Operationalizing the interpretive turn: Deploying qualitative methods toward an economics of meaning

Abstract

In his original essay advocating the interpretive turn in economics, Lavoie makes an explicit argument favoring (1) an economics of meaning and (2) the growth of knowledge through discursive rivalry within the scientific community. This paper contends that within Lavoie's explicit argument is an implicit case for a particular mode of discovery that resists the excesses of formalism common within the economics discipline and instead puts the investigator, the investigator's theoretical lens, and the subject under investigation in close proximity to one another. With the nodal points of this triangulated relationship in closer proximity to one another, an iterative learning process emerges that is itself a source of social scientific discovery. Further, and in connection to this mode of discovery, is the implicit case favoring qualitative research methods that correct the economics discipline's excessive reliance upon quantitative analysis in its empirical investigations that distances the investigator from the subject under investigation. The goal of this paper is to make these implicit arguments explicit.

1 Introduction

There remains in economics a strong “objectivist bias” against the qualitative/interpretive aspects of research in favor of the quantitative/predictive aspects. Worst of all, the objectivist bias has made economics boring.

—Don Lavoie (2011)

Through his scholarship and training of graduate students, Don Lavoie advocated the development of an economics of meaning by bringing the interpretive turn to the economics discipline. In keeping with the Austrian tradition, an economics of meaning is one that recognizes the essential connection between purpose, plan formation, expectations, action, and learning at the individual level, on the one hand, and widespread patterns of social coordination on the other.

In one respect, the impulse to ground explanations of economic phenomena in individual action is well-honed within the economics profession, but the “individual” is more often than not a generic individual devoid of historical context, culture, gender, or identity. Or as Deirdre McCloskey frequently describes, the universe of mainstream economists is populated with “Max-U’s.” Because Max-U is devoid of any particular interpretive frame (other than generic self-interest), standard economics has no reason to and no means to go beyond the most basic levels of meaning and purpose. Lavoie argued throughout his career that the connections between purpose, action, plan formation, expectation, and learning remain beyond the investigator's intellectual reach without a deliberate introduction of the interpretive dimension. Thus, we cannot understand questions that are most essential to economics, for example, Hayek's (1984 [1948]) question of how it is that people come to possess relevant pieces of and effectively use the knowledge dispersed in society, without including the interpretive dimension into our discipline.

Lavoie develops his argument favoring the interpretive turn in economics primarily by building off of Gadamer (1975a, 1975b), Bernstein (1983), Ricoeur (1965, 1981), and others working within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition, Geertz (1973, 1979) and others within interpretive social science, and by identifying the interpretive themes within Mises (1966, 1969, 1978, 1981a, 1981b) and other members of the Austrian school. Lavoie saw the interpretive turn as possessing a natural affinity with the Austrian school's emphasis on the necessary connection between meaning, purposefulness, and action (Mises 1966). Furthermore, Lavoie saw the Austrian school's focus on the link between individual action and unintended patterns of social coordination as one ripe for interpretive analysis, just as it had been applied in the study of language and the transmission of cultural norms.¹ Lavoie recognized that science must possess a predictive element, but the lesson he drew from the interpretive turn was that if it was to be good science, it must also tell a plausible story. Good scientific stories are those that render complex circumstances intelligible to the trained mind. Quantitative methods are useful for the predictive dimension, but to get at the interpretive element, the research must draw upon the “full language of a culture” (Lavoie 2011).

Lavoie profoundly influenced several generations of Austrian scholars, many of whom became convinced that the intentions and subjective meanings of subjects operating within particular institutional and cultural contexts ought to feature prominently in our economic investigations.² In his teaching, in his selections for readings groups, in his mentoring of graduate students, and in some of his later writing, it was clear that he considered qualitative empirical methods, such as in-depth case analysis, archival investigations of first-hand accounts, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation to possess appealing qualities that the quantitative empirical methods so dominant within the economics profession lacked (Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright 2000).³ But Lavoie's own work was largely focused on the history of economic thought and grounded in the literature on the philosophy of the social sciences. Though Lavoie was an enthusiastic advocate of empirical work influenced by the interpretive dimension, he was not in a particularly strong position to offer specific guidance on the nuts and bolts of qualitative methods (something for which he received a fair amount of good-natured ribbing from his graduate students).⁴ More importantly, and perhaps because he was not a practitioner of qualitative methods himself, Lavoie's explicit argument connecting the case for the interpretive turn and the case favoring qualitative methods remained underdeveloped.

