On domesticated hybrids and misplaced dialogues: troubles with positivist legacies

This essay critically examines recent attempts to build methodological and epistemological ‘bridges’ between positivism and interpretivism in policy research. While often presented as gestures of dialogue or pluralism, such efforts frequently conceal power asymmetries that privilege positivist logics. The result is what I term domesticated hybrids – works that adopt the language of interpretivism while neutralizing its critical and political force. Drawing from the sociology of science and critical interpretivist perspectives, the essay argues that epistemic disagreement is not a flaw but a constitutive condition of knowledge production. In its final section, I call for implicated, value-laden, and situated policy research – a form of inquiry that refuses methodological pacification, embraces conflict as a source of understanding, and reclaims the political and reflexive heart of doing science in public life.