Negotiating incommensurability in marketing theory

This paper reviews the recent paradigm debates in marketing and reflects on the current pluralism of paradigms. It makes the case that a future important direction for marketing theory is multiple paradigm research; an avenue that has been widely explored in organisation studies, but as yet has had little extended treatment in marketing or consumer research. As a first movement in this direction, we review the debates that have taken place in organisation studies showing how the so-called “paradigm mentality” has been seen to hamper constructive debate across paradigms, whereby researchers from different paradigms can fail to agree on inter-paradigm standards of evaluation so that theory choice between the divergent outputs of two different paradigms cannot easily be resolved. We then turn to the incommensurability thesis. We question the veracity of the early incommensurability thesis apparent in Kuhn’s writing and the subjectivism that follows from Feyerabend’s interpretation of incommensurability, negotiating these arguments by drawing upon the Kuhnian concept of taxonomical lexicon, to suggest that learning alternative paradigms is similar to learning another natural language. By way of a conclusion, we reflect on the possibilities and problems associated with undertaking doctoral research using a multiple paradigmatic team brought together to contribute the distinct insights that each paradigm brings to the project.