The Paradigm wars
It has been widely documented that the formation of contemporary academic disciplines and inquiry processes was shaped by modernity (see Jay, 2001; Leitch, 2000). The modernist orientation was characterized by the following assumptions: that the objective of inquiry had to be carefully defined and separated from other domains (i.e., language system separated from history, society, and politics); that the final answers to question about nature or society were available from empirical inquiry; that one had to be objective and detached in order to develop valid finding; that the findings had to be generalizable to claim universal validity; and that the deeper one went underneath surface-level forms and contexts, the more one discovered the core rules and norms that mattered.