The Contest Over Meaning: Hermeneutics As An Interpretive Methodology For Understanding Texts

ORGANIZATIONAL
Prasad / INTERPRETIVE
RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY
METHODS
The Contest Over Meaning:

Hermeneutics as an Interpretive
Methodology for Understanding Texts
ANSHUMAN PRASAD
University of New Haven
This article focuses on the methodological and epistemological aspects of herme-

neutics, a leading genre of interpretive research. Beginning with a brief overview
of the limitations of methodological discussions of hermeneutics in current orga-
nizational research, the article first introduces readers to the historical context of
hermeneutics and then discusses the major epistemological and methodological
concepts and debates that inform contemporary hermeneutics. Next, methodolog-
ical guidelines for employing hermeneutics in organizational research are pro-
posed. Finally, some conclusions are offered.
This article seeks to analyze the key methodological, epistemological, and philosophi-
cal aspects of hermeneutics, a major interpretive approach for understanding texts.
With the recent burgeoning of interpretive research in management scholarship, her-
meneutics as a methodology has made its appearance in such diverse fields as account-
ing, marketing, management information systems, organization studies, and so on.
Despite this “hermeneutic ferment” within the broad disciplinary domains of manage-
ment, however, a number of important epistemological issues relating to the use of her-
meneutics as an approach for scholarly organizational research remain under-
examined. This article proposes to address this lacuna in our current understanding of
hermeneutics. The article is structured as follows.
The first section of the article presents a brief overview of hermeneutic research in a
range of management subdisciplines. This overview highlights the somewhat limited
nature of epistemological and philosophical discussions of hermeneutics in most man-
agement and organizational research. Next, an account of the historical evolution of
contemporary hermeneutics is offered. Toward that end, this part begins with the emer-
gence of hermeneutics in Greek antiquity and traces the development of present-day
hermeneutics through the stages of classical hermeneutic theory, philosophical herme-
neutics, and critical hermeneutics. In the third section, the article presents a detailed
Author’s Note: I would like to express my gratitude to Larry Zacharias for his erudite help in conceptual-
izing and developing this article. Thanks also to the four anonymous ORM reviewers for their meticulous re-
view. The article has greatly benefited from their detailed comments. The author alone is responsible for any
shortcomings that may still remain in the article.
Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 5 No. 1, January 2002 12-33
© 2002 Sage Publications
12
Prasad / INTERPRETIVE METHODOLOGY 13
analysis of the major concepts and debates that characterize contemporary hermeneu-
tics. Thereafter some methodological guidelines for employing hermeneutics in orga-
nizational research are discussed, and a brief example of hermeneutic research is pre-
sented. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of implications.
Hermeneutics in Past
Organizational Research
The term hermeneutics has been used by researchers in a variety of management
subdisciplines (e.g., Aredal, 1986; Boland, 1989; Francis, 1994; Gabriel, 1991;
Hirschman, 1990; Lee, 1994; Meredith, Raturi, Amoako-Gyampah, & Kaplan, 1989;
Parker & Roffey, 1997; Phillips & Brown, 1993; Standing & Standing, 1999; Thomp-
son, 1993; Thompson, Locander, & Pollio, 1990; Wolf, 1996). An examination of this
body of research shows that in general, management scholars have tended to employ
the term hermeneutics in two broad senses. These two senses (representing, in some
ways, two poles of a continuum) may be referred to as (a) the “weak” sense and (b) the
“strong” sense.
In its “weak” sense, the term hermeneutics has been used by management scholars
to broadly refer to research that may adopt (or that may be influenced by) any of a num-
ber of perspectives and approaches to inquiry, including interpretivism, qualitative or
ideographic inquiry, existentialism, phenomenology, postmodernism, and so on. In its
“weak” sense, hence, hermeneutics holds a somewhat nebulous meaning and refers to
one or more aspects of what organizational scholars commonly understand by the
omnibus term “qualitative research” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, 2000; Van Maanen,
1983).
In its “strong” sense, on the other hand, the term hermeneutics is used by manage-
ment scholars in a relatively more precise fashion to refer to research that engages in
interpreting texts (and other organizational artifacts and activities) and, for purposes of
such interpretation, closely relies on the epistemological and philosophical insights
and guidelines offered by classical hermeneutic theory, philosophical hermeneutics,
and/or critical hermeneutics (e.g., Aredal, 1986; Boland, 1989; Francis, 1994; Lee,
1994; Phillips & Brown, 1993; etc.). However, for a variety of reasons, this research
mostly offers only a partial (and not comprehensive) analysis of the epistemological
aspects of hermeneutics. Looking at a sample of such research, for instance, we find
that whereas both Boland (1989) and Francis (1994) primarily focus only on
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Lee (1994) seems to mostly ignore
Gadamer’s contributions. Similarly, Aredal (1986) and Phillips and Brown (1993) are
able to provide only a limited explication of the diverse aspects of contemporary her-
meneutics.
Hence, within management scholarship, there seems to be a genuine need for an in-
depth analysis of the methodological, epistemological, and philosophical consider-
ations involved in the use of hermeneutics as an interpretive research approach. This
article seeks to address that need. We begin with a brief account of the historical devel-
opment of hermeneutics.
14 ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH METHODS
Historical Evolution of
Contemporary Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics—an important contribution of the Western world to the theory and
the practice (the science and the art) of understanding and interpreting texts—is said to
be as old as ancient Greece (see, e.g., Bleicher, 1980; Palmer, 1969; Mueller-Vollmer,
1985; Ormiston & Schrift, 1990). Etymologically, the term hermeneutics can be traced
back to Hermes, the Greek messenger god,1 and Aristotle’s Peri hermeneias (On Inter-
pretation) is commonly regarded as one of the early treatises on hermeneutics (Palmer,
1969). In the course of its development through the centuries, hermeneutics, accord-
ingly, was employed for such purposes as Homeric interpretations and disputations in
ancient Greece, the rabbinical interpretations of the Torah, biblical exegesis and, dur-
ing the Protestant Reformation in Europe, for addressing theological controversies
(Connolly & Keutner, 1988; Palmer, 1969).
As a result of its extended association with biblical exegesis and commentary, her-
meneutics, for a long time, became synonymous with biblical interpretation as such.
And although scholars now define hermeneutics much more broadly, to some extent
the theological meaning of hermeneutics continues to persist in popular imagination to
this day; for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) defines hermeneutics as
“the art or science of interpretation, especially of Scripture” (emphasis added).2
Despite this popular conflation of hermeneutics and biblical interpretation, however,
during most of its history, hermeneutics has been much more than merely a theological
enterprise. Hence, in addition to theological hermeneutics, the evolution of hermeneu-
tics has been marked also by the growth of other variants of hermeneutics like juridical
hermeneutics, philological hermeneutics, and the like.
One of the key characteristics of this stage of hermeneutics (which saw the emer-
gence of several varieties of hermeneutics) is its particularistic nature. In other words,
at this stage in the evolution of hermeneutics, scholars advocate different, specialized
hermeneutics suited for aiding interpretation in different fields like history, law, reli-
gion, poetry, and so on. This fragmented notion of hermeneutics was to change dra-
matically with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)—“the father of modern herme-
neutics”—who offered the important view of hermeneutics as a general theory of
textual interpretation and understanding.
Beginning with Schleiermacher, the theory, epistemology, and philosophy of her-
meneutics has been developed by several thinkers along a number of dimensions. For
analytical convenience, however, it is useful to classify the efforts of such thinkers
under three categories, namely, (a) classical hermeneutic theory;3 (b) philosophical
hermeneutics, or hermeneutic philosophy; and (c) critical hermeneutics.4 We now turn
our attention toward understanding the broad contours of these three streams of herme-
neutics.
Classical hermeneutic theory. Prior to Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was gener-
ally understood as providing a set of tools and techniques for understanding those parts
or passages of a text that may be difficult to understand. Schleiermacher (1985), how-
ever, pointed out that the conception of hermeneutics as a technique for interpreting
only the difficult passages of a text implicitly assumes that normally, “understanding
occurs as a matter of course” (p. 81). Schleiermacher challenged this assumption, insist-
ing that the ever-present differences between the author and the reader-interpreter with
respect to their personal histories, (the use of) language, culture, worldview, and so on
imply that misunderstanding, rather than understanding, would be the normal situa-
tion in textual interpretation. Hence, argued Schleiermacher, what was needed was
not rules and methods of interpretation designed merely for exceptional and episodic
use, but a comprehensive theoretical foundation for all textual interpretation.
Schleiermacher, thus, transformed hermeneutics from a technique to a general the-
ory of understanding and interpreting texts. For Schleiermacher, the goal of interpret-
ing a text is to recover the author’s originally intended meaning. Toward that end,
according to Schleiermacher (1985), interpretation has two, equally important,
aspects: grammatical (or objective) and psychological (or subjective). Grammatical
interpretation refers not merely to grammar but to the wider “moment of language”
(Palmer, 1969, p. 88) in the interpretive act. Arguing that language provides “the struc-
tures within which . . . thought operates” (Palmer, 1969, pp. 88-89), Schleiermacher
(1985) points out that our “linguistic heritage . . . modifies our mind” such that any text
“can be understood only in the context of the totality of the language” (p. 75). For
Schleiermacher, accordingly, grammatical interpretation refers to understanding and
interpreting a text “in the context of the language with its possibilities [and limits]” (p.
74). As distinct from grammatical interpretation, psychological interpretation seeks to
reconstruct or reexperience the author’s mental and creative processes with a view to
developing an empathetic understanding of the text.
Whereas Schleiermacher transformed hermeneutics from a technique to a general
theory, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) raised hermeneutics to the status of a general
epistemology for the Geisteswissenschaften (the human and social sciences). Dilthey
(1976) argued that whereas the Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences) aimed at
Erklaeren (explanation), the aim of the human and social sciences was Verstehen
(understanding). He pointed out that similar to texts, all social phenomena arise from
human externalization (or objectification) of inner feelings and experiences.
Hence, Dilthey (1976) claimed that the postulates of Schleiermacher’s general the-
ory of hermeneutics could be extended to the interpretation of social meaning com-
plexes such as legal or economic systems and the like. Moreover, somewhat similar to
Schleiermacher, Dilthey also envisaged the task of interpretation and understanding as
an empathetic grasping, reconstructing, and reexperiencing by one human mind
(namely, the interpreter’s) of the mental objectifications (e.g., texts, legal structures,
historical processes, etc.) produced by other human minds. Thus, by focusing on her-
meneutics as (a) the general theory of interpretation and (b) as the epistemological
foundation of the social sciences, classical hermeneutic theory greatly contributed to
the development of hermeneutics. In contrast, philosophical hermeneutics made its
contribution by conducting a deep exploration of the philosophical issues surrounding
interpretation.
Philosophical hermeneutics. Classical hermeneutic theory and philosophical her-
meneutics are markedly different with respect to their conceptualization of the project
of hermeneutics. For the former, the purpose of hermeneutics is to guide the practice of
correct interpretation and understanding. In the view of philosophical hermeneutics,
on the other hand, the major concern of hermeneutics is not with creating prescriptive
theories for regulating interpretive practice. Rather, in this view, hermeneutics is con-
cerned with what is constitutively involved (in a deep, philosophical sense) in each and
every act of interpretation.
The growth of philosophical hermeneutics is particularly indebted to the intellec-

