Search results

The chapter aims to enhance our understanding of “opportunity” in the context of social entrepreneurship through a paradigm interplay juxtaposing a functionalist thematic analysis and interpretivist sensemaking. This paradigmatic contrasting identifies differences and connections in the tensions of: linearity and simplicity/dynamism and complexity; forward/backward, generalizability/situated relationality, and value-laden/value-neutral. These contrasts deepen our understanding of “opportunity” so that the theoretical and practical implications can be seen.

Interdisciplinary research allows us to broaden our sights and expand our theories. Yet, such research surfaces a number of challenges. We highlight three issues – superficiality, lack of focus, and consilience - and discuss how they can be addressed in interdisciplinary research. In particular, we focus on the implications for interdisciplinary work with paradox scholarship. We explore how these issues can be navigated as scholars bring together different epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies within interdisciplinary research, and illustrate our key points by drawing on extant work in paradox theory and on examples from this double volume. Our paper contributes to paradox scholarship, and to organizational theory more broadly, by offering practices about how to implement interdisciplinary research while also advancing our understanding about available research methods.

We propose that management scholars can improve their research by triangulating alternative philosophies of science to gain a richer and more holistic understanding of complex managerial problems. We illustrate the proposition by triangulating with three scientific philosophies – positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism – to design a study in response to a debate in the sociology of professions. After summarizing and applying positivism, postmodernism, and critical realism to reveal their differing research approaches, we discuss how to deal with the convergent and divergent information often produced by triangulating philosophies of science. Although common views of triangulation emphasize reliability by focusing on convergent information from different methods, we emphasize validity by discussing how divergent information from different methods reveal important aspects and values of a complex phenomenon that often go unrecognized without triangulation.

In this chapter we ask a simple question: how can we tell if strategic management research is making progress? While other limitations are noted, we argue that it is the absence of metrics for gauging research progress that is most limiting. We propose that research should focus on measures of effect size and that “precision” and “generalizability” in our predictions of important phenomena represent the core metrics that should be used to judge whether progress is occurring. We then discuss how to employ these metrics and examine why existing research practices are likely to hinder efforts to develop cumulative knowledge.

The chapter addresses the challenges of research into educational technology in the context of higher education and of theory-building in this field afforded by singular research methods and philosophies. Using an exemplar case study, the authors argue for the adoption of pluralism to facilitate deep exploration of complex social phenomena. Pluralism is conceptualized by distinguishing between methodological, analytical, and philosophical pluralism. In addition, arguments for and against pluralism are advanced. The chapter concludes with step-by-step proposals for engaging pluralism in higher education research studies.

The premise for this volume is that there is “a need to develop a Handbook that takes scholars and practitioners through the paradigm change going on in the field of management and organizational inquiry.” In their invitation to contributors, the editors suggested we should comment on this transition and inform readers of theoretical and philosophical changes that have occurred in recent times. In this chapter, we attempt to do this by revisiting the influential concept of paradigm from the philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1962, 1970) and explore its relation to recent contributions to postmodern social theory in organizational analysis. In particular, the influential paradigm model of Burrell and Morgan (1979) is revisited through meta-theoretical analysis of the major intellectual movement to emerge in organization theory in recent decades, post-structuralism and more broadly postmodernism. Proposing a retrospective paradigm for this movement we suggest that its research can be characterized as ontologically relativist, epistemologically relationist, and methodologically reflexive; this also represents research that can be termed deconstructionist in its view of human nature. Consequently we demonstrate not only that organizational knowledge stands on meta-theoretical grounds, but also how recent intellectual developments rest on a qualitatively different set of meta-theoretical assumptions than established traditions of agency and structure.

While the steep increases in rates of incarceration seen in the United States in the late twentieth century have begun to level out, one form of incarceration has seen more drastic reductions in rates of use in the 2010s: long-term solitary confinement. Across the United States, prisons that once isolated prisoners for decades at a time stand hauntingly empty. The solitary confinement reform movement provides an important lens for examining what happens when an entrenched punitive practice faces widespread and sustained criticism and reveals the multiple paradigms through which reform operates – through politics, litigation, or charismatic leadership.