REALISM’S ROLE AMONG SCIENTIFIC PARADIGMS IN MARKETING

RESEARCH

Perry, C., Riege, A. and Brown, L. 1999, ‘Realism’s role among scientific paradigms in
marketing research’, Irish Marketing Review, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 16-23.
December.

AUTHORS

Chad Perry, Andrew Riege and Les Brown

Department of Marketing
Faculty of Business
University of Southern Queensland
Toowoomba Q4350
Tel: 0746 311535
Facsimile: 0746 312811
e-mail: perry@usq.edu.au

Key words: business networks, scientific paradigms, realism

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the issue of scientific paradigms in marketing research. It begins
with an overview of a ‘rapprochement’ model suggested for network research by Borch
and Arthur (1995) which attempts to integrate both objective and subjective research.
We argue that their two-dimensional approach that separates the objective, positivist
dimension and the subjective, interpretive dimension could be extended to include the
realism paradigm. Characteristics of that paradigm are described and its appropriateness
for case study research is established.
REALISM’S ROLE AMONG SCIENTIFIC PARADIGMS IN MARKETING

RESEARCH

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of scientific paradigms in marketing research. It begins

with an overview of a ‘rapprochement’ model suggested for network research by Borch

and Arthur (1995) which attempts to integrate both objective and subjective research.

We argue that their two-dimensional approach that separates the objective, positivist

dimension and the subjective, interpretive dimension could be extended to include the

realism paradigm. Characteristics of that paradigm are described and its appropriateness

for case study research is established.

Introduction

In recent years, research about business and marketing strategy has been criticised for

not capturing real-world complexity (for example, Pettigrew, 1987). Borch and Arthur

(1995) suggest that a mix of objectivist and subjectivist methodologies can help address

criticisms like these. The aim of this paper is to argue that the mix involves more than

methodological considerations - it involves a reconsideration of all three aspects of

scientific paradigms used for marketing research. Realism is a particularly appropriate

paradigm for research in marketing, as the example of case study research about

networks illustrates.

2
This paper has three sections. In the first section, the Borch and Arthur (1995)

suggestion about methodologies is revisited. Then, four scientific paradigms are

discussed in terms of ontology and epistemology, as well as methodology. Reasons why

the realism paradigm is the most appropriate for some marketing research like that

about networks, are then addressed. Finally, the case study research methodology

within the realism paradigm is examined.

Borch and Arthur’s (1995) ‘Rapprochemont’ Methodology

The objectivist approach is predicated on explaining and predicting phenomena, while

the subjectivist approach emphasises describing and understanding phenomena. This

bipolar approach to how scientific research can be done is common, for example,

Easterby-Smith, Thorpe and Lowe (1991), and Donnellan (1995) share it. In turn,

Borch and Arthur (1995, p. 423) claim that both approaches should be used, arguing a

mixed methodology would ‘contribute to the richness of the new strategic management

models’. In brief, their methodology aims to blend the rigour of the ‘scientific’ validity

of objectivist research with the contextual elements and insights of subjectivist research

(Borch and Arthur, 1995).

We suggest that their blend of two approaches could be replaced with one approach, a

third approach of realism. This third approach involves a reconsideration of all three

elements of scientific paradigms - ontology, epistemology and methodology - and not

just methodology. This issue of scientific paradigms is addressed next.

3
Four Scientific Paradigms

Researchers operate within a scientific paradigm that is either explicit or implicit. A

paradigm is an overall conceptual framework within which a researcher may work, that

is, a paradigm can be regarded as the ‘basic belief system or worldview that guides the

investigator’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p. 105). Philosophical assumptions which

support the four different paradigms of social science relating to ontology,

epistemology and methodology are summarised in Table 1. In effect Table 1

summarises the following discussion.

INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Positivism. Positivists assume that natural and social sciences measure independent

facts about a single apprehensible reality composed of discrete elements whose nature

can be known and categorised (Guba and Lincoln, 1994; Tsoukas, 1989). The

objectives of the research inquiry often include the measurement and analysis of causal

relationships between variables that are consistent across time and context. The

primary data collection techniques include controlled experiments and sample surveys

which are outcome oriented and assume natural laws and mechanisms, with the primary

mode of the research inquiry being theory-testing or deduction. Data is usually

collected in a structured manner with the researcher not intervening in the phenomenon

of interest and seeking for theory testing in value-free or hopefully value-free

4
generalisations. In other words, the data and its analysis are value-free and data does

not change because they are being observed. That is, researchers view the world

through a ‘one way mirror’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p. 110). Even in nuclear physics

where particles cannot be directly observed, uncertainty in results is a methodological

issue and not an ontological one - different observers using the same methodology

should obtain similar results. All these assumptions of positivism are appropriate in a

natural science, for example, every zoologist in the world will count the same number

of bones in a dead kingfisher.

However, a positivist view is inappropriate when approaching a social science

phenomenon like networks which involves humans and their real-life experiences, for

treating respondents as independent objects ‘ignores their ability to reflect on problem

situations, and act upon this’ (Robson, 1993, p. 60). That is, positivists separate

themselves from the world they study, while researchers within the three other

paradigms acknowledge that they have to participate in real-world life to some extent

so as to better understand and express its emergent properties and features (Gilmore and

Carson, 1996).

Furthermore, social science researchers should not seek to provide causal explanations

within a closed system as a positivist would. Instead, they should consider the complex

nature of reality and the research problem, reflecting, forming and revising meanings

and structures from managerial experiences and how these problems appear to

managers (Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991). To approach this task, social science

researchers could operate within the non-positivist scientific paradigms introduced

5
next.

Critical theory and constructivism. The second paradigm, critical theory, assumes

apprehensive social realities, incorporating historically situated structures. Critical

theory researchers aim at critiquing and transforming social, political, cultural,

economic, ethnic and gender values. Examples of critical theory researchers are

Marxists, feminists and action researchers. Thus research inquiries are often long-term

ethnographic and historical studies of organisational processes and structures.

Assumptions are essentially subjective and hence knowledge is grounded in social and

historical routines and is therefore value-dependent and not value-free (Guba and

Lincoln, 1994).

However, this paradigm is not appropriate for marketing research unless the researcher

aims to be a ‘transformative intellectual’ who liberates people from their historical

mental, emotional and social structures (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p. 112). For

example, most business network research aims at understanding the actions of the

decision-makers rather than changing them or their approaches to strategy formulation.

The third paradigm, constructivism, adopts a relativism ontology. An example of a

constructivist would be a psychologist or a researcher of organisational culture. From a

constructivist's perspective, truth is a construction which refers to a particular belief

system held in a particular context. Realities appear as multiple realities which are

socially and experientially based, intangible mental constructions of individual persons.

Meaning has more value than measurement, for perception itself is the most important

6
reality. Like critical theory, constructivism enquires about the ideologies and values

which lie behind a finding. Researching this created knowledge depends on the

interaction between interviewer and respondent, that is, the researcher has to be a

‘passionate participant’' during his or her field work (Guba and Lincoln, 1994, p. 112).

This constructivist approach may be suitable for some social science research like that

about religion, beauty or prejudice but it is rarely appropriate for business research

because the approach excludes concerns about the clearly real economic and

technological dimensions of business (Hunt, 1991). For example, when a steel mill

closes, the decision is based not only on ‘beliefs’ but include constructs that are

measurable such as present and past profit levels and plant capacities. But these

measurable constructs are difficult to measure and they are not the only considerations

involved, and so positivism is not the appropriate paradigm to investigate such

phenomena either. That is, a steel company must forecast future levels of these

constructs based on the beliefs of many people and has to consider complex social

constructs like industrial relations and the impact of public opinion. What researchers

of business phenomena like network formulation need is a paradigm that is different

from but has some elements of both positivism and constructivism. That paradigm is

the realism paradigm (Hunt, 1991), sometimes called the critical realism or

postpositivist paradigm (Guba and Lincoln, 1994).

