2003 Western Political Science Association Meetings, Denver, Colorado
Saturday, March 29, 1:30 - 5:00 p.m.
http://www.csus.edu/org/wpsa

Schedule, Selected Readings, and Syllabi

Organizers:

With the participation of:

Martha Feldman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Frederic Schaffer, MIT
Ron Schmidt, Sr., California State University, Long Beach

Syllabi*:

Martha S. Feldman, Proseminar in Qualitative Methods
Frederic C. Schaffer, Cultural Perspectives on Politics
Frederic C. Schaffer, Language and Politics
Susan E. Clarke (University of Colorado, Boulder), Contextual Research Methods Seminar
Joe Soss (American University), Qualitative Research Methods
Dvora Yanow, Interpretive Research Methods

*Not included here.

Description

This workshop is designed to introduce researchers to the varieties of interpretive methods available for the empirical study of politics and to their grounding in interpretive philosophies and methodology. These approaches have a long history and are used across the social sciences. Yet in our discipline, they are rarely taught in doctoral programs, so they are typically not part of the standard repertoire of empirical researchers.

The first half of the workshop (Panel 8.04, 1:30-3:15 p.m., sponsored by the Methodology Section of WPSA) will have two parts. The first will provide an overview of the philosophical grounding of interpretive methods. What are their epistemological and ontological presuppositions? How do these differ from the quantitative and qualitative approaches more commonly used in the discipline? What are the standards for assessing interpretive research? Which journals publish such research?

The second part of that session will focus on one technique of "accessing" data, conversational interviewing, in order to explicate the interpretive focus on meaning and to show how such interviewing contrasts with surveying, standard elite interviews, and focus groups. The sorts of research questions appropriate for this method will be explored.

The second session (3:30-5:00 p.m.) will emphasize that "data analysis" need not mean turning "word data" into numbers. Whether word data are accessed through conversational interviewing, (participant-) observation, or in document form, there are a variety of meaning-focused forms of data analysis for exploring content in its context (e.g., metaphor analysis, category analysis, ethnomethodology). This session will introduce several of them, emphasizing the research questions and empirical applications of such approaches for various subfields of the discipline.

Bibliographies will be provided to participants so that they can pursue subjects in greater depth than can be covered in the limited workshop time. Course syllabi may be included in the packet.

Workshop Schedule

Session 1:  1:30-3:15 p.m.

A:  Why “interpretive” methods?

Dvora Yanow, California State University, East Bay:  “The Philosophical Roots of Interpretive Methods”

Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, University of Utah:  “Issues in Qualitative-Interpretive Methodologies”

B:  Methods of Accessing Data

Frederic Schaffer , MIT:  “Accessing Interpretive Data:  Ordinary Language Interviewing”

Session 2:  3:30-5 p.m.

C:  Methods of Analyzing Data

Martha Feldman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:  "Semiotic Squares and Understanding Opposition"

Ronald Schmidt, Sr., California State University, Long Beach:  "Value-Critical Policy Analysis:  The Case of Language Policy in the U.S."

Selected References

These readings are divided into four sections:  historical background on the methodological issues (a history of ideas), philosophical background (critiques of positivism, arguments for meaning-centered methodologies), subject areas (e.g., IR, public policy, organizational studies), and methods-specific readings.  Some entries could as well have been listed under another heading; to conserve space, each appears only once.  That placement, and indeed the entire selection, represents the orientations of the organizers and participants in this workshop.  We have tried to suggest the breadth of these areas, but the list is by no means exhaustive.  We would welcome suggestions for additions, particularly in the 3^rd and 4^th sections (please email these to Dvora Yanow:  dvora.yanow@csueastbay.edu).

I.  Historical Background

Abbagnano, Nicola (1967).  Positivism.  Encyclopedia of philosophy, Vol. 6.  NY:  Macmillan.

Beam, George and Simpson, Dick (1984).  Political action.  Chicago:  Swallow Press.

