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and Scholes, 1990; Bulow, 1989). These views place Checkland somewhat centrally betweenthe hard and soft poles of this continuum.Alternative views focus on the ‘soft’ orientation, and acknowledge the social constructionof organisations. Vickers posits that goals are replaced by relationship management. Theprevious history of a system, and its interactions with its environment, generate the possiblecourses of future actions, tempered by criteria by which they are judged (Vickers, 1984).Vickers’ work is placed in the interpretive tradition, which sees social action as based onpersonal and collective sense making (Checkland and Holwell, 1998) by a group engagedin dialogue. This view underlies other significant work, in which organisations are seen asnetworks of conversations (Winograd and Flores, 1986), based on Pask (1976)’s concept thatlanguage does not reflect the ‘world out there’ but constitutes it as ‘public knowledge’ in thesocial process of interaction.A non-positivist systems approach therefore explores the way in which people in organisationsattribute meaning to their world (Checkland and Holwell, 1998). The use of language in theanalyst/stakeholder dialogue does not reflect any participant’s view, but helps constitute it(Boland, 1985): different worlds are created for the system under consideration.2.2.3 Positivism and non-positivism in REThe dominant views as to the nature of Requirements Engineering in systems developmentalso span across the dimensions positivist – non-positivist and hard – soft.Within the positivist software development literature it is suggested that the purpose of theRE process is to accurately acquire and ‘represent’ the problem solution in a form appropriatefor development and implementation. Philosophically this may be seen to equate to theobjectivist view of knowledge. Just as knowledge exists independent of and external tothe individual – it is a fixed commodity with attributes, relationships and structure whichcan be known objectively – so too does a solution to an RE problem exist, independent ofthe socio-organisational context within which it is embedded. The problem becomes one ofcommunication – the fundamental goal of the objectivist paradigm is accurate transmissionand reception of knowledge (Miller and Miller, 1999). Implied within this epistemologicalstance is an acceptance that requirements exist:• hard – the software engineer creates models of physical situations in software (Fairley,1985); requirements describe the relationships among the phenomena of the problemcontext (Jackson, 1995). Pohl (1994) suggests that opaque personal views on the systemexist in the people involved in the Requirements Engineering process, and that these48