tual labors of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (b. 1900).
Heidegger’s principal contribution to hermeneutic philosophy is to be found in his
masterpiece (originally published in 1927), Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962),
wherein, in the course of formulating his ontology of Dasein (literally, “being there”),
he offers an existential-ontological conception of hermeneutics and, in so doing, raises
“understanding” to the status of a fundamental category of human existence, or an
Existentiale. Gadamer, in turn, uses Heidegger’s reconceptualization of understanding/
interpretation for developing a systematic philosophy of hermeneutics (Gadamer,
1975, 1976, 1989). This philosophy, on one hand, rejects the ideas of (a) a separation
between the text (i.e., the so-called object of interpretation) and the reader (i.e., the
putative subject engaging in interpretation) and (b) the goal of interpretation as grasp-
ing the author’s intended meaning and, on the other hand, emphasizes, among other
things, (a) the productive role of “tradition” and “prejudices” in the act of interpreta-
tion, (b) the nature of interpretation as a dialogue between the text and the interpreter,
and (c) interpretation as non-author-intentional.
The hermeneutic philosophy following from Heidegger and Gadamer has been crit-
icized as being subjectivistic and relativistic by some objectivist thinkers (e.g., Betti,
1990). Betti (1990), for example, insists that the text must be regarded as an autono-
mous object independent of the subjectivity of the interpreter, and maintains that the
aim of interpretation must necessarily be to recover the original intention of the text’s
author. Gadamer’s defense of philosophical hermeneutics against such objectivist crit-
icisms consists, in part, of reiterating his rejection of the subject-object dichotomy.
The key role played by philosophical hermeneutics in shaping the contours of contem-
porary hermeneutics will be discussed in detail later during the course of this article. It
may be useful to note here that although earlier hermeneutics made a distinction
between understanding and interpretation, that distinction is no longer maintained
after the emergence of philosophical hermeneutics. Accordingly, this article uses the
two terms interchangeably.
Critical hermeneutics. By insisting that the goal of interpretation is a recovery of
the original intention of the text’s author, Betti’s (1990) above-noted criticism of philo-
sophical hermeneutics seeks to return hermeneutics to a pre-Heideggerian position. In
contrast, some critical theorists (e.g., Apel, 1980; Habermas, 1990a, 1990b) have
taken issues with certain principles of philosophical hermeneutics, not in order to roll
hermeneutics back to a pre-Heideggerian position, but to further build on the insights
of philosophical hermeneutics, and in so doing, develop a more comprehensive herme-
neutics of critique and emancipation.
According to critical theorists, the task of interpretation includes, among other
things, the necessity of providing a critique of the ideological aspects of the text being
interpreted. Hence, critical theorists like Habermas, for instance, have carried out an
intense debate with philosophical hermeneutics with a view to giving a new, critical
orientation to hermeneutics. The major arguments of the Gadamer-Habermas debate
and the significance of this debate for the task of interpretation are discussed later in
this article.
Notwithstanding the intensity of the hermeneutic debate between Gadamer and
Habermas, however, it needs to be recognized that the epistemological and method-
ological implications of the insights offered by both these thinkers are, broadly speak-
ing, interpretivistic and antipositivistic in nature. Hence, scholars often emphasize that
despite the so-called dispute between Gadamer and Habermas, the two have much in
common (see, e.g., Brenkman, 1987; Howard, 1982; Hoy, 1978; Outhwaite, 1987).
Indeed, Howard (1982, p. 121), for instance, has observed that the debate between
Habermas and Gadamer is more like a “family quarrel” between two kinsmen than a
polemic between two irreconcilable adversaries. Such being the case, critical herme-
neutics may reasonably be viewed as a constructive enterprise directed at developing a
more complete form of hermeneutics.
Major Concepts and Debates