The argument I make in this paper is that implicit within Lavoie's advocacy of the interpretive turn is a case for a particular mode of discovery that resists the excesses of formalism common within professional economics and instead puts the investigator, the investigator's theoretical lens, and the subject under investigation⁵ in close proximity to one another. With the nodal points of this triangulated relationship in closer proximity to one another, an iterative learning process emerges that is an essential source of social scientific discovery. A greater use of qualitative research methods can help to correct economics' excessive reliance upon quantitative analysis in its empirical investigations and reduce the distance between the investigator and the subject under investigation. My intent is to make these implicit arguments explicit.⁶ Specifically, I will argue that the economics discipline's excessive reliance on formal theoretical models and quantitative empirical methods have inhibited the discovery that would otherwise unfold. Furthermore, I will argue that qualitative empirical methods generally eschewed by the economics profession are an essential component of operationalizing an economics of meaning.

2 The case for closer proximity between investigator, theory, and subject

In his argument favoring the interpretive turn, Lavoie charts a course for how the economics discipline can steer between (or better, steer beyond) the extremes of relativism and objectivism. Lavoie acknowledged that the discipline's concern to avoid the extremes of relativism is legitimate, in that they give up the rival effort to come to a better understanding of the phenomena we seek to render more intelligible. But the profession's response to these concerns has in Lavoie's view led to the opposite, objectivist extreme. And it is this tendency toward objectivism that has inspired an excessive formalism of theory and an excessive “quantitativism” in our empirical work.

In our work favoring a more culturally informed economics, Lavoie and I discuss the ways in which the profession's excessive formalism and exclusive reliance upon quantitative empirical methods have cut the economics discipline off from serious investigations of culture.

Formalism can be defined as getting so caught up in the pyrotechnical difficulties of one’s [abstract] theory that one loses sight altogether of the practical problems it was invented to solve… There are many wonderful questions that have been posed throughout the history of economics which are being ignored because such a premium is put on technical theory-building of the kind that puts theory far away from the “life-world,” the world of everyday existence… Modernism also brings about a narrowing of economists’ attitudes toward the nature of empirical work, which might be called “quantitativism.” Empirical research in economics today is, in the minds of many economists, synonymous with econometrics. Sophisticated statistics tend to crowd out both simple and straightforward uses of statistics, and non-statistical, qualitative empirical investigations. Now of course, unlike a great deal of mathematical theorizing, statistical economics does at least have some practical usefulness, that is, you can do quantitative studies of real-world questions, and can try to discern meaningful patterns in the numbers. But in contemporary economic empirical work, there is a tendency to ask only the kind of questions to which sophisticated econometric tools can be applied… But there is another whole kind of empirical work that is highly regarded outside of economics, ethnography and archival-historical research, which involves very close-up studies of the complex details in their specific contexts. Here, the rich description and interpretation of the context is what is important… And this is, in our view, how you get at culture. It is by way of intimate, detailed, qualitative research, immersed in the complex context of one particular situation, that you can begin to get a handle on culture (Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright 2000: 21–22).

This passage begins to flesh out more fully what is implied in Lavoie's essay. Excessive formalism has put unnecessary distance between the tools of our understanding (our theory) and the subjects we seek to understand.⁷ Furthermore, the profession's exclusive reliance on quantitative empirical methods has put unnecessary distance between the investigator and the subject under investigation. The implication of this criticism is that there is a preferred mode of discovery—one in which investigator, theory, and subject remain in close proximity. But what exactly are the advantages of this proximity? This part of the argument, though implied in Lavoie's work, requires fuller support.

