Interpretive Approaches

LINDA L. PUTNAM AND SCOTT BANGHART

University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Abstract
Interpretive approaches encompass social theories and perspectives that embrace a view of
reality as socially constructed or made meaningful through actors’ understanding of events. In
organizational communication, scholars focus on the complexities of meaning as enacted in
symbols, language, and social interactions. This entry describes the distinctive features of
interpretive approaches, the history of their development in the field, their role in paradigms of
organizational studies, genres of interpretive approaches, links to naturalistic research, guidelines
for interpretive research, and directions for future studies. Organizational communication
scholars have embraced interpretive approaches in studies on such topics as organizational
culture, identity management, organizational discourse, accounts in organizational change, and
social construction of technology.

Keywords
linguistic turn; naturalistic approaches; paradigms; qualitative methods; social construction

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 Organizational members as well as scholars hold general beliefs about what an
organization is and how it fits into society. These assumptions stem from different views of
reality or philosophical beliefs as to what is real and what constitutes facts or truths. For some
individuals, organizations are brick and mortar entities characterized by concrete facts such as
the number of employees, products, or departments and units. For other people, organizations are
comprised of people who share common goals but have widely different tasks, role identities,
and networks of social interaction. For others, organizations are brands, images projected in
advertising, persona of CEOs, or products that consumers use. Clearly, all three of these
representations are plausible, yet they privilege different realities and ways of knowing about an
organization. Specifically, the first one focuses on physical traits and identifiable features, the
second one on employees and their communication, and the third one on projections of a
company’s image to the general public. Importantly, these views about organizations are not just
different opinions or angles of vision. Rather, they reflect different beliefs about the nature of
reality.
The interpretive approach, then, is a generic term that aligns with a particular perspective
on organizational reality, one based on the belief that reality is socially constructed or made
meaningful through actors’ understandings and interpretations of events (Berger & Luckmann,
1966). In organizational communication, interpretive scholars focus on the complexities of
meaning as revealed in symbols, language use, and social interactions. For interpretive scholars,
the very foundation and existence of an organization emanates from actions, social interactions,
and interpretations that form in communication (Prasad & Prasad, 2002).

Distinctive features
Interpretive approaches share a focus on two distinctive features: meanings and
interpretations. Meanings refer to how actors make sense of their experiences or reach
understandings of their everyday organizational lives. While these approaches focus on actors’
subjective accounts, scholars concentrate on how these accounts come together, align in
particular ways, and become collective. Initially, researchers investigated consensual or shared
meanings among participants (Putnam, 1983); however, scholars have since moved away from
consensus to focus on clusters of intersubjective understandings that organizational actors hold
or develop over time. In particular, organizational actors often construct collective

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understandings of their situations in ways that differ from what other actors think. For this
reason, interpretive scholars contend that they are not relativists or subjectivists who treat any
idiosyncratic meaning as valid in constructing realities (Heracleous, 2004). Rather, they focus on
how diverse intersubjective meanings align and engage with each other in socially constructing
organizations. Still, other scholars place less emphasis on intersubjective meanings and focus on
how actors co-develop meanings through their discourse and social interactions.
Interpretations refer to the process of making meanings or forming inferences
about organizational phenomena. They function differently when researchers house them in
actors’ cognitions as opposed to social interactions. Interpretive scholars who adopt sensemaking
approaches often privilege individual cognitions and focus on schemes, cognitive frames, or
mental models as the sources of inferences about meaning. Understandings arise from comparing
actions and experiences to scripts or frames of reference that individuals hold internally (Gioia,
1986). In this way, interpretive scholars who embrace cognitive approaches construct the social
world by assembling it from the minds of participants (Guba, 1990).
For many communication scholars, the source of meanings and interpretations resides in
language, symbols, and texts (Cheney, 2000). An interpretive approach emphasizes how actors
transform social phenomena into texts, narratives, and discourse that become central to
organizational practices. It underscores the power of naming or labeling in creating social
situations and it focuses on the interrelationships among symbols in developing patterns and
constructing meanings (Ricoeur, 1993). In this way, interpretations emanate from actions and
interactions through language, symbols, and texts.
The relationship between action and meanings, however, is recursive one. In a
retrospective way, meanings reflect back on and shape future interactions (Weick, 1979). Thus,
collective or co-created understandings function reflexively to enable or constrain actions.
Interpretive researchers who focus on a communicative view of sensemaking often aim to
capture this recursive relationship and bridge both the cognitive and interactional threads of
interpretive research.

