Page 119 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

What is understood about the nature of knowledge, how it is known to be true is the epistemology. The clearer epistemology is described the better is a position to think how an in-depth way of thinking might be developed, to be able to enter into new fields and/or explorations. Epistemology usually leads the researcher to a methodology that is characteristic to that position.
The philosophical variations and the impact of such, remain hidden in publications, with controversies, disputes and ambiguity towards the “scientific” status of AR and the importance for organisational and corporate research as a possible result. As noted by Reason and Bradbury (2001, p. xxiv) “The AR family includes a wide range of methodologies, grounded in different, traditions that express competing philosophical assumptions”. Cassell and Johnson (2006, p.786) argue that “to describe and explain the apparent diversity of AR in the domain of management and organisation studies, by reflexively clarifying how assumptions of variable philosophical nature, about ontology and epistemology, are leading to variants of AR with their associated concepts: summative and normative”. Philosophical assumptions are underpinning any AR categorisation and notwithstanding the importance of understanding the philosophy. Since there is multiple variation in their idiom, as noted by philosophers such as Norris (1996), Margolis (1986) and Bernstein (2015), explaining the difference in understanding of science, they are subsequently developed into different assumptions in the direction of epistemology or ontology. Each variant is expressed as a concept of the relative conditions between the receiver (subject) and the knowledge (“known”).
In this study the ontological position of “realism” is considered whereas from the epistemological stance, the approach of a “pluralist” is implemented. In the following section an ongoing debate regarding AR is described.
Positivism versus Interpretism dilemma in Action Research
Among others, in the field of social science studies, the main direction of research is either phenomenological subjective ( Giorgi, 1997; Tesch, 2013) or positivist objective (Lee, 1991; Halfpenny, 2014). So, there are two completely opposite positions regarding the ontology and epistemology.
Positivism adopts objectivist ontology and a realist epistemology. It is developed from the empiricist tradition of natural science and sees social science as having the same possibilities as natural science. That is, it is possible to observe everything that happens and understand it as such without any mediation, thereby denying any appearance/reality dichotomy. The theory is used to generate hypothesis, which can
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