“In thinking … of a topic of the rise and fall of the West, it may be not so much a question of thinking of the overreaching of the Western economies and societies by geographically Eastern ones, as the infusion of world hegemonic Western and capitalist ways of thinking and being with ideas traditionally associated with the East. If I am right, however, in the narrative of this book, these ideas and ways of being are not the prerogative of the East. They are equally consonant with both the teaching of the Christ and the whole thrust of the radical egalitarian libertarian tradition that incorporates both [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and [Karl] Marx. A new synthesis is what is required; and it is this new synthesis which this book attempts to initiate. Such a synthesis will see a partial rapprochment of the best insights of the New Age and the New Left movements, but such insights will be set in a context of a global philosophy which resonates with themes traceable back to the dawn of the great world civilisations (and perhaps even beyond).” [Roy Bhaskar. From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Page 69.]

“Let us look at the higher levels of freedom I distinguish: emancipation from specific ills through to autonomy or self-determination, through to well-being, through to flourishing, through to universal flourishing or eudaimonia. They all encompass colonial rebellion, the suffragettes’ revolt, the revolt of the oppressed, the revolt of the periphery, and so on. It is very Eurocentric of people to say that this is western – to imagine that, say, Islamic people today are not concerned about liberty. I find that an extraordinary idea, indeed a quasi-Eurocentric conceit. They are concerned about liberty under the declension of self-determination, of freedom from arbitrary arrest, or freedom to practice their religion in the way they want to, and so on. This is what we are all striving for. The struggle for freedom comes from people wherever they are, there is nothing Eurocentric about it.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 138.]

“It is worth bearing in mind, in the context of the world historical problem of agency for the radical libertarian left, that even inaction makes a difference.” [Roy Bhaskar. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page xviii.]

“… [We should conduct] an examination of emancipatory theorists such as [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Noam] Chomsky, or those in the socialist traditions such as [Karl] Marx.…

“There is a primary or essential level which is good, true, autonomous, etc. and a secondary, emergent or derivative level which is evil, false, illusory, heteronomous and oppressive.”

[Roy Bhaskar. The Philosophy of metaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Page 348.]

“We have the idea of an irrealist categorial structure masking and overlaying and acting as a surface filter to a profound deeper realist structure which is waiting (and wanting) to be free of this irrealist superstructure. And the idea of autonomous human beings in some basic sense aspiring to be free, that is to be shed of, or rather to shed themselves the heteronomous structures that impede and prevent the liberation of humanity.” [Roy Bhaskar, “Introducing Transcendental Dialectical Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 1, July 2000. Pages 15-21.]

“To put it in a nutshell, as [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau said—this is the summary of the western tradition of libertarian thought—man is born free but is everywhere in chains, in his inner essence he is free, but in his actuality he is in chains. That inner essence is not allowed to manifest, not allowed to express itself in society.” [Roy Bhaskar. From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“… the idea of autonomous human beings in some basic sense aspiring to be free, that is to be shed of, or rather to shed themselves of the heteronomous structures that impede and prevent the liberation of humanity.” [Roy Bhaskar. From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“… it is not that we have to hope that an autonomous or realist society will magically manage to spring into existence. It already is in existence. It is the heteronomous and irrealist world which is entirely dependent on it. This is itself a liberating thought, though thoughts are only truly liberating when geared into action. But it does mean that the world of duality, split, alienation, illusion, ideology, fetishism, money, reification can only survive for so long.” [Roy Bhaskar. From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“… if we can come to the realisation that at the deepest level we are autonomous, that if we are slaves or otherwise oppressed, we are nevertheless free, a freedom upon which all oppression ultimately depends; if we can realise that we are such beings as a dialectical critical realist and perhaps a transcendental dialectical critical realist describes, then we do have grounds for the belief that ours is the struggle for the survival of humanity. For humanity cannot survive unless we become free.” [Roy Bhaskar. From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“Different ‘highest-order’ explanatory theories will contain their own conception of what kinds of social organization are possible and of what human beings essentially are (or can become). The most powerful explanatory theory, by situating the greatest range of real (non-Utopian) possibilities, will increase our rational autonomy of action.” [Roy Bhaskar. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Page 70.]

“… I was well known to be a Marxist and to identify with the revolutionary left.” [Roy Bhaskar in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 47.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar continued to work metacritically within the conatus to freedom linking [René] Descartes, [Immanuel] Kant, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel and [Karl] Marx … and—uniquely among major contemporary philosophers—remained committed to a (libertarian) form of revolutionary socialism.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “Introduction” to Roy Bhaskar. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page xviii.]

To briefly illustrate, people do not, generally speaking, join DꞌIʿIŠ (Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, دإِعِش)— ISIS or ISIL—in order to identify with an ideology. People join DꞌIʿIŠ, relationally, in order to be a part of a community. Therefore, demireality, as in critical realism, needs to be abandoned. Challenging ideologies of oppression, as in some other branches of the critical social theoretical tradition, is letting the tail wag the dog or putting the cart before the horse. Moreover, America first must be replaced by America last. “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” [“Matthew 19:30.” Berean Study Bible. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Bible Hub. 2016. Page 36.] Similarly, as a man from an Ashkenazi (Hebrew/ʿIḇəriyṯ, אַשְׁכְּנַזִּי, ʾẠšəkənạzziy, “Germanic”) Jewish maternal and paternal background, I am not anti-Israeli, nor am I opposed to any country. Israel already exists as a sovereign, albeit imperialist, nation, so there is nothing to advocate. I am pro-proletarian, pro-subaltern, pro-minority, and, in particular, pro-Palestinian.

With respect to the West, identity politics have been maligned by some on both the left and the right. However, identity politics are not, in themselves, the problem. The concern should be the common practice of divorcing sociohistorical experiences of domination from the larger dialectical generative mechanisms. Practically, identity politics must be coupled with intersectionality or a recognition of demireality. One shifts the center of one’s thinking to the marginalized Other. Then, identity politics can, through a process of absenting absences, transcend issues of collective identity and, as class consciousness, become revolutionary. Rejecting identity politics outright serves no purpose. Indeed, class politics are themselves a version of identity politics. The actuality of alienation is, by necessity, contextualized in the sociohistorical experiences of particular human populations. Rather than some version of idealistic utopianism, a Bhaskarian concrete utopianism, or applied metaReality, is required for this emancipatory project.

“Dialectical metaRealism (MP3 audio file), a perspective which was renamed on June 26th, 2015, applies critical realism, including the philosophy of metaReality, to intersectionality (a branch of critical social theory), to social constructionism, to world-systems analysis, and to the social model of disability. The phenomenological methodology used in Dialectical metaRealism is Heartfulness Inquiry™. In Echoes of Cosmic Unity™, the ontology (study of being or existence) of Dialectical metaRealism, reality is illustrated on multiple levels (beginning with elemental cohesion and ending with cosmic unity). The real structures or mechanisms refer to stepped-down degrees of Spirit (generative mechanisms)—manifested as Will (free will), Word (perfections), or Cause (agency or action). Social construction (emancipatory action in copresence) is distinguished from social destruction (action in demireality). The present writer previously used other designations for this evolving perspective, including (in chronological order) Structural Dialectics, Conflict Constructionism, Neocritical Realism, Restructurational Realism, Recontextual Realism, Transmodern Critical Realism, Dialectic Constructionism, Structurization Theory (not to be confused with Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory), Emancipatory Constructionism, and then back to Structurization Theory.

“To provide some context, following the U.S. Supreme Court decision to mandate marriage equality or ‘same-sex marriage’ (2015), a national conversation began over whether a bakery could, as a matter of religious conscience, refuse to bake a cake for a Gay or Lesbian wedding. On August 9th, 2015, the writer offered, as a straight ‘ally,’ a response to a YouTube video, Gay Wedding Cake with Confederate Flag? Question, ‘Baking a Gay wedding cake is a simple emancipatory act (social construction). On the other hand, baking a cake with a Confederate flag on it pays tribute to a system of human capitalism – slavery (social destruction). Of course, my comments are ethical, not legal.’ Dialectically absenting, or removing, heterosexism (‘homophobia’) is preparing society for the emancipation of the GSD (gender-and-sexual-diversity) community (absenting the absence).

“Similarly, the easy availability of firepower in the U.S., while perhaps an issue deserving of some debate, resulted from a misinterpretation of the the country’s Constitution. A standing army, which the founding fathers by and large opposed, has made a ‘well regulated militia’ functionally irrelevant. Nevertheless, ‘gun rights’ do not, in my opinion, provide a sufficient explanation for the high rate of American mass shootings. In this regard, American historican Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, ‘… [I would like to mention] the importance of the frontier, … as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.’ A dialectic between advanced capitalism and rugged individualism has produced an individual, primarily white and male, who is, at once, alienated from nature, culturally conservative, and conspiracy-minded. Much as darkness is the absence of light, the demireality of alienation might be conceived as an absence of metaReality. That absence can only be absented, or contradicted, by living in copresence, duality, the ground state, or the cosmic envelope.

“One of the major characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a compromised ‘theory of mind’ or ability to empathize with others and their mental states. This condition of neurologically mediated alienation can be absented by, epistemologically, shifting the center, or focus, of one’s thinking from various forms of domination, including capitalism and Neurelitism™ (neurological elitism), to the oppressed and the subaltern (the marginalized or ‘the othered’). Ontologically, the Autist can move from the demireality or intersectionality of disunity in difference to the copresence of unity in difference.

“Dialectical metaRealism supports shifting the center, using intersectionality, from imperialism to the uprisings of the subaltern (the marginalized or the ‘othered’). The vision of Dialectical metaRealism is framed by aspects of impossibilism (MP3 audio file), or antireformism, and spontaneism (MP3 audio file) which are accepted within some tendencies of Luxemburgism, autonomism, and Trotskyism. Although this writer is not a member of any political organization, he appreciates many of the views held by Solidarity, a multi-tendency movement which arose out of Trotskyism, and by Freedom Road Socialist Organization (left refoundation), rooted in Maoism. The world-system (or ‘world order’) is seen as progressing through five revolutionary stages (the dialectics or contradictions of capitalism, individualist anarchism, rebuilding from the bottom up, global state-centric socialism, and a locally centered communist new world order).

