowledge is therefore primarily descriptive and ideographic rather than abstract from the specific context (as knowledge is assumed to be in the traditional scientific approach). Furthermore, one must immerse oneself in the context in order to truly understand the meanings and experiences which one is attempting to study (the influence of phenomenology is clear here). These points are concerned with the epistemology of interpretive approaches, or the type of knowledge which they aim to generate.

  I’ve left the ontology of interpretive approaches until last, because it could be seen as the source of some debate. You will remember that ontology refers to the belief about the nature of reality itself – which is a pretty tough idea to come to terms with. It should be clear already that traditional scientific ontology views reality as being ‘out there’, a single, objective world which we can measure and explain if we had the tools to do so. It should be equally clear that interpretive approaches do not concur, and instead take the view that there are multiple realities. Of course, this seems to open something of a can of worms in terms of the nature of reality. I mean, is there anything specific which actually defines what reality is? One way of closing the lid on this can is to take the viewpoint that reality exists within the minds of social actors, individuals and groups within different sociohistorical contexts. This would seem to work pretty well, and can be considered to be a social constructionist

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