History of the interpretive approach

The interpretive approach traces its roots to German idealism in social theory,
particularly to Immanuel Kant’s (1929) idea that the mind contributes to the construction of

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knowledge in the world; thus, social reality exists in spirit or idea – not in concrete facts
(Mumby, 2000). It came of age during the intellectual ferment across the social sciences in the
1890s to 1930s that focused on the subjective aspects of scientific inquiry. To capture this spirit
of a social situation, Wilhelm Dilthey (1976), and later Max Weber (1968), felt that the cultural
sciences needed a new analytical approach based on verstehen or a means of understanding
subjective meanings for actions and interactions. Thus, the outward actions of human beings
needed to be understood in terms of their inner experiences. Verstehen provided a method to
relive or re-enact the experience of others. For Weber (1968), the essential function of social
science was to be interpretive or to understand the subjective meaning of social action.
Edmund Husserl (1931) continued this agenda through drawing on phenomenology to
explore intentionality and consciousness as central concerns for subjective understanding. Yet, it
was Alfred Schutz (1967) who took up the critical question of how subjective meanings were
shared. He advanced interpretive work by exploring cultural knowledge, or the ways that humans
developed shared beliefs and norms from personal experiences. This pursuit led to exploring the
concept of intersubjectivity as shared meanings or stocks of knowledge acquired through spoken
language. Importantly, then, the origins of interpretive work in the social sciences focused on the
subjective and intersubjective processes in which individuals attributed meaning to cultural
experiences.
In organizational studies, the interpretive approach gained a stronghold in the work on
organizational culture that explored the meanings of symbols, values, and beliefs (Pacanowsky &
O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1983 [1983 as in the Refs?]; Smircich, 1983). Of note, communication
studies on organizational culture moved away from situating meanings in individuals and began
to treat culture as shared meanings (Deetz, 1982). Scholars focused on deep understandings that
grew out of competing values and norms and treated symbols as socially constructed rather than
as reflections of a pre-formed culture.
At the same time, organizational communication scholars met in 1981 at an event called
“the Alta Conference.” This conference was the first gathering of scholars to discuss the
potential of interpretive and critical scholarship for the field. The meeting and the publications
that followed from it set forth an agenda for future research, one grounded in a set of clearly
demarcated characteristics for interpretive approaches (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Another
aim of this conference was to show how an interpretive lens could offer new research

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opportunities and enrich such organizational arenas as climate, culture, socialization, and
leadership. Some scholars, however, believed that interpretive perspectives gained a foothold in
the field through providing a stylized version of positivism, one that cast functionalists as the
“bad guys and gals in black hats” and interpretivists as wearing the white hats (Miller, 2000, p.
57; Tompkins, 1997, p. 368). However, setting up distinct contrasts between the status quo and
the alternative view might have been necessary at the time for interpretive work to gain a voice.
Kuhn (2005) provides another explanation for why the interpretive approach caught hold
at this time. Using an institutional lens, he contends that Alta was not merely a turning point but
served to crystallize an innovation in the field. Alta could have represented “a temporary
deviation” from traditional research had not a set of institutionalizing practices developed from
this event. Specifically, Kuhn tracked how Alta became inculcated in the field by situating the
interpretive approach as a unique perspective, habituating and formalizing it in research
practices, reaching consensus about the value of this approach, and cementing interpretive
scholarship across the discipline over a period of time. As Kuhn (2005) points out, “As the story
of Alta and its impacts [were] taught to new generations of graduate students as a social given …
the fact of multiple perspectives and of the validity of the interpretive and critical views became
increasingly engrained in the field’s consciousness” (p. 622).
Another reason that the interpretive approach gained legitimacy in the field was its
alliance with the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn underscored the pivotal role of discourse in
interpretive studies (Rorty, 1967). Unlike the interpretative perspectives that privileged
subjective meanings, the linguistic turn countered the view that language represented or reflected
a pre-formed reality. Instead, discourse as a collection of texts formed the raw materials for
constituting organizational reality through shaping social practices and the very nature of an
organization. The linguistic turn extended the interpretative approach to a domain central to the
field, namely, communicative processes.
Importantly, interpretive research shifted traditional notions regarding communication in
organizations. Initially, scholars treated communication as a conduit or a channel in which actors
transmitted messages (Axley, 1984). Early research in the field focused on the directionality of
message flow, message barriers and breakdowns, message transmission, and media as
communication channels (Redding & Tompkins, 1988). The content of messages played a
secondary role to transmission, and meanings typically resided in messages or individual

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perceptions (Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996). The interpretive approach in combination
with the linguistic turn shifted this image of organizational communication. Communication was
no longer a conduit for expressing meanings; rather, it constituted organizational life through the
ways that discourse entered into interaction processes. Thus, the linguistic turn moved
interpretive approaches away from a primary focus on meanings and symbols to the ways that
language shaped social practices. The image of an organization also shifted from being a fixture
or a container in which messages flowed to being discursively grounded in social interactions.

