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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the paradigmatic context and structure of the current theories and controversies in mainstream academic finance. It identifies the context among paradigms and the structure within the identified paradigm. The paper is based on the view that worldviews underlie theories and controversies in general, and those of finance, in particular. It notes how any worldview can be positioned on a continuum formed by four basic paradigms: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and radical structuralist. Then, the paper notes that theories and controversies in mainstream academic finance, despite their apparent diversity, are founded on and associated with the functionalist paradigm. Then, the paper continues with the discussion of the hierarchical structure of paradigms. It discusses that it consists of three consecutive levels: paradigm; metaphor; and puzzle solving. It looks at a sample of prominent controversies in academic finance and notes that they belong to the substructure of the functionalist paradigm. Throughout, the paper emphasizes that, in the future, mainstream academic finance should benefit from the contributions of the other three paradigms.

This article aims to explain the role of philosophical anchors and research paradigms in business research, and how they can be extrapolated in the transformative era of automation, digitalization, hyperconnectivity, obligations, globalization and sustainability (ADHOGS) in the midst of disruption, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (DVUCA).

This article entails a general review based on the 3Es of exposure, expertise and experience, delving into the ontological, epistemological, methodological, axiological and rhetorical aspects of the major research paradigms—i.e. positivism, post-positivism, constructivism, interpretivism and pragmatism—and their interplay with the emergent trends shaping business research.

This article underscores the multifaceted nature of business research in the modern day, with an increasing need for blending, or shifting between, research paradigms to address the complex issues arising from automation, digitalization, hyperconnectivity, obligations, globalization and sustainability (ADHOGS). This article also highlights the nuanced interplay between research paradigms and theoretical perspectives, demonstrating the rich, diverse potential of business research inquiries.

While this article provides a broad overview of the interplay between research paradigms and emerging trends, future research could explore each of these interplays in greater detail, conducting empirical studies or utilizing specific case studies.

Researchers and practitioners should be open to adopting, combining or switching between different paradigms according to the demands of their research questions, context and trends shaping the business landscape, thereby underscoring the need for methodological flexibility and reflexivity in business research.

The shift toward embracing digital transformations and integrating sustainability in business research holds significant implications, driving socially responsible and sustainable business practices at the micro-level, and by extension, industrial revolution and sustainable development at the macro-level.

This article offers a holistic and contextualized view of the philosophy of science and research paradigms for business research, bridging the gap between philosophical foundations and contemporary research trends.

The book has generated a passionate dialogue-disagreement (mostly but not entirely) with the book. Dialogue-disagreement is based on challenges, disagreements and rebuttals between opponents, often belonging to different, even irreconcilable, paradigms. The goal of dialogue-disagreement is not so much to convince the opponent to change their mind but rather to critically examine and problematize the two involved paradigms: the authors’ and the reviewer’s. By taking the generated challenges and disagreements seriously, both irreconcilable paradigms can grow through their replies. Dialogue-disagreement gives the participants–opponents the gift of revealing their own paradigmatic blind spots, which are often invisible from within their paradigms. Dialogue-disagreement is exploratory and based on an agnostic relationship between frenemies, i.e. “friendly enemies.”

This is a critical book review essay of Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm (Cunningham, 2021).

The reviewer views Ian Cunningham’s Self Managed Learning educational paradigm as a hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education, while the reviewer sees his/her Self-Education paradigm as entirely Democratic (and Dialogic). Elsewhere, the reviewer discussed and critically analyzed the Progressive Education paradigm, which generally involves channeling the student’s learning activism and subjectivity toward learning outcomes desired by an educator. It uses the educator’s manipulation of the student’s subjectivity to make them study what the educator wants them to study. In contrast, the paradigm of Democratic Education assumes that the educatee is the final authority of their own education. The educatee decides whether to study, when to study, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, where to study, for what purpose to study and so on. The educatee makes these decisions by themselves or with the help of other people at the educatee’s discretion and conditions. The reviewer charges that Ian’s Self Managed Learning paradigm is a hybrid of both paradigms, with the Progressive Education paradigm taking the lead and exploiting the Democratic Education paradigm.

The book presented a unique, innovative practice worth a critical analysis. The reviewer’s dialogue-disagreement with the book reveals a particular hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education which is common to some innovative self-directed learning.

This essay takes issue with the incommensurability thesis, which assumes that meaningful research work across different paradigms cannot occur. Could it be that the thesis understates the case for meaningful relationships to develop across paradigms? Is it possible that researchers can authentically and rewardingly collaborate across paradigms and create joint studies published in established journals?

