ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on organizational studies as an interpretive science. The methods of generating and analyzing data used today in meaning-focused research study both meaning and the artifacts that embody and convey it. Studying the lifeworld of research site members and the political, organizational, and communal artifacts they embed with meaning, as hermeneutics would argue, entails a decentering of expertise on the part of the researcher. Interpretive philosophies have not been without their critics from within the interpretive end of the epistemological spectrum. Interpretation operates at several levels: that of the situational actor and the researcher experiencing and interpreting an event or setting; of the researcher interpreting conversational interviews with situational actors and situation-relevant documents. In this view, all knowledge is interpretive, and interpretation is the only method appropriate to the human, social world when the research question concerns matters of human meaning.