While discussing the major concepts and debates that define contemporary herme-
neutics, we will primarily focus on the following: (a) the idea of the hermeneutic cir-
cle, (b) the historicality of understanding and the hermeneutic “horizon,” (c) the
dialogical nature of understanding and the attendant concept of “fusion of horizons,”
(d) the role of authorial intention in interpretation, and (e) the significance of critique
in the process of interpretation. Our discussion draws on insights offered by each of the
three principal streams of hermeneutics identified above.
The hermeneutic circle. The concept of the hermeneutic circle has long been an
important part of the theory and practice of hermeneutics. One of the early mentions of
this concept occurs in the works of the German philologist, Friedrich Ast (1778-1841).
Ast, under the influence of German Romanticism, believed in the notion of a unitary
cultural Geist (spirit) and held that the imprint of the same Geist was to be found in all
the artifacts (including textual productions) of a given culture. Hence, claimed Ast, the
cultural and textual productions of a civilization necessarily constituted a unified
whole, and he propounded his famous hermeneutic circle by asserting that “the part
[can only be] understood from the whole and the whole from the inner harmony of its
parts” (Palmer, 1969, p. 77; referring to Ast’s Grundlinien der Grammatik,
Hermeneutik und Kritik [Basic Elements of Grammar, Hermeneutics, and Criticism]
published in 1808). In other words, the meaning of the individual texts of a given cul-
ture can be fully understood only by understanding the meaning of the overall spirit of
that culture, and, in turn, the overall spirit of a culture can be understood only by under-
standing the meaning of the individual texts and other artifacts produced by that cul-
ture.
According to Ast, understanding a text involved a reproduction (or recreation) of
the original author’s creative process (Palmer, 1969). For Ast, one of the key devices
facilitating such reproduction of the author’s creative process was the idea of the her-
meneutic circle. The importance of the hermeneutic circle was emphasized by
Schleiermacher (1985) as well. Similar to Ast, Schleiermacher also insisted that the
task of understanding a text required reproducing or reexperiencing the author’s cre-
ative processes. As already mentioned, for Schleiermacher, this involved two dimen-
sions, “grammatical” and “psychological.” Schleiermacher (pp. 84, 94) maintained
that both “grammatical” and “psychological” understanding operated through the
device of the hermeneutic circle.
It is important to note here that at an analytical level, the notion of the hermeneutic
circle suffers from a logical contradiction, for, as Palmer (1969) notes, “If we must
grasp the whole before we can understand the parts, then we shall never understand
anything” (p. 87). From a hermeneutic perspective, therefore, understanding cannot be