Realism. The fourth paradigm of realism is more appropriate for some marketing

research than the three above. This type of research is searching, albeit necessarily

imperfectly, towards an understanding of the common reality of an economic system in

7
which many people operate independently. That is, realists believe that there is a ‘real’

world to discover even if it is only imperfectly and probabilistically apprehensible

(Godfrey and Hill, 1995; Guba and Lincoln, 1994; Tsoukas, 1989; Merriam, 1988).

In other words, perception is not reality as constructivists and critical theorists might

aver, instead, a perception for realists is a window on to reality through which a picture

of reality can be triangulated with other perceptions. That is, realists acknowledge the

difference between the world and particular perceptions of it, and the pre-eminent

importance of that world. In brief, constructivists and critical theorists consider there

are many realities, while realists consider there is only one reality although several

perceptions of that reality must be triangulated to obtain a better picture of it.

Within the realism paradigm, the world can be distinguished as having the three

domains of reality of mechanisms, events, and experiences, as illustrated in Table 2

(Bhaskar, 1978). In more detail, the three domains are the real domain, consisting of

the processes that generate events, in which generative mechanisms or causal powers

exist independently with a tendency to produce patterns of observable events under

contingent conditions; the actual domain in which patterns of events occur, whether

they are observed or not; and the empirical domain, in which experiences may be

obtained by direct observation (Tsoukas, 1989; Bhaskar, 1978). The discovery of these

observable or non-observable structures and mechanisms that underly events and

experiences is the goal of realism research (Tsoukas, 1989). Given this complexity of

their social science world, the knowledge that realism researchers obtain ‘is considered

real but fallible’ (Wollin, 1995, p. 80).

8
INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

Summary and implications for researchers. Popper (Magee, 1985, p. 61)

summarises the three ontological assumptions above in three ‘worlds’. World one is

positivist and consists of objective, material things. World two is related to critical

theory and constructivism, and is the subjective world of minds. World three is related

to realism and consists of abstract things that are born of people’s minds but exist

independently of any one person … ‘the third world is largely autonomous, though

created by us’. As well, Figure 1 summarises ontological, epistemological and

methodological aspects of the above discussion, showing the three different levels of

reality at the bottom and middle of the figure and emphasizing the differences between

theory-building, analytical generalisation and theory-testing, statistical generalisation to

a population at the top of the figure.

INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

In brief, a researcher’s task is to discover, identify and then describe and analyse the

structures and generative mechanisms related to marketing. Obviously, using a

quantitative technique like regression analysis which assumes the dependent variable is

known with zero measurement error, is inappropriate. Instead, realism methodologies

include qualitative ones such as case studies or convergent interviews (Nair and Riege,

1995) which are process-oriented and do not investigate cause and effect relations but

are rather concerned with underlying ‘causal tendencies’ or powers (Bhaskar, 1978, p.

9
20). The data analysis is usually summarised in an interpretive, necessarily value-laden

way but with an awareness of the presence of those values. That is, the analysis is

usually non-statistical and uses qualitative techniques. Moreover, note that

constructivist tools like NUD*IST are not essential for realism research because realism

researchers do not need to map all the details of an interviewee’s subjective reality,

they merely look through some parts of that reality at an external reality and manual

coding of interview data can be adequate for this process.

In those research situations when complex phenomena have already been sufficiently

understood to warrant an attempt at generalisation to a population rather than to a

theory, then structural equation modeling may be the only appropriate quantitative

technique to use, for it has two attractive features for a realism researcher: it models

structures with complex interdependencies, and it explicitly allows for multi-item scales

and some measurement error in its constructs (Hair et al., 1995).

Case Study Methodology

Justification of the case study research methodology. Consider an example of how

the realism paradigm discussed above could be incorporated into marketing research.

