Interpretive Theory

Interpretive theory is constituted of a family of approaches rooted in the German idealist tradition, beginning with Immanuel Kant's emphasis on the importance of a priori knowledge of mind as preceding any attempt to grasp empirical experience. This tradition, which included theorists such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz, provided the grounds for challenging sociological positivism. These challenges included the understanding that science was not (and could not be) as value free and as providing objective, unmediated access to universal truth as previously assumed and, second, that the nomothetic methods employed in the natural sciences in search of general laws and causal explanation were seen as unsuitable for the cultural sciences, aiming to understand human life, its processes, and products.

From an interpretive perspective, the subject matter of sociology is not a predetermined universe of objects, but one that is constituted by active agents. The constitution of the social world should be seen as a skilled accomplishment, rather than as a mechanical, determined series of processes. Agency in this view is intentional but not unbounded; it is historically located and both constrained and enabled by broader structures. These structures are not separate and overarching, but are constituted through agents' actions and social practices in the context of structuration processes imbued with dimensions of meanings, norms, and power. Nomological analysis, where behaviors are positivistically understood and analyzed, also has a place as an avenue for explaining the structural properties of social systems but is seen as unsuitable for gaining in-depth interpretive understanding.

As the sociologist Anthony Giddens suggests, from the perspective of interpretive theory researchers interpret social life through drawing on their own stocks on knowledge and preunderstandings; and to understand a form of life they have to immerse themselves in it, [Page 721]but taking care not to become uncritical natives. Researchers' descriptions are then mediated by the discursive categories of social science, obeying a double hermeneutic, involving the second-order interpretations by researchers of the first-order interpretations of agents.