Bernstein, Richard J. (1976).  The restructuring of social and political theory.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bernstein, Richard J. (1983).  Beyond objectivism and relativism.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press.

Dallmayr, Fred R. and McCarthy, Thomas A., eds. (1977).  Understanding and social inquiry.  Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press.

DeHaven-Smith, Lance (1988).  Philosophical critiques of policy analysis.  Gainesville:  University of Florida Press.

Fay, Brian (1975).  Social theory and political practice.  Boston:  George Allen & Unwin.

Hawkesworth, M. E. (1988).  Theoretical issues in policy analysis.  Albany, NY:  SUNY Press.

Jennings, Bruce (1983).  Interpretive social science and policy analysis.  In Daniel Callahan and Bruce Jennings, eds., Ethics, the Social Sciences, and Policy Analysis.  NY:  Plenum.  Chapter 1.

Jennings, Bruce (1987).  Interpretation and the practice of policy analysis.  In Frank Fischer and John Forester, eds.  Confronting values in policy analysis.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.  Pages 128-152.

McCloskey, Donald (1985).  The rhetoric of economics.  Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press.

Passmore, John (1967).  Logical positivism.  Encyclopedia of philosophy, Vol. 5.  NY:  Macmillan.

Polkinghorne, Donald (1983).  Methodology for the human sciences.  Albany:  SUNY Press.

Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds. (1979).  Interpretive social science.  Berkeley:  University of California Press.

II.  Philosophical Background

Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas (1966).  The social construction of reality.  NY:  Anchor.

Brown, Richard H. (1976).  Social theory as metaphor.  Theory and society 3, 169-197.

Bruner, Jerome (1990).  Acts of meaning.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Burke, Kenneth (1969) [1945].  A grammar of motives.  Berkeley:  University of California.

Burke, Kenneth (1989).  On symbols and society.  Edited and with an introduction by Joseph R. Gusfield.  Chicago:  University of Chicago.

Charon, Joel M. (1985).  Symbolic interactionism, 2nd edition.  NJ:  Prentice Hall.

Filmer, Paul, Phillipson, Michael, Silverman, David, and Walsh, David (1972).  New directions in sociological theory.  London:  Collier-Macmillan.

Fish, Stanley (1980).  Is there a text in this class?  The authority of interpretive communities.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Garfinkel, Harold (1977).  What is ethnomethodology?  In Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds.   Understanding and social inquiry.  Notre Dame:  University of Notre Dame Press.  Pages 240-261.

Geertz, Clifford (1973).  The interpretation of cultures.  NY:  Basic Books.

Geertz, Clifford (1983).  Local knowledge.  NY:  Basic Books.

Goffman, Erving (1959).  The presentation of self in everyday life.  NY:  Doubleday Anchor.

Goffman, Erving (1974).  Frame analysis.  NY:  Harper & Row.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970).  The structure of scientific revolutions.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.  Second edition, enlarged.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1977).  The essential tension.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno (1987).  Science in action.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Mead, George Herbert (1934).  Mind, self, and society.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Polanyi, Michael (1966).  The tacit dimension.  NY:  Doubleday.

Polanyi, Michael and Prosch, Harry (1975).  Meaning.  Chicago:  University of Chicago.

Polkinghorne, Donald (1988).  Narrative knowing and the human sciences.  Albany, NY:  SUNY Press.

Ricoeur, Paul (1971).  The model of the text:  Meaningful action considered as text.  Social Research 38, 529-562.

Rorty, Richard (1979).  Philosophy and the mirror of nature.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Schutz, Alfred (1967).  The phenomenology of the social world.  Northwestern University Press.

Schutz, Alfred (1973).  Concept and theory formation in the social sciences.  Collected papers, Volume 1 (Maurice Natanson, ed.).  The Hague:  Martinus Nijhoff.  Pages 48-66.

Taylor, Charles (1971).  Interpretation and the sciences of man.  Review of Metaphysics 25, 3-51.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1958. Language, thought, and reality. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical investigations, 3rd ed. Translated by G.E.M. Ascombe. New York: Macmillan.