seen merely as a logical and analytical process. Rather, according to hermeneutics, the
process of understanding goes beyond logic and analysis and is, in some essential
respect, “intuitive and divinatory” (p. 87). The idea of the hermeneutic circle continues
to remain an important element of the conceptual architecture of hermeneutics. How-
ever, as later parts of this article will explain, the concept has been given a more “tem-
poral” and “historical” character by thinkers like Heidegger and Gadamer.
A brief example may be useful for further clarifying the idea of the hermeneutic cir-
cle. Consider, for instance, the task of understanding a paragraph in any piece of writ-
ing. The paragraph in question must, of course, be understood by means of understand-
ing the individual sentences that make up that paragraph. On the other hand, it is often
the case that the meaning of individual sentences in a paragraph becomes clear only
when we already have an understanding of what the paragraph as a whole is trying to
convey, or what the paragraph is “driving at,” or what is the “direction” of the entire
paragraph. Similar part/whole dialectics constituting the hermeneutic circle may be
seen to operate between words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters, chapters and
the book, individual books written by an author and the author’s complete oeuvre,
authorial oeuvre and the genre to which a specific oeuvre may belong, and so on.
The historicality of understanding and the hermeneutic horizon. At its broadest and
most general, the idea of the hermeneutic circle (as developed in the writings of
hermeneuticians such as Ast and Schleiermacher) may be seen as emphasizing the
importance of developing an understanding of the context (e.g., in Ast’s case, the uni-
fied spirit of a culture) for purposes of interpreting a text. These thinkers, however,
seem to pay little attention to the creative role of the reader-interpreter’s own historico-
cultural context in the process of understanding a text that may belong to a relatively
different historical and/or cultural milieu. This issue is addressed by Gadamer (1975,
1989), who offers important insights into the “historicality of understanding.”
Elaborating earlier explications of the hermeneutic circle, Gadamer (1975, p. 235
ff.; 1989, p. 265 ff.) notes that any act of interpretation must take place within a circular
movement between, on one hand, the reader-interpreter’s prior understanding of the
whole, and on the other hand, an examination of the parts. In the specific context of
interpreting a text, this implies that the interpreter approaches the text with certain
expectations and a pregiven understanding of the historico-cultural tradition (“the
whole”) to which the text in question (“the part”) belongs. The name that Gadamer
(1975, p. 239; 1989, p. 269) gives to such preunderstanding of the whole is, “preju-
dice” (in a relatively neutral sense of the term), and he points out that it is our preju-
dices (Vorurteile) that “constitute the historical reality of . . . [our] being” (Gadamer,
1975, p. 245).
According to Gadamer (1975, p. 269 ff.; 1989, p. 302 ff.), it is our prejudices that
signal our participation in our own historico-cultural tradition, and that define the lim-
its and the potentialities of our horizon of understanding (or our “hermeneutic hori-
zon”). Hence, rather than being viewed as obstacles to understanding, prejudices need
to be regarded as the necessary conditions of all understanding. Such defense of preju-
dice on Gadamer’s part, however, does not imply a blanket endorsement of all preju-
dices. On the contrary, Gadamer (1975) makes a distinction between, on one hand,
“legitimate prejudices” (p. 246) or “productive prejudices that make understanding
possible” (p. 263), and on the other hand, “prejudices that hinder understanding and
lead to misunderstanding” (p. 263). In which case, the logical question that arises is,
How do we distinguish the legitimate or productive prejudices from those prejudices
that may not be productive? With a view to addressing this question, Gadamer investi-
gates the hermeneutic significance of the temporal distance separating the text from
the reader-interpreter.
Gadamer (1975, p. 264) notes that early hermeneutics, with its notion of under-
standing as placing oneself “within the spirit of the age,” viewed time as “a gulf to be
bridged,” and temporal distance as “something that must be overcome.” In contrast,
philosophical hermeneutics regards temporal distance as a condition of understand-
ing. Moreover, by making possible a confrontation between our prejudices and a his-
torically distant text, temporal distance provides us the space in which productive prej-
udices can be distinguished from the unproductive ones.
Elaborating on the importance of temporal distance in the “filtering” of prejudices,
Gadamer points out that we can become conscious of our prejudices only when we
encounter a text whose meaning challenges the truth of our prejudices. As Gadamer
(1975, p. 266) put it, “It is impossible to make ourselves aware of . . . [one of our preju-
dices] while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, stimu-
lated. The encounter with the text . . . can provide this stimulus.” In such an encounter,
in which the meaning of a text confronts our own prejudices, it is possible for us to
clearly distinguish between those prejudices that facilitate understanding and those
that hinder understanding. True understanding of a text, therefore, “requires . . .
the . . . suspension of our [unproductive] prejudices” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 266).
It is important to point out here that in calling for the suspension of our unproduc-
tive prejudices, Gadamer is not merely echoing earlier methodological prescriptions
(e.g., those of Descartes, 1931, 1968) that hoped to purify human subjectivity and
thereby allow guaranteed access to truth and certainty. As this article next points out,
Gadamer’s discussion of the hermeneutic role of prejudices is linked, in important
ways, to his conceptualization of understanding/interpretation as dialogue.
Understanding as dialogue and the fusion of horizons. For Gadamer (1975, 1989),
one of the major limitations of early hermeneutics is its reliance on the notion of
subject-object dichotomy, with the text being treated as an “object” and the reader-
interpreter serving as the so-called “subject” (see also, Bauman, 1978; Bleicher, 1980;
Palmer, 1969). Building on the philosophy of Heidegger (1962), however, Gadamer
(1975, p. 225 ff.; 1989, p. 254 ff.) rejects this subject-object dichotomy as philosophi-
cally unacceptable and conceptualizes interpretation not as a mere acquisition of our
mind (i.e., not as something produced by remaining “outside” the text) but as partici-
pation in the “tradition” to which the text belongs.
According to Gadamer (1975), such a participation implies that understanding/
interpretation has the nature of a dialogue in which the meaning of a text emerges
through a conversation between the interpreter and the text (p. 331; see also Palmer,
1969; Tracy, 1998; Warnke, 1987). Moreover, given that “the necessary structure of [a
conversation] is that of question and answer” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 330), the hermeneu-
tic conversation between the interpreter and the text is a dialogue in which the inter-
preter puts questions to the text, and the text, in turn, puts questions to the interpreter.
The questions put by the text challenge the truth of the interpreter’s prejudices. The
goal of this dialogue between the interpreter and the text (i.e., the goal of interpreta-
tion) is to find those questions to which the text constitutes the answers (Bleicher,
1980, p. 114; Palmer, 1969, p. 200), for as Gadamer (1975, p. 333) points out, “the
meaning of a sentence is relative to the question to which it is a reply.” Indeed, it is only
by finding out such questions that we can genuinely understand a text (as “logical,”
“reasonable,” etc.), and not dismiss it as nonsense.
However, finding out the questions to which the text constitutes the answers
requires that we suspend those of our prejudices that (in whatever way) may militate
against our articulating such questions; that is, we suspend those prejudices that may
lead us into treating the text as nonsense. Hence, Gadamer’s call to suspend our unpro-
ductive prejudices is not Cartesian; rather it is meant to highlight the conditions of gen-
uine understanding.
According to Gadamer, such a hermeneutic dialogue, in which the interpreter sus-
pends her or his unproductive prejudices and successfully arrives at an authentic
understanding of the text, constitutes a “fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung)”
(Gadamer, 1975, p. 273; 1989, p. 306). In this “fusion” that is understanding, the inter-
preter expands her or his own horizon of prejudices to integrate the horizon of the text.
Such a fusion of horizons requires an awareness of effective-history, or an “historically
effected consciousness” (Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein; Gadamer, 1989), which
makes the interpreter conscious of “the effective historical continuum” to which he or
she belongs (Mueller-Vollmer, 1985, p. 39). Such a consciousness requires an aware-
ness, on the interpreter’s part, of her or his own hermeneutic horizon, a recognition of
interpretation as dialogue, and an openness for tradition (Bleicher, 1980, p. 111).
The fusion of horizons (and, hence, all understanding/interpretation) takes place
through the medium of language. However, for Gadamer’s philosophy of hermeneu-
tics, language is not merely instrumental; rather, language has an ontological signifi-
cance. In other words, according to hermeneutic philosophy, language should not be
viewed merely as “an instrument or a tool” (Gadamer, 1976, p. 62) that we use for
pointing to the objects of the world. Rather, our world gets constituted in and through
our language: “The appearance of particular objects of our concern depends on a world
already having been disclosed to us in the language we use” (Linge, 1976, p. xxix).
“Language,” asserts Gadamer (1989, p. 443), “is not just one of man’s possessions in
the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all.” Language having
