ABSTRACT
Nomothetic and idiographic approaches to social science research have traditionally been viewed as antagonistic. The former seeks to develop generalizations about human conduct, culling out idiosyncrasies of behavior and thought, and abstracting to the level of theoretical understanding; the latter rejects the representation of human action in terms of theory and seeks instead to probe deeply into the single place and event. In response to this tension and the acknowledged strengths and weaknesses of each approach, a number of researchers have begun the search for a middle ground. Working from the nomothetic toward the idiographic, they seek ‘more flexible, extroverted, and combinatorial theorizations… theorizations that do not dogmatically project themselves onto the empirical world but instead are informed and open to diversity, uniqueness, and conjuncture-the distinctiveness of time and place, event and locality’ (Soja 1987:293).