The passage cited above also asserts that for many important economic questions, qualitative empirical methods are preferable to quantitative methods. This would be particularly true when the topic under investigation is one in which subjective interpretation has to be at the forefront of the analysis. For example, the question of how cultural context is shaping entrepreneurial action in a given time and place is one that would benefit from the nuanced reading qualitative methods afford.⁸ But again, what exactly are the advantages of qualitative methods in terms of developing the interpretive dimension within economics? And again, this part of the argument, though implied in Lavoie's work, also requires fuller support. (I return to this point in Section 3.)

Under the influence of philosophical hermeneutics, interpretive social science recognizes the triangulated relationship between the investigator, the theoretical framework, and the subject or phenomenon under investigation (see Fig. 1), and that each of these nodal points has a particular quality or character. Interpretive social science recognizes the fact that the investigator comes equipped with a trained mind—trained within a given field—but also that the investigator is a person with his or her own life history. This life history can be both enabling and limiting when it comes to the investigative process. The theoretical framework serves, of course, as the principal guide in the investigation, but interpretive social science is sensitive to the fact that the theoretical frame is itself both enabling and limiting in the central role it plays in the discovery process (Gadamer 1976; Bernstein 1983). Finally, interpretive social science is aware that the individual subjects we seek to understand are themselves interpreting beings, and the social phenomena we seek to understand are patterned outcomes of intersubjective interpretive processes (Gadamer 1975b; Geertz 1973; Giddens 1979, 1984).

Fig. 1

Triangulated Relationship Between Investigator, Theory, and Subject.

The case favoring a close proximity between investigator, theory, and subject must begin, ironically, by pointing out that some distance between these three nodal points is essential and productive in the investigative process (Gadamer 1975a, 1975b).⁹ Or in terms of Fig. 1, the three nodal points are distinct from one another, and the “legs” between them must have some positive length. Though we want our theory to possess some recognizable correspondence to the subject or phenomenon we seek to understand, we need our theory to do some sorting for us—to filter out details inessential for understanding the relevant aspect of the subject—and to highlight others. Like Gadamer's and Bernstein’s (1983) notion of enabling prejudices, theory “constitutes the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience” (Gadamer 1976, p. 9, quoted in Lavoie 2011). Understanding thus requires that our theory has some distance from the subject or phenomenon under investigation.

Similarly, the investigator should not be reduced to the preferred theory, even if an investigator uses a particular theory consistently and exclusively for some particular investigation. Even in this case, the investigator will be aware of alternative theories that might be deployed, and this knowledge acts as a check on the preference for the chosen theory or analytic framework. Furthermore, investigators come equipped with more than just their bundle of possible analytic frames. Investigators are people who live in the world—people who have developed intuition that lead them to question accepted theoretical frames (their own and rival theories), lead them to hone and place appropriate qualifications around their own preferred theoretical frames, and so on. Thus, again, some distance between investigator and his or her preferred theory is essential.¹⁰

Finally, some distance between the investigator and the subject or phenomenon under investigation is also productive. The meaning of an impressionist painting cannot be ascertained if the viewer is so close that it is only the flecks of color that can be seen. If one's mental model of a house or a garden is to be useful in grasping the meaning of the painting, some distance is essential. Similarly, before one can understand the meaning individual action has for explaining some social phenomenon, the researcher must be able to gain the mental distance that is necessary to put that action in the relevant context.