“Therefore, the end result (the dialectical synthesis or unity of the contradictions) is expected to be a world-system based upon grassroots stateless socialism (or communism), including municipally administered organizations for financial redistribution and political localism. The withering away of ‘the state’ refers to the capitalist state. Without capitalism, any state would be a proletarian state or, in other words, a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ All of its citizens shall presumably be workers. As such, the communist left, with Rosa Luxemburg, is not a libertarian socialism. Whether the eventual cosmopolitan communist society could be described as a state may simply be an issue of semantics. The obvious phonetic similarity between Dialectical metaRealism and dialectical materialism is certainly striking.

“Roy Bhaskar was, by his own admission, a moral realist. He grounded this perspective in an innovative ethical naturalism or ontology of ‘natural law.’ Perhaps the present writer’s personal standpoint on morality or ethics can, at least to some extent, be attributed, at least on face value, to a matter of semantic or terminological preference. A positional response, or caveat, to Bhaskar’s view would distinguish between the acquisition of virtues or attributes from a stratified higher and human nature, on the one hand, and the actuality, historicity, or relative reality of sociocultural values and norms, on the other. Thus, one may, in this context, refer to a dialectic between the metaReality of virtues and the actuality of values.

“More specifically, in the dialectical absenting of the absence (demireality), virtues are uncovered from the universal higher nature (or the substance of faith) and the universal human nature (or copresence) of humanity. The methodology, which is phenomenological, can become particularly effective and profound by directly focusing one’s attention upon A̓pokálypsis (Common Greek/Koinḗ Hellēniká, Ἀποκάλυψις). Moralities, by contrast, are the products of socially contextualized human agency. While agreeing with Bhaskar that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is,’ an added qualification would be that any such ‘is,’ or natural-law ethics, should be carefully distinguised from the actuality and the subordinate epistemological relativity (or empiricism) of concrete social and historical experience.

“Dialectical metaRealism also accepts the critique, by critical realists in the theology-and-science dialogue, of naïve realism, including both religious literalism, and scientism or Humean empiricism. From a naïve realist standpoint, reality is immediately available to the empirical observer. On the other hand critical realists in the theology-and-science dialogue, borrowing from empistemological critical realism, have wisely affirmed that human knowledge is indirect. Consequently, both scientists (including social scientists) and theologians need to be humble about their claims for knowledge. The intellectual posturing of Christian fundamentalism and the New Atheism are both rejected as untenable.”

[Mark A. Foster, “A Short Essay on Dialectical metaRealism.” The Institute for Dialectical metaRealism™. 2016. Updated and retrieved on August 9th, 2016.]

“The Institute for Dialectical metaRealism™, a neo-Marxian think tank, is the theory, research, and literary agency of The MarkFoster.NETwork™. Substantively, the institute has focused upon clinical sociology (with public sociologists as public intellectuals), advocacy journalism, history, and religious studies, including the Bahá’í Faith, Ṣūfism (Taṣawwuf), Pentecostalism, and the sociology of language and religion. A Marxist-Luxemburgist approach to Bhaskarian critical realism is applied to: intersectionality (a branch of critical social theory), social constructionism, world-systems analysis, the social model of disability, and community organizing.

“The institute’s dialectical unity turn is analogous to the late Roy Bhaskar’s spiritual turn. Ontology (being) in Dialectical metaRealism™ (DmR™) is the realist Echoes of Cosmic Unity™. A multi-layered enfoldment of eternal, unknowable unities (not consciousness) approximates Bhaskar’s cosmic envelope, metaReality, copresence, nonduality, or ground-state. Emancipatory agency is acquiring the attributes (events) of various unities.

“A fallibilist epistemology (explanation of knowledge) is limited to essential attributes and relative to human capacities and expectations. Methodologies are systematic implementations of epistemologies. The phenomenological and qualitative human science methodology, freely offered, is Heartfulness Inquiry™. It resembles heuristic, individual lived, integral, mindful, intuitive, integrated, organic, and phenomenological inquiries, autoethnography, participant observation, and others.”

[Mark A. Foster. The Institute for Dialectical metaRealism™. 2016. Retrieved on July 17th, 2016.]

“Meditation or ‘deepening’ is entering into a relationship with attributes or qualities which we can identify by name. The first chapter of the book will offer some personal suggestions. Please introduce your own variations. Obviously, each of our needs and requirements may differ. Find what works just right for you.” [Mark A. Foster. Heartfulness Inquiry™. 2016. Retrieved on February 28th, 2016.]

Echoes of Cosmic Unity

[Mark A. Foster. Echoes of Cosmic Unity™. 2016. Retrieved on February 28th, 2016.]

“On the position that I am articulating here, truth is in fact a more basic conception than reality—for truth, unlike reality, is not necessarily implicated in a dualistic mode or structure of thought. Transcending dualism, and transcending realism (understood as involving subject–object duality)—even if that transcending of realism is actually arrived at by being realistic about transcendence—we move to the position of our metarealism or more precisely that of metaReality, which is designed precisely to capture a level of being which is—one implication of the ‘meta’—beyond reality (realism, dualism, etc.) as customarily conceived. This is the level of non-duality, the level of the truth, captured in concepts such as the ground-state, the cosmic envelope, transcendental identification and co-presence, which underpins, sustains and constellationally englobes the world, the reality of duality, in which we customarily (but to an important degree incorrectly) think our being.” [Roy Bhaskar. The Philosophy of metaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 50-51.]

“Structurization Theory is a critical realist perspective in The MarkFoster.NETwork™, a sociology project.…

“Unities, unifying essences, or essential unities are the unknowable webs of interconnectedness between beings and things. They are the ontological (real) fabric of existence.… These essences preexist, or precede, their ontological attributes or individualized attributes (beings and things).…

“… Emancipation from oppression is the name of an attribute of human unity.…

“… I adopted the rarely used word, structurization, in order to distinguish the perspective from Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory (one of the rational practice theories) and from the usually anti-essentialist, or anti-realist in an ontological sense, social constructionism.”

[Mark A. Foster. A Short Essay on Structurization Theory. December 17th, 2011.]

“Among the anti-essentialist assumptions of Structurization Theory is that the process of social structural formation is situated, not in some fanciful generalized Platonic quiddity or naïve realism, which regards beings as mere appendages or manifestations of the ideal forms in a hypothetical mind of God, but in the historically contextualized preexistence of a structure to a present-day human population and its artifacts.…

“My theoretical orientation (perspective for explaining sociological data), is ecclectic and has been most influenced by Roy’s Bhaskar’s critical realism and George Lakoff’s embodied realism, minus their realist assumptions, by Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, and Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory.

[Mark A. Foster. The Framework of Structurization Theory™. December 12th, 2004.]

“The Institute for Structurization Theory™ (IST™), a global think tank, is the theory and research agency of The MarkFoster.NETwork™.…

“The institute’s dialectical unity turn is analogous to Roy Bhaskar’s spiritual turn.”

[Mark A. Foster. The Institute for Structurization Theory™. June 6th, 2014.]

“These days, Foster sometimes relates structural dialectics to Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism, a neo-Marxist approach. However, Foster began developing structural dialectics before he was familiar with [Roy] Bhaskar and his work.…

“I term this metaphysical, transmodernist (meaning that it contains elements of modernism and postmodernism; that it accepts modernism while moving beyond it) framework to the philosophy of science, the structural dialectics paradigm. Dialectics refers to unity in diversity, which is my primary focus of analysis in examining social structure.…

“American society, in which a sociological imagination is conspicuously absent, scapegoats individuals for social problems; promotes a cult of the personality; glorifies fame and so-called celebrity; misapplies the star label to well-known, high-profile (unfortunately) performers, journalists, sports figures, and other media personalities; transforms supposedly counter-individualist behavior, such as low self-esteem and codependency, into diseases; hosts a huge cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery, industry; and advocates psychotherapy as the panacea for all that ails us.…

“As social beings, learning takes place as we come into dialectical tension with our structural surroundings. But to become engaged in this type of trans-individual perception, one needs to develop a sociological imagination and avoid conceptualizing one’s experiences in purely personal categories.…

“Slavery can be seen in the enslavement of African Americans to poverty, unemployment, and ghettoization. African Americans make up only 12% of the population. However, approximately 50% of the nation’s prison inmates are people of color. And 24% of young African American males are under some form of correctional supervision.

“Colonialism is most visible in the reservation system which, although of some benefit to First Nations peoples, is largely controlled by a European American power base in Washington.…

“… structures are both enabling and constraining. Society and the people who, along with social structures, constitute it, adapt, over long periods of time or during periods of significant large-scale crisis, through creative, dialectical interaction with these structures.

“Structures cannot be legitimately viewed outside of history. The structure of race is the product of colonialism and slavery – both of which continue to the present day. Structures typically change only in response to the flow of history and its critical, often violent, events.…

“Ultimately, social structural change is realized in a dialectic between communities, with their existing structures, and history. It is the result of how society, in the context of existing structures, collectively responds to the challenges of history.”

[Mark A. Foster. The Structural Dialectics Paradigm. Approximately 2003-2004.]

“… [The philosophy of metaReality] could perhaps better be described as a form of panentheism than of panpsychism …; however I prefer to call it metaRealism. MetaRealism acknowledges the divine but does not claim to know what if anything lies beyond spacetime and has no allegiance to any religious tradition.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “The Power of Absence: Dialectical Critical Realism, MetaRealism and Terrence W. Deacon’s Account of the Emergence of Ententionality.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 2, January 2013. Pages 210-243.]

