NEGOTIATING INCOMMENSURABILITY IN MARKETING THEORY

Mark Tadajewski, Jaqueline Pels () and Michael Saren
Additional contact information
Mark Tadajewski: Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Essex, C04 3SQ, UK
Michael Saren: Management Centre, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK

Chapter 2 in Advances in Doctoral Research in Management, 2006, pp 21-46 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: AbstractThis paper reviews the recent paradigm debates in marketing and reflects on the current pluralism of paradigms. It makes the case that a future important direction for marketing theory is multiple paradigm research; an avenue that has been widely explored in organisation studies, but as yet has had little extended treatment in marketing or consumer research. As a first movement in this direction, we review the debates that have taken place in organisation studies showing how the so-called "paradigm mentality" has been seen to hamper constructive debate across paradigms, whereby researchers from different paradigms can fail to agree on inter-paradigm standards of evaluation so that theory choice between the divergent outputs of two different paradigms cannot easily be resolved. We then turn to the incommensurability thesis. We question the veracity of the early incommensurability thesis apparent in Kuhn's writing and the subjectivism that follows from Feyerabend's interpretation of incommensurability, negotiating these arguments by drawing upon the Kuhnian concept of taxonomical lexicon, to suggest that learning alternative paradigms is similar to learning another natural language. By way of a conclusion, we reflect on the possibilities and problems associated with undertaking doctoral research using a multiple paradigmatic team brought together to contribute the distinct insights that each paradigm brings to the project.

Keywords: Doctoral; Research; Management Methodology; Data; Analysis; Paradigm; Modeling; International (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789812707246_0002 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789812707246_0002 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789812707246_0002

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().