turned ontological, “Being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer, 1989,
p. 474), with the result that hermeneutics and interpretation/understanding assume
universal significance.
Interpretation and authorial intention. For both Schleiermacher and Dilthey,
broadly speaking, the goal of understanding a text (and hence the goal of the process of
hermeneutics) was to reproduce and reexperience the original author’s creative pro-
cess.5 For these theorists, therefore, the project of hermeneutics was inseparably tied to
the notion of authorial intention. In other words, according to these early hermeneutic
theorists, the purpose of textual interpretation is to understand the intended meaning of
the text’s author (Bleicher, 1980; DiCenso, 1990; Gadamer, 1989; Hoy, 1978; Ormis-
ton & Schrift, 1990; Palmer, 1969; Warnke, 1987). This view of hermeneutics is radi-
cally disturbed in Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy.
As we will recall from this article’s previous discussions, according to Gadamer
(1975, 1989), Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, that is, an “historically effected
consciousness” (or an “authentically-historical consciousness,” see Mueller-Vollmer,
1985, p. 39) enables the reader-interpreter to suspend her or his unproductive preju-
dices in the course of interpreting a text, leading to the fusion of horizons that is under-
standing. Notwithstanding such fusion of horizons, however, as Gadamer points out,
the fact remains that interpretation/understanding is always rooted in the present and
can take place only in and through the interpreter’s own horizon of prejudices. There-
fore, although interpretation does not mean a forcing of the text to fit into the strait-
jacket of the interpreter’s own prejudices, categories, and constructs, neither does
interpretation imply that the interpreter empathetically places herself or himself in the
shoes of the text’s author: the former does violence to the integrity of the text; the latter,
given the interpreter’s inevitable historicality and hermeneutic situatedness, is impos-
sible to achieve (Gadamer, 1975, p. 272; Howard, 1982, p. 152).
In view of the above, the process of interpretation always brings to bear on the text
“the totality of the objective course of history” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 263) as manifested
in the historical situation (and hermeneutic “situatedness”) of the interpreter. Hence,
asserts Gadamer (1975, p. 264), “the meaning of a text [always] goes beyond its
author” and “the text at all times represent(s) more than the author intended” (Bleicher,
1980, p. 111). In consequence, “the interpreter . . . must . . . understand more than [the
author],” and interpretation, accordingly, “is not merely a reproductive [activity], but
always a productive [one]” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 264).
The rejection of authorial intention in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is
found troubling by objectivist theorists (e.g., Betti, 1990; Hirsch, 1965, 1967), who
conceptualize the text as possessing a fixed meaning (generally speaking, the intended
meaning of the text’s author) and define the task of understanding as seeking to objec-
tively decipher such meaning by relying on method-governed analysis. However, to
the extent that methods themselves are historically produced and contingent, and inas-
much as no method can ever be successful in completely removing all traces of history,
culture, and context from the interpreter, there would seem to be considerable merit in
Gadamer’s philosophical conclusion that the meaning of a text is always emergent
through the “conversation” between the text and interpreter, and that such meaning is
not delimited by authorial intentions. Gadamer’s non-author-intentional view of tex-
tual meaning is widely accepted among contemporary hermeneutic scholars (e.g.,
Ricoeur, 1981).
The moment of critique in interpretation. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics
was given a new orientation by critical theorists like Apel and Habermas, who sought
to transform hermeneutics into a vehicle for emancipatory critique (i.e., into critical
hermeneutics). This transformational project was primarily carried out through the
famous Habermas-Gadamer debate, which took place via four key pieces of writing
published during the late 1960s and the early 1970s (see Gadamer, 1985, 1990;
Habermas, 1990a, 1990b). The overall debate is full of complex arguments (see, e.g.,
Brenkman, 1987; Colburn, 1986; DiCenso, 1990; Hoy, 1978; McCarthy, 1978, 1982;
Mendelson, 1979; Misgeld, 1976; Outhwaite, 1987; Ricoeur, 1973; Thompson, 1981),
and considerations of space prevent us from engaging in an in-depth analysis of the
same. In what follows, we will take a brief look at this debate with a view to under-
standing some of the major issues raised therein.
In the course of this debate, Habermas (1990b) acknowledges the strength of
Gadamer’s insight that interpretation can proceed only on the basis of a hermeneutic
horizon constituted through the interpreter’s “prejudices” (which signal the inter-
preter’s participation in her or his own historico-cultural “tradition”). However, he is
troubled by, what he regards as, Gadamer’s conflation of the unavoidability of preju-
dices with an acceptance of the legitimacy of all such prejudices. According to
Habermas (1990b), the mere fact of the existence of hermeneutic “prejudices” does
not necessarily mean that all such “prejudices” must be regarded as legitimate. In
essence, Habermas argues that tradition is not something simply “lying out there” that
we passively pick up and make our own. Rather, our tradition is what we actively con-
struct through critical self-reflection. This self-reflection, although confirming many
received “prejudices,” also rejects and destroys several others. This implies that
although “prejudices” may indeed be inevitable and unavoidable, not all “prejudices”
are necessarily legitimate. Habermas (1990b, p. 237), hence, is critical of Gadamer for
not recognizing “the power of reflection,” and for the latter’s “prejudice for the rights
of [unexamined] prejudices.”
In a similar vein, Habermas (1990b) recognizes the importance of Gadamer’s view
of the linguisticality of understanding/interpretation, and accepts Gadamer’s claim
that language is a “metainstitution on which all social institutions are dependent”
(p. 239). However, he rejects Gadamer’s view of language as ontological. He asserts
that far from language “determin(ing) the material practices of life” (Habermas,
1990b, p. 240), it is the “metainstitution of language” that gets altered by the social
practices of labor and power relations.
Habermas observes that as a result of empirical conditions of social labor and domi-
nation, linguistic structures continually get altered. As a consequence of such changes
in linguistic structures, language inevitably becomes a medium not only for the mani-
festation of a benevolently-understood tradition, but also a medium of “domination,
deception, and social power” (Habermas, 1990b, p. 239), and of “sedimented vio-
lence” (Weinsheimer, 1989, p. 128). In short, with language getting worked over by
history and historical processes, language as such becomes an ideological vehicle for
“legitimat(ing) relations of organized force” (Habermas, 1990b, p. 239). For Haber-
mas (1990a, 1990b), therefore, an adequate interpretive act must demonstrate a con-
sciousness of this fissured nature of language that makes linguistic tradition a reposi-
tory of both truth and untruth, of authentic beauty as well as violence.
Habermas, accordingly, seeks to transform Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics
into critical hermeneutics. Habermas’s project of developing a critical hermeneutics
needs to be viewed in the context of his overall social theory (see, e.g., Habermas 1971,
1984, 1987). Without getting into the details of his extensive oeuvre, however,
Habermas may be understood as arguing that language as tradition (which is mostly
seen by Gadamer as above reproach) also includes those ideological elements that
legitimate and perpetuate the conditions responsible for “systematically distorted
communication” (i.e., conditions that prevent the emergence of a language/tradition
that would represent an authentic social consensus) and hence militate against the
establishment of that “ideal speech situation” in which human beings may arrive at
genuine consensus by means of engaging in rational discourse totally free of domina-
tion and coercion.
According to critical hermeneutics, therefore, the task of interpretation is to offer a
critique of the above-mentioned ideological elements. Concomitantly, for critical her-
meneutics, the task of interpretation is to offer a critique also of the ideological “tech-
nocratic consciousness” that translates political/ethical issues into technical ones and
fails to realize the negative consequences of the increasing “colonization” of the
lifeworld processes (involving shared meanings, community and intersubjectivity) by
system processes (e.g., those of the formal economy and the state) in contemporary
industrialism (see Bleicher, 1980; McCarthy, 1978; Thompson, 1981, 1990).
Gadamer’s (1985, 1990) principal defense against the preceding critique consists
of asserting that (a) critique of tradition is itself subsumed in, and dependent on, the
very tradition or language that serves as the focus of critique and (b) that the primary
goal of philosophical hermeneutics is not to provide a narrow method of interpretation
(which, in Gadamer’s view, is what critical hermeneutics is offering) but to explicate
the conditions for the possibility of understanding as such. Habermas’s (1990a) rejoin-
der to this consists, in part, of observing that “hermeneutic consciousness remains
incomplete as long as it does not include a reflection on the limits of hermeneutic
understanding” (p. 253), and pointing out that the limits of philosophical hermeneutics
are emphatically underscored in cases of “systematically distorted communication.”
A way out of this seeming impasse between Habermas and Gadamer is sought to be
provided by Ricoeur (1973, 1981, 1990), who argues, among other things, that both
Gadamerian and Habermasian approaches to interpretation are necessary. Ricoeur