Within the realism paradigm, the case study research methodology appears to be

especially appropriate for research about some marketing issues such as networks.

Note that we are referring to the rigorously analytical method of case study research

(Perry, 1998; Yin, 1994; Perry and Coote, 1994) not the merely descriptive use of case

studies that led reviewers of many US PhD theses to comment that the best way of

improving them would be to ban the use of case study research (Adams and White,

10
1994). This case study research methodology is usually based on many interviews

within 4 to 14 cases conducted using set questions in an interview protocol. The data is

analysed using structured steps outlined in Miles and Huberman (1994), Perry and

Coote (1994) and Perry (1998).

There are four major reasons for using this qualitative research methodology of case

studies for research about a marketing issue such as networks. The first reason relates to

its preparadigmatic stage (Borch and Arthur, 1995). Qualitative methods such as case

studies address theory construction and theory building rather than theory testing and

theory verification (Tsoukas, 1989; Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Bonoma, 1985;

Donnellan, 1995). In the early stages of theory development where phenomena are not

well comprehended and the relations between phenomena are not known, quantitative

research methods can lead to inconclusive findings (Parkhe, 1993). In contrast, theory

is built in case study and related qualitative research by making comparisons, looking

for similarities and differences within the collected data, and for future questions to be

examined (Neuman, 1994, p. 405). That is, elements of the theory are being confirmed

or disconfirmed, rather than being tested for generalisability to a population.

Furthermore, a qualitative or exploratory method makes the research effort more

flexible and allows data and theory to interact (Neuman, 1994, p. 322), at least in the

early stages of the research project.

In particular, this first justification for case study research methodology relates to

network research. Several authors have looked upon organisations as social

constructions whose strategies and policies change as a result of processes of human

reaction and they have advocated qualitative research such as in-depth case studies to

11
outline important dynamic dimensions of strategy development. Indeed, as Borch and

Arthur (1995, p. 436) themselves argued, ‘at the present state of knowledge within

strategic network research, theory creation should have priority over theory

verification’.

The second reason for using a qualitative method like case studies is the need to delve

deep to gain an understanding of the phenomenon. The primary objective of case study

and related qualitative research is to understand the phenomena under research and

interpret the respondent’s experiences and beliefs in their own terms (Gilmore and

Carson, 1996). The depth and detail of qualitative data can be obtained only by getting

physically and psychologically closer to the phenomena through in-depth interviews:

‘the closer the researcher gets to the phenomenon, the clearer it is understood’ (Carson

and Coviello, 1996, p. 55; Merriam, 1988, p. 68). Thus ‘previously unknown

relationships … can be expected to emerge from case studies leading to a rethinking of

the phenomenon being studied’ (Stake, 1981, p. 47).

The third reason for using the case study research methodology is related to the reasons

above and concerns the required classification into categories and the identification of

inter-relationships between those categories. As theory building in this area becomes

the researcher’s interest, so does the role of describing, classifying and comparing the

complexity of several organisational operations and managerial experiences (Bonoma,

1985; Gilmore and Carson, 1996). The goal of case study research can be to isolate

and define categories as precisely as possible and then to determine the relationship

between them (McCracken, 1988). For this reason, details uncovered in a case can

12
delve into the complexities and processes of people and organisations, as network

research often requires.

Prior theory in case study research. The inductive nature of case study research has

been emphasised above, but some prior theory can have a pivotal function in the design

of the case study and analysis of its data. Pure induction might prevent the researcher

from benefiting from existing theory, just as pure deduction might prevent the

development of new and useful theory. Thus Parkhe (1993, pp. 252, 256) argues that

‘both extremes are untenable and unnecessary’ and that the process of ongoing theory

advancement requires ‘continuous interplay’ between the two.