“Etymologically, ‘psyche’ [Greek/Hellēniká, ψυχή, psychḗ] derives from the classical Greek word for breath, life (the capacity of organisms to be active) or (human) spirit or soul, none of which adequately captures the metaRealist understanding of supramental consciousness, more generally the ground-state and cosmic envelope as interconnected fields of underlying possibility, at the level of which everything is enfolded within everything else.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “The Power of Absence: Dialectical Critical Realism, MetaRealism and Terrence W. Deacon’s Account of the Emergence of Ententionality.” Footnote. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 2, January 2013. Pages 210-243.]

“… in my view, metaRealism adds an absolute transcendental stratum or spiritual infrastructure to critical realist philosophical ontology. If [Roy] Bhaskar sometimes refers to his spiritual turn as ‘so-called’ it is because, I think, he deemed his philosophy to be always already at least implicitly spiritual. The fundamental drive of the system as a whole is spiritual in the sense of transcending dualism and oppositionality, that is, achieving union or identity in a total context.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “MetaRealism.” Editorial. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 4, August 2015. Pages 339-349.]

“… he [Roy Bhaskar] wishes to underline, not that PMR [philosophy of metaReality] is not a system of philosophy, which it most certainly is, but that it ‘engages as much a polemic against thought, and the ego, and the products of thought and the ego, as it does against subject–object duality as such’ and that it is a philosophy of truth rather than of reality, a metaRealism rather than a realism ….” [Mervyn Hartwig’s introduction to Roy Bhaskar. The Philosophy of metaReality: Creativity, Love and Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“MetaRealism, like critical realism, which it preservatively sublates, is a philosophy of the transition from capitalist modernity to a eudaimonian future. It is arguably the developmentally necessary ‘completion’ of Roy Bhaskar’s philosophical system, as an ultimate stratum of identity-in-difference and union (non-duality) is seen to underlie and sustain the world of non-identity (duality) that is the focus of original or basic critical realism (BCR) and dialectical critical realism (DCR), analogously to the interconnectedness of quantum phenomena and their ingredience in emergent levels of being.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “MetaRealism.” International Association for Critical Realism (IACR). November 19th, 2013. Retrieved on August 30th, 2015.]

“While metaRealism goes beyond original critical realism (CR) and dialectical critical realism (DCR), DCR arguably preservatively sublates CR, and metaRealism both presupposes, and is broadly presupposed by DCR, such that the three form a single system, which I refer to throughout as critical realism.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “From the Anatomy of the Global Crisis to the Ontology of Human Flourishing.” Editorial. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 3, June 2015. Pages 227-237.]

“In metaRealism the entropy of relative reality is itself underpinned by the negentropy (undissipated pure or free energy) of the ground-state or absolute reality. When we draw on this energy, for example in spontaneous right action, we reverse entropy locally and temporarily. Recent nonequilibrium thermodyamical theory, which treats entropy and negentropy as facets of a single energetic-informational process, supports similar conclusions.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “All You Need is Love.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 2, April 2015. Pages 205-224.]

“I am … grateful to Roy Bhaskar, the renowned philosopher, whose books have been enormously helpful to me in developing the idea of metarealism.” [C. Ravindran Nambiar. Indian Metaphysics in Lawrence Durrell’s Novels. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2014. Page ix.]

“Roy [Bhaskar], while explaining his theory of metarealism, points out the importance of individual enlightenment …. In short, we can say that non-dualism is metarealism….

“Bhaskar’s definition of meta-Realism or Meta-Realism … is nothing but the Indian view of reality, but without the word metarealism attached to it.”

[C. Ravindran Nambiar. Indian Metaphysics in Lawrence Durrell’s Novels. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2014. Pages 149-151.]

“According to [Roy] Bhaskar, reality as currently understood is a compromised formation, a limitation on the possibilities of being. For this reason he refers to current reality as ‘demi-reality.’ From the position of the philosophy of meta-Reality, prior critical realist philosophy has been concerned with developing an adequate account of this demi-reality … with its characteristic elements.…

“… THE STRUCTURE OF META-REALITY …

“For Bhaskar, meta-Reality is a complex totality or fine structure, and copresence is the condition of non-dual states that are in turn an aspect of everyday mundane activity (the transcendental identity in listening etc). The logical implication of the very structure of Bhaskar’s totality is, therefore, that access to one’s ground state will not only be a focussed intentionality but will make one maximally aware of how the self-referential subject is a part of something greater (through the ground state).”

[Jamie Morgan, “What is meta-Reality?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 2, May 2003. Pages 115-156.]

“Philosophical realism, if it is to grasp horizontal transcendence, must become philosophical metaRealism. Via the emancipative transformation of nature achieved at the level of finite-teleologism coupled with the social emancipation heralded by socialism, humanity arrives at the position where it is liberated from ‘unfathomed necessity’ … and can ‘consciously make history for the first time’ … Here the intrarelationality of penultimate utopia is highlighted. Only under the socialist reconstruction of society when socio-economic causes of alienation or eliminated, when the interrelation of humanity of humanity … has realised its concrete potential, ‘can a truly concrete mediation also begin … with the forces of inorganic nature’ ….” [Jolyon Agar. Post-Secularism, Realism and Utopia: Transcendence and Immanence from Hegel to Bloch. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Page 205.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar and his company’s theistic argument is all the more strange given that they are trying to formulate it within a philosophical tradition that seems to me to have been more effective than most in understanding claims that a recourse to God or an abstract ‘Idea’ has any place in a realist ontology.” [Jolyon Agar. Rethinking Marxism: From Kant and Hegel to Marx and Engels. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 151.]

“… metaRealism deepens and widens the scope of the rational by positing spirituality and transcendence as the fundamental constituents of key emancipatory normative values that were previously the unchallenged domain of secularism. Examples of such secularist approaches to critical realism are especially evident from the radical left. [Roy] Bhaskar’s metaRealism endeavours to re-acquant this tradition with its spiritual roots.” [Jolyon Charles Leslie Agar, “Raging Against God: Examining the Radical Secularism and Humanism of ‘New Atheism.’” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 2, March 2012. Pages 225-246.]

“This article argues for a rejection of approaches to school discipline which are rooted in behaviourism and Humean notions of causality. An alternative approach is called for, one that draws upon critical realism to sustain an interdisciplinary depth-realism explanation of the causal mechanisms at play in Indigenous students’ struggles for emancipation. The critical realist metaReality approach to spirituality (secular or religious) – suggests a deeper reality in which we are all intimately connected. As such, the freedom of each is necessarily dependent on the freedom of all. This provides us with an alternative way for students and staff to interact which should be seriously considered by schools and their communities. We argue that metaReality, and a respect for the virtues of Indigenous culture, rooted as it is in spirituality, offers the potential to avoid many of the recalcitrant problems of discipline in Indigenous education.…

“We wish to stress that ontologically flat ‘consequences’ models of school discipline cannot function in an emancipatory way for remote Indigenous students. As a corollary, we argue that those involved in the education of remote indigenous students should abandon simplistic, cause-and-effect behaviourist models of school management. Instead, they should adopt restorative-justice training ….”

[Ian Mackie, Gary MacLennan, and Brad Shipway, “‘There Must Be Consequences’: The Impact of Misaligned Behaviour Management Perspectives in Remote Indigenous Education.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 3, 2017. Pages 303-314.]

“… new spiritual thought contains transforming possibilities that potentially can lead to a radical change in the way we have organized this world and the way the world organizes us. To advocate this point, I will use some of the work of philosopher Roy Bhaskar, whose Marxist left background leads him to articulate traditionally verbalized spiritual-metaphysical ideas in language familiar to critical theory.…

“Equipped with an all-around western education in both hard and social sciences from which he founded his own ‘brand’ of philosophy—critical realism—Bhaskar went through quite an amazing series of spiritual experiences which brought about a whole new turn in his philosophical perspective of reality and led to the articulation of a new philosophical position which he called Meta-Reality. Meta-Reality ‘pinpoints the reality of non-dual states and phases of being, showing how they underpin and sustain the totality of all forms of human, and indeed all, life. Understanding Meta-Reality is to realize the limitations of the world of duality’ or, as he calls it, the pluriverse, ‘structured and differentiated, in process and changing’ ​. Human beings, like everything else in the pluriverse, are emergent forms of God, the absolute, and the divine. The divine comes to self-realization in and through the relative world of humans and other beings, i.e., the whole expanding pluriverse is (becoming) the embodiment of God.…

“There are some good examples in which spirituality based on a spiritual metaphysics is being strongly politicized; for instance, through the use of wisdom traditions from all over the world …, or against the background of fairly complex esoteric thought and cosmology …. According to [Roy] Bhaskar, our becoming aware of ‘who we really are’ instigates this process of transformation and affirms the dawning realization that ‘enlightenment’ is here and now, in every moment, in every breath. ‘The kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it,’ says the Gospel of Thomas. When a significant number of people—a critical mass—start seeing this, Bhaskar’s Meta-Reality might become a reality all people will experience.”

[Suzette van IJssel, “The Immanent Heaven: Spiritual Post(Metaphysics) and Ethics in a Postmodern Age—Working towards spontaneous right action and a society of abundance, peace and fulfillment.” BSU/IUC Journal of Social Work Theory & Practice. Issue 9, 2004-2005. Online publication. No pagination.]

“… philosophy must be responsive to the, as he saw it, necessarily experiential and historical context in which normative ideals are formulated. As we will see, expressions of this principle such as his even more famous comment in the Philosophy of Right that ‘the Real is rational’ … have often got Hegel into a lot of trouble with those who interpret him as seeking rational justification for a particular set of political or cultural institutions simply by virtue of their existence.…

“One of the main positions advanced in this article is that when viewing the organic intrarelationality of the state and the individual Hegel was reliant on the key concept of his dialectical panentheism, namely finite self-transcendence.… But, as the logic of panentheism dictates, the infinite comes to self-realization only as it is mediated by the finite via the latter’s self-sublating activities. Applied to Absolute Spirit, this involves relations of intradependency (if not a wholly symmetrical one) between God and the created world. Applied to objective and subjective spirit, it means that the state is only ‘in that allows the principle of subjectivity to complete itself to an independent extreme of personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back into the substantive unity, and thus preserves particularity in the principle of the state’ ….”

