Guba and Kuhn ABOUT PARADIGM.....

Paradigms are fundamentally the worldviews (value windows) through which things are seen, and known. Since 1970, some huge shifts have occurred in the basic beliefs and assumptions that are held about nature, reality and humanity, particularly regarding the conduct of social science. The conventional paradigms of science have been challenged ontologically (the perceived nature of reality), epistemologically (the relationship between the knower and the known) and methodologically (approved ways to carry out investigations). The term 'paradigm' itself is commonly associated with the pioneering work of Thomas Kuhn (1970), despite the fact that he supposedly used it in a score of different ways himself. Indeed, the paradigm concept can mean many things to many people.

In 1989 an important Alternative Paradigms Conference was held in San Francisco to clarify the parameters of what some believe are the three leading paradigms that have succeeded positivism in social science: postpositivism (objectivist, but critico-realist, lenses on the world), critical theory (dialogic and transformative outlooks that seek to eliminate false consciousness of some particular kind or kinds) and constructivism (relativist views that identify multiple but contextual truths in and of the world). The debates about the ethics, the goodness criteria and the values involved as knowledge accumulates under each of these paradigms have been comprehensively reproduced in Guba (1994). Some social scientists consider that the focus of the 1989 gathering was reductionist in celebrating just three so-called 'master' paradigms, and claim genres like structuralism and neo-Marxism are also worthy of the term 'paradigm', while still others would apply the concept even more flaccidly for an infinity of interpretative positions variously grounded in race, class, gender and the like.

PARADIGM IN THE TOURISM INDUSTRY
 In 1996, the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Sociology of Tourism held an important paradigma-tologie in Finland to explore the manner in which competing worldviews empower and/or delimit understanding in tourism. The ISA text that emanated from that symposium (Hollins-head and Graburn, forthcoming) should prove to be a highly valuable examination of both the manner in which different paradigms exercise hegemony over the industry and the fashions in which different paradigms are respectively influential in interpreting heritage, culture and nature, as they interface with the tourism phenomenon.