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Embracing impressionism. Giving the game away, or pushing at an open door?

‘Embracing impressionism: revealing the brush strokes of interpretive research’ addresses in a polemic way epistemological and methodological issues in interpretive policy research. Opening the ‘black box’ of research practices, presenting and explaining what researchers do, and how they do it, is a necessary exercise if we are to enable readers to assess the validity of research outputs. This is especially the case for non-positivist researchers, who oppose the idea of science as an unquestioned set of preestablished hypotheses, standard techniques and routine practices, and instead place reflexivity at the core of their epistemology. Boswell and Corbett are themselves interpretive researchers. Far from being a charge leveled by opponents of the interpretive approach, this is a discussion from within, which gives a special tone to their polemic. By discussing the interpretivists’ claim to systematicity, and urging the acknowledgment of an impressionism they see as the true nature of interpretivism, they encourage researchers to do what they should always do: question the shared beliefs of their community, the once original notions which, after years of dissemination, may have become taken for granted, or been diluted, and may therefore have lost part of their analytical strength, if not their relevance. Boswell and Corbett strengthen the polemic tone of their discussion by playing the part of ‘children of the family’ who disclose untold truths: they were born and raised as interpretivists and were told stories that they eventually came to consider untrue. When they give the game away, and label interpretive policy analysis (IPA) ‘impressionist’ (i.e., they use a label that interpretivists are reluctant to come to terms with, but which Boswell and Corbett think represents the truth about IPA), they say they do so not in order to debunk interpretivism, but to help specify the approach’s unique methodology. This initiative may contribute to the discussion and dissection of notions we have ended up not thinking about any more. It may be a way to refresh our minds and possibly to revise some of our ideas. Its proponents raise an important point: one which goes far beyond the scope of IPA. In the competition between dominant and alternative epistemologies, that is, historically, between natural sciences and social sciences, and here between mainstream positivist approaches and critical, non-positivist, interpretive ones, advocates of the alternative always have to face a dilemma. A first possibility is to endorse the alternative view, claiming that it fulfills exactly the same epistemological requirements as the dominant one, in the way that Durkheim claimed that sociology must be regarded as a ‘real science.’ To get closer to our own subject, prominent promoters of IPA have asserted its systematic and controlled methodology in order to discuss policy on an equal footing