Reference no: EM132522241

Both from evidence in the literature and from our experiences in supervising HDR (High - Degree Research) students, it is clear to us that many HDR research students and early career researchers are often confused about the use of the term paradigm. At the broader level, this confusion stems from the use of the term paradigm in everyday discourses in contrast to its use in the educational research. Paradigm in everyday parlance does not include the qualities of epistemology, ontology, methodology or axiology, which, as we have seen above, are integral to the term in the field of research. It is therefore important for HDR students to be cognizant of this reality. What's more, there is also considerable diversity in how the term is used within research contexts.

A review of research literature reveals that over the years, the term paradigm has conjured up considerable controversy. The controversy was in the main centred first of all, around the historical development of the term and how it was defined by various authors and secondly, by what became known as 'inter and intra-disciplinary power wars' or 'paradigm wars' in the social sciences, which were rampant especially in the 1980s. An analysis of the definitions given by leaders in the field such as Guba and Lincoln (2005) and Creswell (1998; Creswell & Miller, 2000) betrays a lack of agreement about what constitutes a paradigm as well as an overlap in definitions and explanations.

For example, while Creswell's (1998) definition of a paradigm as "....a basic set of assumptions that guide their [researchers'] inquiries" (p. 74) aligns with the worldview perspective of a paradigm, Lincoln's (1990) definition (as alternative world views with such pervasive effects that ... permeates every aspect of a research inquiry) goes beyond this and encapsulates other perspectives of paradigm without being specific. This considerable and glaring overlap of definitions and/or explanations has to do, in part, with the fact that social behaviour is fluid and how we think or behave cannot be completely compartmentalized with clear-cut boundaries. As such, to think about a paradigm as a worldview or epistemological stance does not preclude the cross-over of ideas. Thus, no matter the position we start from, how we know and go about knowing is linked, or overlaps and affects how we conceive and explain paradigms. This is a major contributor to the confusion in the social sciences that HDR students and early career researchers experience in trying to articulate what constitutes the research paradigm for their projects.

The controversy in relation to the historical development has to do with Kuhn's (1962) original use and explanations of the term in his early work and how researchers in different fields of study came to understand and use the term. For example, Morgan (2007) asserts that the social scientists' use of the term differs from that in science studies. He argues that Kuhn's initial articulation of the notion of paradigm was confusing and culminated in the term being used by researchers in the field of science studies to mean "the consensual set of beliefs and practices that guide a field...." (Morgan, 2007, p. 49). At the same time the term has been used in social science research in about 3-4 different ways. These include that a paradigm means a worldview, a paradigm is an epistemological stance, a paradigm is a set of shared beliefs among members of a specialty area and, a paradigm as a model example of research (Morgan, 2007). In casting a paradigm as a worldview, Morgan (2007, p. 49) presents the term as ".... all-encompassing ways of experiencing and thinking about the world, including beliefs about morals, values, and aesthetics". This all- encompassing position could mean that researchers might question what can be researched or whether at all some topics should be researched on moral grounds. Such a position could be useful in directing ethics and ethical decision-making within research, which aligns with questions about axiology. But it might also be restrictive in terms of the human desire to explore and understand our world. Therefore, this view of a paradigm could potentially be a source of confusion, de-motivation or incoherence for HDR students. The interpretation of paradigms as epistemological stances has its roots in the meaning of epistemology, which, as we saw above, relates to the questions about what does it mean to know and how can we know? Therefore, this view of paradigm, takes the position that research inherently involves epistemological issues about the nature of knowledge and knowing. In this sense, researchers will align their notion of paradigm with the most popular epistemological stances (e.g., realism and constructivism) as distinctive belief systems (Morgan (2007).

Researchers who are guided by either stance are directed by that position to ask particular type of research questions and also answer them in a particular way. The interpretation of paradigms as shared beliefs among members of a specialty area focuses on what members of a particular field of research think are the fundamental principles that govern research. Additionally, an analysis of a paradigm as a model example of research draws on the notion that paradigms are models about how research is done in a given field (Kuhn, 1970, Morgan, 2007). With such a diverse sense of what constitutes a paradigm, it is not surprising that HDR students and early career researchers experience difficulties in understanding paradigms and choosing one for their research. In terms of the 'inter and intra-disciplinary power wars', the issue under consideration was about who had the power to name and define a paradigm. In this regard, key personalities in particular disciplines have over time sought to 'create' and 'add' new paradigms, which were often challenged or dismissed by colleagues and cross-disciplinary researchers. For example, in the late 1990s, the field of special education saw the emergence of a 'new' tradition of research into special educational needs, which Skidmore (1996) called an 'organizational paradigm'. While some in the special needs field (e.g. Avramidis & Smith, 1999) accepted this as a new paradigm, other researchers in the social sciences did not agree with Skidmore's new paradigm. This raised the question about who had the power to name and keep a paradigm? In this regard, Morgan (2007, p. 61) writes ".....paradigms in social science research methodology are not abstract entities with timeless characteristics; instead, what counts as a paradigm and how the core content of a paradigm is portrayed involves a series of ongoing struggles between competing interest groups" . This conclusion endorses the reality of the inter-and intra- disciplinary power wars and is buttressed by the many 'new' paradigms that have been added to the list of social science research paradigms in the last two decades. Despite this complexity in the history of paradigm development, there is now general agreement about the major paradigms that are applicable in educational research, and we turn to these, in the following section.

Required:

1. Critically discuss the concept of research paradigm.

2. Why research paradigm is a matter of high significance in business research?