Paradigms of Theory in Higher Education. ASHE Annual Meeting Paper.

A content analysis was done of the past 3 years of articles from five journals (Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, the American Educational Research Journal, and the Journal of College Student Personnel) in order to gather and examine empirical evidence of the impact of paradigms, through journal literature, on the higher education knowledge base. Analysis was done according to the paradigm schema of Burrell and Moran (1979) and revealed that the bulk of journal literature was functionalist (that is, that it is based on realist, positivist, determinist, and nomothetic approaches to social science). No examples of the radical humanist paradigm were found, and only a few radical structuralist studies (combination of functionalist and radical humanist paradigms) appeared. Thirty articles made use of at least one assumption of radical sociology in the form of conflict, domination, contradiction, emancipation, and deprivation, but no assumptions of radical change were present in the journal literature. There was complete lack of research in the interpretive paradigm (basically functionlist but more nominalist, anti-positivist, voluntarist, and idiographic in its approach to social science). The results indicated that higher education knowledge is dominated by the assumptions of objective social science and the sociology of regulation (functionalism). The knowledge base is thus incomplete because of the unwillingness to explore the new world of alternative paradigms. Contains 78 references. (GLR)