The interpretative approach as a paradigm

The interpretive approach is a major paradigm for conducting research in organizational
communication. A paradigm refers to theories and schools of thought on research that share a
common set of assumptions about the nature of social science, particularly regarding ontology
(what is the essence of a phenomenon?), epistemology (how do we know or come to understand
a phenomenon?), and axiology (what values enter into producing knowledge about a
phenomenon?). Although scholars differ as to how many paradigms exist, their exact names, and
the relationships among them, the interpretive approach appears in most typologies of
organizational studies (Putnam, 1983). For example, Burrell and Morgan (1979) set forth four
paradigms: functionalist, interpretivist, radical humanist, and radical structuralist, and Deetz
(1996) recasts these orientations as normative, interpretive, critical, and dialogic. Redding and
Tompkins (1988) [Please provide details] present three paradigms: modernist, naturalistic, and
critical, while Corman and Poole (2000) reframe them as post-positivist, interpretive, and
critical.
The interpretive approach differs from other paradigms in all three assumptions of social
science. In the area of ontology, interpretive scholars favor a social constructivist position that
treats reality as constituted by actors who attach meanings to phenomena, typically through
interactions (Zoller & Kline, 2008). Ontology deals with assumptions about reality typically cast
in dualistic ways, for example, subjective versus objective (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). A
subjectivist stance is often depicted as rejecting any notion of a real structure or the existence of
an external world outside of individual cognitions, while an objective stance refers to views of
reality as externally measurable and existing prior to human interactions. This dualistic view of
reality, however, has come under considerable critique (Mumby, 2000). For Deetz (1996),

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determining what type of research is objective or subjective is really an exercise in knowledge
production. He claims that the perpetuation of an object–subject dualism poses a number of
problems for understanding paradigms and their interrelationships, especially since all forms of
knowledge are intersubjective constructions of research communities. Even for post-positivists,
objectivity is emergent based on standards that an academic community develops and enforces
(Cooren, 2005) [2015?].
Therefore, epistemology and axiology may provide better distinctions between the
interpretive approach and other paradigms. Epistemology, or how we know what we know,
refers to an agreement among scholars about how to gain knowledge, including focusing on the
origin of concepts, the development of research questions, and ways of conducting
investigations. In the interpretive paradigm, concepts develop in collaboration with
organizational members and are transformed into the research process as problems that emanate
from local circumstances. Thus, concepts and research questions become grounded in local and
emergent practices as situated, practical knowledge (Deetz, 1996). This process stands in
contrast to a priori selection of concepts and theories, typically drawn from a research
community. In the latter case, research functions at a distance from organizational actors and
their systems of meaning and aims to draw inferences about universal knowledge claims. Since
interpretivists generate knowledge in collaboration with organizational actors, they use concepts
and theories as guides, translations, and comparisons rather than as formulae or directives.
Research aims to gain insights rather than discover truths, capture multiple forms of rationality
rather than center on one, and generate concepts and categories from the site itself rather than
test them within an organization.
Axiology focuses on the role of values in knowledge production. Interpretive research
also differs from other paradigms in terms of value assumptions. For interpretive scholars, all
inquiry is value laden and context bound (Guba & Lincoln, 1985) – that is, researchers bring
their own values and assumptions to guide the process and investigators draw values from
organizational participants and their research settings. In effect, value-free data or complete
neutrality does not exist in interpretive work. Even though some post-positivists believe in
separating values from research, Miller (2000) contends that the issue of bias has largely
evaporated from post-positivist work as scholars have relinquished a blind obedience to the

