Dvora Yanow
Biographic Data
| ID | 187161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dvora Yanow |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dvora |
| FAMILY NAME | Yanow |
| SIGNATURE | YANOW D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wageningen University & Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1382-7504 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2070 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Thinking with Kirstie in advance
What logic joins political theory and some circles of interpretive empirical research as members of the same category? Aren’t the two on opposite sides of a methodological and practice divide? The late Kirstie McClure’s work suggests not—that the two may be bridged in particular areas, in particular ways, up to a point
Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power
There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, c…
Ethnography on Trial: Introduction to the Dialogue
While [ethnographers] do seek to uncover the rules of action, such rules are not as clearly discoverable as law is to lawyers – through examination of definitive statements. Most rules of social be
Trying Lubet's ethnography: On methodology, writing, and ethics
By the early 2000s, immersed in fieldwork methods literatures (participant-observer ethnography, interviewing, and document-based research), I increasingly saw that “evidence” meant something different in different research and professional practices. Its operational meanings in law and journalism especially interested me. During a sabbatical at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society, I audited the Law School’s evidence course. The…
Mentoring,” Past and Present
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Apsa Active and Award Committees
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What does it mean to teach ‘interpretively’
The ‘interpretive turn’ has gained traction as a research approach in recent decades in the empirical social sciences. While the contributions of interpretive research and interpretive research methods are clear, we wonder: Does an interpretive perspective lend itself to – or even demand – a particular style of teaching? This question was at the heart of a roundtable discussion we organised at the 2014 Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) Internati…
Encountering Your IRB 2.0: What Political Scientists Need to Know
This essay corrects and updates one that was originally published in Qualitative & Multi-Method Research and, in a condensed version, in three other APSA Organized Section newsletters. Our research into IRB policy has shown that many political scientists are not familiar with some of its key provisions. The intent of the essay is to increase awareness of the existing policy’s impact on political scientific research and, in particular, on graduate…
Legitimizing Political Science or Splitting the Discipline? Reflections on DA-RT and the Policy-making Role of a Professional Association
We have been invited by Politics & Gender's editors to review the origins and current standing of the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) policy, an effort initiated by the eponymous American Political Science Association (APSA) Ad Hoc Committee and led primarily by Colin Elman, Diana Kapiszewski, and Arthur (“Skip”) Lupia. We have not been bystanders in this unfolding history, and in keeping with feminist and interpretive epistemologie…
Troubled Taxonomies and the Calculating State: Everyday Categorizing and "Race-Ethnicity"-The Netherlands Case
Tabulating population demographics, including "ethnicity," "nationality," and "race," has long been a mark of the modern state. Achieved through its statisticians, this requires the designation and operationalization of relevant categories. Such category-making practices are commonly "invisible," as is, consequently, their role in making up race-ethnic identities, especially when conducted through the ordinary "everyday-ness" of registering for p…
Constructing Race and Ethnicity in America
Doing Social Science in a Humanistic Manner
The ideal study in political science today would be the comparative study of health regulation of noodles in one hundred and fifty countries. As a child of liberalism and the Enlightenment, social science has been a major ideological force in the victory of civility over violence, reason and evidence over passion and prejudice, clear communication over cloudy commitment. A generational analysis of academic practices highlights the fact that indiv…
Making sense of policy practices: Interpretation and meaning
Interpretive policy analysis – which derived its name from the interpretive turn under way in the latter part of the 20th century across the social sciences – departed from a different set of methodological presuppositions from those informing policy analysis as that practice had been initially conceived. Shifting analytic focus away from instrumental rationality, it turned to meaning-making – its expression as well as its communication – as an a…
Constructing "Race" and "Ethnicity" in America: Category-making in Public Policy and Administration
What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms "race" and "ethnicity"? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that "race" and "ethnicity" are …
Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn
This book demonstrates the relevance, rigor, and creativity of interpretive research methodologies for the social and human sciences. The book situates methods questions within the context of broader methodological questions--specifically, the character of social realities and their know-ability. Exceptionally clear and well-written chapters provide engaging discussions of the methods of accessing, generating, and analyzing social science data, u…
Constructing Race and Ethnicity in America: Category-Making in Public Policy and Administration
I Am Not a Camera: On Visual Politics and Method. A Response to Roy Germano
No observational method is “point and shoot.” Even bracketing interpretive methodologies and their attendant philosophies, a researcher—including an experimentalist—always frames observation in terms of the topic of interest. I cannot ever be “just a camera lens,” not as researcher and not as photographer. Framing research “shots,” an observer always includes some features of the research question terrain while excluding others—of necessity, give…