[Jolyon Agar, “Hegel’s political theology: ‘True Infinity,’ dialectical panentheism and social criticism.” Philosophy and Social Criticism. Volume 41, number 10, 2015. Pages 1093-1111.]

“The real world is in earnest with the principles of right and duty, and in the full light of a consciousness of these principles it lives. With this world of reality philosophic cob-web spinning has come into open rupture. Now, as to genuine philosophy it is precisely its attitude to reality which has been misapprehended. Philosophy is … an inquisition into the rational, and therefore the apprehension of the real and present. Hence it cannot be the exposition of a world beyond, which is merely a castle in the air, having no existence except in the terror of a onesided and empty formalism of thought. In the following treatise I have remarked that even Plato’s ‘Republic,’ now regarded as the byword for an empty ideal, has grasped the essential nature of the ethical observances of the Greeks He knew that there was breaking in upon Greek life a deeper principle, which could directly manifest itself only as an unsatisfied longing and therefore as ruin. Moved by the same longing Plato had to seek help against it but had to conceive of the help as coming down from above and hoped at last to have found it in an external special form of Greek ethical observance. He exhausted himself in contriving how by means of this new society to stem the tide of ruin, but succeeded only in injuring more fatally its deeper motive, the free infinite personality. Yet he has proved himself to be a great mind because the very principle and central distinguishing feature of his idea is the pivot upon which the world-wide revolution then in process turned:

“What is rational is real;

“And what is real is rational.”

[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. S. W. Dyde, translator. London and New York: George Bell & Sons. 1896. Pages xxvi-xxvii.]

“… criticisms of [Gerald A.] Cohen’s method from within the Analytical Marxist tradition fail to recognize that it is not just the substantive content of theory itself that is wantingbut the Humean ontological assumptions that underpins it. Critical realism, on the other hand, undertakes a critique of Cohen’s substantive thesis precisely because of his philosophical premises, and it is to this that we now turn in greater detail.…

“… To get causally adequate accounts of an explanandum that we believe to have a functional purpose depends precisely on those explanations of them that Cohen believes to be superfluous to causal explanation. The ‘why’ explanations that Cohen believes functional explanation can deliver rely on functional elaboration that, he argues, is not part of the deductive-nomological schema. From a realist perspective, ‘how’ explanations are part of causal explanation itself rather than something apart from it. We must therefore understand the causal mechanisms at work that bringabout the state of affairs in which the explanandum is said to be functional.”

[Joly Agar, “G. A. Cohen’s Functional Explanation A Critical Realist Analysis.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 33, number 3, September 2003. Pages 291-310.]

“I now expound in greater detail one of the … functional explanatory theses, that which concerns base and superstructure. The base, it will be recalled, is the sum total of production relations, these being relations of economic power over labor power and means of production. The capitalist’s control of means of production is an illustration. And the superstructure, we saw, has more than one part; exactly what its parts are is somewhat uncertain, but certainly one bona fide part of it is the legal system ….” [G. A. Cohen. Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2014. Page 288.]

“The philosophies of dialectical critical realism and metaRealism provide a rich range of concepts which enable us to rethink a number of intractable problems around Indigenous education, especially in the field of school attendance. These concepts include the concrete universal, four-planar social being, the self, active perception and dialectical universality. … [I]t is through this turn to dialectical critical realism and metaRealism that one can break though the current dialectics of stagnation. Through dialectical critical realism and metaRealism one can address the ontological basis for the unsatisfactory status quo, that is, one can begin to unravel and then restructure the underlying master–slave relations of oppression and domination that for so long have marked Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Australia. Dialectical critical realism and metaRealism, through the concept of the concrete universal, also enable young Indigenous Australians to recognize their own humanity and unique individuality and also to see themselves as strong and proud members of an ancient people.” [Ian Mackie and Gary MacLennan, “The Crisis in Indigenous School Attendance in Australia: Towards a MetaRealist Solution.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue. 4, August 2015. Pages 366-380.]

“… I … hope to be able to make a crucial connection here with the emancipatory logic that underpins all three stages of critical realism, and particularly dialectical critical realism and metaRealism.” [Nick Wilson, “Managing Authenticity: Mission Impossible?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 3, June 2014. Pages 286-303.]

“What may be labeled as a meta-realist critique (an ongoing fusion of phenomenological, critical and radical realist principles) would appear to be the only sustainable and theoretically coherent critical mode for future meaningful developments in the literary-critical field, but it will mean a great deal of rethinking and re-coordination for literary-critical studies. It offers a creative and critical access to a facticity replete in what [Roy] Bhaskar describes in his recent work as a ‘re-enchanted reality’ where beyond duality comes in that meaningful reality ‘the re-emergence of rich concepts of identity, process and totality.’” [Philip Tew, “A New Sense of Reality? A New Sense of the Text?: Exploring Meta-Realism and the Literary-Critical Field.” Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessment in Literature, Theory, and Culture. Klaus Stierstorfer, editor. New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. 2003. Pages 29-50.]

“In criticism one ought to avoid what [Pierre] Bourdieu would describe as the ‘space of possibles.’ In his introduction to The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction … Malcolm Bradbury defines elements of the novel that seen perpetually to be the subject of critical contention, concerning the ‘polar distinctions that have long been made – between, on the one hand, the novel’s propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements, and on the other with its propensity toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination.’ We are shifting from an overemphasis on the second cluster of characteristics or propensities. In redressing this balance I must stress that formal and generic elements are not inconsequential and can balance other sociological and ‘meta-realist’ readings.” [Philip Tew. The Contemporary British Novel. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2004. Page XII.]

“… according to Roy Bhaskar … [an] orientation of particularity is rooted in a perceptuality that extends well beyond the fictional since ‘Perspective is ineliminable in dialectic,’ or any fuller understanding, including response to the real (the reality of language reference). Therefore, acknowledgement of particularity (viewpoint) in itself cannot foreclose a commitment to ontological reference as truth, even within the act or event of narrative exposition, unless ontological reference is impossible (which would preclude any reference to the ontological possibilities of language as language).” [Philip Tew, “(Re)-acknowledging B. S. Johnson’s Radical Realism, or Re-publishing ‘The Unfortunates.’” Critical Survey. Volume 13, number 1, 2001. Pages 37-61.]

“For a culture to survive the people who carry it and the animals and plants which carry them, must all survive together. From this, you may gather that our ontology is a methodologically pragmatically chosen one …. The critical realist ontology at first seemed a good candidate but now [Roy] Bhaskar’s … meta-realist ontology commends itself to us by transcending possessive individualism.…

“… Bhaskar’s critical integrative meta-realism will endure and grow in significance we believe.”

[Gary Boyd and Vladimir Zeman, “Designing cybersystemically for symviability.” Kybernetes. Volume 36, number 9/10, 2007. Pages 1255-1265.]

“… there are two primary implications of a meta-Realist Indigenist meta-theory. First, [Roy] Bhaskar’s dialectical analyses of emancipatory movements within social being as four-planar, even multi-planar and n-dimensionally generalized, are highly compatible with Indigenist views. Second and consequently, for decolonization as a social process entailing self-emancipation to be at all realized, self–other power relations must be a priority focus in praxis, in relation to both generalized master–slave-type (power2) relations and the transformative capacity of agency (power1).” [Neil Hockey, “Engaging Postcolonialism: Towards a Critical Realist Indigenist Critique of an Approach by Denzin and Lincoln.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 3, October 2010. Pages 353-383.]

“… by drawing attention to processes of re-enchanting … and sustaining the underlying unity … of reality, a meta-Realist dialectic of liberation at the least then ‘deepens the existing conceptual space of TDCR [transcendental dialectical critical realism]’ ….” [Neil Edward Hockey. Learning for Liberation: Values, Actions and Structures for Social Transformation through Aboriginal Communities. Ph.D. dissertation. Queensland University of Technology. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 2007. Page 292. Retrieved on November 19th, 2015.]

“Based on the above, this chapter suggests that environmental education can benefit from engaging with critical realist metaReality in a number of ways. First, by advocating an immanent spirituality, it allows even atheists to have access to transcendental ethics, where that transcendentalism is based on a conception of reality as being layered such that real structures are emergent from empirical structures (for example, mind is emergent from body or society is emergent from individuals). This does not mean a return to naďve transcendentalisms that assumed a damaging mind/ body split and are associated with fundamentalist religious stands. Rather it is simply a transcendentalism that assumes that we are all interconnected at the level of the transcendental real. Second, metaReality allows academic environmental educators (who, statistically speaking, are likely to be atheists) to engage more honestly with ethical positions of religious/ spiritual people, for example indigenous peoples, ecofeminists, adherents of any of the major world religions and the early environmentalists of the USA.” [Leigh Price, “Some implications of metaReality for environmental educators.” Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change. Leigh Price and Heila Lotz-Sisitka, editors. London and New York: Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Google Play edition.]

“In the 1990s, [Roy] Bhaskar continued to innovate. Drawing initially on his Eastern heritage, he began to look beyond the Western tradition to ideas thematised under the term ‘metaReality’ – a deeper level of being than the natural and social sciences are used to dealing with. He was concerned with thinking about the underlying unities that hold humanity and nature together even in a world of splits and divisions. To listen to another is at a deep level to identify with the other person, and even antagonistic relations require cooperation. Even in a world of conflict and difference there are underlying realities which hold things together. This work has become important for scholars in a variety of disciplines, for example in understanding creativity, peace and theology.” [Alan Norrie, “Roy Bhaskar, philosopher: born 15 May 1944; married Hilary Wainwright; died 19 November 2014.” Obituary. The Independent. Newspaper. January 29th, 2015. Retrieved on April 17th, 2016.]