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scientific method. Instead, post-positivists aim to be aware of their values and to have them
scrutinized by members of academic communities.
For interpretive scholars, however, values enter directly into the research process itself.
That is, interpretive scholars attend to participants’ feelings and intuitions in ways that make
values part of the research investigations. A goal to present multiple, constructed, and holistic
perspectives on organizational situations is grounded in an analogic value of pluralism. Pluralism
gives interpretive weight to multiple points of view rather than relying on analyses of power,
dominant coalitions, or processes of domination as the salient lens for understanding
organizational reality, as critical theorists often do. Interpretive scholars, however, take a stand
and provide a foundation for gleaning insights and understandings, but ones often shaped by the
values of participants and the exigencies of organizational contexts.
A comparison among paradigms also cast interpretive research as seeking order and
consensus. Consensus refers to making the production of order the dominant feature of social
systems. Existing orders appear as natural and unproblematic through highlighting principles of
organizing and downplaying deviance and uncertainty. In this way, the focus on micro-practices
in organizational life aims to discover order through ignoring random events, focusing on norms
and regularities, and using language to reflect or mirror social practices. The drive for consensus
or regulation also emphasizes integration and harmony rather than conflict and tensions, and thus
implicitly reflects a bias toward maintaining the status quo (Deetz, 1996). Dissensus, in turn,
treats struggle as the natural state of organizational life. Critical theorists often aim to
deconstruct order and taken-for-granted assumptions that unmask hidden conflicts.
The emphasis on regularities and consensus as opposed to dissensus, however, fails to
account for the linguistic turn and the role of discursive processes in understanding structures of
meaning. As interpretive research has come of age, the lines between interpretive and
critical/postmodern scholarship have become blurred (Prasad & Prasad, 2002). Clearly, some
interpretive scholars focus primarily on discovering order and, thus, maintaining or preserving
the status quo. However, other researchers challenge the guiding assumptions behind social
practices and focus on how these practices enable and constrain organizations and their
members. This enjoining of interpretive and critical work stems in part from interpretive
researchers becoming increasingly focused on self-reflexivity and their roles in the research
process.

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 In response to this blurring, an emerging group of scholars now embrace the term
“critical/interpretive” as a potentially unique paradigmatic perspective that incorporates features
of both interpretive and critical work (Prasad & Prasad, 2002; Zoller & Klein, 2008). As
interpretive scholars confront ethical and political questions such as widespread consumerism,
organizational involvement in environmental issues, and ways that digital technologies dissolve
public and private boundaries, they engage in critique and situate their work in ways that
promote change. Interpretive scholars also unite with postmodern researchers to track the flow
between consensus and dissensus and deconstruct meaning systems. In this way, interpretive
scholars draw from features of other paradigms.

The interpretive approach and paradigm wars

For many scholars, science is a contested social enterprise in which certain paradigms
about what constitutes knowledge exist in intellectual tension, controversies, and often intense
debate. Scientific paradigms are social constructions in their own right; therefore, proponents of
particular perspectives aim to mobilize a community of supporters. This collective process often
results in struggles for dominance or privileging one paradigm over others in a field. Paradigm
debates can even lead to scientific revolutions when fields shift their traditional paradigms to
alternative ways of knowing (Kuhn, 1970). This struggle, however, can result in destructive
conflicts that surface in strident rhetoric, “King of the Hill” games, and even declarations of war
(Corman, 2000). In organizational studies, representative examples include “the organizational
culture wars,” calls for “metatheoretical weed pulling,” and accusations of “Stalinist purge” (p.
5).
Although paradigm wars have not been frequent in organizational communication,
scholars have raised concerns about incommensurability in which researchers dismiss claims
purported by advocates of a particular paradigm or do not recognize assumptions outside of their
own ideologies (Cheney, 2000). Incommensurability can also result from treating one paradigm
in “God-like” terms (e.g., interpretivists) and the others in “devil-terms” (e.g., positivists), as
Tompkins (1997) believed occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s. To address these concerns,
scholars in organizational communication participated in a panel at the National Communication
Association on “Finding Common Ground between Metatheoretical Perspectives on

