The preceding pages have hardly eschewed theoretical issues. Thus far, however, theory has been used primarily as a means of highlighting the problems inherent in interview techniques, exploring their theoretical roots, and pointing the way to methodological progress. Such discussion is not, in and of itself, sufficient to show that the adoption of a critical perspective on interviewing is requisite to theoretical advances in the social sciences and linguistics. But the lack of a critical perspective on interview techniques is tied to a number of fundamental theoretical obstacles.

My thesis is that methodological shortcomings have both emerged from and in turn reinforced these theoretical quagmires. The problem is that the goals of social-scientific and linguistic research lie beyond the confines of this highly circumscribed process. The only way to break this pattern is to raise methodological questions from the inferior status they currently enjoy, explore the interpenetrations of theoretical and methodological problems, and revise methodology in the light of theory and vice versa.

A number of important theoretical advances have been made in the last two decades. Scholars from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives have moved away from an emphasis on static structures and codes as abstracted from human conduct. Research has focused increasingly on the way codes relate to messages, or structure to action, and the manner in which the system is transformed through use. Social–cultural anthropology, for example, has moved away from viewing culture as monolithic and static toward analyzing the way in which cultural systems are instantiated in individual events by concrete persons (cf. Crick 1976; Geertz 1973).