A nice passage from Crotty’s Foundations of Social Research (emphasis is mine):

A first way to approach texts might be described as empathic. This is an approach characterised by openness and receptivity. Here we do more than extract useful information from our reading. The author is speaking to us and we are listening. We try to enter into the mind and personage of the author, seeking to see things from the author’s perspective. We attempt to understand the author’s standpoint. It may not be our standpoint; yet we are curious to know how the author arrived at it and what forms its basis.

There can also be an interactive approach to texts. Now we are not just listening to the author. We are conversing. We have a kind of running conversation with the author in which our responses engage with what the author has to say. Dialogue of this kind can have a most formative and growthful impact on ideas we brought to the interchange. Here, in fact, our reading can become quite critical. It can be reading ‘against the grain’.

Then there is the transactional mode of reading. What happens in this mode is much more than refinement, enhancement or enlargement of what we bring to our engagement with the text. Out of the engagement comes something quite new. The insights that emerge were never in the mind of the author. They are not in the author’s text. They were not with us as we picked up the text to read it. They have come into being in and out of our engagement with it.

These are all possible ways of reading. There are others beside. And we are free to engage in any or all of them. These various modes prove suggestive and evocative as we recognise research data as text — and, even before that, as we take human situations and interactions as text. In this hermeneutical setting, ways of reading are transfigured as ways of researching.

I see this book as a natural continuation of Richard J. Bernstein’s excellent Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. The biblio-fetishist in me wants to shelve them together.

*

One more nice bit from this chapter, a quote from Stanley Straw:

In contrast to conceptualizations of reading built on the communication model, transactional models suggest that reading is a more generative act than the receipt or processing of information or communication. From the transactional view, meaning is not a representation of the intent of the author; it is not present in the text; rather, it is constructed by the reader during the act of reading. The reader draws on a number of knowledge sources in order to create or construct meaning.

This is the goal of generative research: not to understand “the user” (as UCDers think) in order to provide what is needed and desired in the most convenient and comprehensible form possible, and even less, to use an understanding of “the customer” (as ad folks think) in order to manipulate perceptions and behavior — but rather to use divergence of perspective as material for dialectical synthesis of entirely new opportunities for offering-mediated relationships between organization and customer.