Chapter 3: There is No Ground and No Theory in Grounded Theory! Can We Create Both With Dialectic Ontology?

Glaser and Strauss’s grounded theory (GT) was a new theory of conceptual sociology. GT emerged from Glaser’s empirical sociology and Strauss’s pragmatic symbolic interactionism. The result of GT was a practical method to build theory from qualitative data. Unfortunately, the practicality of GT hid its ontology, epistemology, and philosophical foundations. Three waves, or historical periods, of scientific philosophy have attempted to reveal GT’s foundations. These waves, inductivism, positivism, and social constructivism, left GT with no ground and no theory. This chapter pinpoints where GT went off track by examining the foundations of GT. We use Hegel’s philosophy to develop a fourth wave of GT using a foundation of dialectic ontological processes, with precisely what that means being explored in-depth. The intent of this fourth wave of GT is to get it back on track. Fourth-wave GT recognizes the multiplicity of intra-active, self-organizing ontologies necessary to defining ground and theory. Fourth-wave GT embraces Peirce’s, Heidegger’s, Bhaskar’s, and Žižek’s ontologies, resisting the grounding fallacies of logical positivism and social constructivism, contributing to the question of what theory can be, creating both ground and theory by attending deeply to philosophical concerns.