notes, moreover, that (a) Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics already includes the
moment of critique (e.g., in its insistence on the role of critically filtering out “unpro-
ductive” prejudices in the task of interpretation) and (b) that the Ideologiekritik advo-
cated by Habermas’s critical hermeneutics is, in turn, part of a tradition, and is further
linked to tradition by its project of regenerating and reinterpreting that tradition itself
(see also, Bleicher, 1980; Thompson, 1981, 1990). In this way, Ricoeur seeks to recon-
cile two distinct moments (or aspects) of hermeneutic interpretation, namely, those of
faith and of doubt. The hermeneutics of faith interprets a text primarily with a trusting
disposition; the hermeneutics of doubt, in contrast, adopts a critical and skeptical
stance toward the text. Hence, these two approaches to interpretation are often seen as
opposites. Ricoeur, however, seeks to embed each of these two approaches within the
other. Indeed, going even further, he posits critique to be an integral part of hermeneu-
tic interpretation and asserts: “We can no longer oppose hermeneutics and the critique
of ideology. The critique of ideology is the necessary detour that self-understanding
must take” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 144). The next section of the article discusses some
guidelines for employing hermeneutics as a methodology in organizational research.
Methodological Guidelines
for Organizational Research
Early approaches to hermeneutics were driven by the goal of formulating rigid
rules, methods, and techniques for textual interpretation. Under the influence of the
philosophical insights of Heidegger and Gadamer, however, such a restrictive view of
hermeneutics has now mostly been given up. Hence, hermeneutics is no longer seen as
a narrowly defined method but as a broad epistemology and philosophy of understand-
ing/interpretation. Implicit in such a philosophy of interpretation, however, are a num-
ber of important method-related guidelines for organizational researchers.
We may begin by noting here that the scope of hermeneutics is no longer seen as
being confined merely to interpreting texts (narrowly defined as written documents
and the like). Following, in part, from Ricoeur (1971), who argued that human action
in general could be considered as “text,” contemporary hermeneutic thought has
expanded the meaning of the term text to include organizational practices and institu-
tions, economic and social structures, culture and cultural artifacts, and so on. The
point to grasp here, of course, is that organizational and social/cultural practices and
institutions are “texts” not in any physical sense, but in a metaphorical sense; they are
texts because they may be “read,” understood and interpreted in a manner that is simi-
lar to our reading/understanding/interpretation of written texts (Francis, 1994). As a
result of this metaphorical transformation of the word, “text,” the methodological
applicability of hermeneutics in organizational research stands considerably
expanded.
Another important methodological consideration for organizational research fol-
lows from the principle of the hermeneutic circle, which, as we noted earlier, empha-
sizes the significance of the context for purposes of interpreting a text. Methodologi-
cally, two points need to be kept in mind: (a) that in any research situation, the context
is not a simple given, but needs to be actively defined by the researcher, and (b) that the
context can usually be defined at different levels of comprehensiveness. Let us imag-
ine, for instance, that a management researcher is trying to understand the recent
Exxon-Mobil merger (the “text”). The context of this text may be defined, with
increasing comprehensiveness, at a number of levels, including (a) the U.S. and/or
global petroleum industry, (b) the U.S. and/or global economic system, (c) the U.S.
and/or global political economy as a system, (d) the U.S. and/or global totality (repre-
senting a social, cultural, political, and economic gestalt), and so on.
In general, the higher the level at which we define the context, the more comprehen-
sive is our understanding of the “text.” A broad methodological guideline for organiza-
tional researchers employing hermeneutics, hence, is to begin the process of interpre-
tation with a relatively narrowly defined context (i.e., at a lower level) and gradually
move in the direction of higher level definitions of the context. Hermeneutic interpre-
tation, thus, is an iterative process, which goes through a number of iterations corre-
sponding to the different levels at which the overall context is progressively defined.
Sometimes, however, for a variety of reasons, the researcher may not have the flexibil-
ity of moving through multiple levels of the context and may need to choose one out of
the several possible levels that may be available for this purpose. In part, such a choice
of levels will be influenced by the precise nature of the research questions being asked.
In addition, however, it is important to recognize that the management researcher’s
choice of levels has a value-laden dimension as well, because how the researcher
chooses to define the context will have an important bearing as to which aspects and
facets of the “text” will receive attention, what kinds of questions will eventually get
raised, and so on.
For hermeneutic research, history serves as an important part of context. In other
words, hermeneutic research conceptualizes context both synchronically as well as
diachronically. In methodological terms, therefore, hermeneutic inquiry requires the
organizational researcher to develop a thorough familiarity with the historical aspects
of the phenomenon of interest. For instance (to go back to the example of Exxon-Mobil
merger), in order to adequately understand this “text,” the researcher may need to
become familiar with various aspects of the history of the modern global petroleum
sector since its emergence in the 19th century.
Methodologically, hermeneutics is also a deeply self-reflexive and self-critical pro-
cess. As we saw earlier, we can approach a “text” only from within our own finitude
(i.e., from within our hermeneutic horizon constituted through our “prejudices”).
However, unless we become conscious of these “prejudices,” we may not be able to
suspend our “unproductive prejudices” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 263) when the need for
such suspension arises during the course of interpretation. Imagine, for instance, that
an international management researcher is trying to understand the organizational
arrangements and practices of an “esoteric” culture. Unless this researcher is actively
conscious of his or her own fundamental assumptions, “prejudices” and “common-
sense,” he or she may run the risk of dismissing that “other” culture’s practices as irra-
tional, superstitious, and the like. Hence, the organizational researcher who is using
hermeneutics as a methodology needs to continually question and test her or his own
prejudices.
This form of critical self-reflexivity is necessary not only when we are trying to
understand a “text” from an alien culture, but also when we are dealing with “texts”
belonging to what we may regard as our “own” culture. Consider, for instance, the case
of a management researcher from the northeastern United States who may be trying to
understand a worker strike in an Appalachian mine, or who may be studying the stake-
holder policies and practices of a grassroots nongovernmental organization in rural
Mississippi. It is easy enough to see that unless this researcher is willing and able to
suspend some of his or her “prejudices,” he or she may not succeed in developing a
comprehensive understanding of these organizational phenomena. Similarly, critical
suspension of unproductive prejudices may sometimes be necessary when researchers
seek to understand organizational practices across different workplace subcultures.
The above focus on the critical dimension achieves a new salience in critical herme-
neutics that conceptualizing interpretation as a critical-emancipatory project views the
very process of interpretation as fundamentally motivated by the goal of critique.
Methodologically, this requires the organizational researcher to go beyond the “sur-
face” (or obvious) meaning of the text and to “dig beneath” the surface language of the
“text” with a view to unveiling and retrieving those meanings that often lie buried
beneath the surface.
It is important to recognize here that such an act of critical unveiling is always
informed by one or more theoretical perspectives. Given his own location in neo-
Marxist critical theory, Habermas advocates the Ideologiekritik perspective for guid-
ing the process of critical hermeneutics (also known as “depth hermeneutics”). How-
ever, in addition to critical theory, depth hermeneutics can also rely on other theoretical
perspectives, such as feminism, materialist Marxism, postcolonialism and many more.
Once again, the management researcher’s choice of one or more of these theoretical
perspectives is a value-laden activity, which is mediated by a number of interrelated
factors including the researcher’s ethical/political posture, the researcher’s personal
history and hermeneutic situation, the nature of the “text” being interpreted, and so on.
Methodologically speaking, however, the organizational researcher needs to make a
conscious and well-reasoned decision as to the theory (or theories) that will inform the
process of depth hermeneutics.
This article has previously noted that contemporary hermeneutics does not sub-
scribe to an author-intentional view of interpretation. Methodologically, this implies
that the goal of interpretation is not to retrieve the author’s intended meaning, but to
focus on the text (i.e., the data) instead. This approach to interpretation makes herme-
neutics an eminently suitable methodology also for interpreting texts having corporate
authorship. In the case of texts with corporate authorship (where the actual authorship
may be unknown, and/or where there may be several authors for any given text), any
author-intentional approach to interpretation would soon find itself in a methodologi-
cal dead end. In addition, the non-author-intentional view of interpretation is consis-

