Five philosophies Flashcards
Explain positivism
- Positivism relates to the philosophical stance of the natural scientist and entails working with an observable social reality to produce law-like generalisations.
- The label positivism refers to the importance of what is ‘posited’ – i.e. ‘given’. This emphasises the positivist focus on strictly scientific empiricist method designed to yield pure data and facts uninfluenced by human interpretation or bias
- Epistemologically you would focus on discovering observable and measurable facts and regularities, and only phenomena that you can observe and measure would lead to the production of credible and meaningful data
- As a positivist researcher you might use existing theory to develop hypotheses. These hypotheses would be tested and confirmed, in whole or part, or refuted, leading to the further development of theory which then may be tested by further research. However, this does not mean that, as a positivist, you necessarily have to start with existing theory.
Explain critical realism
• The philosophy of critical realism focuses on explaining what we see and experience, in terms of the underlying structures of reality that shape the observable events.
• Critical realists see reality as external and independent, but not directly accessible through our observation and knowledge of it (Table 4.3).
o Rather, what we experience is ‘the empirical’, in other words sensations, which are some of the manifestations of the things in the real world, rather than the actual things.
• Critical realism claims there are two steps to understanding the world.
o First, there are the sensations and events we experience.
o Second, there is the mental processing that goes on sometime after the experience, when we ‘reason backwards’ from our experiences to the underlying reality that might have caused them (this reasoning backwards is known as ‘retroduction’)
• Critical realist research therefore focuses on providing an explanation for observable organisational events by looking for the underlying causes and mechanisms through which deep social structures shape everyday organisational life which is why they tend to focus on in-depth historical analysis.
• Epistemological relativism recognises that knowledge is historically situated (in other words, it is a product of its time and is specific to it), and that social facts are social constructions agreed on by people rather than existing independently.
Explain interpretivism
• Interpretivism emphasises that humans are different from physical phenomena because they create meanings. Interpretivists study these meanings.
• As different people of different cultural backgrounds, under different circumstances and at different times make different meanings, and so create and experience different social realities, interpretivists are critical of the positivist attempts to discover definite, universal ‘laws’ that apply to everybody.
• Different strands of interpretivism
o Phenomenologists, who study existence, focus on participants’ lived experience; that is, the participants’ recollections and interpretations of those experiences
o Hermeneuticists focus on the study of cultural artefacts such as texts, symbols, stories, images.
o Symbolic interactionists, whose tradition derives from pragmatist thinking (discussed later in this section) and who see meaning as something that emerges out of interactions between people, focus on the observation and analysis of social interaction such as conversations, meetings, teamwork
Explain postmodernism
- Postmodernism emphasises the role of language and of power relations, seeking to question accepted ways of thinking and give voice to alternative marginalised views
- They believe that any sense of order is provisional and foundationless, and can only be brought about through our language with its categories and classifications (Chia 2003). At the same time they recognise that language is always partial and inadequate
- what is generally considered to be ‘right’ and ‘true’ is decided collectively. These collective ‘choices’, in turn, are shaped by the power relations and by the ideologies that dominate particular contexts
- Other perspectives that are suppressed are potentially just as valuable and have the power to create alternative worlds and truths.
- The goal of post- modern research is therefore to radically challenge the established ways of thinking and knowing
- As a postmodernist, you would be open to the deconstruction of any forms of data – texts, images, conversations, voices and numbers.
- Fundamental to postmodernist research is the recognition that power relations between the researcher and research subjects shape the knowledge created as part of the research process. As power relations cannot be avoided, it is crucial for researchers to be open about their moral and ethical positions
Explain pragmatism
• Pragmatism asserts that concepts are only relevant where they support action.
• It strives to reconcile both objectivism and subjectivism, facts and values, accurate and rigorous knowledge and different contextualised experiences (Table 4.3).
o It does this by considering theories, concepts, ideas, hypotheses and research findings not in an abstract form, but in terms of the roles they play as instruments of thought and action, and in terms of their practical consequences in specific contexts.
• If you were to undertake pragmatist research, this would mean that the most important determinant for your research design and strategy would be the research problem that you would try to address, and your research question.
Which research philosophies does your subject draw upon?
Positivism – hypotheses, what can we observe, measurable facts
Pragmatism – focusing on research problem and RQ, recognizing that there are different ways of interpreting the world and that that no single point of view can ever give the entire picture and that there may be multiple realities.