But while some distance is productive, excessive distance inhibits the process of social scientific discovery. Excessive formalism tends to unnecessarily increase the distance between the theoretical frame and the subject under investigation. Or in terms of Fig. 1, “leg a” lengthens. The intellectual habit of excessive formalism trains us to leave the particulars behind, especially if those particulars are “messy,” i.e., too nuanced and complex to capture in abstract mathematical terms. When so much detail is lost that the phenomena we seek to understand are no longer recognizable in the theories we construct, the principal goal of rendering complex phenomena more intelligible recedes to the background. The more that mathematical elegance serves as an end in itself, the less our theoretical models are likely to inform us about the complex phenomena we observe in the world.¹¹

Furthermore, the greater the distance that is created by excessive formalism, the less likely it will be that the subject or phenomenon will be able to inform our theory. Mises' understanding of the relationship between theory and history (or more generally, the phenomena we are attempting to understand) is that theory gives us “schemes of interpretation” that help us to understand how the world works (Mises 1966). Empirical analysis sheds light on how the world worked in a particular context and time. Lavoie (2011) emphasized that Mises' point here was not to draw a stark line of distinction between theory and empirical work, but instead was to demonstrate the relationship between the two.¹² As Lavoie (2011) argues, “[T]he growth of knowledge literature teaches us that scientific theories are neither strictly deductive, thus dichotomized from history, nor strictly hypothetical and generated by induction from history, but can be better described as alternative devices for interpreting the historical world.” The point that theories are neither strictly deductive (completely separable from the empirical world under investigation) nor strictly inductive (thus having no independent reference point except the subject under investigation) suggests an iterative, mutually informing relationship between theory and subject.

While Lavoie (2011) emphasized the role the scientific discourse plays in advancing the growth of knowledge, he also highlighted the dynamic connection between theory and subject—that there is a circuit of learning that goes from the theory to the world and from the world to theory. Not only does theory (if in close enough proximity) shed light and render more intelligible the subject under investigation, the reverse is also true—i.e., the subject has the potential to call aspects of our theory into question, and/or render it more nuanced. This iterative play between theory and the world is an essential part of the process of the growth of knowledge. But in order for the growth to happen, theory and subject must be in close enough proximity whereby such a “conversation” can take place.

Whereas formalism tends to put distance between theory and subject, quantitativism tends to put distance between the investigator and the phenomenon. Or in terms of Fig. 1, “leg b” lengthens. Lavoie was not opposed to econometric/quantitative analysis in principle. He respected the fact that, unlike abstract theorists, econometricians were attempting to render political economy phenomena, as they existed in the real world, more intelligible. Lavoie's frustration with quantitative analysis was the exclusive hold that such techniques seem to have on the profession—an exclusivity, even hegemony, that barred empirical analysis that would be better equipped to understand the connections between meaning, purpose, expectation, plan formation, action, and learning at the individual level, and how these individual-level phenomena led to wider-spread patterns of social coordination (or patterns of social disorganization and decay).¹³

One result of the exclusive reliance upon quantitative methods is that all too often, it is only the quantitative results that count as the scientific part of our work, not the intuitive appeal or the “story” behind it. The adage “if you can measure it, you can understand it,” and its corollary, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it,” conflates measurement with understanding. As Hayek (1979[1952]) argued in The Counter-Revolution of Science (p. 89), this tendency

“is probably responsible for the worst aberrations and absurdities produced by scientism in the social sciences. It not only leads frequently to the selection for study of the most irrelevant aspects of the phenomena because they happen to be measurable, but also to 'measurements' and assignments of numerical values which are absolutely meaningless (emphasis added).”

If measurement is to be useful, it requires the interpretive dimension. Can measurement be an essential tool in understanding? Undoubtedly, yes, but not without the interpretive dimension. And for the intuition of the trained mind to inform our understanding, the investigator must be in close enough proximity to the subject or phenomenon to use it.

The empirical methods we deploy also determine the quality and character of the information flow between the investigator and the subject. Similar to our theoretical models, empirical methods allow us to leave behind unimportant details, ignoring anomalies and outliers in favor of broader patterns within the data. But just as excessive formalism often leaves behind what are essential details in favor of formal elegance, the exclusive use of quantitative methods often leads us to disregard as unimportant critical anomalies in the data that might lead to new discovery if the trained mind could get close enough to exercise this kind of nuanced judgment. In other words, there is a two-way dialog between the investigator and the subject (Gadamer 1975a). In response to our questions, the subject sometimes “speaks” in general terms, revealing broad patterns. But the subject can also “speak” in cryptic terms, revealing what might be small clues to a different and perhaps better question. But in order to gain the most we can out of this “conversation,” we need to be close enough to get at the meanings behind the general pattern—to understand why and how a pattern emerges, and not just that a pattern has emerged. We need to be close enough to ask the subject or phenomenon under investigation new questions and see where the clues lead.