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Organizational Communication” and published an edited volume of papers on this topic (Corman
& Poole, 2000).
Importantly, incommensurability across paradigms is less likely to occur if scholars
develop a system of reference to evaluate competing perspectives. Thus, standards for evaluating
paradigmatic research need to be readily available (Corman, 2000). Another alternative is to
foster and support a polyvocal pursuit of knowledge as the basis for a cohesive discipline. In this
way, scholars recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each paradigm and find ways to
dialogue, translate from one perspective to another, and learn to think together. For example,
researchers sometimes use different paradigmatic approaches to investigate the same research
problem, either sequentially or in parallel. To illustrate, Papa, Auwal, and Singhal’s (1995) study
of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh employed the interpretive approach to examine co-
orientation among clients and bank employees and also used a critical analysis to analyze
concertive control.
Other ways of avoiding incommensurability emerge from treating paradigm boundaries
as permeable and developing metatheories from crossing the borders between them – for
example, critical-interpretive scholarship or structuration theory. Engaging in paradigm interplay
in which scholars move back and forth between paradigms is another alternative for developing
metaperspectives (Schultz & Hatch, 1996). Other scholars recommend grounding research in
praxis or developing organizational imagination based on engagement with research participants
(Mir & Mir, 2002). In this way, scholars move away from paradigms as grand theories and
produce work that helps individuals engage with corporations at a meaningful level. Each of
these options, however, differs from integration which often leads to meshing logically
inconsistent assumptions, as can occur with triangulating interpretive and positivist research
(Lee, 1991). Engaging in paradigm interplay, then, is not synergistic or simply additive; it is
thoughtful theory construction.
The implications of incommensurability are that paradigms are prototypes that are not
sealed off from each other. Researchers often situate their work on the periphery or borders
between them. The key issue, as Deetz (1996) points out, is doing high-quality work within a
particular paradigm but being open and knowledgeable about claims and assumptions from other
perspectives.

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Genres of interpretive approaches
The interpretive paradigm encompasses a number of schools of thought, typically ones
grounded in meanings, texts, and symbols. Scholars who write about interpretive approaches list
an array of different theoretical orientations, including hermeneutics, phenomenology,
ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and structuration theory (Burrell & Morgan, 1979;
Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979). Other scholars add particular discourse based theories as part of the
interpretive turn, such as rhetorical theory, narrative theory, actor–network theory, and dialogic
perspectives (Bantz, 1983 [Missing – please provide details]; Heracleous, 2004; Lindlof &
Taylor, 2011; Prasad & Prasad, 2002). Typically, organizational communication scholars draw
ideas and concepts from hermeneutics, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and social
construction. Thus, to provide the foundations of interpretive work, this entry focuses on
reviewing these schools of thought.
As a cornerstone of interpretive work, hermeneutics focuses on deciphering the meaning
of texts through historical and contextual analysis. Textual interpretation is a reflexive concern
that entails the double hermeneutic or understanding the social world through interpreting how
other people make sense of it (Zoller & Klein, 2008). Interpretation moves in a circular direction
in which a scholar enters into a dialogue with the text by placing him- or herself “inside” the
subjective experience of the author to grasp “the form of life” that gives it meaning. Importantly,
following the linguistic turn, scholars have expanded the notion of texts to include organizational
practices and institutional structures that are inscribed in social reality as well as the written
documents that form the foundation of hermeneutics. This extension of hermeneutics contributes
the concept of intertextuality that is often used in interpreting the cyclical relationship among
social practices, organizational contexts, and societal/institutional structures.
Drawn from an interest in the mutual constitution of self and society, symbolic
interaction grew out of the philosophy of pragmatism. It treats meaning as an emergent,
indeterminate process in which realities are formed from negotiations among people, objects, and
events (Blumer, 1969; Goffman, 1967; Mead, 1934). Joint actions emanate from successfully
negotiating meanings of symbols, rules, and norms; hence, meanings are developed from social
interactions. This school of thought underlies semiotics or the study of signs as meaning making
and dramaturgical theories that are often used in organizational communication research on

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symbolic convergence (Bormann, 1983), organizational culture (Keyton, 2005), and identity
management (Bastien & Hostager, 1992).
Ethnomethodology focuses on how everyday life is actually accomplished or how
sequences of activity and enacted conversations emerge as orderly, taken-for-granted, and
meaningful (Garfinkel, 1967). This approach aims to discern how people create and sustain
intersubjective meanings through making their actions orderly, visible, and accountable. To do
so, researchers who embrace this tradition examine the practices of participants in unique
settings: for example, talk at work that illustrates how organizational members accomplish tasks,
display neutrality in jobs, manage advice giving, and handle dispatcher calls for emergency
services (Drew & Heritage, 1992; Fairhurst & Cooren, 2004). Important concepts that emanate
from this tradition include accounts that focus on justifications and explanations for what actors
should and should not do, and reflexivity that refers to how talk and action in a situation actively
participates in the definition and constitution of what that event is (Cooren, 2015). That is, when
people interact with each other, they look back at what has gone on before and reflexively
construct features of their current situation from past interactions.
More recently, scholars have developed a school of thought known as social construction
or constructivism by drawing ideas from both phenomenology and symbolic interaction (Berger
& Luckmann, 1966; Gergen, 1999). Constructivism focuses on the creation of meaning through
stockpiles of historically and culturally rooted knowledge (Allen, 2005; Burr, 1995). Language
internalizes and objectifies meanings in the ways it becomes ordered, how it engages in naming
conventions, and how systems of meaning inculcate knowledge. Social constructivists, however,
differ in their conception and treatment of language (Pearce, 1995) [Missing – please provide
details]. One approach centers on products of social construction in which language and symbols
represent meanings. Another approach examines how construction occurs in the process of social
interaction through the use of language. Process based researchers treat language, conversations,
and dialogue as engaging in reality construction rather than reflecting or representing knowledge.
Hence, communication processes perform or enact social construction. A third approach
embraces both process and products to attend to material, economic, and sociohistorical features
of social construction. Social constructive approaches, particularly the last two orientations, are
very popular in communication (Bartesaghi & Castor, 2008). In organizational communication,
this school of thought underlies the work on identity formation (Allen, 1998; Sias, 1996),

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coordinated management of meaning (Castor, 2004), and the social construction of
communication technology in the workplace (Jackson, Poole, & Kuhn, 2002). This approach also
plays an active role in discourse studies and the role of communication in constituting
organizations (Cooren, 2015).
Scholars often critique social construction and other genres of interpretive work as having
an antirealist stance that fails to incorporate embodied experiences and the physical world into
interpretive processes. Moreover, some schools of thought, namely hermeneutics and social
construction, often treat people as passive actors. Irrespective of the particular orientation,
however, interpretive approaches struggle with accusations of relativism and the need to ground
meanings in material conditions, such as poverty, economic inequities, embodied practices, and
environmental constraints. Taken together, interpretive approaches differ in their foci on texts,
social interactions, everyday taken-for-granted practices, and stockpiles of knowledge. In
comparison with other paradigms, they offer different constructs for examining organizations
and society, ones rooted in the construction of meaning.

Interpretive approaches as naturalistic research

Another term used interchangeably with interpretive approaches is naturalistic research
(Bantz, 1983; Frey, 1994; Guba & Lincoln, 1985). Naturalistic research focuses on
understanding naturally occurring routines in organizational practices. Thus, it highlights
particular features of the research process and setting that embody an interpretive perspective.
Yet, naturalistic research extends beyond a particular method or form of data collection and
analysis by setting forth a philosophy for conducting research. In particular, naturalistic
researchers believe in thick descriptions, pluralistic perspectives, ideographic understandings,
and active participation in the research process.
Interpretive scholars typically focus on thick descriptions or faithful representations of
organizational occurrences from the standpoint of the participants (Geertz, 1973). Research
enters into the streams of ongoing actions and interactions in the daily lives of organizational
participants. Thus, interpretive research occurs in situ and focuses on the durée of daily activities
in organizational life. Interpreting these streams of behavior, however, draws on cultural and
historical contexts and aims to ascertain a deep understanding of language and organizational

13
practices (Putnam, 1983). With a focus on thick descriptions and local meanings, interpretive
research is typically grounded in micro- or in-situ organizational practices.
Interpretive scholars adopt a naturalistic view of research to capture pluralistic
perspectives on organizational situations. A pluralistic perspective means that researchers are
aware of a multiplicity of viewpoints on organizational practices and processes (Cheney, 2000).
They aim to produce a composite picture of organizational life rather than represent the interests
of any one group, such as managers or owners who want to improve organizational productivity
or dominant coalitions who seek to control or constrain others. As opposed to adopting the goals
of a particular group, naturalistic research helps interpretive scholars develop a composite picture
of the forces that enable and constrain organizing that stems from the multiple values and biases
of organizational participants.
In addition, interpretive scholars treat research as ideographic or grounded in local
occurrences that have recurring patterns but that typically differ across situations and contexts.
They take care to avoid total generalizations or sweeping law-like claims that can easily transfer
from one situation to the next (Williams, 2000). Interpretive scholars, however, do make
generalizations, but not ones that are grounded in law-like principles or probabilities of
occurrence. Rather, these generalizations arrive inductively from first-order data; thus, they
represent moderated claims. They stem from insights or meaning structures that cut across
situations and organizations and that reveal general processes regarding the production of
knowledge (Deetz, 1982).
Like naturalistic researchers, interpretive scholars also embrace participatory
relationships with their subjects. In interpretive studies, investigators become immersed in
organizations and thus enter into the research process itself. They treat organizational actors as
relative equals or as laypersons who act in meaningful ways because they have their own
theories and perspectives on organizational circumstances (Cheney, 2000). Rather than working
at a distance from the research setting, scholars become part of the lives of organizational actors
and are open to the ideas of participants. The research process is open-ended, flexible, and
iterative, often reshaped based on preliminary findings and in conversation with participants.
Overall, interpretive research aims for two major goals. First, it strives for a rich
understanding of naturally occurring events through yielding insights about the deep structures of
meaning that form taken-for-granted knowledge. Interpretations as insights bring to a level of

