Research pick: A paradigm shift in paradigm shifts - "Paradigm busters: researchers into stomach ulcers and corporate psychopaths"

Researchers who present radical new theories are often ridiculed and their work rejected despite the evidence they provide because the new theory upsets the received wisdom or is so outside what is considered to be the accepted paradigm. But there is a third way forward that could allow radical new thinking to emerge without it being lambasted unnecessarily so that it can be judged wholly on its merits.

Writing in the International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, a team from Australia and the UK discuss two well-known theories that too many years to be accepted into the mainstream. The first was the medical discovery that peptic ulcers and stomach cancer are not generally caused by stress but by infection with a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. The second was the social theory in management research that looked at how toxicity in the workplace can arise because of the presence of corporate psychopaths. Both “new” theories took many years to be accepted, both are now widely acknowledged.

Clive R. Boddy of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, Sharyn Curran of Curtin University in Bentley, Western Australia, and Fiona Girkin of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, have viewed these two discoveries through the lens of Kuhn’s ideas of scientific paradigms. American philosopher of science Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) used the word “paradigm” in his 1962 work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and described it as a perspective on reality For instance, Galileo’s heliocentric view of the solar system, which was initially rejected when the paradigm shift in understanding broke through the common culture and of the day.

The team re-emphasises that paradigms are not merely abstractions, but are embodied in people, in their relationships and interactions, in institutions and in their culture. Kuhn’s insight was that academic inquiry is never merely academic but is embedded within academic society and society as a whole. The critical point is that an established paradigm is just that, it is established, entrenched, embedded, and can thus preclude the development and acceptance of a new paradigm in a given field irrespective of how compelling that new paradigm might be should the old school deign to even consider it.

A new paradigm must traverse five stages. Almost as with psychological changes in the five stages of grief The new paradigm must transcend initial ridicule, methodological innovations, rejection of evidence, attempts to disprove it, and then to final acceptance, recognition, until we see the paradigm shift.

Boddy, C.R., Curran, S. and Girkin, F. (2023) ‘Paradigm busters: researchers into stomach ulcers and corporate psychopaths’, Int. J. Management Concepts and Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp.11–29.