Based on the observation that interparadigmatic research exists, the authors investigate two questions. How is interparadigmatic research expressed in the accounting research literature? How can we comprehend the process that underlies the development and publication of interparadigmatic research, focusing on cohabitation involving the positivist and interpretive paradigms of research?

To deal with the first question, the authors focus on two interparadigmatic articles: Greenwood et al. (2002) and Paugam et al. (2021). The authors find each article showcases a dominant paradigm – whereas the role of the other paradigm is represented as secondary; that is, complementing and enriching the dominant paradigm. To address the second question, the authors rely especially on their involvement as coauthors of three interparadigmatic studies, published between 2019 and 2022 in FT50 journals. The authors’ analysis brings to the fore a range of facilitators that fit their experiences, such as the development of cross-paradigmatic agreement within the authorship to cope with the complexity surrounding the object of study, the crafting of methodological compromises (e.g. regarding the number of documents to analyze) and the strategizing that the authorship enacted in dealing with journal gatekeepers.

From the authors’ experiences, they develop a model, which provides a tentative template to make sense of the process by which interparadigmatic research takes place. The model highlights the role of what the authors call “epistemic mediation” in producing interparadigmatic studies.

This study demonstrates how individual paradigms implicate the questions asked, methods used and results drawn in association with a common object of study in human information behavior (HIB) research – the relationship between uncertainty and decision-making.

The author uses textual case studies to examine uncertainty and decision-making through the framework of four paradigms used in HIB research: positivism, cognitivism, collectivism and constructionism and suggests deconstructionism as a paradigm which raises new questions around this topic.

Positivistic approaches to uncertainty are often systems oriented; cognitive approaches are often user-oriented; collectivist approaches are intersubjective; and constructionist approaches blend a subjective and intersubjective research orientation. Deconstructionism raises new questions around ethics and responsibility in relation to decision-making, and the author therefore situates it as a new paradigmatic approach for this topic in HIB research.

Despite the presence of research aimed at recognizing and defining paradigms in HIB research, a comparative micro-examination of how individual paradigms implicate a specific research topic has yet to be conducted. Each paradigm uniquely shapes the ways in which uncertainty and decision-making are characterized, but the four central ones examined here have thus far left out questions of ethics and responsibility as being core elements of decision-making as tied to uncertainty. Therefore, this paper introduces deconstructionism as a paradigm new to HIB uncertainty research, arguing that it provides an important and novel complication of existent research questions and approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the delay associated in running two real-time machine learning-based applications, namely, a video quality assessment (VQA) and a phishing detection application by using the edge, fog and cloud computing paradigms.

The VQA algorithm was developed using Android Studio and run on a mobile phone for the edge paradigm. For the fog paradigm, it was hosted on a Java server and for the cloud paradigm on the IBM and Firebase clouds. The phishing detection algorithm was embedded into a browser extension for the edge paradigm. For the fog paradigm, it was hosted on a Node.js server and for the cloud paradigm on Firebase.

For the VQA algorithm, the edge paradigm had the highest response time while the cloud paradigm had the lowest, as the algorithm was computationally intensive. For the phishing detection algorithm, the edge paradigm had the lowest response time, and the cloud paradigm had the highest, as the algorithm had a low computational complexity. Since the determining factor for the response time was the latency, the edge paradigm provided the smallest delay as all processing were local.

The main limitation of this work is that the experiments were performed on a small scale due to time and budget constraints.

A detailed analysis with real applications has been provided to show how the complexity of an application can determine the best computing paradigm on which it can be deployed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse international business (IB) scholarship and present current gaps and new realities to enhance scholarly discourse.

The paper divides the scholarship into three distinct sections. First, it interrogates the changing definitions of the field from the 1880s to date. Secondly, IB paradigms are cross-examined while highlighting the understudied emerging interaction paradigm. Lastly, literature gaps, methodological gaps and new realities in IB are presented.

This research shows that IB inquiry has concentrated on firm-level paradigms, leaving the emerging interaction paradigm understudied. As a result, there is a deficit of novel ideas and limited research on critical emerging issues affecting IB. Further, simplistic methodologies are prevalent, making IB scholarship weak. Additionally, a majority of studies concentrate on the Americas, Europe and Asia, leaving Africa understudied.

This research augments the need for scholars to cross-examine the best approach to apply in IB discourse and presents gaps calling for new insights and future research directions.

The purpose of this research is to explore the deployment of the total quality management (TQM) paradigm in the TQM Journal in relation to the context of the 21st century. The study builds on the theoretical framework of the four quality paradigms that together compose TQM. The four paradigms differ in their effectiveness based on the context in which they are used. In a complex context, one would expect the reflective and the emergence paradigm to flourish. The TQM Journal is one of the leading scientific journals on TQM. If the assumption that the reflective and emergent paradigm would flourish in a complex environment is correct, one will see that represented in the past five years of scientific research in that magazine.

