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Abstract: For a long time, there have been two approaches in the research field of marketing: positivism methodology and interpretivism methodology. Positivism holds that the world exists objectively. The research methods include statistical survey and experimental research. Based on the results, the truth is obtained, which are then "regularized", "theorized" or "modeled". The positivism-based marketing research includes the development of new products and the construction of consumer behavior models. Interpretivism holds that there is no objective world, as the world is constructed by human beings, and truth arises from the interaction between "human and human" or "human and society". The research methods are mostly qualitative approaches. The interpretivism-based research, through participating or observing the product development process, investigates the experience and joyfulness of the consumers generated during the consumption process. Critical realism is the unity and transcendence of positivism and interpretivism. Critical realists hold that the world exists objectively, but human understanding is subjective. Therefore, the research is not to uncover the "constant rule" between the representations of things, nor to simply understand and explain social concepts and meanings, but to discover and explain the underlying mechanisms that cause representations of things to be constant. Critical realism has launched a third path for the study of marketing. At present, the existing research in the field of marketing includes the research on innovative models of cultural products, analysis of the causes of green brands segmentation from the aspects of individual consumers, the rationality of green brands and the reference groups, as well as the research on the micro-mechanism of media dissemination. Throughboth quantitative and qualitative research methods, the limitations of these two approaches, positivism and interpretivism, can be overcome. It is expected that such researches and future researches can reveal the "mechanism", "semi-law" or "semi-rule" in the field of marketing, which will bring more influence and provide more inspiration to the research in the academic and practical fields.
Keywords: positivism; interpretivism; Critical Realism
1.Introduction
Since it was first proposed in the U.S. in the early 19th century, marketing has gone under more than 100 years of development. Converse (1945) started the methodological debate with the question "Is marketing a science or art?". Researchers from various countries conducted several stages of debates on the discipline nature,...