III.  Subject Area Readings

Astley, W. Graham (1985).  Administrative science as socially constructed truth.  Administrative Science Quarterly 30, 497-513.

Ball, Terence, James Farr and Russell Hanson. 1989. Political innovation and conceptual change, edited by Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boland, Richard J. Jr. 1989 Beyond the objectivist and the subjectivist: Learning to read accounting as text, Accounting, Organizations and Society 14: 591-604.

Burrell, Gibson and Morgan, Gareth (1979).  Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis.  Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.

Clair, Robin P. 1993 The bureaucratization, commodification, and the privatization of sexual harassment through institutional discourse:  A study of the 'Big Ten' universities, Management Communication Quarterly, 7 (2), 123-157. 

Cooper, Robert and Burrell, Gibson (1988).  Modernism, post-modernism, and organizational analysis.  Organization Studies 9:1, 91-112.

Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara (1992).  Budgets as texts:  On collective writing in the public sector.  Accounting, Management & Information Technology 2:4, 221-239.

Czarniawska, Barbara (1997) Narrating the organization: Dramas of institutional identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Czarniawska, Barbara (1999) Writing management: Organization theory as a literary game. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Feitlowitz, Marguerite. 1998. A lexicon of terror: Argentina and the legacies of torture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ferguson, Kathy E. (1984).  The feminist case against bureaucracy.  Philadelphia:  Temple University Press.

Forester, John (1983).  Critical theory and organizational analysis.  In Gareth Morgan, ed., Beyond method.  Sage.  Ch. 15.

Gagliardi, Pasquale, ed. (1990).  Symbols and artifacts.  NY:  Aldine de Gruyter.

Geertz, Clifford. 1990. Negara: The theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gray, Barbara, Bougon, Michel G., and Donnellon, Anne (1985).  Organizations as constructions and destructions of meaning.  Journal of Management 11:2, 83-98.

Hatch, Mary Jo (1996).  The role of the researcher:  An analysis of narrative position in organization theory.  Journal of Management Inquiry 5:4, 359-374.

Holy, Ladislav. 1994. Metaphors of the natural and the artificial in Czech political discourse." Man 29,4 (December): 809-29.

Hummel, Ralph P., 1992.  Stories managers tell:  Why they are as valid as science, Public Administration Review  51(1), 31-41. 

Hyden, Goran. 1970. Language and administration. In Development administration: The Kenyan experience, edited by Goran Hyden, Robert Jackson, and John Okumu. Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Chalmers. 1995. "Omote (Explicit) and Ura (Implicit): Translating Japanese political terms." In Japan: Who governs?. New York: W.W. Norton.

Lewis, Bernard. 1988. The political language of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Morgan, Gareth (1980).  Paradigms, metaphors and puzzle solving in organization theory.  Administrative Science Quarterly 25, 605-22.

Morgan, Gareth (1983).  More on metaphor.  Administrative Science Quarterly 28, 601-7.

Putnam, Linda L. and Pacanowsky, Michael E. (eds.) (1983).  Communication and organizations:  An interpretive approach.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Rosen, Michael (2000) Breakfast at Spiro's: Dramaturgy and dominance; and other essays in Michael Rosen, Turning words, spinning worlds:  Chapters in organizational ethnography.  Amsterdam:  Harwood Academic Publishers.

Schaffer, Frederic Charles. 1998. Democracy in translation: Understanding politics in an unfamiliar culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Schatzberg, Michael G. 1986. "The Metaphors of Father and Family." In The political economy of cameroon, edited by Michael G. Schatzberg and I. William Zartman. New York: Praeger.

Schmidt, Mary R. (1993).  Grout:  Alternative kinds of knowledge and why they are ignored.  Public Administration Review 53:6 (November/December), 525-530.

Weick, Karl E. (1993) The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly 38: 628-652.

