Especially in research-oriented disciplines, the system or logic of methods in the aggregate (see METHOD). By one account, the relationship between method and methodology resembles that between the part and the whole, where a method, or a set thereof, occupies a larger research framework. The distinction between the specific and the general provides another analogous model, where some method(s) instantiate(s) a wider research ethos or program. Still further, and in the sense suggested by its etymology, methodology relates to method as theory relates to practice. “Methodology” combines “method” with “-ology,” which designates the study of some field or object, and thus implies the analysis of analytical strategies themselves. In this way, methodology asks questions of methods in order to articulate their operative logic. The full ramifications of methodological thought reflect the manifold potentialities of theory itself. Methodology might seek to demonstrate the integrity, accuracy, relevance, reproducibility, and/or efficacy of methods, for instance, much as theory can be said to substantiate, explicate, defend, codify, and/or regulate practices. In effect, layering, as it does, over method, methodology builds accountability and self-critique into research scholarship. However, in “softer” humanistic disciplines largely bereft of (or indifferent to) quantifiable data, a rhetoric of interpretive practices displaces one of research methods. That said, “theory” in this domain has, since the theoretical turn of the 1970s, come to designate a consolidated critical enterprise with some transdisciplinary purchase. Insofar as theory operates alongside methodology, the humanities call for a more nuanced distinction between the two terms.
Namely, if theory supplies an analytical framework for interpretation, which overtakes research in certain humanistic fields, what is the methodological remainder? The concurrence of theory with methodology jeopardizes the relay between either term and the scholarly activities it ostensibly describes. To the extent that methodology is incompatible with theory, it transforms a scholarly program into a tactical agenda that determines—rather than derives from—interpretive practices. Ironically, methodology here risks the suspension of the self-conscious attitude it otherwise affords (see OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD).