essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– HERMENEUTIC UNDERSTANDING ––––– 193‘“sciences of the spirit”, . . . the concept is deeply rooted in German idealist philosophy....Hermeneutic-spiritual knowing and positivistic-pragmatic knowing are opposed to eachother’ (Bettelheim, 1983: 41).The idealist thrust in hermeneutics may be illustrated through the work of Dilthey, whois the instigator of the development of modern hermeneutics (Blaikie, 1995). According toBlaikie, ‘Dilthey insisted that the foundation for understanding human beings is in life itself,not in rational speculation or metaphysical theories. Life, by which he means the humanworld, provides us with the concepts and categories we need to produce this understanding’(1995: 32). As social scientist (or actor) the ‘“objectifications of life”, or residues of ourthoughts in cultural achievements and physical things, can be understood through an innerprocess of verstehen, of hermeneutic understanding’ (1995: 32). This is related to the idea ofhermeneutic phenomenology in which the ‘aim is to construct an animating, evocativedescription of the human actions, behaviours, intentions, and experiences as we meet themin the lifeworld’ (Van Manen, 1990: 19).Whilst the contribution of Dilthey is important in the development of modernhermeneutics and clearly influences the legitimacy of hermeneutic approaches tounderstanding human behaviour he does not tell the whole story. Gadamer, for example,suggests that ‘Dilthey’s attempt to explicate the human sciences in terms of life, and to startwith the experience of life, was never really reconciled with his firmly held Cartesianconception of science’ (1985: 258) – the split between the outer and the inner aspects oflife.Gadamer, who may be seen as ‘both the most forceful and coherent exponent ofcontemporary hermeneutics’ (Grondin, 1995: xi) discusses a number of core principles thatunderpin the hermeneutic approach and that constitute the hermeneutic cycle. These includethe idea that there can be a ‘hermeneutical rule that we must understand the whole in termsof the detail and the detail in terms of the whole.... The harmony of all the details with thewhole is the criterion of correct understanding’ (Gadamer, 1985: 291). He then suggests thatthere is an objective and subjective aspect to this understanding. He discusses this in terms oflooking at a text as an example of the unfolding hermeneutic cycle or spiral, the ‘iterativeprocess whereby each stage of our research provides us with knowledge’ (Gummesson,2000: 70).When the researcher looks at a text ‘objectively’, that text needs to be looked at in thecontext of the writer’s work, and that work has to be looked at in relation to the genre andtradition of the culture. From the perspective of the researcher, this assessment of the text canonly be undertaken with an awareness of the researcher’s own ‘objective’ circumstances. Onthe subjective side, he suggests, ‘the same text, as a manifestation of a creative moment,belongs to the whole of its author’s inner life’ (Gadamer, 1985: 291).An example of exploration of the subjective may be seen in the work of Saleh and Hassan(1999). They suggest that the professional activity known as financial audit is usuallyunderstood through the lens of positivist empirical research but that this approach alienatespractitioners, researchers and academics from each other. They suggest that if audit isconsidered as an art, as a social phenomenon and exposed to the hermeneutic gaze greaterunderstanding can be achieved. A different approach to the reconciliation of the objective andthe subjective may be seen in Boland (1989). He claims, ‘the hermeneutic turn appreciatesthat our understanding of accounting and organizations is not guaranteed by a method thatseparates the objective from the subjective. Instead, our knowledge of accounting and