To sum up then, the economics discipline's objectivist tendencies have led to excessive formalism, on the one hand, and an exclusive reliance upon quantitative empirical methods on the other. Formalism puts unnecessary distance between our theoretical tools of analysis and the subjects we seek to understand. The exclusive reliance upon quantitative methods put unnecessary distance between the investigator and the subjects we investigate. These distances inhibit the iterative discourse between investigator, theory, and subject and the process of scientific discovery that would otherwise unfold. Having made a more explicit case favoring a close proximity between investigator, theory, and subject, we must now make more explicit the case favoring the use of qualitative methods as a means for operationalizing the interpretive turn, which I take up below.

3 The case for qualitative methods as a means of operationalizing the interpretive turn

In his argument favoring the interpretive turn, and his critique of objectivism within economics, Lavoie (2011 and Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright 2000) frequently names qualitative methods of ethnography, historical archival research, and case studies as the preferred method of empirical investigation. The implication is that such methods keep the triangulated relationship between investigator, theory, and subject close, and the discursive process of discovery that emerges from it richly interactive. But what, exactly, is it about qualitative methods that accomplishes this? What is the explicit case that points to qualitative methods as the preferred means of operationalizing the interpretive turn?

The overarching case favoring qualitative empirical methods is that they enable us to develop an economics of meaning—one that recognizes the essential connection between individual purpose, plan formation, expectations, action, and learning, on the one hand, and widespread social patterns on the other. If we want to understand how people perceive their own circumstances and craft purposeful strategies of action in the face of those circumstances; if we want to understand how people in a given time and place learn from their experiences and form expectations about the future, we may find it extremely helpful to talk to them (or in the case of historical research, to read or hear what they said) in a way that is guided by the theoretical frames available to us.

On one level, when we speak with and listen to our subjects, we are deploying a very simple set of tools. On another level, the tools associated with our natural (i.e., verbal as opposed to mathematical) language are anything but simple. The daily and life-long use of our natural language has outfitted us (as investigators) with a highly sensitive and refined means of capturing a wide variety of complex meanings within a given exchange. Paired with our training, these tools can enable us to access the intersection between individual subjects’ own mental processes and the larger context they must navigate. It is the tools of our natural language that give us our best access to the subjects’ life-world, the meanings they derive from their cultural and material context, an understanding of how individual subjects match those meanings with purposeful plans of action, what they learn from these actions, and how they adjust their plans in the face of success and failure in carrying out those plans.

In one respect, qualitative methods are not as alien to economists as we might at first imagine. Most economists make use of at least one qualitative methodological form—at least those who strive to make their arguments intuitively appealing. As Mises (1966) argued, introspection, or what we might call “indwelling,” is a useful source of scientific discovery. According to Mises, and the verstehen tradition more broadly, social scientific understanding is not that different from how we understand our fellow man in daily life. Social scientific inquiry “is simply intended to represent a more careful and systematic effort” of what we do everyday in the course of our daily interactions with others (Lavoie 2011). As Lavoie points out, Mises' principal “method” was the unbounded use of imaginary constructs. Lavoie argued further that our starting point in effectively using our speculative imagination toward a fusion of horizons with the subject is our own humanness. The wedding, the funeral, and coming of age ceremonies may look different in other places, but they are still recognizable to us because of our own cultural embeddedness. The same holds with rituals and constraints governing economic exchange.

