I have used the literature of educational and educational technology research in my own work for thirty years, and I think Tom Reeves' paper is an important challenge and position statement. It is amazing how long it takes for fruitful ideas to take root! Tom reminds us rightly that various researchers have sounded the same warnings loudly from time to time but that comparatively little heed has been taken of them, and his journal article categorization supports that view. I've certainly been guilty of slipping too easily into routine research patterns myself, so I think I know the problems.
The evidence Tom has drawn together supports his case that the general research paradigm that Guba and Lincoln described in 1982 as "essentially analytic, reductionist, empiricist, associationist, reactivist, nomological and monistic" is still broadly seen as the only "safe" bet for research theses and publication in respectable journals.
These same authors suggested then that "finding a paradigm that can tolerate real world conditions surely makes more sense than manipulating those conditions [i.e. the supposedly controllable variables of scientific inquiry] to meet the arbitrary design requirements of a paradigm." Certainly makes sense to me! There are many aspects of Tom's paper that merit careful (mindful!) exploration, so I'll limit myself here to the observation that the now well documented field of action research is one of the qualitative paradigms which sets out deliberately to narrow the gap between the purportedly detached researcher and the "subjects" researched, and seeks the kind of collective knowledge creation that can both satisfy criteria of social accountability and is directed towards real world results.
Guba, E., & Lincoln, Y. (1982). Epistemological and methodological bases of naturalistic inquiry. Educational Communications and Technology Journal, 30(4), 233-252.
Guba, E. (1981). Criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of naturalistic inquiries. Educational Communications and Technology Journal, 29(2), 75-91.