From Policy “Frames” to “Framing”: Theorizing a More Dynamic, Political Approach
The concept of frames or framing, especially cast as “frame analysis,” has an established history in public policy. Taking off from the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein, we develop the idea of policy analytic fram ing, the more dynamic of the two terms, in ways that strengthen what we see as its promise for a more process-oriented and politically sensitive understanding of the activities it is used to characterize. We argue that such an appro…
Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes
"Research design is fundamentally central to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. This book is a practical, short, simple, and authoritative examination of the concepts and issues in interpretive research design, looking across this approach's methods of generating and analyzing data. It is meant to set the stage for the more "how-to" volumes that will come later in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Method…
Extending the assessment of anthropology's history in organizational studies - an invitation
People out of place: Allochthony and autochthony in the Netherlands' identity discourse — metaphors and categories in action
Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political
A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Public Administration Research Universe: Surviving Conversations on Methodologies and Methods
Scientific conversations can be riddled with confusion when contributions to the discussion are based on notions about ways of knowing that remain implicit. Researchers often mix different methodological positions in their research designs because they lack an awareness of the distinctions between different ways of knowing and their associated methods. The authors engage and reflect on these differences, with particular attention to four areas: r…
Organizational ethnography between toolbox and world-making
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of theJournal of Organizational Ethnography.Design/methodology/approachThis essay brings together some current issues and concerns in one form of "marked" ethnography.FindingsThis essay touches on the questions: what is organizational ethnography and why is it re-emerging now?; and on …
Perestroika Ten Years After: Reflections on Methodological Diversity
One of the primary concerns driving Perestroika was the hegemony of quantitative methods in American political science research, curricula, journals, and positions, to the exclusion of qualitative and interpretive approaches. In this article, we assess the contemporary methodological diversity of U.S. political science, at the APSA in particular, to see what, if anything, has changed over the last 10 years. This is an admittedly rough assessment,…
Constructing Race and Ethnicity in America
Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis
Underlying Assumptions of an Interpretive Approach The Importance of Local Knowledge Accessing Local Knowledge Identifying Interpretive Communities and Policy Artifacts Symbolic Language Symbolic Objects Symbolic Acts Moving from Fieldwork and Deskwork to Textwork and Beyond
From Policy “Frames” to “Framing”: Theorizing a More Dynamic, Political Approach
The concept of frames or framing, especially cast as “frame analysis,” has an established history in public policy. Taking off from the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein, we develop the idea of policy analytic fram ing, the more dynamic of the two terms, in ways that strengthen what we see as its promise for a more process-oriented and politically sensitive understanding of the activities it is used to characterize. We argue that such an appro…
Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life
Studying Everyday Organizational Life - Sierk Ybema, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels and Frans Kamsteeg PART ONE: ETHNOGRAPHIC DOING AND WRITING Getting Going: Organizing Ethnographic Fieldwork - Kees van der Waal Ethnographic Practices: From 'Writing-up Ethnographic Research' to 'Writing Ethnography' - Michael Humphreys and Tony Watson Reading and Writing as Method: In Search of Trustworthy Texts - Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow When the 'Subje…
Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes
"Research design is fundamentally central to all scientific endeavors, at all levels and in all institutional settings. This book is a practical, short, simple, and authoritative examination of the concepts and issues in interpretive research design, looking across this approach's methods of generating and analyzing data. It is meant to set the stage for the more "how-to" volumes that will come later in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Method…
People out of place: Allochthony and autochthony in the Netherlands' identity discourse — metaphors and categories in action
Re-Turn to Practice: An Introductory Essay
The study of practices has a long theoretical history and draws on a wide range of methods. This introductory essay sets the stage for the five articles presented in this Special Issue by explaining its background and providing one narrative of the theoretical background on which both its editors and the authors of its articles, in one way or another, draw and to which the latter make explicit or implicit reference
Constructing "Race" and "Ethnicity" in America: Category-making in Public Policy and Administration
What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms "race" and "ethnicity"? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that "race" and "ethnicity" are …
The communication of policy meanings: Implementation as interpretation and text
Built Space as Story: The Policy Stories That Buildings Tell
Policy analysis, both of a positivist and of an interpretivist bent, often focuses on the explicit, formal language of legislation. But policy meanings are also communicated through agency acts that take place in settings. In this essay I explore what we might learn for policy analysis in seeing built spaces–that is, policy settings–as texts, and specifically as stories
Ways of Knowing: Passionate Humility and Reflective Practice in Research and Management