Figure 2 illustrates these differences between induction and deduction in case study

research, between the ‘indigenous concepts’ of the data and the ‘sensitising concepts’

from prior theory which the analyst brings to the research (Patton, 1990, p. 391). The

left-hand side of Figure 2 shows the more inductive or ‘exploratory’ approach (Yin,

1994, p. 5) to case study research. The first case on the left-hand side of the figure is

almost purely inductive, with very little prior theory. But data collection and analysis

of the following cases on the left-hand side are informed by preliminary concepts from

that first case and from prior theory in the literature which can ‘enfold’ the data in these

exploratory case interviews (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 544). The disadvantage of this left

hand side's relatively inductive approach is that all cases cannot be compared with

others (because there are different interview questions for each case) and the researcher

runs the risk of ‘discovering’ existing theory and so not making a contribution to his or

her body of knowledge.

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The right hand side of Figure 2 shows our preferred position of ‘confirmatory’ case

research (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 17; similar to Yin, 1994, p. 18). The aim of

this type of research is to confirm or disconfirm elements of the prior theory, rather

than to develop theory as the left hand side aims to do. The prior theory is gained from

the literature or from some exploratory cases. Just one interview protocol is used for all

these right hand side cases, to facilitate cross-case analysis. Details of how to

implement both these approaches to case study research are provided in Perry (1998).

Validity and reliability. A final issue of case study research is criteria for judging its

quality. The issue of how validity and reliability are assessed in realism research has

not been finalised, and so that assessment usually uses a blend of positivist and

constructivist approaches (Riege and Nair, 1996). Only one attempt at establishing

validity and reliability within realism’s own worldview ahs been made (Healy and

Perry 1998). Of course, all reports of case study research should conclude with the

theory that has been built during the research project, together with some propositions

that could be tested for statistical generalisability to a population in later, survey

research.

Conclusion

In summary, the realism paradigm is appropriate for researching complex social

phenomena in marketing research about business networks and international marketing

strategy because of the nature of its reality, the required relationship between reality

and the researcher, and the related methodologies. Realism provides a coherent

approach of its own that is not a mere blend of other approaches. The application of

14
rigor through the adoption of case study research’s procedural approaches to data

gathering and analysis proposed in this paper enables the researcher to avoid the

criticisms of positivism and constructivism in marketing research about networks.

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Table 1 Basic belief systems of alternative inquiry paradigms
Paradigm
Item Positivism Realism Critical theory Constructivism
Ontology naïve critical realism: historical realism: critical
realism: reality is ‘real’ but ‘virtual’ reality relativism:
reality is real only imperfectly shaped by social, multiple local and
and and economic, ethnic, specific
apprehensible probabilistically political, cultural, ‘constructed’
apprehensible and and gender values, realities
so triangulation crystallised over
from many sources time
is required to try to
know it
Epistemology objectivist: modified subjectivist: subjectivist:
findings true objectivist: value mediated created findings
findings probably findings
true
Methodology experiments/ case dialogic/dialectical: hermeneutical /
surveys: studies/convergent researcher is a dialectical:
verification interviewing: ‘transformative researcher is a
of triangulation, intellectual’ who ‘passionate
hypotheses: interpretation of changes the social participant’
chiefly research issues by world within which within the world
quantitative qualitative and participants live being investigated
methods quantitative
methods such as
structural equation
modeling
Note: Essentially, ontology is 'reality', epistemology is the relationship between that reality and the
researcher and methodology is the technique used by the researcher to discover that reality.
Source: Perry, Alizadeh and Riege, (1996, p. 547) based on Guba and Lincoln (1994).

18
Table 2 Ontological assumptions of realism
Real domain Actual domain Empirical domain
Mechanisms 
Events  
Experiences   
Source: Wollin (1995), adapted from Bhaskar, 1978, p. 13

19
Figure 2 A comparison of two case study research positions: a purely exploratory,
inductive position (left hand side) and a preferred, confirmatory/diconfirmatory position
(right hand side).

Exploratory Confirmatory/disconfirmatory

high

Level of prior
theory
used in data
collection and
analysis

none
0 Number of cases
Source: Perry (1998).

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