tent with the requirements of critical hermeneutics as well.
Finally, one of the strengths of contemporary hermeneutics lies in that it does not
fetishize method. Simply stated, adopting the hermeneutic perspective does not imply
that the organizational researcher may not employ quantitative or statistical techniques
of analysis (see, e.g., Bernstein, 1983; Bleicher, 1982; Habermas, 1971). In method-
ological terms, therefore, the hermeneutic approach offers management researchers
considerable flexibility for combining qualitative and quantitative methods. We will
next provide a brief illustration of critical hermeneutic textual interpretation in organi-
zational research.
An Illustrative Example of Hermeneutic Interpretation
The example that follows looks at a macrolevel event in the international petroleum
industry. Conventionally, such events are often interpreted from a narrowly economic
perspective that tends to rely on notions of rational economic decision making. Her-
meneutic interpretation, however, helps us develop a more holistic understanding of
such macro-industry-level events.
In October 1973, a group of large Western oil companies (the so-called interna-
tional petroleum cartel, to use the terminology employed by the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission, see Prasad, 1994, p. 57, n. 11) entered into negotiations with OPEC (the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to discuss the price of crude oil.
The negotiations broke down soon after they had begun, and on October 16, 1973,
OPEC made a major decision, significantly raising the price of crude petroleum. This
decision is commonly regarded as a watershed event in the evolving institutional
dynamics of the international petroleum sector, because this was the first time in its
history that OPEC was resorting to a unilateral increase in the price of crude oil. How
do we understand/interpret this event or decision (i.e., the “text”). In what follows, we
will briefly illustrate how the various methodological principles and concepts dis-
cussed earlier come together to facilitate a critical hermeneutic interpretation of this
text. In our subsequent discussions, this text will be referred to as OPEC-1973.
Let us begin by looking at the importance of suspending unproductive prejudices in
hermeneutic interpretation. We need to note here that any attempt to interpret OPEC-
1973 in terms of the Arab’s presumed mastery of “the arts of the bazaar—trading . . .
dealing, intrigue” (Yergin, 1990, p. 186), or the Arab’s supposed immersion in the
“values of desert survival—suspicion, stealth, surprise” (Yergin, 1990, p. 708), is not
likely to be particularly productive.6 Here, we are referring to certain common preju-
dices or presuppositions often held in the West about the Arabs/Orient. On the basis of
these Orientalist (Said, 1979) prejudices, one may conceivably try to interpret OPEC-
1973 as a sinister Arab plot. Such an interpretation of OPEC-1973, however, is not par-
ticularly insightful because of the unproductive nature of the Orientalist prejudices. In
brief, the Orientalist prejudices are unproductive because they fail to recognize that
“trading, dealing, intrigue, suspicion, and surprise” are not unique to the Orient and are
likely to be found as much on the Wall Street, for instance, as in any Arab bazaar. And
because these characteristics or practices are not unique to the Orient (or the OPEC),
no useful purpose is served by invoking them while attempting to understand/interpret
the OPEC decision. Here, then, we have a clear example of an unproductive prejudice
(in Gadamer’s terms), which the interpreter must suspend or filter out during the pro-
cess of interpreting the text in question.
Let us now turn toward the operation of the hermeneutic circle in the process of
interpretation. As noted earlier, while interpreting a text, it is possible to define the
context at increasingly higher levels, with each higher level offering increasingly com-
prehensive understanding of the text being interpreted. In the process of interpreting
OPEC-1973, therefore, we may, as an example, begin by initially defining the context
at the more proximate level of the dynamics of international demand and supply of oil,
and the October 1973 War (the Yom Kippur War) between Egypt and Israel. The open-
ing years of the 1970s were characterized by galloping increases in the demand for oil
in the United States, Europe, and Japan, which put the OPEC in a very strong bargain-
ing position. And the support extended by the United States and its Western allies to
Israel in the Yom Kippur War (which began on October 6, 1973) angered many Arab
nations. Hence the more immediate economic and political context of the October
1973 negotiations does help us develop an understanding of the breakdown of the
October 1973 negotiations between OPEC and the cartel of Western oil companies,
and of the OPEC decision to unilaterally effect a massive hike in oil prices.
It is possible, however, to define the context of OPEC-1973 at a higher level than
above and, in so doing, develop a more comprehensive hermeneutic understanding of
the text in question. We may, for instance, define this higher level context to be consti-
tuted by the system of petroleum concessions existing during the late 19th and early
20th centuries in the major oil producing regions of the world. Under the concession
system, major Western oil companies (mostly belonging to the petroleum cartel)
enjoyed exclusive long-term rights (with durations of 45 to 75 years) for the explora-
tion, extraction, and export of crude oil in the leading oil producing countries. In
return, the host countries either received a fixed royalty per ton of crude oil produced
or, as became the case during later years, entered into profit sharing arrangements with
the cartel companies. The concessions made the cartel the sole arbiter of whether it
would undertake any exploration and production of crude oil, and of the nature and
extent of investment in the concession-granting country. Thus, having won a conces-
sion, a company belonging to the Western cartel was completely free if it so desired not
to produce any crude at all in a specific country.
By its very nature, therefore, the concession system made the concession-granting
country extremely dependent on the Western cartel. Indeed, in the course of time, such
concessions came to be seen as a forfeiture of the concession-granting country’s sover-
eignty itself. In addition, after the World War II, for a variety of reasons, the oil compa-
nies kept continually reducing the price of crude oil. The result was the establishment
of OPEC in 1960 with a view to safeguarding the oil producing countries’ interests.
One of the most important objectives of OPEC was to put an end to the inequitable sys-
tem of oil concessions and to attain control over the pricing of crude oil. With the con-
text thus defined, OPEC-1973 may be understood as a culmination of the historical
process that began in 1960 with the establishment of OPEC, and which was marked by
a series of agreements (each arrived at after highly protracted negotiations) between
the oil companies and the oil producing countries. Each of these agreements contrib-
uted in important ways toward weakening the overall edifice of the concession system,
with OPEC-1973 finally signaling the demise of this system (and of the attendant con-
trol over the pricing of crude oil that had hitherto been exercised by the Western oil
companies). This higher level context, thus, allows us to develop a relatively more
comprehensive interpretation of OPEC-1973.
In the present case, it is possible to define the context at an even higher level,
namely, the global dynamics of colonization and decolonization. History informs us
that the ascendancy of the Western oil companies in the oil producing regions of the
world during the 19th and 20th centuries was achieved only as a result of the active
intervention of these companies’parent governments. In other words, the international
dominance of the Western oil companies during these years was a function of the mili-
tary, political, and economic power wielded by their parent governments. In a deep
sense, therefore, the process of establishing the global mastery of these oil companies
went hand in hand with the projection, establishment, and consolidation of European
and American political and military power over the rest of the world during the colo-
nial era. Hence, the structural features of the international petroleum order (e.g., the
system of petroleum concessions) constituted powerful economic sinews of imperial-
ism. It was inevitable, therefore, that the decolonization movement, which success-
fully ended the formal political aspects of Western imperialism during the middle of
the 20th century, would continue to wage a struggle to overthrow the economic fea-
tures of imperialism as well. With the context thus defined, we can offer an even more
comprehensive interpretation of OPEC-1973, understanding this event as a further
extension of the decolonization movement into the economic sphere (specifically, into
the international petroleum sector).
The preceding interpretation of OPEC-1973 has been carried out by employing
some important methodological precepts integral to hermeneutics, including (a) the
significance of recognizing our own historical situatedness, and suspending those
unproductive prejudices that hinder adequate understanding (e.g., the Orientalist pre-
suppositions), and (b) utilizing the operations of the hermeneutic circle. By way of
illustrating the latter, we iteratively defined the context of OPEC-1973 at increasingly
higher levels. The result of following these two methodological steps is that fusion
between the respective horizons of the text and the interpreter’s that Gadamer calls
hermeneutic understanding. Moreover, by gradually moving in the direction of higher
level definitions of the context, we have outlined the process whereby our understand-
ing of the text becomes more and more comprehensive.
Notice further the non-author-intentional approach to interpretation adopted above.
At no point does the preceding hermeneutic endeavor seek to retrieve authorial inten-
tion. In other words, the focus of our interpretation is the event itself (namely, OPEC-
1973), and not what the actors involved with this event (e.g., representatives of OPEC
and the oil companies) might have intended. Notice also that by thematizing oppres-
sive and inequitable politico-economic arrangements (e.g., the grossly unfair system
of petroleum concessions, and the tyrannical reign of colonialism), our specific
choices regarding higher level definitions of the context open the door for the preced-
ing hermeneutic interpretation to eventually take a more critical-emancipatory turn.
Conclusion and Implications

