Mapping the aliran of the academic discipline of entrepreneurship: A ...

Heidegger, and secondly rather than viewing these as parts of a distinct school of thought I
view them as being part of a ‘continuum’ of knowledge. Pope and Mays [cited in Clark,
2000, p3] use the term continuum as part of a discussion on the terms qualitative and
quantitative and they ‘argue that the differences between ‘qualitative’ and quantitative’ are
overstated which has lead to the entrenchment of a dichotomy’ [Clark, 2000, p3].
3.1.1.03 In my limited exposure to academic thinking two things have puzzled me.
Firstly, is the lack of clear demarcation between methodologies and data collection
processes, particularly with regards to the application of adjectival terms ‘qualitative’ and
‘quantitative’. Secondly, is the perceived strong ‘dichotomous’ [Pope and Mays, cited in
Clark, 2000, p3] delineation between the qualitative and the quantitative, be these in
reference to either methodologies or data collection processes.
3.1.1.04 With regards to the first point, I am comfortable using the terms ‘qualitative’ and
‘quantitative’ with regards to data collection or data analysis processes relating to
particular types of data. Using these two terms with regards to methodologies I perceive as
being problematic. In this position statement I define methodologies as a particular
theoretical framework. These methodo logies are not necessarily quantitative or qualitative;
however certain theoretical frameworks may have a prejudice towards either a quantitative
or qualitative data collection process, or data analysis process. This prejudice may start to
evolve during the develop ment of the research methodology, possibly, partly as Barnes, et
al [2005] describes it, being due to the researcher ‘positioning oneself within a particular
discipline or research tradition’. This positioning is depicted graphically in the Model H
developed in section 2.4 a nd s hown in Graphic 2g.
3.1.1.05 It could be assumed that having initially selected Foucauldian discourse analysis
as a basic methodology for this dissertation, then the data collection processes would, by a
sense of continuity, be more qualitative. However the emergent methodological process I
undertook soon found that, because Husserl’s phenomenological archaeology (discussed
further in section 3.1.3), did not lend itself to a qualitative process of both data collection
and data analysis. I found much less cognitive dissonance in having a quantitative data
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