ABSTRACT
In order for PBE to legitimately enact the principles described earlier, it must maintain logical integrity. To do this it has to confront and respond to a series of practical and theoretical criticisms that can easily be overlooked or dismissed by researchers of particular ideological persuasions. Practitioner-based enquiry is a process that involves competition between different kinds of theories. Consequently, criticisms of PBE have a ‘deep structure’ that is rooted in nature/nurture and macro/micro debates in social and behavioural science and in arguments about the nature of knowledge.
