{"id":1260,"date":"2011-01-22T23:32:47","date_gmt":"2011-01-23T06:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=1260"},"modified":"2011-03-04T13:34:51","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T20:34:51","slug":"methodology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2011\/01\/22\/methodology\/","title":{"rendered":"Methodology"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Methodology” is one of those horrible words — like “strategy<\/a>” — that everyone dislikes but dislikes for different reasons and so any discussion about them is bound to end badly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My own definition of methodology is accepted by no one else: I think it means ‘the study of methods’ on the pattern of “x + logy”; e.g., ‘biology’ is the study of life (bios) or ‘geology’ is the study of the earth (geos).<\/p>\n

More generally, it refers to the ‘the way you do things.’ It’s a fancy way of saying ‘recipe’ in this loose definition. “What’s your methodology for making apple pie?” Or, “What’s your methodology for deploying dozens of SLES servers?”<\/p>\n

To me, those are ‘methods’ rather than ‘methodology’, but like I said, I’ve never met anyone who agrees with me on that.<\/p>\n

If you start thinking more deeply about methodology, you end up with some kind of process, and this is the common thoughtful meaning of the word, a synonym for process. For example, a consulting company will invariably have a process for delivering their projects which they describe as their methodology.<\/p>\n

I have a theory that all methodology in this sense has five steps. You start out with however many steps in the process and abstract it down to three: beginning, middle, and end. (You score points in the methodology drinking game by coming up with cleverer and cleverer names for these steps.) Then you add a before-the-beginning step and an after-the-end step and so you wind up with five. I know you think I’m joking, but I’m not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Methodology” is one of those horrible words — like “strategy” — that everyone dislikes but dislikes for different reasons and so any discussion about them is bound to end badly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[646],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-kk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1260"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1321,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions\/1321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}