This article has sought to provide organizational researchers with a comprehensive
grounding in the methodological, epistemological, and philosophical aspects of her-
meneutics, a major interpretive approach for understanding “texts.” Toward that end,
the article has (a) surveyed the historical evolution of hermeneutics, (b) presented an
in-depth analysis of the key concepts and debates that inform contemporary herme-
neutics, and (c) offered important methodological guidelines for hermeneutic research
in management and organization studies.
With Greek antiquity as its origin, the evolution of hermeneutics has been marked
by the emergence, at different historical periods, of relatively distinct forms of herme-
neutics. During early periods, hermeneutics was primarily characterized by two distin-
guishing features: (a) the self-defined project of hermeneutics mainly consisted of for-
mulating precise rules, techniques, and procedures for understanding the meaning of
difficult passages in written texts; and (b) the process of hermeneutic understanding
and interpretation was governed by an author-intentional theory of meaning. During
the course of its evolution, hermeneutics has discarded both of these early features.
Following major theoretical innovations by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger,
Gadamer, Habermas, and so on, contemporary hermeneutics no longer defines itself as
a method (narrowly understood), but as a comprehensive epistemology and philoso-
phy of interpretation, which is informed by such important concepts as the hermeneu-
tic circle, the hermeneutic horizon, understanding as dialogue and fusion of horizons,
the non-author-intentional view of meaning, and interpretation as critique. To fully
appreciate the epistemological and methodological space occupied by hermeneutics,
we need also to compare hermeneutics with, on one hand, poststructuralist deconstruc-
tion (see, e.g., Derrida, 1976, 1978) and, on the other hand, with different approaches
to interpretation developed in other (i.e., non-Western) philosophical traditions (as, for
example, in the various schools of Indian philosophy, see, e.g., Raju, 1992). Mostly for
reasons of space, however, this article has been prevented from engaging in these dis-
cussions.
As an epistemology and philosophy of interpretation, contemporary hermeneutics
has expanded the scope of the term text to include not only documents in the conven-
tional sense but also organizational practices and structures, social and economic
activities, cultural artifacts, and the rest. In methodological terms, this implies that
management scholars may legitimately adopt hermeneutics as a research approach not
only for interpreting the usual corporate documents (e.g., annual reports, internal
memoranda, policy documents, etc.) but for investigating a whole host of microlevel
and macrolevel organizational phenomena such as technological change, leadership,
motivation, empowerment, corporate strategy, and many more.
Methodologically, hermeneutics as an approach for management research requires
the investigator to pay great attention to the context and history of the organizational
phenomenon being studied. Moreover, hermeneutics as a methodology makes impor-
tant demands on the organizational researcher’s capability for self-reflection and auto-
critique. In addition, contemporary hermeneutics emphasizes the value of adopting an
ethically informed critical perspective in organizational research. Several of these
methodological prescriptions and guidelines are of immense value to organizational
researchers working within other interpretive genres as well. We may, therefore, con-
clude this article with the observation that developing a genuinely hermeneutic imagi-
nation may well be regarded as the overall goal of organizational scholarship as such.
Notes
1. It may be useful to note here that in the Greek cosmos Hermes was not only an interpreter
and messenger, he was also a liar and a contriver of tales. Could it be the case that in choosing to
name the act of interpretation after their duplicitous god, Hermes, the ancient Greeks were try-
ing to convey something meaningful about the complex nature of the interpretive act? An inter-
esting question for all management researchers to ponder.
2. Similarly, The American Heritage Dictionary (2nd college edition, 1985) defines herme-
neutics as “the science and methodology of interpretation, especially of the Bible.”
3. Classical hermeneutic theory is also referred to as romantic hermeneutics (see, e.g.,
Gadamer, 1989; Warnke, 1987).
4. This tripartite classificatory scheme reflects, to some extent, Bleicher’s (1980) identifica-
tion of three forms of hermeneutics, namely, (a) hermeneutical theory, (b) hermeneutic philoso-
phy, and (c) critical hermeneutics. It is worth pointing out here that scholars often use different
(sometimes conflicting) labels while referring to the hermeneutic contributions of specific
thinkers. Bleicher, for instance, uses such terms as existential-ontological hermeneutics, philo-
sophical hermeneutics, and dialectical (or critical) hermeneutics for referring to the works, re-
spectively, of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas. Palmer (1969, p. 94 ff.), on the other hand,
employs the term dialectical hermeneutics for Gadamer’s hermeneutic contributions, whereas
Thompson (1981) uses the expression hermeneutic phenomenology as an umbrella term that
subsumes the hermeneutic thoughts of Heidegger and Gadamer, as well as, Ricoeur. In contrast,
Bleicher (1980) employs the expression, phenomenological hermeneutics, only in connection
with Ricoeur, although Ricoeur (1980, p. 238) himself has rightly observed that it was actually
Martin Heidegger who first sought to ground hermeneutics in phenomenology. Also note, in this
connection, Bleicher’s (1980, p. 4) remark that Ricoeur’s thoughts, while “(bringing) into sharp
relief the other three [forms of hermeneutics],” do not “(represent) a clearly separable strand” of
hermeneutics and Ormiston and Schrift’s (1990, p. 22) related observation that Ricoeur’s princi-
pal hermeneutic contribution seems to be his attempted reconciliation of the hermeneutic differ-
ences between Gadamer and Habermas. However, Arnold and Fischer (1994, p. 56) regard
Ricoeur’s hermeneutic contributions as constituting a new “version” of hermeneutics. See also,
in this context, Bleicher’s (1980, p. 3 ff.) discussion of his own distinction between the terms
hermeneutical and hermeneutic, a distinction not considered crucial for purposes of the present
article, and Palmer’s (1969, p. 33, n. 1) extended note on his dissatisfaction with the different ad-
jectives used for characterizing the hermeneutic contributions of different thinkers.
5. For some subtle differences between Schleiermacher and Dilthey, see, for example,
Palmer (1969, p. 104 ff.) and Ormiston and Schrift (1990, p. 14 ff.).
6. Yergin’s (1990) recitation of these supposedly Arab characteristics does not take place
during the course of his analysis of OPEC-1973. His book mentions these characteristics while
discussing other issues.
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Anshuman Prasad (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst) is associate professor of management

and director of the doctoral program at the School of Business, University of New Haven, Connecticut. His
research interests include institutional-theoretic analyses of strategic action in the petroleum industry,
postcolonialism, diversity and multiculturalism, employee empowerment, and workplace resistance.

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ORGANIZATIONAL

The Contest Over Meaning:

This article focuses on the methodological and epistemological aspects of herme-

The growth of philosophical hermeneutics is particularly indebted to the intellec-

Major Concepts and Debates

anything” (p. 87). From a hermeneutic perspective, therefore, understanding cannot be

cal dead end. In addition, the non-author-intentional view of interpretation is consis-

An Illustrative Example of Hermeneutic Interpretation

Conclusion and Implications

Anshuman Prasad (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst) is associate professor of management

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