“I introduce [Nikolas] Rose’s theories of the formation of subjectivity and his metaphor of ‘folding souls’ for how our interiority is produced through the social practices we are part of ….

“Rose’s work fleshes out the role of institutionalised practices in the formation of dominant norms and offers a theory of ‘folding souls̻ to explain our sources of agency.…

“I explore some of the complexities of the lives of these five individuals and the other social roles that are part of them, such as spouse, parent, teacher, builder, holiday cottage owner; all identities and practices that each one has to juggle with on a daily basis, and which are other parts of their folding souls, in Rose’s discourse. According to Rose, we deal with this complexity by constructing a unified biography for ourselves through such things as the technologies of family photos, the repetition of stories, school reports, and videos. Selections are made from the stream of life.…

“… His [Rose’s] folding souls theory sheds light on some … social experiences …. It does not, though, account for why they continue to ‘listen’ to one particular pleat of their soul, which takes them into the risky spheres of creativity and being other. [Roy] Bhaskar’s theory of meta-Reality fills this gap.”

[Kathy Pitt, “Folding Souls or the Real Self?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 2, June 2010. Pages 172-198.]

“In his philosophy of ‘Meta-Reality’ [Roy] Bhaskar draws on ancient and more contemporary discourses about the nature of being human. To do this he crosses the boundaries between western and eastern traditions of thought, and also between philosophical and spiritual practices. He brings together the skills of a certain kind of thorough, systematic philosophic argument that he has learned from the western philosophical practice with eastern traditions of knowledge that contemplate the nature of consciousness and being. The well-known phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ from the work of [René] Descartes, is a philosophic ‘sound-bite’ that reflects a long-lasting preoccupation with the rational, thinking dimension of mind in western philosophy.…

“As Bhaskar’s writings emerge from the argumentation practices and concepts of western philosophic tradition that has its roots in classical Greek thought, this, at times, makes them difficult for readers who are not familiar with these philosophical discourses.”

[Kathy Pitt. Sourcing the Self: Debating the Relations between Language and Consciousness. Bern, Switzerland, and New York: Peter Lang. 2008. Page 78.]

“Folding souls …

“… [A] diagram of the fold describes a figure in which the inside, the subjective, is itself no more than a moment, or a series of moments, through which a ‘depth’ has been constituted within human being. The depth and its singularity, then, is no more than that which has been drawn in to create a space or series of cavities, pleats, and fields, which only exist in relation to those very forces, lines, techniques, and inventions that sustain them.…

“This singularized and folded inside is thus inevitably stabilized, not in relation to a domain of psychological processes, but in relation to a configuration of forces, bodies, buildings, techniques that hold it in place. For the Greeks this comprised the whole apparatus of ethical formation established within the city, family relations, tribunals, games of power and of leisure, erotic relations and so forth within which those males who would exercise power were assembled.… This relation to oneself, this folding that produces the effects of subjectification, is not passive.”

[Nikolas Rose. Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pages 188-189.]

“An account of … [certain] practices of the self might be organized in a rough threefold division. There would, first, be the moral codes, the languages they use, the ethical territory they map out, the attributes of the person that they identify as of ethical significance, the ways of calibrating and evaluating them they propose, the pitfalls to be avoided and the goals to pursue. Second, there would be the ethical scenarios, the apparatuses and contexts in which the moral codes are administered and the means by which they are enjoined – in the school and the courts, in the practices of social work and medicine, in the private consultation, in the radio phone-in, in the solitary act of reading or viewing. Third, there would be the techniques of the self, the ‘models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the deciphering of the self by oneself, for the transformation one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object.’” [Nikolas Rose. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. Second edition. London and New York: Free Association Books. 1999. Page 245.]

“The segmentation of time and space introduced by industrial capitalism with the disciplines of the clock and the factory is giving way to a more dispersed, but more intensive, inscription of the obligation to work into the soul of the citizen, not a reduction of the principle or ethic of work but, in many ways, its intensification. At the ‘positive’ pole of this shift lie the dreams of the integration of life and work made possible by new technologies of communication. At the ‘negative’ pole, which is undoubtedly more significant, the working relationship has become saturated with insecurity. Whilst the workplace once functioned as a secure site for inclusion, in the form of the lifelong career, the permanent job and so forth, the space of work can no longer be regarded as an automatic mechanism for the promotion of security. Rather, work itself has become a vulnerable zone, one in which continued employment must ceaselessly be earned, the employment of each individual constantly assessed in the light of evaluations, appraisals, achievement of targets and so forth – under the constant threat of ‘down-sizing’, efficiency gains and the like. Perpetual insecurity becomes the normal form of labour. [Nikolas Rose. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Page 158.]

“In contemporary Western societies, the subjective features of individual and social life have become the object and target of a new expertise. The mental lives of citizens, their emotions, capacities and propensities, have become the object of expert knowledge and the attention of professional ‘engineers of the human soul.’ This expertise has focussed on such key areas as childhood, the family, sexual relations, work, unemployment and organizational life. Psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and consultants of one sort or another practice their arts in institutions from the nursery to the factory, on television and radio and in the press. The knowledge and skills they deploy not only offer the opportunity of alleviating many of the personal and interpersonal difficulties which beset individuals in these different facets of contemporary existence, but also hold out the promise of positively enhancing the quality of life.” [Nikolas Rose, “The Tavistock Programme: The Government of Subjectivity and Social Life.” Sociology. Volume 22, number 2, May 1988. Pages 171-192.]

“… in societies that celebrate individual responsibility and personal initiative, the reciprocal of that norm of active self-fulfillment is depression, now largely defined as a pathology involving the lack of energy, an inability to perform the tasks required for work or relations with others. While such a global cultural account is unconvincing, it is certainly the case that the shape and incidence of the pathology of depression in Western developed nations can only be understood in relation to contemporary conceptions of the self involving the obligation of freedom: responsibility, choice and active self-fulfillment. The continual incitements to action, to choice, to self-realization and self improvement act as a norm in relation to which individuals govern themselves and are governed by others, and against which differences are judged as pathologies.” [Nikolas Rose, “Neurochemical Selves.” Society. Volume 41, number 1, November/December 2003. Pages 46-59.]

“This article analyses the pedagogic discourse of family literacy, a type of education that works on the literacy development of both mothers and young children.…

“In this article, I bring into the discussion of language in the new capitalism the question of how certain women are positioned in the new capitalist world, as particular kinds of mothers and learners, and how their time in the private sphere of the home is regulated by a pedagogic discourse in the public sphere of the classroom. I base the analysis on Basil Bernstein’s conception of the pedagogic device, which, he argues, is dominated by regulative discourse ….”

[Kathy Pitt, “Being a new capitalist mother.” Discourse & Society. Volume 13, number 2, 2002. Pages 251-267.]

“… it is illuminating to consider the co-transformation of self and society from the philosophical perspective of non-duality. In the eloquent words of Roy Bhaskar,

“The philosophy of Meta-Reality describes the way in which this very world nevertheless depends upon, that is, is ultimately sustained by and exists only in virtue of the free, loving, creative, intelligent energy and activity of non-dual states of our being and phases of our activity. In becoming aware of this we begin the process of transforming and overthrowing the totality of structures of oppression, alienation, mystification and misery we have produced; and the vision opens up of a balanced world and of a society in which the free development and flourishing of each unique human being is understood to be the condition, as it is also the consequence, of the free development and flourishing of all.”

[Rakesh Kapoor, “Transforming self and society: Plural paths to human emancipation.” Futures. Volume 39, 2007. Pages 475-486.]

“The philosophy of metaReality is a philosophy of hope. It is a critique of the reality of oppression experienced by many and argues that underneath this ‘demi-reality’ there is a metaReality of unity, trust and solidarity. It argues that recognizing this deeper level and acting in accordance with it can contingently lead to a world of universal human flourishing. Our arguments in this paper draw on all three phases of critical realism.” [Jacek Brant and Farid Panjwani, “School Economics and the Aims of Education: Critique and Possibilities.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 3, 2015. Pages 306-324.]

“Can social scientists know the truth? [Roy] Bhaskar argues that ‘science gives us knowledge of truth’ …. This may appear hubristic until its meaning is unpacked. Bhaskar’s alethic truth is much misunderstood and falsely taken to imply a metaphysically-based, epistemological absolutism based upon a belief in an ultimate truth that we can know and that will set us free. However, despite his spiritual turn, this is not what Bhaskar means. For Bhaskar …, alethic truth is: ‘a species of ontological truth constituting and following on the truth of, or real reason(s) for, or dialectical ground of, things, as distinct from propositions, possible in virtue of the ontological stratification of the world and attainable in virtue of the dynamic character of science.’ Thus, alethic truth, as the ‘real reason(s) for,’ appears to be synonymous with the underlying process, real essence or the generative mechanism in the non-sensate world that gives rise to an event in the sensate world …. In the Bhaskarian view, such a truth is possible due to ontological stratification, given that causality can only be explained in the real. The goal of identifying powers at ever-increasing depth presupposes exactly the model of scientific progress that he has proposed, although what is now considered to be an alethic truth (a causal mechanism), counter-intuitively, may turn out not to be ‘truth’ given the fallibility of social science …. This is especially the case given the dynamic nature of much knowledge ….” [Susan Florence Kerr. A Critical Analysis of Multinational Oil Companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility in Colombia and Venezuela: The Dynamics of Two Models. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. Bradford, England. 2013. Creative Commons. Page 19.]

“I wish to offer not only a philosophical critique of the later work of Roy Bhaskar, but also a socio-political critique of it. That is, I intend not only to show logical error in, for example, his argument concerning reincarnation, but also to show that such argument is damaging in the sense of having ‘retrograde effects’ on the sciences of history, anthropology, sociology, economics, cultural studies and the humanities more generally. It particularly damages critical realism.…

“… Alethic truth is ontological truth and as such we can thus assert that this notion of truth is itself simply a category mistake. Truth is inescapably epistemological—by practical and common usage definition. ‘Things,’ ‘powers,’ ‘causal mechanisms’ etc. are neither true nor false; they simply are. The manners in which we describe, explain or identify them, are what is true or false.”

