Introduction

One purpose of scholarly praxis in social science is to have effects on social realities. Depending on our normative orientation, we may want to stabilize, subvert and transform the status quo. How can we do so? The conventional answer is that we need positivist approaches because, to intervene effectively in things social, we must know the regularities or even ‘laws’ governing them. In this chapter, I leave to one side the question of whether positivism has as much explanatory power and real-world relevance as proponents claim. Instead, I show how reflexive approaches are more relevant than conventional wisdom suggests. My focus is on approaches where scholars reflect in the context of the present about the past, with a vision for the future on their minds. To show how the scholarly praxis of thinking on time can stabilize, subvert and transform social realities, we need a hermeneutical framework that connects our contemporary lifeworlds as scholars with the historical lifeworlds of the people we study, while also taking account of the zeitgeist, or wider social realities, that influence us and that we may want to influence.

Originally, hermeneutics was the art of interpreting text. Today, it has become the art of interpretation tout court: not just texts but cultural artefacts; and not just cultural artefacts but human action and social interaction. What unites hermeneutical approaches is the realization that interpretation always mediates between one context and another (Gadamer, 1975 [1960]). If this is true, then to understand an act of interpretation we need to understand not only the context to which an interpreter turns their gaze but also the context from which the interpreter operates. To account for an act of interpretation, we must grasp not only what it refers to but also the interpreter’s positionality – what Anthony Giddens (1982) calls ‘double hermeneutics’. In what follows, I move from double to triple hermeneutics. Giddens is right that we operate from a research context to envisage a referent context, but we do so in the wider context of our society and epoch – what I call the cultural horizon. Based on this tripartite conceptual framework, I show how engaging the cultural horizon can serve stabilizing, subversive and transformative purposes.