Post-Positivist and Interpretivist

Post-Positivist and Interpretivist

Post-Positivist and Interpretivist

Introduction

Interpretive perspective is a framework and practice within social science perspective that is invested in philosophical and methodological ways of understanding social reality. (Carter, 2000, pp. 50)Interpretive perspective have drawn inspiration from idealist philosophical traditions—notably hermeneutics and phenomenology—and also from postmodern and poststructuralist philosophies.

Critique

Interpretive perspective and approaches have been gaining ground in organization theory, serving as repositories of tools for empirical analysis, theoretical perspectives, and thoughtful commentaries on social life and the human condition. Organization theory over the years has been host to a wide variety of such theories and approaches, beginning with Egon Bittner's classic work on the concept of organization and David Silverman's critiques of functionalist sociology. Hermeneutics, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, critical theory, storytelling analysis, metaphorical analysis, and rhetorical analysis have all constituted an interpretive repository of approaches that organization theorists draw on. While they have subtle differences, they are united by a voluntarist orientation, their acceptance of the social construction of reality through language and social practices, the importance of grasping first-order realities, the active nature of agency, and the historically and situations of experience. These themes have been the focus of active studies and debates in organization theory, and this trend is likely to continue. (Carter, 2000, pp. 50)

Discussion

The assumption held by the author, among others, however, that a method could provide both empathetic access to the ideational world as well as objective validity of the type sought in positivist science has been seen as problematic, and a contrast is often made (in Paul Ricoeur's work for example) between meaningful understanding of the type sought in interpretive theory on the one hand and explanation as the search for causal, law like deterministic regularities based on the natural science paradigm on the other. (Dennis, 2003, pp. 60) Others such as Richard Daft went further, viewing both interpretive and nomothetic perspective as forms of storytelling, characterized by the need to tell a plausible story effectively and believably linking the data, their interpretation, and perspective outcomes. Employing literary metaphors, he advocated designing perspective as a poem, containing just a few (two to four) perspective variables that cohere together and provide depth of meaning, rather than a novel that has numerous variables without all having tight interconnections within a meaningful whole. (Prasad, 2000, pp. 04)

Central to the interpretive framework is the notion of Verstehen or understanding (first discussed by Max Weber). Since Weber, several philosophers and social scientists have emphasized the inseparability of understanding from interpretation. At some level, then, all social research is interpretive because all such research is guided by the researcher's desire to understand (and therefore interpret) social reality. Whether the focus is on quanta or qualia, at bottom it still understands that is being sought by researchers across the board. In a Nietzschean sense, then, there are “no facts, only interpretations.” However, the kind of understanding being sought is usually determined by researchers based on the varying ontological, epistemological, and methodological beliefs to which they ...