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Beyond Epistemology: Qualitative Research and the Constitution of Forms of Life

Packer, Martin, The Science of Qualitative Research. New York, NY: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2011. 422 pp. ISBN 978-2-521-14881-8 (ppbk).

Reviewed by: Gregory A. Thompson,Brigham Young University

Martin Packer's The Science of Qualitative Researchis a work of social theory best

described as a page turner.Through well-argued prose, Packer develops a compelling narrative

that includes villains, heroes and other complex characters.

Rather than rehearse old debates about which epistemology is better, Packer asks: Is

epistemology enough? His convincing answer is "no." In making his case, Packer moves beyond

the qualitative/quantitative paradigm wars and exposes the foundational (and flawed)

assumptions of most qualitative research. In so doing, he offers an entirely new way of seeing

what social science research can be.

The book has 15 chapters, in three sections of five chapters each. The book considers three

major qualitative methods, research interviewing, ethnography, and discourse analysis. The book

begins with research interviewing. Although Packer is sympathetic with research interviewers

interest in recovering the subjects voice,Packer points out how research interviewing, through

the decontextualizing method of coding, actually obscures the subjects voice precisely as it

strives to represent subjectivity objectively. Packer show how these approaches strive for a

maximally objective account by minimizing the role of interpretation, which is seen as

subjective. By not attending to the role of the researcher either in interviewing or in coding, these

methods lose the responsive and alive nature of the subject's voice as it interacts with others.

Additionally, as Mischler, Garfinkel, Denzin, and Taylor have shown, these methods involve

substantial and unacknowledged interpretation that is implicitlyaccomplished by coders. Thus

Packer concludes that this approach to research interviewing is inherently problematic.

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In lieu of an approach which seeks to minimize interpretation, Packer proposes an

approach that takes seriously the act of interpretation as it happens in interaction between

research, subjects, and the fixed texts produced fromresearch. Here Packer turns to Gadamer

and his student Iser for a non-objectivist hermeneutic approach that captures this complex

interaction. Packer argues that this approach opens up exciting possibilities for qualitative

research as a method not just for understanding subjects and subjectivity, but also for

understanding "the constitutionof both the subjects and their subjectivity" (p. 120).

In this engagement with traditional qualitative research we begin to see the outlines of the

central antagonism that motivates Packer's book

subject/object dualism. Packers book aims to

dissolve this dualism in the minds and the practices of his readers.

The second section of the book turns to the other major mode of qualitative research,

ethnography. This section first introduces three good guys, Taylor, Giddens, and Geertz, who

bring in the argument that social practices constitute subjectivity. It is here that Packer reveals

the villain behind subject object dualism, Immanuel Kant. Here Packer also provides the back

story of how we got mired in subject/object dualism in the first place.

His account explores two different approaches to constitution. The first approach, the

villainous Kantian one, views constitution as a matter of epistemology, in which the mind

constitutes the world. Packer traces the development of this idea and its discontents through

Husserl, Schutz, and Berger and Luckmann. Each of these developments of Kant's thinking

return to a basic ontological distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, between the world

as experienced and the world as it reallyis. It is this distinction that has bedeviled traditional

approaches to qualitative research, leaving researchers struggling to locate the "thing-in-itself."

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constitution of forms of life as it happens in interaction. Nonetheless, despite CDA's problematic

assumptions, Packer endorses its claim that people sometimes misunderstand their form of life. It

is to this issue that the third part of the book turns.

Packer begins with Marxs outline for an emancipatory science, but soon notes that Marx

overreached in his desire to produce a purely objective account of the whole of society. For a

more appropriate conception of emancipatory research, Packer turns to a new set of protagonists

Habermas, Bourdieu, and Foucault. Habermas offers a way of achieving a critical distance from

the practices of a society through "negotiated impartiality." Here Packer describes Habermas'

treatment of psychoanalysis in order to demonstrate critique from withina form of life.

Bourdieus work addsa reflexive turn by noting that the principle virtue of critical inquiry is that

it objectifies objectification, thus casting the scientist as neither partisan nor absolute but rather

as critical and reflexive and therefore objective without being objectivist. Foucault, the hero of

Packers book,is critical because his research demonstrates how to study what establishes and

constitutes human beings, first as knowing subjects (truth games), second as social and juridical

subjects (relations of power), and third as ethical subjects (care of the self). In the final chapter,

Packer describes how qualitative research should investigate these three forms of constitution:

"Investigation will move from the truth gameof a form of life, the order of its regional ontology,

explored through fieldwork, to the relations of powerin everyday interaction, fixed and studied

in detail, and finally to the care of the selfin these forms of life, the ontological complicityof the

participants, evident in interviews" (p. 385).

This book is a call to armsa qualitative research manifesto with an emancipatory notion

of whywe should be doing qualitative research while also imagining radical new possibilities for

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whatqualitative research can accomplish. By exploring the constitution of subjects and

subjectivity, it opens up issues central to our work as social scientists and qualitative researchers.

Reading the book, however, one is left wondering howto do this type of qualitative research. For

that, I eagerly await the sequel.

Gregory A. Thompson

Brigham Young University