MANAGEMENT RESEARCH: A META-SYNTHESIS OF NATURAL SCIENCE, SOCIAL STUDIES AND MANAGEMENT PRACTICE

摘要

Academics argue between the merits of "positivist" technical proofs derived from natural science and "interpretivist" contextual arguments justified by social studies. We propose a "Third Paradigm" that makes a dialectical synthesis of management practice with both. This "synthesis!" paradigm should be founded in situational realities as distinct from technical or contextual issues. It should respond to the goals of the business rather than either mainly to what the researcher sees as theoretically correct, or to accommodating the views of researchers or stakeholders. It should be more attuned to business practice requirements and confront research situations directly using methods that have been empirically tested on real management problems. The paper puts the three paradigm case at different levels in the context of emerging theory in multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM). Firstly MCDM uses a structured approach to identify decision makers' criteria trees. It facilitates decision makers to incorporate their views through the use of weights on criteria. Through associating scores with the alternatives in order to help decision-makers make a preference it facilitates applications to situations in practice. An illustration is shown. It also shows that the process applies to a methodology for dealing with MCDM problems. Shaping criteria and using them to help a decision-maker make a preference is itself a structured multiple-criteria information management process. It uses theories that draw from different contexts including psychology, sociology, philosophy and management science. It is applicable to any preference finding situation. And it applies at a meta-level. Correctly structured criteria trees exist for each MCDM problem, and are founded in generic decision science structures. One of these, the structure of a Convincing process, involves technical, contextual and situational aspects. This provides the most compelling argument that ignoring the third "Synthesis!" paradigm leads to less convincing management research.