Positivism in Education: Philosophical, Research, and Organizational Assumptions.

The basic concepts of the positivistic paradigm are traced historically in this paper from Aristotle through Comte, the Vienna Circle, empiricism, Durkheim, sociobehavioral theory, and organizational theory. Various concepts have been added, deleted, and transformed through positivism's history, but its fundamental basis has remained the same: Objective reality exists that can be known only by objective means. Underlying this reality are organizational principles, and, thus, reality is inherently ordered. The ultimate purpose of positivism is to control and predict human and natural phenomena. Sociobehavioral and organizational theory apply positivism's basic concepts to the study of society and organizations. Under this paradigm, sociobehavioral theorists view society as an independent entity with inherent order underlying society and individual behavior. Human behavior is studied as a natural type of behavior via the empirical method in order to control and predict human social behavior. Positivistic organizational theorists posit that organizations that are inherently ordered are independent entities that can be studied as a type of social structure by empirically testing organizational behavior with the ultimate goal of controlling and predicting organizational behavior. (Contains 35 references.) (RT)