Arguably, positivist paradigm relates to business studies to a greater extent compared to other disciplines. This is because business relationships are justly perceived as aggregation of relationships between individuals within and between firms and positivism is one of the most suitable approaches to study the nature of relationships.
Positivism as an epistemology is associated with the following set of disadvantages:
Firstly, positivism relies on experience as a valid source of knowledge. However, a wide range of basic and important concepts such as cause, time and space are not based on experience.
Secondly, positivism assumes that all types of processes can be perceived as a certain variation of actions of individuals or relationships between individuals.
Thirdly, adoption of positivism in business studies and other studies can be criticized for reliance to status quo. In other words, research findings in positivism studies are only descriptive, thus they lack insight into in-depth issues.
The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Dissertation in Business Studies: a step by step approach by John Dudovskiy, author of this article and the main author of this blog explains how to apply positivism and other branches of research philosophy and research methodology in simple ways.