In philosophy, ontology can be taken to broadly refer to conceptions of reality.
Objectivist ontology sees social phenomena and their meanings as existing
in dependently of social actions, whereas constructivist ontology infers that social
phenomena are produced through social interaction and are therefore in a constant
state of revision (Bryman and Bell, 2003: 19–20). Epistemology refers to what should
be regarded as acceptable knowledge in a discipline (ibid. 13). Epistemological
perspectives are bounded by the positivist view that the methods of the natural
sciences should be applied to the study of social phenomena, and the alternative
orthodoxy of interpretivism which sees a difference between the objects of natural
science and people in that phenomena have different subjective meaning for the
actors studied. Understanding the influence that competing paradigms have on
the way in which research is carried out is fundamental to understanding the contribution
that it makes to knowledge. Taking Bryman’s (1988) definition of a paradigm as a
‘cluster of beliefs and dictates which for scientists in a particular discipline influence
what should be studied, [and] how research should be done’, different research
paradigms will inevitably result in the generation of different kinds of knowledge about
the industry and its organisations. This perspective sees different paradigms as
incommensurable, and so the choice of which paradigm to adopt fundamentally
affects the ways in which data are collected and analysed and the nature of the
knowledge produced.