78 LISA CLAIRE WHITTEN
Adopting this perspective then, post-positivist research can be depicted as ‘resistance’
which, in the post-positivist lexicon, is understood as a co-existent of power – “where
there is power there is resistance” (Foucault 1978: 349). Power is always
accompanied by the possibility of resistance. Therefore, post-positivist research is
more than methodology: it is an act of resistance against dominant understandings of
what is accepted as legitimate knowledge: “a kind of attempt to emancipate historical
knowledges from... subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of
struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse”
(Foucault 1976: 349). Post-positivism in practice prioritises the exposition or
emancipation of otherwise repressed historical “knowledges” (Foucault 1976: 349).
Such knowledge is proposed to be found in marginalized areas of society, overlooked
in the hegemonic order of the day.3
The work of Kuhn is also of importance to building an understanding of postpositivism as a theoretical framework. Kuhn’s proposition of the existence of
historical paradigms directly critiques the positivist claim to scientific objectivity and
universalism (Halperin and Heath 2012: 61). Kuhn highlighted the inevitability of
“theory-laden” observations in scientific testing (Halperin and Heath 2012: 61). The
social context of the researcher, Kuhn argued, is inescapable. By extension the
subjectivity of an individual person is reflected in the macro practice of science.
Aligning with Foucault’s understanding of the inevitability of power and presence of
discipline in society, the collective that constitutes the scientific community are, for
Kuhn, a historically contingent group, impossibly attached to their own context.
Science is therefore an essentially social endeavour: “[s]cientific knowledge, like
language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all”
(Kuhn 1996: 210).
In light of this, Kuhn envisioned the growth of knowledge to be governed by the
aggregate of collective social action within the community of science – this he termed
a paradigm. “A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and,
3
Foucault (1980: 70-108) articulates his understanding of the dynamics of knowledge and power in his
‘Two Lectures’.