Study of the Effect of Changing the Philosophical Paradigms on Knowledge Management

The word paradigm has become so inflexible in the warp of various disciplines, from natural science to human sciences, that it is necessary to understand the concept and dimensions of it for each researcher and, accordingly, has become a dominant concept in the philosophy of science. There are various definitions of the paradigm, but one can imagine a paradigm as a set of fundamental beliefs and assumptions that are embodied in ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Several divisions of paradigms have been made, but in the science of organization and management, the division of paradigms into structuralism, fundamental anthropology, interpretiveism, and functionalism are more prevalent. In this paper, with a description of each paradigm, the impact of changing the philosophical paradigms on knowledge management has been discussed and it is stated that over time the paradigm of knowledge management has changed from positivism to postmodern. In addition to examining the process of changing the paradigm in theory, a study was conducted on 40 papers between 2011 and 2015 to determine the dominant paradigm of the international research space in knowledge management. The results showed that the paradigm of functionalism (positivism) overwhelms other paradigms.