For Positivism, trace the writings of Comte and Frederic Harrison, whilst this seems a useful bibliography of 'Critical Theory'

You should not, however, overlook the importance of Saint- Simon and Fourier

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ufhatch/pages/02-TeachingResources/bibliography/05bibl-crit-thry.htm

http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0142.xml

http://augustecomte.org/actualite/

https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Harrison%2C%20Frederic%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Frederic%20Harrison%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Harrison%2C%20Frederic%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Frederic%20Harrison%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Harrison%2C%20F%2E%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Frederic%20Harrison%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Harrison%2C%20Frederic%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Frederic%20Harrison%22%29%20OR%20%28%221831-1923%22%20AND%20Harrison%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29

Hi Hina,

You say that you need literature on Three Major Research Paradigm's Positivism, Interpretivism and Critical theory? 

Let me say that in 1942, Stephan Peeper spoke about four paradigms or world's views in Science (Formism, Mechanism, Contextualism, and Organicism), in his famous book titled World Hypotheses: A study of evidence. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Each paradigm appeals to a specific root metaphor.The root metaphor of mechanism is the machine.The root metaphor of formism is similarity.The root metaphor of contextualism is the ongoing act in context. And the root metaphor of organicism is the process of organic development, as in living, growing, organic systems. Mechanism and formism are analytic: The whole is reducible to its parts. The parts are basic, the whole derived. Organicism and contextualism are synthetic: The whole is basic, the parts derived. Formism and contextualism are dispersive: Facts are related when they are found to be so, not by assumption. Chance, therefore, is not denied in these hypotheses. Mechanism and organicism are integrative: Facts are related by assumption and order is categorical. As such, chance is denied. Dispersive world views or hypotheses tend to be higher in scope than in precision; integrative world hypotheses tend to be higher in precision than in scope. Skinner's theory of learning is an example of a mechanistic approach. Piaget's theory of development is an organismic approach. Life-span developmental psychology (see Baltes, 1987) and Bronfennbrener's (1979) ecological approach to human development are only two examples of  a contextualist view of the world. Fodor's  (1983) theory of the modularity of mind is just an example of a formistic paradigm or world's view.   

I think that you can learn a lot with respect to your question from reading that book, and also books to which it gave rise. You can also benefit from reading a chapter (chapter 1) by Willis Overton, published in 1998, in the Handbook of child psychology. New York: John Wiley   

Have I got your point?

Best regards

I think that these articles will be useful for your consultation.

Schwandt, T. A. (1994). Constructivist, interpretist approaches to human inquiry. In N.

K. Denzin & Y S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Heron, J., & Reason, P. (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. Qualitative inquiry, 3(3), 274-294.

Beck, M. S., Bryman, A. & Liao, T. F.(1993). The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Science. (Vol.1). London: Sage Publications.

Henning, E., Van Rensburg, W., & Smit, B. (2004). Finding your way in qualitative research (pp. 19-22). Pretoria: Van Schaik..

There are some nice introduction texts that provide overviews of positivism, and critical theory (quite broadly, as I assume that's what your looking for given the nature of the question). 

Michael Crotty's The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process is a good place to start, though quite flawed. There is also Celine-Marie Pascale's Cartographies of Knowledge: Exploring Qualitative Epistemologies, which I like reasonably well.

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Vivian Burr's Social Constructionism, and Brian Fay's Critical Social Science are all good primers on those paradigms as well. I find that starting with introductory texts and following citational trails (who and what do those texts cite that get at the specific questions or areas of interest that I have) to be quite useful. 

Hope that helps!

Hani, 

I'm curious to know what motivates your question.  Are you just fulfilling an academic assignment, or are you genuinely interested in problems of methodology?  In my view, all of the problems we face as humans (social, psychological, medical, educational, economic, etc.) are a result of flawed methods.  But those flaws never show up in most critiques of the standard research methodologies.  So, research in most fields becomes less useful in every generation, solving ever more trivial problems, while the really big problems (eg. the death of the oceans) receive relatively little attention because they are trans-disciplinary and do not fit within the bounds of specialized empirical research.  Most of what is taught in universities--in every discipline--is knowledge based on ideas that are deemed acceptable, which is to say they fit within the research paradigms that are regarded as valid.  The fact that prevailing research methods fail to provide solutions  to the most important problems we face does not diminish the faith of scientists and social scientists in their methods.  In fact, as Festinger showed 50 years ago, this cognitive dissonance just leads researchers to become even more committed to the paradigms that fail. 

