Interpretive Research

Interpretive Turn and Communication Scholarship

The “interpretive turn” marked a turning point in the second half of the 20th century when some social scientists began to question the objective stances toward knowledge construction and research practices. Asserting that social realities are socially constructed, this philosophical turn and associated research methods began a hotly contested reassessment of epistemological and ontological positions in social science. Although most social scientists in communication now agree that knowledge is not wholly objective and neutral, there are particular communication areas where one side of the continuum is more valued than another. Even so, most communication scholars acknowledge that context matters in knowledge production. An increasing trend toward mixed methods research attempts to work within the opportunities and constraints afforded by these different stances to develop theory and findings applicable to different research aims and questions.

Because the interpretive turn presented a meaning-centered and culturally grounded approach, questions centered on how communication was constituted in different contexts. For organizational communication, Linda L. Putnam and Michael P. Pacanowsky’s edited collection, Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach, provided insights into the everyday practices and processes in which workers engaged to organize themselves and their organizational structures with reciprocal effects. This volume and other publications around that time prompted researchers to pay attention to ways workers discursively and materially constructed their worlds. These approaches provided thick descriptions through narrative, case study, thematic, metaphorical, grounded theory, and constant comparative analyses, among other ways of studying sense-making processes in communication.

[Page 795]The turn toward an interpretive lens also heralded in critical, postmodern, poststructural, feminist, and postcolonial approaches. These approaches not only delved deeply into the political nature of organizing such that individuals and collectivities do not always act in their own best interests, but also the ways linguistic choices, institutional structures, and normalized ways of thinking, doing, valuing, and being can create divisiveness and inequitable participation, resulting (often inadvertently) in re-creating dominant power structures. For instance, critical research “aims at producing dissensus and providing forums for and models of discussion to aid in the building of more open consensus” for emancipatory purposes (Deetz, 2001, p. 26). Postmodernism offers insight into and operates in an uneasy and complex relationship with modernist tenets of linear progress, beliefs in achieving objective knowledge, and faith that scholars can derive and test laws governing human behavior. Poststructural, feminist, and postcolonial approaches and methods deconstruct the linguistic and cultural bases for power, privilege, and normative understandings by foregrounding the contestations surrounding agency, gender, and other inequities, identity, and generative colonizing structures. The appropriate interpretive research methods for these approaches is grounded in discourses of understanding (interpretive realism), suspicion (critical modernism), and vulnerability (postmodernism). These three discourses operate as means of reading below the surface, or probing what is missing within representational views and analyses of communication. They unravel the multiple ways in which communication constructs life. Regarding feminist and postcolonial projects, they attempt to fulfill moral obligations to examine, make visible, and advocate as well as implement solutions for gendered inequalities and global economies and cultural politics marked by imperialism.

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