14
awareness systems of meaning that construct organizational experiences and the larger contexts
in which organizations exist. These understandings also reveal options and choices that were
previously hidden by standard practices and presumed knowledge. A second important goal of
interpretive research is to form new concepts for both scholars and organizational members.
Rather than applying pre-existing constructs, interpretive scholars seek to generate new concepts
for a research community and for organizational members. These new concepts offer practical
wisdom to help individuals get things done in organizations, avoid problematic situations, and
shape organizational identities.

Conducting research with interpretive approaches

To capture the role of text and talk in meaning construction, interpretive schools of
thought necessitate different research approaches. For some scholars, interpretive research is
synonymous with qualitative methods. Even though the two often intersect, interpretive
approaches are not methods per se but are philosophical assumptions that underlie research.
Qualitative research, then, is an umbrella term that incorporates an array of data collection and
analysis approaches, including interviewing, participant observation, ethnography, and textual
analysis (Frey, 1994). In comparison with quantitative approaches, qualitative methods rely on
nonstatistical modes of data collection and analysis. Importantly, scholars who conduct critical,
postcolonial, and post-positivist research may use qualitative techniques without necessarily
embracing interpretive assumptions. For instance, post-positive scholars have used qualitative
methods to generate new concepts, pre-test ideas for survey design, and investigate explanations
of statistical findings. In this way, they fit qualitative research into positivist assumptions about
the nature of reality and the production of knowledge (Prasad & Prasad, 2002). Therefore,
scholars argue that qualitative methods and interpretive approaches are not identical.
Interpretive scholars, however, draw on particular forms of data analysis that fit their
goals and their epistemological and axiological assumptions. First, as a research goal,
interpretive studies seek rich understandings of naturally occurring organizational events,
especially systems of meaning that characterize organizational experiences. Second, scholars
engage in a purposeful, varied sample of participants, events, and organizational units. To gain
an understanding of specific situations and consequences, investigators must be willing to listen
to the voices of multiple participants (Arnett, 2007). Third, researchers typically employ multiple

15
methods of data collection to gain insights about participants’ meanings. Scholars collect
archival data, examine reports and documents, and rely on unobtrusive measures to analyze data
and glean interpretations. Thus, researchers strive for a full engagement with participants and the
organizational context (Frey, 1994). Fourth, participants become partners in the overall research
process as both actors and investigators exchange resources, develop a community, and negotiate
interpretations of norms and practices. For Frey (1994), interpretive research adopts a stance of
empowering participants. Fifth, interpretive scholars practice transparency by making their own
values known and by engaging openly and publicly in a process in which a story gradually
unfolds (Ricoeur, 1991).
Finally, the standards for evaluating high-quality interpretive research stem from the
goals and assumptions of this perspective. For interpretive scholars, the concepts of reliability
and generalizability often used in post-positivist studies are not germane. Instead, criteria such as
plausibility, coherency, comprehensiveness, and rigor are applied to interpretive work (Bantz,
1983; Deetz, 1982). Plausibility refers to insights that are recognizable and credible to
participants. Specifically, interpretations that elicit tacit knowledge resonate and seem most
credible to participants as well as to a scholarly community. Coherent accounts are not only
logically consistent but also draw on principles of legitimacy and appropriateness in making
interpretations. They hang together in ways that make sense in a particular organizational
context. Comprehensiveness relates to adequacy or having a large range of texts to make valid
inferences about mutual understandings, draw comparisons, and uncover contrasts across the
organization. In a related way, rigor draws on the appropriate amount of data, but it also
highlights systematic steps in data collection and analysis. In addition to these criteria, scholars
also advocate standards of treating participants ethically, fitting ethical norms in the situation,
and helping organizational members uncover options for responsible choice (Bantz, 1983; Deetz,
1982).
Overall, Deetz (1982) sets forth a canon for conducting interpretive research. The
principles of this canon incorporate the standards for doing quality research, but also include
suggestions that can guide the process. Drawing from genres of interpretive approaches,
organizational talk and activity should be treated as texts, not just collections of actors’
subjective meanings. The goal of the research, then, is to seek an understanding that makes the
text maximally reasonable and coherent for a particular, unique organization. Scholars should

