Dear Author, Dear Reviewer:
Looking for Reflexivity and Other Hallmarks of Interpretive Research
“Researchers...produce claims in which the author figures more as a
claimant than judge. That is, each scientific article functions as a judgment
passed on claims made by colleagues....”
– Bruno Latour (2004, 78)
Over the last couple of years an increasing number of manuscripts
submitted to various journals have crossed my desk for review, all
purporting to do ethnographic or some other form of interpretive research.
As a consequence, my readerly antennae have become ever more sensitized
to the elements of such writing that need to be present in order to signal to
a reader – reviewer or otherwise – that she is in the presence of an
interpretive research project. In establishing its procedural and
presuppositional contours, these elements – dare I say, the sine qua non of
this sort of writing – shape the reader’s experience of such a manuscript, as
Schwartz-Shea (2006) so vividly notes. Their presence – or, in the event,
absence – affects the perceived trustworthiness of the research report, the
extent to which a reader will be persuaded as to the evidentiary character of
the “truth” claims made by the analysis. Reflecting on my own experience
as a participant-observer in this aspect of disciplinary science, I essay here
to make explicit what these elements are, in the hope that this might help
Convention