Past Postmodernism: Interviews, Accounts and the Production of Research Stories

The paper discusses some of the aspects of poststructuralist thinking in relation to the cogency of field research and ethnographic methods of enquiry. Problems of the role of the author and the reliability of empirical material in providing access to “reality” are considered. This discussion is then extended to consider its implications for the construction of research stories involving interview accounts. This paper regards interviews as the prime technique used for data collection in qualitative case research. As a consequence it is deemed possible and indeed desirable to locate a theoretic discussion of the appropriate use of interviews as a technique and interview data as research material as centrally important to the crafting of research stories.