The Modeling-Empiricism Gap: Lessons from the Qualitative-Quantitative Gap in Consumer Research‪.‬

Supply chain management is not the only area of business research experiencing divergent research methods. Nor is it the only discipline with methodologically aligned researchers who seem to be going their separate ways rather than interacting and learning from one another. Organizational behavior has gone through a similar paradigm battle. Communications has done the same. And over the past 25 years, my field of consumer research has experienced something quite similar. The contending paradigms in consumer research go by the names of Behavioral Decision Theory (BDT), Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) and Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). But often the first two are grouped together as "quantitative" or "positivistic" versus CCT, which is also labeled "qualitative," "postpositivist," or "interpretive." For simplicity, I will use the terms quantitative versus qualitative, although there are exceptions that occasionally defy these labels. Perhaps supply chain management scholars will see some familiar events in the history of qualitative versus quantitative tensions in consumer behavior research. In that hope, I will sketch the nature of these tensions and make some suggestions for how these camps might play nicely together if not actually learn from one another. ACT I: THE EMERGENCE OF CONSUMER RESEARCH