Alternative Inquiry Paradigms, Faculty Cultures, and the Definition of Academic Lives

Abstract

Introduction and Context The rise of alternative inquiry paradigms has provoked controversy and discord among scholars. The emergence of critical and interpretive scholarship has caused them to perceive fluctuating and out groups. Shared paradigms separate and define scholars in the same manner as disciplines, but along different, and sometimes less apparent, lines. With the rise of new paradigms, particularly over the past two decades, scholars working in the same university departments increasingly find themselves grounded within quite different intellectual traditions and distinct academic cultures. Scholars working in different paradigms view the purposes of their work differently, apply different evaluative standards, rely upon different methods and frameworks, and accept different types of values. With the evolution of new paradigms, wars have arisen in much of academe, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, as well as in related professional fields. Given the impact of the friction among scholars upon institutions, scholarship, and professional lives, higher education scholars must come to understand the dimensions and sweep of the discord (Weiland, 1995; Lincoln, 1992). In describing this intellectual scene, researchers have focused on the theoretical and philosophical bases of alternative paradigm scholarship, which includes varieties of critical theory or models based upon hermeneutics, phenomenology, structuralism, and so on. They also have continued to analyze the conceptual foundations of work within the established postpositivist paradigm. Few have explored what ensues, however, when new ways emerge of viewing what we can understand about the world and how we can understand it. In other words, even though scholars have focused considerable attention upon the increasingly pluralistic scholarly output in various academic fields and have offered some comment upon the emerging pluralistic professional environment that results from paradigm changes, they have paid only scant attention to the effects upon the individual scholars involved (Collier, 1993; Delgado, 1993; Post, 1992; Levinson & Balkin, 1991; Posner, 1987; Kissam, 1986; Allen, 1983). In response I explore in this study how paradigm choices influence the professional lives of scholars, particularly alternative paradigm scholars but also those who work in conventional paradigms. I focus upon a single discipline, law.(1) I adapt a social science-based typology of paradigms to law and suggest where my findings might extend to other academic fields, particularly those in the social sciences. The research literature on faculty culture indicates that scholars work within several cultures concurrently, including those defined by the discipline, institution, profession, and society (Austin, 1990; Tierney & Rhoads, 1993). I suggest that scholars, including law faculty, work within an additional culture determined by their inquiry paradigm. In turn, paradigm culture, in conjunction with the other cultures, shapes the overall climate within which individual scholars work. For alternative paradigm scholars, their paradigm influences their daily lives and scholarly careers in both positive and negative ways.(2) My exploratory study aims to improve understanding of the overall faculty culture that defines the debates that have accompanied the advent of critical and interpretive inquiry. Advancing substantive arguments within disciplines, including those that emerge from paradigmatic differences, has long occupied the attention of scholars, particularly those in law. Improving our understanding of the social and cultural factors that influence these debates in several disciplines--the connection between increasing discord and the advent of alternative inquiry paradigms--poses an appropriate and engaging set of questions for the higher education scholar. Paradigmatic differences, for instance, often coexist with identity-based differences among faculty, but paradigm issues may be less apparent than those of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. …