[Garry Potter, “Reopening the Wound: Against God and Bhaskar.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 5, issue 1, 2006. Pages 92-109.]

“I am amazed at how many philosophers or sociologists of science have completely ignored the metaphysical and often mystical thoughts of great scientists. If [Garry] Potter is upset at [Roy] Bhaskar for talking of God in realist terms, by what hypocritical standard can he maintain his atheism in realist terms? His Marxist materialism may have something to offer to political and economic thought, but it is antithetical to the foundations of classical physics, relativity and quantum theory.” [John Spencer, “Defending Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 6, issue 1, 2007. Pages 126-147.]

“… I moved from a critical poststructural orientation to research towards a relational-processual orientation.… [I outline] the key characteristics of critical realism (CR), more correctly called dialectical critical realism (DCR) and CDA [critical discourse analysis].” [Leigh Price. A Transdisciplinary Explanatory Critique of Environmental Education: Business and Industry. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Rhodes University. Grahamstown, South Africa. April 10th, 2007. Page 11.]

“… in this thesis, I have used [Roy] Bhaskar’s explanatory critique, interpreted within a CDA [critical discourse analysis] framework, to arrive at a set of tentative recommendations for ethical environmental education praxis in business and industry. In so doing, I hope to have made a contribution to the relational-processual approaches to educational theory …. Since, as I have argued in this thesis, educational processes and management processes in business and industry are closely related, this work could also be seen as a contribution to management theory ….” [Leigh Price. A Transdisciplinary Explanatory Critique of Environmental Education: Business and Industry. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Rhodes University. Grahamstown, South Africa. April 10th, 2007. Page 260.]

“We began this Introduction by outlining the ways in which RCT [rational choice theory] has increasingly come to influence thinking in academia, public policy and business. We went on to suggest that the presentation of RCT has provided a framework for summarizing and explaining human action that is insidiously attractive but also highly problematic. One classic critique of RCT that has not been a key part of the work collected in this volume is that provided by altruistic acts, given that such actions cannot properly be presented as the maximization of philanthropic preferences. Yet altruism plays a key part in both everyday and life-chance decision-making. Such decisions are problematic for RCT because they draw either upon social normativity or upon sources of morality, both of which should play no part in the constitution of Homo economicus. These may be better understood by examining the voluntary, sector, which now employs 485,000 people in Britain …. Similarly, charitable donation, at least in the United Kingdom, has increased dramatically in the last decade, despite the work of the National Lottery [in the UK] ….” [Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, “Chapter 1: Introduction.” Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization. Margaret Scotford Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Pages 1-16.]

“It is only in the light of our ‘ultimate concerns’ that our actions are ultimately intelligible. None of this caring can be impoverished by reducing it to an instrumental means-ends relationship, which is presumed to leave us ‘better off’ relative to some indeterminate notion of future ‘utility.’

“Nevertheless, this was the model of man which was eagerly seized upon by social contract theorists in politics, Utilitarians in ethics and social policy, and liberals in political economy. Homo Economicus is a survivor. He is also a colonial adventurer and, in the hands of Rational Choice theorists, he bids to conquer social science in general.”

[Margaret S. Archer, “Persons and ultimate concerns: who we are is what we care about.” Acta. Volume 11, 2006. Pages 261-283.]

“The [rational] choice of a specific action rests on how the individual situation is described. With regards to this description, a threefold heuristic is established. This trinity results from the perspective of action as choice under insecurity, an insecurity that is ubiquitous but stems mainly from the uncertainty of interaction with others. Choice implies that (1) diffferent options are compared, and which options are available can be summed up as a first characteristic of the actor. The second characteristic (2) is how these options are compared. They depend, however, in many cases on the diffferent states the world may take, hence (3) including what actors think about the probabilities for these diffferent states of the world has to be included.” [Hanno Scholtz, “Rational Choice Theory in Comparative Sociology.” Comparative Sociology. Volume 14, number 4, 2015. Pages 587-608.]

“Rational Choice (RC) theory argues that individual actions and their social outcomes can be explained by assuming goal-directed behaviour which is consistent with certain rationality criteria. This approach is based on methodological individualism. In economics and also in political science, RC is a proliferating research program. In sociology, there is an increasing number of scholars working in this tradition, in particular among American, European and Japanese sociologists.…

“… methodological individualism and RC have started to play a role in sociology only recently. The main exception is social exchange theory. However, the theoretical core of social exchange theory is a theory of action that is rooted in the tradition of behaviourism and to a lesser extent in economic exchange theory, which is more closely related to RC ….”

[Martin Abraham and Thomas Voss, “Contributions of Rational Choice Theory to Modem Sociology: An Overview.” Advances in Sociological Knowledge: Over half a Century. Nikolai Genov, editor. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. 2004. Pages 127-150.]

“In contradistinction to every version of conflation in social theory is the approach endorsed here, which is based four-square on analytical dualism. This emphatically is not the same thing as philosophical dualism, for there is no suggestion that we are dealing with separate entities, only analytically separable ones and ones which it is theoretically useful to treat separately. However, to forestall the obvious counter-objections from those whom I have just been criticizing it is necessary to justify both the utility and the feasibility of analytical dualism.… Obviously I will have to demonstrate that a parallel distinction can be employed in the cultural realm. This will involve showing not only the desirability but also the practicability of its use there. In other words, I will have to produce some workable means of distinguishing between ‘parts’ and ‘people’ in the field of culture—some way of overcoming the methodological difficulties undoubtedly involved in rendering analytical dualism operational and thus of repelling the charge that these are matters of philosophical intractability.” [Margaret S. Archer. Culture and Agency: The place of culture in social theory. Revised edition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Page xvi.]

“… the new terms in which ‘structure and agency’ were re-conceptualized and linked together were … represented by two standpoints, thus opening up a new debate beginning in the late seventies [1970s] or eartly eighties [1980s]. These I have termed ‘Elisionism’ (because transcending the dualism between individual and society consisted in replacing it by an insistence upon their mutual constitution), and ‘Emergentism’ (because structure and agency are both regarded as emergent strata of social reality and linkage consists in examining their interplay).” [Margaret S. Archer. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pages 59-60.]

“… we [the authors] are all associated with the political left, the economic or Marxian left particularly.” [Margaret S. Archer, Andrew Collier, and Douglas V. Porpora. Transcendence: Critical Realism and God. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Kindle edition.]

“… the examination of social movements, of communal experiments, and of new forms of collective reciprocity is needed to complete the morphogenetic framework.” [Margaret S. Archer, “The Trajectory of the Morphogenetic Approach: An account in the first-person.” Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas. Number 54, 2007. Pages 35-47.]

“This book is about theorising a possible transition from the social order of late modernity. What we examine is the generative mechanism of ‘social morphogenesis,’ held to account for the increasing rapidity of social change. In itself, rapid social change does not necessarily signal, much less constitute, a new type of social formation. What intrigues us is whether or not this increasingly important process could be responsible for generating a different kind of social formation— Morphogenic Society—albeit one with the potential for assuming a multiplicity of specific forms. None of us is committed to announcing the advent of the Morphogenic Society, but regard it as worth exploring. All of us are wary about the array of social forms that have hastily been advanced as superseding modernity. Thus, we do not precipitously announce a new ‘Beyond.’ Instead, the book deals with ‘social morphogenesis’ as a process rather than an end product. Clearly, this process does not necessarily generate macroscopic social transformation because it has been with us for centuries, although always, until now, in counterbalance with morphostatic mechanisms. Whilst we will certainly question the justifiability of thinking and theorising about Morphogenic Society, nevertheless, the question mark remains throughout.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Social Morphogenesis and the Prospects of Morphogenic Society.” Abstract. Social Morphogenesis. Margaret S. Archer, editor. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. 2013. Page 1.]

“Both the ‘morphogenetic’ and ‘structuration’ approaches concur that ‘action’ and ‘structure’ presuppose one another: structural patterning is inextricably grounded in practical interaction. Simultaneously both acknowledge that social practice is ineluctably shaped by the unacknowledged conditions of action and generate unintended consequences which form the context of subsequent interaction. The two perspectives thus endorse the credo that the ‘escape of human history from human intentions, and the return of the consequences of that escape as causal influences upon human action, is a chronic feature of social life.’ Where they differ profoundly is in how they conceptualize it, and how, on that basis, they theorize about the structuring (and re-structuring) of social systems.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Morphogenesis versus structuration: on combining structure and action.” The British Journal of Sociology Volume 33, number 4, December 1982. Pages 455-483.]

“It has been maintained that the new millennium is already a period of unprecedented morphogenesis and the aim of this book is to ascertain what effects this has had upon young people coming to maturity during it. If such effects are indeed detected in the dominant modes of reflexivity they are now practising or beginning to practise seriously, then it is expected that these would be mediated through prior transformations in their respective contextual backgrounds ….” [Margaret S. Archer. The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pages 16-17.]

“Much of the interest in the ideas of critical realism is often expressed in a return to the work of [Roy] Bhaskar … and supplies accounts labelled ‘critical realist.’ Note that this is formally incorrect; there are no critical realist substantive theories of anything. This is because critical realism is a philosophical tradition that seeks to perform an ‘under labouring’ function for those anxious to build a wide range of theories in both the natural and the social domains. Accordingly, there may be considerable debate (as we will see) between those developing substantive theories about the validity of particular concepts, but agreement about the underlying philosophical positions. The task is, therefore, to use the conceptual clarity supplied by some of the notions that we review below to develop substantive theories. One such theory, firmly located within sociology and social theory, is [Margaret S.] Archer’s morphogenetic approach.” [Alistair Mutch, “Technology, organization, and structure—a morphogenetic approach.” Organization Science. Volume 21, number 2, 2010. Pages 507-520.]