16
search for talk and actions that best represent what is thinkable and doable in an organization.
Drawing interpretations from the data should be a transactive process in which the researcher
embraces the hermeneutic circle. Specifically, the analyst should move back and forth from the
part to the whole and the whole back to the part of a text in an iterative way that reveals insights
from the tensions among these part–whole relationships. Interpretive research should not be
grounded in summative or cumulative analysis of meanings, but be based on iterative
comparisons and contrasts.

Contributions and future directions

In their 40-year legacy in the field, interpretive approaches have made a number of
contributions to organizational communication. Importantly, they have helped scholars move
away from a container view of organizations to examine the ways that communication
constitutes organization. This shift has broadened what scholars do and what they study.
Scholars no longer limit their purviews to formal, profit based organizations; they now study
professional associations, theater groups, virtual teams, hospice care units, and even social
movements (Cheney, 2000). By focusing on meanings and actions in everyday lives, researchers
have expanded their horizons of what can be studied. Moreover, interpretive scholarship has
helped the field capture the importance of mundane activities, expand insights about norms and
routines, and account for the emotional side of organizational life. Scholarship is not just
capturing meanings and interpretations, but deciphering how actions and interactions enable and
constrain organizational members.
Acknowledging these contributions, three challenges underlie future directions of
interpretive work. These challenges stem from a rapidly changing organizational world in which
meanings are unstable and often contradictory. The presence of outsourcing, globalization of
markets, continual changes in technologies, and wide variations in economic conditions raise
issues with traditional research. Specifically, interpretivists need to integrate macro- and micro-
views of organizational life, account for materiality in their understandings, and continue to work
on the borders of blurred paradigm boundaries.
The first challenge deals with integrating micro- and macro-studies with an interpretive
lens. Historically, interpretive research concentrates on the micro-practices and everyday
routines in social situations. This legacy calls for modifications in an era in which local

17
subjective meanings are interwoven with large-scale institutional and international processes.
Future interpretive work needs to adopt approaches that are appropriate for institutional practices
and that improve ways of situating local activities in large-scale changes across time and space.
For example, Hardy and Maguire (2010) employed a discourse approach to study the ways that
actors influenced institutional arrangements regarding DDT regulations. Their micro-analyses of
interactions among organizational actors interfaced with macro-analyses of changing events and
discursive spaces to reveal how less powerful actors became entrepreneurs that influenced
change. In a similar way, studies of professional norms at the institutional level revealed how
they impinged on communication and decision making at the microlevels of veterinary practice
(Lammers & Garcia, 2009) and medical care (Barbour, 2010). Finding ways to integrate micro-
with macro-interpretive analyses can aid in capturing organizational complexity in a rapidly
changing world.
The second challenge focuses on the role of materiality in a socially constructed world.
Interpretive researchers often privilege the symbolic or the meaning centered views of
organizational life, even though scholars recognize the importance of incorporating objects, sites,
and bodies as material features (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). For example, studies that
examine the physical nature of bodies in professional practices such as “dirty work” or sex-
segregated jobs often treat bodies as symbols that stand for meanings rather than as ways of
enacting embodied experiences (Ashcraft, 2013; Wolkowitz, 2006). By treating bodies as
symbols, researchers relegate the material to a social role that conceals how organizational
meanings shape bodies and bodies shape occupations and professions. Rather than privilege
language, researchers should examine how the material and the symbolic work together in a
dynamic interplay that negotiates social actions. Thus, scholars need theories and approaches that
move materiality to the forefront of interpretive research in ways that can account for the role of
globalization and changing economic factors in meaning construction.
Finally, future directions in using interpretive approaches will continue to exhibit blurred
boundaries. These boundaries allow scholars to pursue creative integration within and across
paradigms. Given the challenges of incorporating materiality, critical interpretive work is likely
to increase as scholars navigate between empirical investigations and issues of power and
domination in a societal context. Folk empiricism represents another example of a blend between

18
interpretive and post-positivist research. In blending paradigms, scholars need to position
interpretive work in a world of unstable, multiple, and rapidly changing meanings.

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Further reading
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turn. London, UK: M. E. Sharpe.

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