Westerlund, Gunnar, and Sjostrand, Sven-Erik (1979).  Organizational myths.  NY:  Harper and Row.

White, Jay D. (1992).  Taking language seriously:  Toward a narrative theory of knowledge for administrative research.  American Review of Public Administration 22:2 (June).

Yanow, Dvora (1995).  Writing organizational tales:  Four authors and their stories about culture.  Organization Science 6:2, 225-226.

Yanow, Dvora (1996).  How does a policy mean?  Interpreting policy and organizational actions.  Washington, DC:  Georgetown University Press.  (explores the case of a government corporation in Israel implementing national policy)

Yanow, Dvora (2003).  Constructing American "race" and "ethnicity":  Category-making in public policy and administration.  Armonk, NY:  M.E. Sharpe. (cases:  the census, OEO, birth records, police IDs, published academic and consulting research)

IV.  Methods

Altheide, David L.  and John M. Johnson. 1994. Criteria for assessing interpretive validity in qualitative research, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonne Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Alvesson, Mats and Kaj Sköldberg (2000).  Reflexive methodology. London:  Sage.

Brower, Ralph S., Mitchel Y. Abolafia, and Jered B. Carr.  2000.  On improving qualitative methods in public administration research.  Administration and Society 32 (4): 363-397.

Cavell, Stanley. 1976.  Must we mean what we say?  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Devault, Marjorie, 1990.  Talking and listening from women's standpoint:  Feminist strategies for interviewing and analysis, Social Problems  37(1), 96-116.

Erlandson, David A., Edward L. Harris, Barbara L. Skipper, and Steve D. Allen.  1993.  Doing naturalistic inquiry.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Feldman, Martha S., (1995). Strategies for interpreting qualitative data.  Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Feldman, Martha S., Jeannine Bell and Michele Berger and associates (2003).  Gaining access: A practical and theoretical guide for qualitative researchers.  Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Golden-Biddle, Karen and Locke, Karen (1993).  Appealing work:  An investigation in how ethnographic texts convince.  Organization Science 4:4 (November).

Golden-Biddle, Karen and Locke, Karen (1997).  Composing qualitative research.  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.

Hymes, Dell. 1970. Linguistic aspects of comparative political research. In The methodology of comparative research, edited by Robert T. Holt and John E. Turner. New York: Free Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 1980.  Metaphors we live by.  Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Morgan, Gareth and Smircich, Linda (1980).  The case for qualitative research.  Academy of Management Review 5:4, 491-500.

Nida, Eugene A., and William D. Reyburn. 1981. Meaning across culture. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

Patterson, Molly and Kristen Renwick Monroe. 1998.  Narrative in political science, Annual Review of Political Science, 1, 315-331.

Pierce, Jennifer, 1995.  Articulating the self in field research.  In Gender trials:  Emotional lives in contemporary law firms, 189-214.

Pitkin, Hanna. 1972. Wittgenstein and justice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rieder, Jonathan. 1994. Doing political culture: Interpretive practice and the earnest heuristic. Research on Democracy and Society (2): 117-151.

Schwandt, Thomas A. (1994) Constructivist, interpretivist approaches to human inquiry. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of qualitative research, 118-137. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Turner, Barry A. (1981) Some practical aspects of qualitative data analysis: One way of organizing the cognitive processes associated with the generation of grounded theory. Quality and Quantity 15: 225-247.

Van Maanen, John (1983) Qualitative methods. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Van Maanen, John (1988).  Tales of the field: On writing ethnography.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Van Maanen, John (1995).  Style as theory.  Organization Science 6:1.

Whyte, William Foote (1955 [1943]).  Appendix.  Street corner society.  2nd edition.  University of Chicago Press.

Winch, Peter. 1964.  Understanding a primitive society.  American Philosophical Quarterly 1: 307-324.

Winch, Peter. 1967.  The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy. New York: Humanities Press.

Yanow, Dvora (2000).  Conducting interpretive policy analysis.  Sage.