On the experience of paradigm shift amongst researchers - Comprehensive modeling outline of the processes and challenges at play

This dissertation studies how researchers experience paradigmatic shift processes, from the perspective of subjective experience, to address the following questions: « What does the lived experience of researchers who have undergone a paradigm shift reveal in terms of issues at stake and process experienced ? » To do this, I have developed a three-pronged theoretical framework that examines what follows: Kuhn’s concept of paradigm and paradigm shift; the concept of change as a process of transformation and learning; and the potential ramifications for researchers in terms of their identity and creative process. I have carried out this research using a posture of ‘practitioner-researcher in the field of research’, in order to better understand the mechanisms at play in the individual experience of a paradigm shift that can be encountered by a researcher, and to be able to engage my own experience in devising and carrying out this project. I also aimed to learn from the results of this research and to open up a new perspective in my own changing epistemological posture. This research uses a qualitative and hermeneutical methodology that is profoundly phenomenological in order to study lived experience within its most subtle expression. It shows contexts that are often tense and the diverse coping strategies used. It highlights reciprocal influences between the researchers’ identity processes and their paradigm shift, by showing at the same time the role of values in what appears as a process of transformation of the individual, and the strategies adopted when faced with the newness inherent in these situations, thus revealing a singular experience shared by all the researchers that I studied : being positioned at the margins of a paradigm, at the edges of inter- or even more, trans-disciplinarity.