Paradigm

Paradigm as a Normative Framework

Scientific disciplines, according to Kuhn, establish for themselves a number of normative guidelines that regulate the activities of researchers within it as well as guard and distinguish it from others. Paradigms emerge as the dominant ways of thinking within a science and determine the accepted theoretical frameworks, the most commonly used methodologies, and the ways in which future scientists are trained. Thus, they describe the stable pattern of academic activity that provides rules about how research ought to be done, to be taught, and to be accepted by the largest number of specialists within a community of scholars.

Paradigm Shift

What Kuhn called “normal science” typically proceeds for extended periods of time and accumulates theoretical knowledge and empirical data that fall within the dominant paradigm. Research continues to refine the basic constructs within a paradigm and applies the generally accepted models so long as problems can be solved according to a certain procedure and the discipline is making progress. At a certain point in the cumulative and historical development of a discipline, when it fails to make progress or falls short of providing solutions for contemporary problems, clusters of new ideas begin to emerge and actively challenge assumptions that were taken for granted previously. Fueled primarily by new scholars unwilling to conform to the theoretical and methodological standards of the existing paradigm, a period of “extraordinary science” emerges and ushers in a paradigm shift. A new set of questions and research problems that disprove the assumptions and predictions of existing theory surfaces. Previously accepted methodologies fail to provide solutions to new problems, and the moral and ethical underpinnings of certain research techniques are questioned. Small groups of researchers actively challenge the scientific establishment within a discipline and stimulate a long-lasting debate about the new concepts and ideas they introduced. Dominant beliefs are slowly dismantled by a growing group of new converts, and the scientists still embracing the “old” prevailing set of thoughts are slowly dwindling in numbers yet vigorously resist accepting the new set of ideas. The paradigm shift is completed when the supporters of the original paradigm retire, die, or are otherwise largely replaced by scholars adhering to the[Page 350] new alternative set of ideas that emerges as a new dominant paradigm.

Paradigm Shift in Human Geography: An Example

Rather than reconstructing the history of human geographic thought and its multiple paradigm shifts during the past century, it is appropriate to illustrate the concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift in human geography by using one specific example. During the 1960s and early 1970s, inquiry in human geography was dominated by a paradigm based on positivist science. Geographers conceptualized their own role in the research process, and for that matter in the field, as that of detached, value-neutral observers out to collect empirical data that were to be fed into supposedly objective geographic models of society and space. These models of human spatial behavior were to be tested and continuously refined. For example, census data frequently were used to map out the complex sociodemographic patterns of cities. Multivariate statistical analysis, used in techniques such as factorial ecology, created maps representing the different social status or class of citizens that doubtlessly showed the spatial distribution of wealth and capital in an urban environment, but these representations could not answer the questions of how and why such patterns had developed and what exactly the causal mechanisms behind these patterns of distribution were. Such analysis could not be done by studying census data and mapping it out; rather, it required the researcher to get in touch with the community at hand and to get directly involved in understanding the political processes guiding the creation of urban neighborhoods. Subsequently, critical voices such as David Harvey emerged and created alternative models for understanding the complex lifeworlds of cities and the political power struggles within them. This initial push to understand cities used both humanistic and Marxist concepts, not positivist hypothesis testing and generalized model building, and led to a whole new paradigm of critical human geography that became a powerful toolbox for researchers.

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