Scientific Method and Marketing: An Analytical Framework

We propose a unified framework for identifying and interrelating the main issues underlying the debate about the nature of scientific method. This is done in terms of a process model of the scientific process in which the core elements are the reality to be understood, observations, theory, action resulting from theory and the larger social system, which includes science as a component institution. The main issues that have been the concern of students of scientific method in the natural and social sciences for centuries, and which have been the subject of intense debate in the marketing literature in the 1980s and 1990s are depicted in terms of the nature of one or more of these component elements and in terms of the interrelations among them.