The TQM Journal articles of the past five years from January 2016 till January 2021 have been chosen as the scope of an exploratory review. The author assessed the title and abstract of all articles based on the characteristics of the four quality paradigms, as described in the theoretical framework. If the title and abstract did not provide enough data to take the decision for the assessment, the whole article has been taken into account. The results have been collated, summarized and reported. Based on the results, the author explores the possible patterns.

In total, 283 articles from 2016 to 2021 (from Volume 28, Issue 1 to Volume 33, Issue 1) were included in this study. In total, 45 were read fully to be able to characterize the article. Most of the studies relate the tertiary (33.3%) and secondary (27.9%) sectors. Healthcare was the sector in 32 of the cases (11.3%). Most studies have been conducted in Europe (n = 82, 28.9%) and Asia (n = 58, 20.5%). Within Europe, Italy was the most prolific country with, respectively, 25 (30.8%) of the articles. The USA and Canada only had five articles in these five years (1.8%). Many articles did not specify the region. More than half of the articles (52.4%) worked with surveys, questionnaires or other methods to involve the customer in the research; 16 articles (5.6%) used experts in the field through expert panels and such to collect data from. In total, 107 articles (37.8%) did involve no other stakeholders than the researchers themselves. Eight studies (2.8%) used action research or co-design methodology to create optimal stakeholder participation. Based on the data, four patterns can be discovered: the context sensitivity of the articles, reflexivity, coping with uncertainty and co-creation.

It is acknowledged that the articles in the study were published in just one scientific journal. One can expect that this will be represented in other journals on TQM. Still, it would be interesting to conduct a follow-up study in other journals on TQM and compare the results. The research is done by one subjective researcher.

Research on TQM should take the complexity of the context into account. For that purpose, researchers should focus more on the emergence paradigm within TQM.

This study is the first to investigate TQM as a holistic paradigm, including the empirical, reflective, reference and emergence paradigm in TQM research.

This paper aims to explore the divergences and commitments between the lean, agile, resilient and green paradigms while investigating the effect of paradigms' practices within supply chain attributes.

A conceptual model with lean, agile, resilient and green practices and supply chain management attributes is proposed. Causal diagrams were used to represent the relationships between paradigm practices and supply chain attributes. The four diagrams were aggregated to build the conceptual model.

The conceptual model allows for the identification of synergies and divergences resulting from the paradigms practices implementation. The synergies between paradigms are related to “information frequency” and “integration level” increasing as well as reduction of “production lead time” and “transportation lead time”. However, other supply chain attributes such as “capacity surplus”, “inventory level” and “replenishment frequency” are affected in opposite directions by some paradigms creating divergences.

The model relationships were established using an anecdotal approach derived from the literature review, reflecting only a partial view of supply chain dynamics. More research related to other supply chain attributes and/or paradigm practices, and validation of the proposed relationships is suggested.

The proposed model can be the basis for further research in lean, agile, resilient and green paradigms, contributing to a more sustainable and competitive lean supply chain with the necessary agility toward a quick response, resiliency to disruptions, and harmonization with the ecologic and environmental aspects.

To the authors' knowledge this paper is the first to provide an understanding about the tradeoffs among lean, agile, resilient and green supply chain paradigms.

The purpose of this paper is to elicit the subtle but progressive shift in organizational/institutional interaction with its rivals within a competitive framework, and thereby discusses and analyses paradigm shifts in competition and competitiveness. The paper argues that interorganizational networks and the recent concept of supply chain management may have induced a change in how competitiveness is viewed at the national, industry, and firm levels of interaction.

The paper conceptualizes extant literature into distinct themes of (organizational and institutional) analysis – micro, macro, and meso – and based on this review the paper seeks to identify emerging logics and shifts within mainstream competitiveness literature over the last decade.

The paper suggests that the micro‐macro theme of competition and competitiveness remains dominant in mainstream literature. Results from the analysis also support the notion of emergent logics of competition and competitiveness, which could then imply that a paradigm shift may well have begun within the area of competition and competitiveness.

The limited findings point towards more detailed forays into competition of interorganizational forms such as networks and supply chains, before a paradigm shift may be claimed.

The paper serves to trigger the consciousness of stakeholders to think realistically with regards to claims that competition and competitiveness are carried out on the network level, e.g. a supply chain vs supply chain playing field.

While networks and supply chains have generally been inferred as new frontiers for contemporary competition in different functionally‐oriented literature domains, analysis and performance of such emergent logics is yet to be shown. The classification of different competition logics put forth in this paper aid in systemizing the competitiveness/competition rhetoric.