Bringing Back the Social: Interpretivism and Social Process Tracing

• In Event: Process Tracing. New Directions in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Process tracing methods are increasingly popular in the social sciences. In this article, we contend that traditional process tracing methods typically miss ‘the social’ because they focus on experience-distant understandings of social entities and processes (Geertz, 1983). Instead, a more interpretivist-inspired social process tracing methodology would focus more include how socially-embedded actors engage in relational processes (Jackson and Nexon, 2019), e.g. the construction and reconstruction of actor identities, or how actors define problems and render potential solutions meaningful through social interactions. We also contend that traditional interpretivist methods will benefit from ideas drawn from traditional process tracing, in particular being more explicit about both what ‘process’ we have evidence of and the temporal dimension that is sometimes lost in semiotic analysis of how humans conceive their social worlds.

The paper proceeds in three steps. First, we unpack the ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations of the two approaches. Process tracing and interpretive methods are commonly depicted as representing two different methodological cultures. Process tracing builds on critical realism and how causal processes play out by tracing their observable manifestations empirically within cases. Starting from hermeneutic and phenomenological foundations, interpretivists focuses on human meaning-making to understand how people make sense of their social setting. While many interpretivists avoid causal language altogether (e.g. Hansen, 2006), or work with a very different idea of constitutive causality (e.g. Schwarz-Shea and Yanow, 2012), there is a shared commitment to abductive research practices in both approaches. Both move back-and-forth between empirics and theoretical ideas to generate analytical abstractions about how meaning-making and causal processes unfolded. Additionally, both agree knowledge-claims are bound to context. Whereas interpretivists focus on contextualizing social understandings with reference to specific agents and settings, process tracers are interested in identifying similarities/differences in how causal processes play out in different contexts. Finally, both share an interest in actions and processes.

Second, we build on these commonalities to bring interpretivist ideas about the social into traditional process tracing, attempting to develop a more explicit interpretivist variant of process tracing that focuses on how specific social relations influence different types of processes in context. Whereas the actors in traditional process tracing are objectified as entities with certain properties, interpretive process tracing departs from a relational definition of process (Abbott, 1995; Emirbayer, 1997) as initiated and developed by agents with subjectively held meanings about the intentions held, roles played and actions performed by themselves and others in process. These subjectively held meanings are not fixed, but subject to ongoing (re-)construction between the participating agents.

The theories we are working with in social process tracing attempt to elucidate whom, why and how these subjectively held meanings are (re-)constructed. Drawing on Jackson (2006), social process tracers are particularly interested in changes of the relation make-up, which may influence how key contestations and commonplaces surrounding specific meanings develop in context. Introduction of a new agent or proliferation of an alternative interpretation of action may change meanings previously contested or commonplace. To explain the development of specific contestations and commonplaces following the change of relational make-up, social process tracing approaches draws on knowledge of the agents’ positionality, knowledgeability and resources (Sewell, 1992), and how they interact during a process (Jackson and Nexon, 2019).


The paper then develops step-by-step guidelines for social process tracing: 1) initial theorization using more experience-distant theoretical ideas, 2) initial empirical probing to explore social context and assess experience-near understandings of the process and what it is a ‘case of’, along with assessment of positionality of researcher, 3) learning more about the social process through an abductive process of fleshing out experience-near social process, juxtaposing theoretical and empirical ideas and attempting to ‘bridge’ the experience-near and distant concepts to understand how a social process plays out at the level of intersubjective experiences of agents. In developing the guidelines, we use several existing studies as examples for what these different research steps can look like (e.g. Jackson, 2006; Fujii, 2008; Neumann, 2011; Schaffer, 2014; Pachirat, 2011), along with how the guidelines can be adapted to different types of research questions.

Authors

• Mathilde Cecchini, Aarhus University

• Derek Beach, University of Aarhus