“In contrast to the ontological assumptions of [Margaret S.] Archer’s social theory (and, perhaps, a wider style of thinking), this article will argue that once the implications of the interpretive tradition are considered more deeply, the notion of an objective social structure becomes unsustainable.” [Anthony King, “Against structure: a critique of morphogenetic social theory.” The Sociological Review. 1999. Pages 199-227.]

“It is … emergent properties to which [Anthony] King objects and against which he offers the standard methodologically individualistic defence, namely that they should properly be construed as nothing but the effects of ‘other people.’ … Instead, to talk about ‘emergent powers’ is simply to refer to a property which comes into being through social combination.” [Margaret S. Archer, “For structure: its reality, properties and powers: A reply to Anthony King.” The Sociological Review. 2000. Pages 464-472.]

“… ‘analytical dualism’ provides the most powerful tool in practical social analysis, yet one which has been slow to develop and whose full potential in terms of its theoretical purchase and pratical utility have still to be fully recognised.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Social Integration and System Integration: Developing the Distinction.” Sociology. Volume 30, number 4, November 1996. Pages 679-699.]

“… in completing a morphogenetic cycle, by issuing in structural elaboration, not only is structure transformed but so is agency, as part and parcel of the same process – the double morphogenesis.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Morphogenesis: Realism’s Explanatory Framework.” Sociological Realism. Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmanuele Morandi, and Riccardo Prandini, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Kindle edition.]

“… [The] debate between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism has been left behind in sociology, in favour of a new debate about non-reductionist solutions, specifically between those who seek to transcend the dichotomy between structure and agency, by conceptualizing them as mutually constitutive, as in structuration theory, versus those who treat the two as distinct and emergent strata and then examine the interplay of their causal powers, as in critical realism.” [Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, “Introduction.” Rational Choice Theory: Resisting colonization. Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Pages 1-15.]

“Transcendentally, it is the pre-existence, autonomy and relative durability of culture which establish its ontological warrant as an irreducible entity, which predates socio-cultural interaction of which any cultural morphogenesis post-dates such activity. As with structure, this provides the temporal basis for distinguishing analytically between the ‘parts’ and the people. To reiterate, culture (and structure) and agency are intertwined in reality and the morphogenetic approach simply disentangles those properties which, by their very nature, provide explanatory leverage on such lived reality because of their causal sui generis nature.” [Robert Willmott, “The Place of Culture in Organization Theory: Introducing the Morphogenetic Approach.” Organization. Volume 7, number 1, 2000. Pages 95-128.]

“The reluctance to engage with [Margaret S.] Archer’s work has undoubtedly provided ammunition for those who are hostile to critical realism and maintain that while it may have value in management and organisational studies, ‘with respect to central questions of ontology and epistemology and to inform empirical studies with this awareness,’ it offers little of value beyond this. This paper seeks to begin to address this criticism, and the reluctance to use Archer’s approach, by reporting on the application of the morphogenetic approach to an example of empirical research: specifically a 15-month longitudinal case study of information systems (IS) development and organisational change in a large British local authority ….” [Ivan Horrocks, “Applying the Morphogenetic Approach: Outcomes and Issues from a Case Study of Information Systems Development and Organisational Change in British Local Government.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 8, issue 1, May 2009. Pages 35-62.]

“I sympathise with [Margaret S.] Archer. At the same time it is important to note that she conserves the languages and thinking of a very strong variant of realism: she talks as if she has access to the ontic, is able to speak ontologically, and assumes that the basic ontic realities of the human being exist and are independent from discourse. That is to say by thought and language we are able to assert the existence and nature of human beings as independent from our thought and language, as subsisting in themselves.” [Staf Callewaert, “Unsystematic Remarks on the Relation between ‘Critical Realism’ and the Sociology of Margaret S. Archer and Pierre Bourdieu.” The Network Society and the Demand of Educational Changes. Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Education, Uppsala University. 2003. Pages 13-34.]

“Welcome to this – the eleventh – edition of the ISRF [Independent Social Research Foundation] Bulletin. This time of year marks changes of all sorts not least for the Centre of Social Ontology which received funding from the ISRF over six years. Funding enabled the group, led by Professor Margaret Archer, to produce a book a year as part of their ‘Social Morphogenesis’ project. Partly inspired by the long-standing theme of transformation implicit in the work of Archer and colleagues, this issue is entitled ‘The Ethical and is the Social’; contributions share a common goal which is to combine methodological, conceptual and empirical approaches, drawn from across the social sciences, to improve understanding of society and tackle the challenges we face.” [Rachael Kiddey, “Editorial.” ISRF Bulletin. Issue XI, 2016. Pages 5-7.]

“Social morphogenesis’ is an umbrella concept, whereas any generative mechanism is a particular that needs identifying, describing and explaining – by its own analytical history of emergence. If we want to talk seriously about ‘Morphogenic Society’ this can only be in terms of specific mechanisms that are potentially important enough to have a global societal impact. Otherwise, it could rightly be objected that positive feedback and morphogenesis have always been with us, even before the first spark ignited the first fire. The amplification of an effect by its own influence on the process that gave rise to it is hardly the preserve of trans-modernity.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Morphogenic society: Self-government and self-organization as misleading metaphors.” Structure, Culture and Agency: Selected Papers of Margaret Archer. Tom Brock, Mark Carrigan, and Graham Scambler, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2017. Pages 227-245.]

“… what has happened to the potential for Morphogenic society and its situational logic of opportunity? The above paragraphs, accentuating the increased influence and scope of the neo-liberal situational logic of competition, also contain the most common representation of the current state of affairs and reinforce the message that ‘there is no alternative’ for the social order. Yet, there is another side to the story precisely because the generative mechanism continues to promote synergy, despite it serving two ultimately incongruent ends. It is the part that TINA’s [there is no alternative’s] supporters would prefer to edit out.” [Margaret S. Archer, “The generative mechanism reconfiguring Late Modernity.” Structure, Culture and Agency: Selected Papers of Margaret Archer. Tom Brock, Mark Carrigan, and Graham Scambler, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2017. Pages 247-269.]

“In this Address I want to advocate a single Sociology, whose ultimate unity rests on acknowledging the universality of human reasoning; to endorse a single World, whose oneness is based on adopting a realist ontology; and to predicate any services the Discipline can give to this World upon accepting the fundamental unicity of Humanity.…

“… [The] search for explanatory mechanisms in the interplay between structures and agents sets international sociology apart from the positivistic quest for Humean constant conjunctions, then expressed as universal laws. For the ramifications of globalisation cannot be explained by confining international sociology to its phenomenal manifestations or committing it to an ontology of experience – the empirical realism endorsed by positivism Yet the very process of globalisation has been further grist to the mill of neo-positivism.…

“… [An] endorsement of realism, reasoning and humanity constitutes the bridge to international sociology: relativists from any part of the world are bridge-burners.”

[Margaret S. Archer, “Sociology for One World: Unity and Diversity.” Presidential address to the twelfth World Congress of the International Sociological Association. International Sociology. Volume 6, number 2, June 1991. Pages 131-147.]

“In her presidential address at the Twelfth World Congress, Margaret S. Archer … applied such observations [regarding globalization] to the discipline [of sociology], calling for ‘an internationalised sociology to address such global phenomena.’” [William G. Martin and Mark Beittel, “Toward a Global Sociology?: Evaluating Current Conceptions, Methods, and Practices.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 39, number 1, winter 1998. Pages 139-161.]

“My argument about collective reflexivity is based upon the emergence of Relational Goods and the causal powers they can exert. It will thus be acceptable to some Relational social theorists but not to others. Relational Sociology is distinguished (from Relationalism) by the endorsement of emergence as part and parcel of its Realist metatheory …. Because all emergent properties are relational properties, all Realists are committed to relationality. Nevertheless, just as there are ‘thin’ ontological forms of relational theory (relationism) there are also ‘relationally thin’ forms of Critical Realism ….

“Ultimately, collective reflexivity derives from the relationality of Ego and Alter, and their subjective acknowledgment—under their own descriptions—that their relationship has a worth that exceeds them as two individuals as well as objectively being irreducible to them. In other words, their relationship itself has emergent properties and powers.”

[Margaret S. Archer, “Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for It.” Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Pages 145-161.]

“The data gathering method was ‘biographical narrative interviews’ which afforded the use of an in-depth qualitative interview approach to explore the subtleties of reflexivity. The interviews addressed both life and work histories, and participants were encouraged to share their thoughts and experiences freely. The themes of the interviews incorporated the key elements of [Margaret S.] Archer’s reflexive theory. The interviews lasted approximately between 25 and 100 minutes, and were digitally recorded. Interviews that were not in the English language were translated and transcribed verbatim.” [Lakshman Wimalasena, “Reflexivity and women’s agency: a critical realist morphogenetic exploration of the life experience of Sri Lankan women.” Journal of Critical Realism. Latest–articles edition. July, 2017. Pages 1-19.]

“The third, voluntary or social-private sector is growing and diversifying and if it is subject to colonization and regulation, it can exert some influence from within and respond with further new initiatives from without. Perhaps we should look at it as the research and development agency for a future civil society and civil economy. This may be slow and suboptimal, but it it probably represents the one new form of future change whose governance is not fundamentally undermined by the deficit in social solidarity. Gradualism is never triumphalistic but it seems the only realistic way of slowly re-building social integration.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Solidarity and Governance.” Governance in a Changing World: Meeting the Challenges of Liberty, Legitimacy, Solidarity, and Subsidiarity Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Extra Series. Volume 14, 2013. Vatican City. Pages 1-25.]

