Rationality And Relativism

What’s the relationship between theories and the world to which theories meant to apply? Are there ultimate truth which can be obtained through a series of scientific validation and falsification? Is critical relativism appropriate for scientific research (marketing or consumer research in particular)? Those are some critical questions raised by this week’s readings that centered on the topic of rationality and relativism. Several authors provide different insights on answering those above questions as follows:
Initially, the debate between Cooper and Anderson introduced the controversial issue of whether scientist or consumer researcher should adopt the perspective of critical relativism. Cooper rejected the critical relativism saying that …show more content…
He also criticized Anderson and Peter’s arguments on relativism and proposed a weak form of relativism.
Through this week’s reading, I have further developed the conceptualization of relativism and realism and identified their main differences. To my understanding those two opposite scientific philosophies are ultimately arguing about the nature and existence of true as well as the relations between the scientific theories and the world to which they meant to explain. Some of my personal reflections are as …show more content…
This notion of symbolic interaction between customers and marketers creates the source of innovation and affect customer valuation reminds me of signaling theory and its application in management research. Basically signaling theory describing the behavior when two parties have access to different information. More specifically, senders must choose how to communicate that information and receivers must decide how to interpret the signal. To my understanding the symbol that marketer intends to convey to the consumer is one form of signals and how the consumer perceived that signal could potentially affect the valuation of product and service. The feedback that the sender of symbolic signals received from the receiver is the symbolic interaction in nature. Symbolic interactions not only exist between consumers and marketers but also in many other two parties like managers and employees (in the domain of human resource management), investors and entrepreneurs (in the domain of entrepreneurship), two strategic partners(in the domain of strategic management) firms and foreign partners (in the domain of international business). In conclusion, based on the logic of signaling theory future research could apply symbolic interaction conception into other business fields besides consumer research and see how it could affect organizational performance and innovation.