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

Packer, Martin, The Science of Qualitative Research. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press, 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 Research is 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 implicitly accomplished by coders. Thus
Packer concludes that this approach to research interviewing is inherently problematic.
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 from research. 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 constitution of 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 booksubject/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 really is. It is this distinction that has bedeviled traditional
approaches to qualitative research, leaving researchers struggling to locate the "thing-in-itself."
The second approach to constitution, the heroic one, views constitution as a matter of
historical or practical ontology and explores how practices constitute the world of real objects
and subjects. "Here constitution is viewed not as a matter of forming concepts or representations
but as the forming of objects and subjects, an ontological rather than epistemological process"
(p. 167). The heroic characters here including Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Garfinkel
argue that representing the world is secondary to practical involvement in the world. Behind
this approach is a "radical realism" in which thought is seen not as a matter of mentally
representing things-in-the-world but instead of action. As Packer writes: "[t]o have a conception
is to touch and see the world differently" (p. 204).
Armed with this critique of constitution-as-representation, Packer presents a powerful
critique of traditional approaches to ethnography. Most notably, ethnographers have seen their
task as "description" and, as such, they feel that the goal of ethnography is to represent a culture.
Instead of this representational mode of ethnography, Packer argues that ethnographers must
seek to make evident the extant forms of life, including the forms made evident by the practice of
writing ethnography itself. Fieldwork should not just describe these forms of life, but it should
also demonstrate the work that goes into producing these forms of life.
To this end, Packer considers a third prominent form of qualitative research, studies of
interaction. Here he considers critical discourse analysis (CDA) and conversation analysis (CA).
Whereas CDA begins with the Kantian premise of representation and aims to discover how
things really are, CA offers "a way of studying practical activity that articulates the work that is
done and that pays attention to the vernacular understanding displayed by the participants" (pp.
265-266). To its further credit, CA attends to the details of the work of ordering that constitute
the order of a form of life" (p. 266), thus making CA the preferred method for studying the
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 within a form of life.
Bourdieus work adds a 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 game of a form of life, the order of its regional ontology,
explored through fieldwork, to the relations of power in everyday interaction, fixed and studied
in detail, and finally to the care of the self in these forms of life, the ontological complicity of the
participants, evident in interviews" (p. 385).

This book is a call to armsa qualitative research manifesto with an emancipatory notion
of why we should be doing qualitative research while also imagining radical new possibilities for
what qualitative 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 how to do this type of qualitative research. For
that, I eagerly await the sequel.
Gregory A. Thompson
Brigham Young University