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

196 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––INTERPRETATION AND THE HERMENEUTIC ENDEAVOUR ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Bleicher (1982) suggests that hermeneutic theory represents a framework for the explicationof meaning, for rendering explicit what has remained implicit, taken for granted ormisunderstood. In this sense it is a ‘reading’, an interpretation of the self-interpretation ofothers within a context. There is additionally the requirement for dialogue (sometimes active,sometimes silent) between researcher, reader and the subject of research. This is the processknown as verstehen. As Strati suggests verstehen is thedevice that releases people from their isolation. We understand human action on thebasis of dynamic connections and in relation to purposes and values. We are enabledto do so by a process of inner experience....It is a process, moreover, which frees usfrom the necessity of having directly lived the experience or emotion . . . (1999: 58)The basis of the ability to undertake such interpretation lies, in part, on the notion that ‘thecapacity of another person, or a professional observer, to understand human objects is . . . basedon a belief that all human beings have something in common’ (my italics) (Blaikie, 1993: 33).Bleicher (1982) suggests that this shared humanity enables the work of the analyst to claimfor the work an all-pervasive or universal character.So, in coming to interpretation there is, on the one hand understanding of commonhumanity – that no matter how unlike the surface understanding of the world of the otherhuman beings can access those experiences. On the other hand there is the notion that theprofessional observer is privileged in their access to understanding. For example, Alvesson andSköldberg talk of the significance of intuition in hermeneutic understanding. In their view,intuition represents a ‘privileged royal road to true knowledge of the world. This is achieved . . .at a stroke, whereby patterns in complex wholes are illuminated. . . . Knowledge is then oftenexperienced as self-evident. Intuition implies a kind of inner “gazing” . . .’ (2000: 52). Andbehind their gentle irony there lies a problem. Eco pithily suggests that ‘While it is a principleof hermeneutics that there are no facts, only interpretations. That does not prevent us fromasking if there might not perchance be bad interpretations’ (1999: 48). Within hermeneuticsthere are two ways in which there is a legitimation of the hermeneutic approach as a mode ofreaching truth. One of these lies in the professionalization of the hermeneutic researcher; theother in the methodic processes through which hermeneutic work is conducted.PRIVILEGING HERMENEUTICS AS MANIFESTED IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ENCOUNTER ––––––––––Dilthey wrote that ‘the final aim of the hermeneutic procedure is to understand the authorbetter than he has understood himself: a proposition which is the necessary consequence ofthe doctrine of unconscious creation’ (1900: 116). One route into this is through thepsychoanalytic process. Both hermeneutics and psychoanalysis are concerned with therestoration of meaning (Ricoeur, 1970) both to the researcher (through the development ofunderstanding) and to the subject of research. Habermas took psychoanalysis as the theoreticlens, the pre-understanding through which distorted communication could be explored. Ata different level, Ricoeur suggests, both hermeneutics and psychoanalysis are concerned with‘demystification, as a reduction of illusion’ (1970: 26).The alignment of psychoanalytic theory to the hermeneutic spirit, to the German