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.