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Interpretive research

Interpretive research. Some Examples.

kathleen-day
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Interpretive research

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  1. Interpretive research Some Examples

  2. ‘Political language is political reality’ (Murray Edelman, 1988)‘…large groups of dead trees are, of course, not a social construct; the point is how one makes sense of dead trees’ (Maarten Hajer, 2005)‘Any satisfactory explanation of actions or practices must refer to the beliefs that animate them’ (Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes, 2005)

  3. Interpretive social science Key premise: human actors collectively make sense of a world that has no meaning by itself So social research should; focus ‘ ..on meaning and meaning-making in specific situational contexts….; [be] concerned with understanding the life world of the actor in the situation being studied; …[and] engage the role of language and other artifacts in constructing and communicating meaning and social relationships’ (Hatch and Yanow, 2007)

  4. An Example: Town Hall Tales (Merlijn van Hulst) Q: How do actors in Dutch municipalities make sense of issues they are confronted with, which images of governing do they use in their sensemaking and how do they use these images? Focus: role of stories in municipal government (practice stories, stories of governing)

  5. THT ctd Research design: • 2 municipalities, 4 ‘cases’ (issues) • 5 months non-participant observation • data: municipality documents; council and management team meetings, bureaucratic committee meetings, town meetings; 90 formal 75-105 min interviews in office as well as home settings, many informal chats

  6. What did the stories ‘do’? • Help construct realities of problems • Provide useful ambiguity for actors unite around a rough ‘frame’ • Helped to contrast: right, wrong; allowing jumps from present ‘is’ to future ‘ought to be’ • Helped to delimit: scope, audience, measurement • Helped to enlarge: focus attention on X (and thus away from Y)

  7. So what? Study helped debunk notion of administrative culture as ‘given’ (static, holistic, entrenched), and advance notion of culture as process (interactive, negotiated, shifty, ‘messy’)

  8. Other examples How do Labour markets work? • Institutional economics vs Elizabeth Wynhausen (Dirt Cheap) What do bureaucratic elites do? • Public choice theories vs Rod Rhodes Why do street-level bureaucrats modify or even subvert policy programmes in implementing them? • Theories of coping/shirking vs Maynard Moody’s ‘client categorization’ practices

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