Indwelling, then, is the most basic qualitative method we use—one that allows us to serve as the investigator and also stand in for the subject. When we ask ourselves “what would I do under these circumstances?” we are in effect “interviewing” our subject, or a reasonable substitute for our subject. The value of the information we obtain through this method is not additional quantitative data. The value of this “discourse” is that it helps to establish a tight intuitive link between our theory and our subject. Indwelling is a critical way in which we perform a “check” to make sure that we are maintaining a close proximity between theory and subject—that the thing we seek to understand is recognizable in the tools we develop to understand it.

Though vital to serving as an intuitive check to our theory, indwelling is, however, often limited in its capacity to shed light on complex real world phenomena. For some research questions we have to “reach” farther to understand the actions we observe in others. Sometimes, for example, the cultural distance is vast. Or the rules of the game are affecting behavior in ways we can’t understand, at least not at first. In other words, sometimes the fusion of horizons requires greater effort. This is where ethnographic field work, archival research, and in-depth case analysis can bridge the distance. Such methods allow us to gain access to not only the actions of others, but also the mental templates shaping their action.

The goal here is not to adopt “the native’s” or the subject’s point of view. Lavoie (2011) draws upon the example of the faulty theory of inflation at work in the subject’s mind. In such a case, Lavoie points out, we would not want to substitute the subject’s judgment for what our training tells us is true.¹⁴ But sometimes the mental models the subject possesses may in fact be better than the investigator’s mental model. For example, an investigator may have a general notion of what motivates rent seeking behavior, but this general notion may be inadequate in a particular political economy environment. The investigator may, for instance, assume that the rents being sought are primarily financial. The subject embedded within this context, on the other hand, may more clearly understand rents as including not just financial reward, but also status, political bargaining power, maintenance of an exit strategy, or protection of one’s self, kin, or ethnic group.

Furthermore, even if the subjects' mental models are questionable or flawed, it may be these mental models that are driving the social phenomena we are attempting to understand. In our work examining the reasons why and strategies by which people return to their communities following a devastating disaster, Storr and I find that mental models attributing a unique and positive sense of place (to an otherwise ordinary neighborhood), mental models attributing to government particular intentions and capacities for providing rebuilding assistance, and mental models of “God’s divine plan” have all significantly shaped individual strategies and widespread patterns of postdisaster recovery (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009a,2009b, 2010; Chamlee-Wright 2010a). But in such cases, when the mental models diverge so significantly from the investigator's mental models, indwelling will not be adequate if we are to understand how subjects' mental models shape broader social patterns. We will need qualitative methods that are more robust than simple introspection.

Sometimes, what is needed are tools that enable the investigator to get at information that is simply hidden from view unless someone asks and documents the subjects' responses. Field surveys are one form of qualitative investigation that can help to reveal basic facts or perceptions our subjects possess but we as researchers do not, unless we ask. More compelling for our purposes here, though, are qualitative methods that enable the researcher to establish the direction of inquiry, while also allowing the subject to articulate his or her own narrative in response to that inquiry. It is these more open-ended forms of qualitative inquiry that have greater potential for fostering a richly interactive relationship between investigator, theory, and subject.

For example, we may know from well-established theory how particular factors work in general (e.g., property rights). But only through case analysis can we know how the particular set of arrangements evolved (North and Thomas 1973) or how particular circumstances might render the general theory more nuanced (Ostrom 2005). In other words, not only does the theory frame the inquiry into the subject, the subject has the potential to inform, challenge, or render more nuanced the theory. Similarly, we may know from existing quantitative analysis that a particular social phenomenon is unfolding (e.g., some communities are rebounding faster than others in the aftermath of a particular disaster), but qualitative methods may be required to explain the how and why behind this variance. In other words, qualitative analysis allows closer proximity between the investigator and the subject than is generally afforded by more traditional econometric methods, thereby making more refined discovery possible.