When I read your full question, which is about ontology, epistemology, and axiology, you are asking about every intellectual debate in the past few centuries.  I read a study a few months ago online (which I can no longer find) that surveyed social scientists to determine their research methodology.  Not surprisingly, most Americans used a positivist approach and most of them did not even know there were alternatives.  They equated positivism with science and disregarded everything else.  Europeans were much more evenly divided among methods and more conscious of why they are using them.  Europeans have a more sophisticated understanding because Continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, etc.) is more nuanced than empiricism, the dominant Anglo-American philosophy.  At least in my view (as an American), the Anglo-American methods train people to investigate with blinders on.  Yet, students from around the world seek a chance to study at the prestigious universities of the US and UK presumably because research prestige is associated with research effectiveness.  But do the methods work on non-trivial problems?  That is the important question.

Many thanks to Orlando M Lourenço for the recommendation of Stephen Pepper's book World Hypotheses. I was unaware of anyone who had written about contextualism as a paradigm.  After seeing this reference, I looked on the internet and found articles about "epistemic contextualism," but what interests me is ontological contextualism--the idea that events are never isolated but always part of larger webs of relations.  So, I look forward to seeing what Pepper had to say about contextualism in 1942. 

An excellent and accessible review of precisely these three approaches, within public administration, as well as a good bibliography,  is provided by Jay White in his article "On the Growth of Knowledge in Public Administration. Public Administration Review. Vol. 46, 1986, 15-24.  I have used this essay in teaching doctoral students in public administration and policy about alternative methodologies and it works well.

A lot have been said in the previous responses, i'll just add that for a robust introduction to critical theory, i find this book really  helpfull : Hay, C. (2002). Political analysis: a critical introduction. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cordial saludo. 

A mi parecer el comentario del Sr. Clifford Cobb es pertinente. No solo por la imposibilidad de unidad del pensamiento, que es mítico en sí mismo de acuerdo con Federico Nietzsche. En Colombia, predomina un positivismo semejante al de finales del siglo XIX, sin una lectura juiciosa de Comte y muy poco sobre Mach. Se trabaja muy poco sobre el Círculo de Viena (Schlick, Carnap, Neurath) y su incidencia en el desarrollo del Neopositivismo. Los estudiantes de pregrado tienen muy escaso conocimiento, o ninguno, sobre la historia del pensamiento occidental (ejemplo, Kühn, Popper, Feyerabend), y por el lado de la teoría crítica, desconocen la Escuela de Frankfurt (Hörkheimer, Adorno, Lukacs, Fromm, Marcuse, Habermas, etc.), y los grandes pensadores oscuros, como Foucault, Agamben, Onfray, Zizek, etc. que, fieles a la imposibilidad de unidad paradigmática, debaten los principios del saber y estudian las maneras como emergen y como terminan estableciéndose en el terreno del conocimento. El argumento para desconocer esta discusión, es la creciente exigencia tecnológica en el mundo, la demanda de dominio sobre el mercado de los objetos de mayor confortabilidad. Esta caída de las instituciones universitarias en la dimensión técnica ha perjudicado de tal modo la investigación científica, que los verdaderos problemas, siguiendo a Mr. Cobb, entran en la categoría de "insolubles". ¿Qué comunidad científica actual podría no solamente proponer, sino actuar, con respecto al problema ecológico global? Si la ética del científico no me es desconocida, este problema debería ser seriamente abordado, ensayando medidas que, de todos modos, no es que se desconozcan, pues se conocen las fuentes de la autodestrucción de la vida (esto considerando al humano como el primer y mayor agente autodestructivo).

Saludos muy cordiales para todos los conversadores.

Rosendo Rodríguez Fernández.  

Hina, My apologies for the delay in sharing these bits.

A. As a philosophical ideology and movement, positivism first assumed its distinctive features in the work of August Comte, who also named and systematized the science of sociology. It then developed through several stages known by various names, such as empiriocriticism, logical positivism, and logical empiricism, finally merging, in the mid-20th century, into the already existing tradition known as analytic philosophy.

This is a few writings/Literature available and I hope will be useful.

1. http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Comte/Presentation/Comte.pdf

2. http://www.univpgri-palembang.ac.id/perpus-fkip/Perpustakaan/Empiricsm/Auguste%20Comte.pdf

3. http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b21819853.pdf

B. Hina, you might also find the works of sociologist, Otto Neurath relevant. He with others brought in the concepts of Logical positivism and logical empiricism.

C. Moritz Schlick's work would also be relevant.

D. Karl Popper, an Austrian-born British philosopher of science, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, (Logik der Forschung), 1935 is another important work.

Siddharth Agarwal