Knowledge, Research Questions and Research Paradigm

The research question thus posed the objective for exploring and discovering processes that led to knowledge creation. Knowledge by itself is a difficult construct which is viewed from various disciplinary perspectives such as philosophy, cognitive psychology, sociology can pose a myriad and often conflicting variety of definitions. Broadly there are western philosophies which posit separations of reality of physical word from the individual while there are eastern that stress upon knowledge to be occurring to the whole personality and character rather than in separated components of body and mind.

According to the interpretive approach knowledge is personal and constructed through interpretations of meanings. Knowledge is emergent and path dependent. Therefore, by building a linked structure of event pathways the process of accumulation of knowledge and its creation can be constructed. Such study involved collection of naturalistic data and observations and interpretation and validation of meanings. It required creation of a framework for undertaking the research.

The interpretive research paradigm however is relatively new with its traditions yet to be fully established. Only a few works existed to demonstrate the use of methods for data collection analysis and theory building. Apart from principles suggested by Lincoln and Guba (1985) and Klien and Myers (1999) which were yet to be widely applied and agreed upon there were no standards for conduct and evaluation of such research.