For all the attention that the concept of reflective practice has attracted, very little has been said concerning what might incline someone to be open to engage in it. My concern in this essay is with two characteristics of professional, including administrative, practice—a language of certainty and a language of inquiry —and, when the conditions under which the language of certainty has come to dominate professional practice, with the question …
Reading” “ Methods” “Texts: How Research Methods Texts Construct Political Science
This article reports on an interpretive content analysis of fourteen research methods texts. We read them as a genre—exploring their structural and rhetorical features—to address two questions: To what extent do research methods texts reflect the breadth of methods used in political science and its fields? To what extent do they reflect contemporary ferment concerning questions of social reality and its “knowability?” These questions are intertwi…
Practices of policy interpretation
Silences in Public Policy Discourse: Organizational and Policy Myths
Myths are not only tales told by “prescientific” peoples about the origins of their universe. Myths also are constructed by modern Western peoples in the arena of public policy, where they direct attention away from equally valued but contradictory societal principles. Agencies created to implement policies also construct myths. Policy myths and their related organizational myths are constructed at those points where the implementing agency is mo…
Organizational ethnography between toolbox and world-making
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to take account of organizational ethnography in its historical and methodological context, on the occasion of the inauguration of theJournal of Organizational Ethnography.Design/methodology/approachThis essay brings together some current issues and concerns in one form of "marked" ethnography.FindingsThis essay touches on the questions: what is organizational ethnography and why is it re-emerging now?; and on …
Toward a Policy Culture Approach to Implementation
Legitimizing Political Science or Splitting the Discipline? Reflections on DA-RT and the Policy-making Role of a Professional Association
We have been invited by Politics & Gender's editors to review the origins and current standing of the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) policy, an effort initiated by the eponymous American Political Science Association (APSA) Ad Hoc Committee and led primarily by Colin Elman, Diana Kapiszewski, and Arthur (“Skip”) Lupia. We have not been bystanders in this unfolding history, and in keeping with feminist and interpretive epistemologie…
Reforming Institutional Review Board Policy: Issues in Implementation and Field Research
Political science as a discipline has largely ignored research regulatory policies associated with institutional review boards (IRBs). Many political scientists—especially those in the senior ranks—are either oblivious to the existence of IRBs or actively decide to sidestep them by not submitting their proposals for review. Based on research conducted since 2004, we hold that APSA members at all ranks of the profession, along with political scien…
Supermarkets and Culture Clash: The Epistemological Role of Metaphors in Administrative Practice
Metaphor analysis traditionally treats its subject as a figure of speech, that is, a purely literary device that can be replaced by literal language. However, recent work suggests that metaphors should be thought of as figures of thought strongly based in cognition; they thus imply action. This article examines a particular organizational metaphor that founders created and members used to form an organization. Tacitly known, the metaphor shaped b…
Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political
Reading" "Methods" "Texts: How Research Methods Texts Construct Political Science
Encountering Your IRB 2.0: What Political Scientists Need to Know
This essay corrects and updates one that was originally published in Qualitative & Multi-Method Research and, in a condensed version, in three other APSA Organized Section newsletters. Our research into IRB policy has shown that many political scientists are not familiar with some of its key provisions. The intent of the essay is to increase awareness of the existing policy’s impact on political scientific research and, in particular, on graduate…
American Ethnogenesis and Public Administration
The categories that we have created in the United States to divide ourselves according to racial and ethnic characteristics are social constructions, not reflections of the natural world and as such are flexible and evolving. Yet we tend to regard and treat them as fixed, stable, scientifically grounded entities. In this way they become the basis for policy decisions and administrative actions. This article explores the characteristics of our cur…
Troubled Taxonomies and the Calculating State: Everyday Categorizing and "Race-Ethnicity"-The Netherlands Case
Tabulating population demographics, including "ethnicity," "nationality," and "race," has long been a mark of the modern state. Achieved through its statisticians, this requires the designation and operationalization of relevant categories. Such category-making practices are commonly "invisible," as is, consequently, their role in making up race-ethnic identities, especially when conducted through the ordinary "everyday-ness" of registering for p…
Mentoring,” Past and Present
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Toward a Policy Culture Approach to Implementation
Supermarkets and Culture Clash: The Epistemological Role of Metaphors in Administrative Practice
Metaphor analysis traditionally treats its subject as a figure of speech, that is, a purely literary device that can be replaced by literal language. However, recent work suggests that metaphors should be thought of as figures of thought strongly based in cognition; they thus imply action. This article examines a particular organizational metaphor that founders created and members used to form an organization. Tacitly known, the metaphor shaped b…
Silences in Public Policy Discourse: Organizational and Policy Myths
