A Guide to Selected References on Hermeneutics

Prepared by Allen S. Lee and distributed at the 1991 International Conference on Information Systems workshop, “Two Techniques for Qualitative Data Analysis: Analytic Induction and Hermeneutics.”  Revised, 1995.

Richard J. Bernstein’s book, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), served as my introduction to hermeneutics.  On page 47, Bernstein directed my attention to Thomas Kuhn’s self-avowed work in hermeneutics as a historian of science; see the preface to Kuhn’s volume of his collected works, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

Three provocative articles on hermeneutics are “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” by Charles Taylor, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text” by Paul Ricoeur, and “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” by Clifford Geertz, all of which are included in the book, Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

One of the most valuable books I have is Research Guide to Philosophy, by Terrence N. Tice and Thomas P. Slavens (Chicago: American Library Association, 1983), which I discovered by browsing in the reference section at the Boston Public Library.  It gives a handy overview of hermeneutics and critical theory in nine pages (293-301).

I regard Richard E. Palmer’s book, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979), to be useful, readable, and digestible.

Another good book (brought to my attention by a kind and anonymous referee of a manuscript I had submitted to a journal) is Josef Bleicher’s Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

A rather detailed view of the historical development of hermeneutics is Kurt Mueller-Vollmer’s introduction, “Language, Mind, and Artifact: An Outline of Hermeneutic Theory Since the Enlightenment,” to the book, The Hermeneutics Reader (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1988), which he also edited.  This volume consists of selected works whose authors are prominent hermeneutical scholars, including Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher, William Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jurgen Habermas.  This volume includes essays from the debate between Gadamer, who is author of the book Truth and Method (which is considered to be a classic and a new translation of which is available [New York: Continuum, 1993]) and Habermas, who is a major proponent of the school of thought known as critical theory.

Bibliographies to the literature on hermeneutics appear in some of the books, mentioned above.  They are Research Guide to Philosophy (pp. 300-301); Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (pp. 254-274); The Hermeneutics Reader (pp. 347-361); and Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (pp. 272-280).  The last book also offers a glossary.

I have been learning a great deal by reading and re-reading the collection of essays by Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), which I learned about through the published work of Richard Boland and which also includes the essay, “The Model of the Text,” mentioned earlier.  Every time I re-read Ricoeur, my understanding of him changes.  “This is why Gadamer,” according to Bernstein (1983, p. 139), “tells us that to understand is always to understand differently.”  The editor and translator of the volume is John B. Thompson, whose introduction to Ricoeur is also good as a review.

A good starting point for examining the different forms that hermeneutic scholarship is taking in the academic IS discipline would include the following studies:

Boland, R., “Information System Use as a Hermeneutic Process” in Information Systems Research: Contemporary Approaches & Emergent Traditions (New York: North-Holland, 1991), edited by Hans-Erik Nissen, Heinz K. Klein, and Rudy Hirschheim, pp. 439-458.

 

Davis, G.B., Lee, A.S., Nickles, K.R., Chatterjee, S., Hartung, R. and Wu, Y., “Diagnosis of an Information System Failure: A Framework and Interpretive Process,” Information & Management, Volume 23, Number 5, 1992, pp. 293-318.

 

Lee, A.S., “Electronic Mail as a Medium for Rich Communication: An Empirical Investigation Using Hermeneutic Interpretation,” MIS Quarterly, Volume 18, Number 2, 1994, pp. 143-157.

 

Myers, Michael D., “A Disaster for Everyone to See: An Interpretive Analysis of a Failed IS Project,” Accounting, Management and Information Technologies, Volume 4, Number 4, 1994, pp. 185-201.

Hermeneutics also receives prominent mention and treatment in the book, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing, 1986) by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. 

The “Qualitative Research in IS” page of ISWorld Net also has bibliographies on qualitative and intensive research methods in the academic field of information systems.

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