Why do feel that your research requires a paradigm? That is a rather old-fashioned approach, so unless your advisors insist on it, I would concentrate instead on have well-defined research questions and a well-specified link between your research questions and your research methods.

In terms of "clout," I did say that it was a special case if "your advisors insist on it." But other wise, I do believe that stale ideas shouldn't dominate current thinking.

Dividing the world up between realist and constructivist perspectives is an approach that goes back at least 2000 years with no sign of resolution.

I understand why this distinction served an important political purpose for qualitative researchers back in the 1980s and 1990s, but the respectability of qualitatively oriented research questions and methods is now well established, without any need to refer to ontology and epistemology.

I think the question of the paradigm as being something like a programme one signs up to a priori, as different from a set of unconscious commitments that shapes research assumptions and interpretations in the background, is worth considering. The former is largely a result of systematic misreadings of Kuhn, and it both oversimplifies complex nature of paradigm contestation and the politics that preserve paradigm dominance and potential incommensurability. John argued that when you look at what scientists do, it isn't value neutral. They operate as intellectual tribes, which preferred views of the world and the universe and favoured methods of generating knowledge about it. They operate to further their interests - research funding, power, influence, prizes, jobs - and tend to defend their positions rather than seek Popperian falsification. Hence new ideas are dismissed or ignored until a combination of a) The existing mainstream becoming less and less effective and b) new ideas gathering increasingly support, causing a tipping point or reduction. Paradigms were ontologically and epistemologically based, but diversified according to methods, and sustained by non-elistemogical concerns (eg resources, politics). Burrell and Morgan (1979) took a focused approach to adapting Kuhn to the social sciences - strictly the field of Organizational Analysis but much broader in its implications. Earlier social thinkers like Bottomore in the UK and Ritzer in the US had attempted paradigm analysis but they did not build as complex a framework as Burrell and Morgan. Lincoln and Guba in my view take us backwards in simplifying the debate, and also in using the term constructivism with too much latitude (constructivism is an approach drawn from psychology (Bruner, Piaget) where constructionisn and social constructionism are primarily features of social psychosocial and sociological thought). Post-positivism is also frequently misused to indicate qualitative approaches opposed to poitivisn, when it more accurately denotes late modifications to rigid forms of positivism that seek to fix its inadequacies (such as critical realism, or speculative realism for example). Post-structural approaches challenge the Burrell and Morgan framework, as does Latour's ANT (and Law's critique of method and "mess"), and the paradigm wars have largely been superseded by struggles over the terrain of post-paradigm social science (and even science - see Protevi and de Landa for example). The philosophical debates are interesting and important, more so than the low-level debates, but rejecting the existing formulations of paradigms, as though they were exogenous, should not distract from the fact that paradigmatic behaviour is whether consciously or unconsciously a enduring facet of what researchers do. Therefore, bring reflexive about these features of your own work is essential. Trying to fit - or being asked/forced to fit- your research into a prefabricated pigeonhole is not terribly productive, and neither is effectively "signing up" to a praradigm as though it were a programme, and one based only around ontological, epistemology and method. Ethics and politics are ineluctable elements here. David Morgan is right when he says that what is important is the reach questions and how there are elaborated and investigated - but the questions you ask in formulating those questions are ontological and epistemological without that needing to be flagged as a particular form of realism, interlretivism etc. When you ask "what kind of a problem am I trying to address" you are doing ontology ( my own early research was into absence at work, and the research of others saw it as either broadly psychological and individual, or broadly sociological and structural. Depending on how you define the problem (ontologically) and its unanswered questions links to and may determine what sort of knowledge you need to generate to answer those questions or fill the knowledge gap. That will be done better by certain methods rather than others, and use of these methods will authorise you to make certain types of claims and not others. So far its a matter of alignment, and the vast majority of these that fail do so because of problems in alignment that cannot be fixed retrospectively and draw conclusions they can't warrant. But there still remain ethical/moral and political dimensions to research that are paradigmatic in Burrell and Morgan's formulation but not considered as such in others. One of the problems of the simplistic qual/quant split is that ethics and politics get wrapped up into qual, and quant is treated as neutral in relation to them (if not value neutral per se). Yet even Sokal and Bricmont, in their scandalous defence of science against their version of the Postmodern, were being excited critical and political as left wing scientists. So really, it's about asking and properly addressing the right (or at least better) questions, in appropriate ways, and asking questions about those ways. You don't need the terminology (ontology, epistemology, paradigm) but if you are pursuing the questions properly, critically and reflexively, you'll be doing the work that those terms signify anyway - just without jumping through artificial hoops.

Stephen Andrew Linstead My most basic response is that the idea of paradigms as statements about ontological and epistemological beliefs is a thorough hijacking of Kuhn that has nothing what so ever to do with his ideas about paradigms. Indeed, I would argue that may own emphasis has far more to do with his use of paradigms as a consensus about which questions are worth asking and which methods are most appropriate for answering those questions.

But even if we leave Kuhn behind and redefine paradigms based on Lincoln and Guba's formulation of ontology and epistemology, I do not accept the claim that those philosophical principles are unavoidable. In particular, I do not accept your statement that statements of research questions are somehow inherently statements about ontology. (i.e., the nature of reality). If tomorrow that debate were somehow resolved after thousands of years, it wouldn't change any of my research questions. Indeed, I doubt if would change much of anything about what most researchers are interested in investigating.

As a pragmatist, I could care less about debates around whether there is or is not a fixed, external reality (or the possibility of truth in terms of epistemology). I certainly do care about issue of power and ethics, but those have nothing to do with either ontology or epistemology. For a pragmatist, issues about how power and ethics affect which questions get asked and how they get answered are fundamental. But that is because pragmatists are focused on action and its consequences, rather than the nature of reality or the possibility of truth.

So, there is not need for ontology and epistemology to act as some kind of "invisible hand" that inevitably guide researchers. Far better to go with Kuhn (and pragmatism) and search for the origins of those choices in the community of researchers that influences the decisions we make.

Paradigm is a situation when some studies would reach a thesis about some subject. One study can t be a paradigm!!

have a nice day