Breaking Incommensurability Boundaries? On the Production and Publication of Inter-Paradigmatic Research

"Purpose: This essay takes issue with the incommensurability thesis, which assumes that meaningful research work across different paradigms cannot occur. Could it be that the thesis understates the case for meaningful relationships to develop across paradigms? Is it possible that researchers can authentically and rewardingly collaborate across paradigms and create joint studies published in established journals? Approach: Based on the observation that inter-paradigmatic research exists, we investigate two questions. How is inter-paradigmatic research expressed in the accounting research literature? How can we comprehend the process that underlies the development and publication of inter-paradigmatic research, focusing on cohabitation involving the positivist and interpretive paradigms of research? Findings: To deal with our first question, we focus on two inter-paradigmatic articles: Greenwood et al. (2002) and Paugam et al. (2021). We find each article showcases a dominant paradigm – whereas the role of the other paradigm is represented as secondary; that is, complementing and enriching the dominant paradigm. To address our second question, we rely especially on our involvement as coauthors of three inter-paradigmatic studies, published between 2019 and 2022 in FT50 journals. Our analysis brings to the fore a range of facilitators that fit our experiences, such as the development of cross-paradigmatic agreement within the authorship to cope with the complexity surrounding the object of study, the crafting of methodological compromises (e.g., regarding the number of documents to analyze), and the strategizing we enacted in dealing with journal gatekeepers. Originality: From our experiences, we develop a model, which provides a tentative template to make sense of the process by which inter-paradigmatic research takes place. The model highlights the role of what we call “epistemic mediation” in producing inter-paradigmatic studies. "