ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights methodological and paradigmatic approaches that can be taken to enrich people understanding of workplace victimisation. The chapter outlines how these approaches and perspectives would seek to research and understand workplace victimisation in its many forms. It uses the term 'workplace victimisation' as an umbrella term that encompasses negative social acts in the workplace such as incivility, bullying, abuse, and violence, among others. Scholars may use one of two dominant approaches, or an approach that combines the two, to investigate a phenomenon: quantitative or qualitative. There are two dominant epistemologies that are: positivism and anti-positivism. The chapter describes paradigms sets up, which provides examples of how each paradigm could be applied to various forms of workplace victimisation. It discusses four paradigmatic approaches: functionalism, interpretivism, critical management, and postmodernism. Interpretivism focuses on the meanings that individuals attach to their experiences.
