“Paradigms Lost”: On Theory and Method in Research in Marketing

Abstract

Only recently have marketing scientists become concerned with issues in the philosophy of science. This paper points to one neglected area—the implications of a theoretical tradition for the selection of research methods (design, data collection, and data analysis). It is argued that marketing has been relying primarily on only one theoretical tradition. The dominance of this philosophy has led to marketing science growing more rapidly in the area of hypothesis testing than in the development of new, rich explanatory theories. Several suggestions are made to achieve a balance in theory construction and testing, with implications for reducing methods bias by a process of triangulating methodologies.