Philosophical Issues in Research in Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Buttle (1998) maintains that the stasis-seeking emphasis of positivism could explain the failure of positivist business literature to account for...
Philosophy and Logic of My Early Research
Qualitative research takes support from anti-positivists, who criticize positivism for failing to accommodate the social world, possibly because social reality...
Deduction or Induction?
To Collis and Hussey (2009), “deductive research” describes the development and testing of conceptual frameworks and the process of moving...
Paradigms and the Philosophy of Methods
Quantitative and qualitative methodologies are generally associated with two research paradigms: “positivism” and “phenomenology” respectively (Lalwani et al, 2004). According...
The Epistemology of Management/Business Studies
Management/business studies is historically committed to positivism (Morrell, 2008). Business studies, although a subcategory of social science, treats the social...
Anti-Positivism: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology
Phenomenology boasts diverse heritage: rationalism was an early contributor. A largely continental movement interpretable as the pre-emptive counterweight of practical...
Proto-Positivists on Society
According to the “mechanistic philosophy” (Ball, 2004 p. 19) of Thomas Hobbes, man is a puppet animated by the impersonal...
Positivism
A belated (C.19th) philosophical byproduct of the Age of Enlightenment, positivism is attributed chiefly to Comte but is strongly foreshadowed...
Ontology and Epistemology in Research
In Kantian terms, a researcher’s ontology is “nomothetic” if s/he regards the universe as a rule-governed reality that exists independently...