A principal feature of the relationship between investigator and subject is the degree to which the researcher is able to cultivate (to borrow Hayek’s phrase) local knowledge of the subject. There may be an aspect of this process in any kind of empirical work, even work involving large data sets. The more the researcher works with a given data set, the more familiar with it she becomes, the more she learns where the quirks and anomalies are. But generally, quantitative analysis leads us to ignore these anomalies, and even if they capture our interest, there may be few clues as to why these anomalies exist unless the researcher goes beyond the quantitative data set. Qualitative methods, ethnographic field work in particular, also afford opportunity to develop local knowledge regarding small differences and anomalies in the data. But unlike quantitative analysis, the closer proximity between investigator and subject that qualitative methods create offers greater opportunity to identify the reasons why such anomalies are manifest and better context for rendering informed judgment as to whether these anomalies are meaningful to understanding the phenomenon under investigation or not.

Again, the seeds of many of the principal research questions Storr and I pursued in our work on postdisaster recovery began as small bits of local knowledge we gathered in the course of our field investigations. The frequent reference Vietnamese-American subjects made to their neighborhood as a “second homeland” inspired a line of inquiry into the provision of “club goods” within this community that fostered a robust pattern of resilience (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009a). Small details regarding the time it took to gain access to one’s property, and the damage associated with even an additional week of waiting led to a line of inquiry into the corrosive effects of time on the recovery process (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009c; Chamlee-Wright 2010a). The specific way interview subjects in the Ninth Ward described and demarcated what government could be doing to assist the recovery process and what government intended to do was the seed that led to an investigation of the role residents’ expectations of government action play in the recovery process (Chamlee-Wright 2010b).

Qualitative field methods afforded close enough proximity to enable us to notice these bits of local knowledge as potentially relevant. Further, qualitative field methods placed us within the relevant and richly detailed context in such a way that we could “try out” existing theoretical frames to see if they helped us to tell a plausible story. Often times it was the small bits of local knowledge that answered back, “Not quite. To be plausible, you need to take account of this small but recurrent detail.” While our training provided useful initial direction, it was more often than not the bits of local knowledge that led us into new tributaries of discovery.¹⁵

To sum up, Lavoie's endorsement of qualitative methods as the means for operationalizing the interpretive turn is appropriate. Qualitative methods ensure that the relationship between investigator, theory, and subject remains close. This proximity, in turn, helps to ensure that the quality of the discursive discovery that unfolds between the three nodal points of this triangulated relationship is rich in relevant detail, with each informing the other. Local knowledge cultivated through the use of qualitative methods plays a particularly important role in this discursive discovery process, as it is precisely this kind of knowledge that can check our preferred theoretical frame and lead to better social scientific questions.

4 Conclusion

Scores of scholars influenced by Don Lavoie have found the case favoring the interpretive turn in economics to be intuitively appealing and on solid philosophical and social scientific ground. And many working within the radical subjectivist tradition of the Austrian school saw this as the route to developing an economics of meaning.

But in the absence of empirical tools that would advance the interpretive turn within economics, even economists inspired by the ideas have tended to confine their intellectual investigations to theoretical inquiries, history of thought, or conjectural history, or adopted the standard methods of the discipline. This habit, particularly the habit of adopting empirical methods we know do not get us much if any closer to an economics of meaning, creates a kind of fissure between our advocacy for an interpretive economics and our efforts to understand the world beyond our office doors.

The case I have attempted to make here is that no such fissure is necessary if we consider more seriously qualitative methods such as ethnographic field work, historical archival research, and case studies. It is true that the costs of making such a transition within our discipline are not zero. But the fact that the economics discipline has failed to capture the advantages qualitative methods can achieve seems also to present an entrepreneurial opportunity. Scholars within the economics profession frustrated by the disjuncture between theory and subject and the arm's length empirical analysis that favors statistical significance over intuitive appeal have an alternative set of tools to turn to. Absent Lavoie's case favoring the interpretive turn, an embrace of qualitative methods may have looked like an abandonment of the economics discipline. But with Lavoie's case favoring the interpretive turn and an economics of meaning, such an embrace is correctly seen as being among the best ways to save this wonderful discipline from the indignities of boredom and irrelevance.