SOCIAL SCIENCES AND PARADIGMATIC POLARIZATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE 21st CENTURY

This paper critically examines the philosophical traditions in social sciences, the dialectics of paradigms, theory, and its strong links with method and the associated data collection techniques. It X-rays the polar tension between structure and agency paradigms as an explanatory framework for social analysis in the context of nomothetic and idiographic approaches to social research, considering social processes and social changes. The paper concludes that in the 20th century, the emerged social processes have deconstructed structures, thus, providing a clue for locating actors within structures in the 21st century. Actors’ interpretations, shared meanings, and lived experiences have tended to be significant in social analysis. By the same token, the structural methodology should be shored up to better provide answers to epistemological questions, given the undeniable structural context for micro-interactions and lived experiences, since structures are reified notions of representation, and this should be the intellectual pursuit of the 21st-century social scientists of the positive (structural) paradigm.