Myths are not only tales told by “prescientific” peoples about the origins of their universe. Myths also are constructed by modern Western peoples in the arena of public policy, where they direct attention away from equally valued but contradictory societal principles. Agencies created to implement policies also construct myths. Policy myths and their related organizational myths are constructed at those points where the implementing agency is mo…
Culture and Organizational Learning
Traditionally, theories of organizational learning have taken one of two approaches that share a common characterization of learning but differ in focus. One approach focuses on learning by individuals in organizational contexts; the other, on individual learning as a model for organizational action. Both base their understanding of organizational learning on the cognitive activity of individual learning. However, there is something organizations…
Award Recipients
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The communication of policy meanings: Implementation as interpretation and text
Practices of policy interpretation
Built Space as Story: The Policy Stories That Buildings Tell
Policy analysis, both of a positivist and of an interpretivist bent, often focuses on the explicit, formal language of legislation. But policy meanings are also communicated through agency acts that take place in settings. In this essay I explore what we might learn for policy analysis in seeing built spaces–that is, policy settings–as texts, and specifically as stories
American Ethnogenesis and Public Administration
The categories that we have created in the United States to divide ourselves according to racial and ethnic characteristics are social constructions, not reflections of the natural world and as such are flexible and evolving. Yet we tend to regard and treat them as fixed, stable, scientifically grounded entities. In this way they become the basis for policy decisions and administrative actions. This article explores the characteristics of our cur…
Engineering Public Management
Obituary
Space Stories: Studying Museum Buildings as Organizational Spaces While Reflecting on Interpretive Methods and their Narration
From what Edah are you? Israeli and American meanings of “race‐ethnicity” in social policy practices
(1998). From what Edah are you? Israeli and American meanings of “race‐ethnicity” in social policy practices. Israel Affairs: Vol. 5, Israel: The Dyanamics of Change and Continuity, pp. 183-199
Figuring authority: Statistics, liberal narrative and the vanishing subject
Figuring authority: Statistics, liberal narrative and the vanishing subject." Administrative Theory & Praxis, 21(4), p. 534
Considering Passionate Humility
This essay considers the role of passion and humility in the theory and practice of public administration in response to one of its central conundrums: how to act in administrative capacities with “passionate” commitment and conviction, while at the same time entertaining the possibility that, in its formulation and/or application, this commitment might be misplaced, misguided or wrong
Seeing Organizational Learning: A `Cultural' View
What sight does a `cultural' approach to organizational learning enable? In an earlier essay my co-author and I argued that such an approach made it possible to bypass certain conceptual problems inherent in treating organizational learning as an attribute of individuals. In this essay I reflect on the metaphoric process that enabled that argument, which was implicitly as much methodological as it was ontological and epistemological, and spell ou…
In This Great Future
Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis
Underlying Assumptions of an Interpretive Approach The Importance of Local Knowledge Accessing Local Knowledge Identifying Interpretive Communities and Policy Artifacts Symbolic Language Symbolic Objects Symbolic Acts Moving from Fieldwork and Deskwork to Textwork and Beyond
Reading” “ Methods” “Texts: How Research Methods Texts Construct Political Science
This article reports on an interpretive content analysis of fourteen research methods texts. We read them as a genre—exploring their structural and rhetorical features—to address two questions: To what extent do research methods texts reflect the breadth of methods used in political science and its fields? To what extent do they reflect contemporary ferment concerning questions of social reality and its “knowability?” These questions are intertwi…
Reading" "Methods" "Texts: How Research Methods Texts Construct Political Science
Practicing Discipline
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Translating Local Knowledge at Organizational Peripheries
This article theorizes about the kinds of knowing present in organizations that share both a structural similarity in the organization of work and work practices – a ‘double periphery’ in which a community of practitioners acts across both a horizontal, geographic periphery and a vertical, hierarchical periphery – and a common mode of practice – translating across these peripheral borders. In principle, these workers develop knowledge in interact…
Jewish Administrative Practice and a Philosophy of Public Administration
To speak of “the” philosophy of public administration or of “public administration theory” as a timeless and placeless umbrella term presupposes a universalism in the meaning of its referents, including its three components, “public,” “administration,” and “public administration.” Yet taking constructivist ontological and interpretive epistemological arguments seriously should lead us to expect that the sociopolitical values of different national…
Symposium—Public Administration in “Translation”: Non-Western and Other Administrative Practices
Interpretation in policy analysis: On methods and practice
Interpretive policy analysis entails the application to studies of public policies of approaches building on ontological and epistemological presuppositions deriving from interpretive philosophies. Its central characteristic is its focus on meaning. Interpretive policy analyses are, then, situation‐specific, rather than entailing general laws or universal principles. They commonly focus on the language used in policy debates, as well as on other …
Sociology (42 works) · Political science (36 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Philosophy (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (14 works) · Politics (14 works)