[Homework, Philosophy of Science]

[dittom]

Hello!

From what I've seen, I believe this is the right subforum for it, but please excuse me if it isn't!

I'm looking for people that can point me to the right direction/theories that can help me to justify my research design for my bachelor thesis. I reached out multiple times to the relevant person/lecturer, but don't get a response, so forums are now my only help :/ Personally, I have no connection to philosophy and my major could not be further away from it, so I struggle quite a lot with it.

Short background of the thesis: It lies in the field of business administration and is concerned with improving the sourcing strategy of a company. Said company has the majority of their suppliers in China and it is aspired to choose new suppliers in Europe, in order to increase the availability of the their products. This will be achieved through determining supplier selection criteria through a literature review and assigning these criteria a weight by applying the analytical hierarchy process (AHP).

Assignment: I need to motivate/justify the above described research design, by for example using theory of philosophy of science such as positivism, falsification etc.

What I did so far: This was my first submission on this:

My research will be inductive in nature and especially critical realism, which is concerned with ontology, will play an important role, as it is feasible to talk about an objective reality here, where we however only see the manifestations of this reality and not reality itself, and the findings of the conducted research should be able to be generalized, in order to provide more to the scientific body of knowledge. The use of qualitative data through AHP, which aids in the decision making process, together with quantitative data such as supplier lead times, supports this choice. Another possibly interesting research design to discuss here would be positivism, and especially post-positivism. As in critical realism, we believe in objective reality and want to generalize our research findings. But in contrast, there is no ‘’manifestation’’ of reality, but only reality itself. Still, it will be sticking to falsification, mainly to try to prove something is wrong, instead of the other way around.

It was rightfully remarked that it is too abstract and lacks elaboration on the implication of the type of design and its basic assumptions.

What now? What I struggle with is first which theory of philosophy of science I should apply here. What I wrote so far isn't really grounded, I just found some youtube comment that said that it is usually like that and I was like "Yeah ok, I can live with that". I watched some videos on positivism, falsification, constructivism etc. so I would claim that I know what the basic thought behind these is, however, I have no clue how they relate to my research design?? I mean, what does objective realitites and positivism or critical realism have in common with me looking for new suppliers?? All of this just seems so far fetched, made up and irrelevant to me. I really struggle to make this less abstract and see the bigger picture or so. Same goes for "implications" and "basic assumptions" and this stuff.

If someone could point me into the right direction for this, I would very appreciate it!