“In this paper I offer the critical realist morphogenetic approach as a means to address these difficulties in organizational innovation research. The use of this approach is illustrated with a retrospective case study of the emergence and development of Six Sigma, a management innovation that has been acknowledged as having had a profound impact on industry …. Critical Realism and Structurationist perspectives provide a complex view of contexts and reflect a keener appreciation of the ‘interwoven nature of the different levels and dimensions of social reality’ …, furnishing theoretical frameworks that focus attention to the interactions between context and agency. Critical realist perspectives, such as [Margaret S.] Archer’s … morphogenetic theory, offer certain advantages over structurationist views. In contrast to the latter’s conflation of structure and agency, the critical realist commitment to the ontological pre-existence of structures and their separation from agency provides a way to grasp the generative and causal mechanisms underlying the production of context-dependent social phenomena.” [C. Kym Wong, “A Critical Realist Approach to Organizational Innovation Research.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-18. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“We therefore have a means of explaining systemic continuity, but also need a clearly specified mechanism for change …. In a morphogenetic-inspired model of path dependence, forces for change can come endogenously or exogenously, or both. If we have ‘necessary’ and ‘compatible’ relations in both structural and cultural spheres, we have the most powerful force for morphostasis (continuity), with actors engaged in a logic of protection in both areas. Even this, however, can eventually lead to change because of the very limited range of legitimising ideas that are being drawn from (extreme specialism can ultimately lead to irrelevance), or through the structural vested interests groups becoming so insular that they engage in factional infighting, and wars on ‘deviant’ groups or ideas to the extent that they actually cause these groupings to begin to establish separate identities and differentiated ideas ….” [Ian Greener, “Historical institutionalism, critical realism and morphogenetic social theory – towards a synthesis of explaining why history matters in organisations?” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-29. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“Competition and conflict between religious and secular projects has generated situational logics by which elite interest groups contextualize their project through social representations to non-elites in order to affirm the project’s relevance and legitimacy. At stake for the group able to dominate discursive and representational capital is the opportunity to gain the loyalty, allegiance and trust of popular sectors. This research contributes theoretically by emphasizing a morphogenetic approach to understanding social and historic processes, and substantively to the historical debate of secularization by showing that secularization is not an inevitable macro-social mechanical process imputed to impersonal and abstract forces, but is carried out by people and groups who manifestly want to laicize society and its sub-cultures.” [Stephen Armet, “Explaining Religion’s Durability or Decline Based on Morphogenetic Generation.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 3, 2017. Pages 315–338.]

“This paper develops a critical realist analysis of the social agency observed within inter-organizational exchange networks.…

“… TCE [transaction cost economics], resource dependency theory and institutional sociology have done much to extend our understanding of both the structural conditions of inter-organizational exchange networks and how these play a role in determining local outcomes. However, it is possible to argue that none of these theories provide an adequate explanation of the networks themselves, which should properly be viewed as causal structures in their own right. To this end, has been posited that it is only after these theories are combined with a realist view of social agency that a better appreciation of networks, as causal structures, actually emerges.”

[Steven Vincent, “Understanding the Agency of Exchange: Critical Realism, Institutionalism and Social Action in Inter-organizational Exchange Networks.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-41. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“… following [Roy] Bhaskar, realists recognise that social reality is an active and complex system, one which is open to human interference and disruption. This makes it an error to establish universal causal laws based only on tests within artificial environments (laboratory-based experiments that do not reproduce themselves within social life). As such, realists reject empiricism on the understanding that if social science is to be intelligible, then it requires an appreciation of the complexity afforded by open systems. Translated, if one seeks to find the principles of social movement formation, then one must depart with an ontological, rather than experiential, model of reality.…

“If one seeks to understand what causes the formation of social movements, then one must turn to a model of reality that places its emphasis on the structures for their emergence. Emergence is a central theme for contemporary realists and it is a principle that is defended based on a stratified account of reality. On this reading, realists defend a form of emergentism that can be captured with the maxim: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This refers to the relationship between people (as ‘parts’) and social structures (as ‘whole’) and the interactions between them. The purpose of such theorizing is to allow for an analytical toolset by which we understand the duality of agency and structure. As the argument goes, people interact to create social structures that are then irreducible to the individuals involved, that is, social structures are the emergent products of human interaction.

“Such a thesis is paramount to understanding the formation of social movements, where agents interact to create social structures with emergent hegemonic and resistant properties. By this account, human and social experiences are no longer epiphenomenal when individual and collective biographies serve as witness to the creation or reproduction of socio-structural forms of power and resistance. What we have here, then, is an ontology of social groups whose principles begin to account for the emergence of social movements. Mobilisation, in this respect, is mapped onto the fundamental organisation of social groups, but with human and social experiences as the mediating factor between existing social conditions and the social consciousness necessary for change.”

[Thomas Brock, “Being realist about social movements: ontological stratification and emergence.” Durham University. Durham, England. June, 2013. Pages 1-3.]

“The theory we propose combines elements of the theory of social reality set out by the philosopher John Searle with the transformational model of social activity that has been proposed in recent realist social theory.…

“Our purpose … is to propose an abstract theory of the ontology of technology, and specifically of the technological objects that we encounter on a day-to-day basis and how these fit into the social world.…

“We hope to show that even the most familiar items of technology that we interact with all the time are underdetermined by their material properties. Technology also has a social aspect that plays a crucial role in constituting the technological objects that surround us.”

[Phil Faulkner, “Getting To Grips With Technology.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-21. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“I first I consider the existing theoretical perspectives on technologies and organizations. Then I consider realist perspectives and their contribution to theorising technologies and organizations. This is followed by analysis based on the case of an emerging technology, virtual reality, through which I sketch out some features of a critical realist theory of technologies and organizations. Finally I conclude by considering the difficulties of applying a critical realist perspective in empirical research.…

“So, what is the nature of the real? [Roy] Bhaskar’s realism proposes a ‘stratified ontology.’ In this the properties and powers within different strata are emergent. For example, living beings are emergent from physical mechanisms. They obey the laws of physics, but it is not possible to use the laws of physics to derive the laws specific to living beings, their physiology, their growth, their procreation. It is this stratified model of reality that I will apply to technology.”

[Jennifer K. Whyte, “Taking time to understand: articulating relationships between technologies and organizations.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-13. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“… [An] objective of this paper is to take an empirically oriented and often explicitly anti-theoretical field of study, industrial relations (IR), and to show that it has pursued a mode of analysis consistent with the ontology of critical realism (CR). Yet CR has only very rarely been discussed explicitly in IR, while ontological debate has also been unusual; hence the description of IR’s progress as DIY [do it yourself].…

“… rather than assuming that there was a uniform phenomenon called teamwork, analysts identified different kinds of teams. A major distinction was between the teams characteristic of lean production and those based on ideas of autonomous work groups. In the former case, team autonomy was tightly restricted whereas in the latter it was much more extensive. The causal power of ‘teams’ thus varied according to the type of team involved.”

[Paul Edwards, “IR: DIY CR.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-13. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“As a part of the groundwork to comparative analyses inspired by [John R.] Hall’s methodological approach, we formulate an ideal type of feminist social research and then demonstrate preliminarily, how some aspects of the ideal type are connected to the subtypes of the formative discourses.…

“… Hall does not argue ontological themes at any general ‘philosophical’ level, but he deals with them closer to actual and multiple research practices of sociohistorical inquiry.…

“Hall’s theory of discursive formations offers both feminists and critical realists a reflective meta-framework, which they might put into best use by look ing at various actual exemplars of feminist and critical realist social research and analyzing, how the formative discourses are given content and how they are connected in each case. Such analyses could help feminists and critical realists to identify not only contradictions but also prospects of cooperation and integration at aptly localized and contextualized levels of research practice.”

[Seppo Poutanen, “Feminism and critical realism – demonstration of a lack of dialogue.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-12. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“… in the 1960s, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault argued that relations among discourses are neither internal nor external to an overall discursive formation. That is, they are not purely matters of logical relations or rhetorical structure, or of form imposed from some external source. Foucault therefore proposed to identify any given empirical discursive formation by defining ‘the system of formation of the different strategies that are deployed in it.’” [John R. Hall. Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Kindle edition.]

“Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, … a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation – thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences, and in any case inadequate to the task of designating such a dispersion, such as ‘science,’ ‘ideology,’ ‘theory,’ or ‘domain of objectivity.’ The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected we shall call the rules of formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division.” [Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. A. M. Sheridan Smith, translator. New York: Pantheon Books imprint of Random House, Inc. 1972. Page 38.]

“The literature on communities of practice has contributed to a deeper understanding of informal learning occurring through social interaction within specific contexts of work/practice. However, this literature focuses only on the immediate local context in which those micro-level interactions take place and it has underemphasized the role of politics and conflicting interests in assessing and analysing those processes. This paper addresses those limitations by adopting a critical realist perspective that locates the emergence of communities of practice in their meaningful contexts (organisational context, market context) and pays specific attention to the role of politics and managerial action. Data are reported from a case of a merging organisation operating in the UK brewing industry.…

“The term ‘communities of practice’ was first used by [Jean] Lave and [Étienne] Wenger …) in their studies of traditional apprenticeships, and given this particular context the authors argued that learning does not occur as the transmission of knowledge in instruction but rather through the participation and immersion of the apprentice within a community of practice. This key idea is denoted by the notion of legitimate peripheral participation, whereby apprentices are allowed to the periphery of a particular practice (there were examples of butchers, midwives, tailors etc) where they construct an idea of the main elements of which their practice consists and their learning takes place as a process where they gradually become insiders, competent members of the community, constructing their identities in relation to it, appreciating its history and contributing to its future.”

[Konstantinos Kakavelakis, “Organisational Change and the Process of Knowing: The Emergence of Communities of Practice within the Context of a Merger in the UK Brewing Sector.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-15. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“The concept of ‘community of practice’ is left largely as an intuitive notion, which serves a purpose here but which requires a more rigorous treatment. In particular, unequal relations of power must be included more systematically in our analysis. Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations. It would be useful to understand better how these relations generate characteristically interstitial communities of practice and truncate possibilities for identities of mastery.” [Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1991. Kindle edition.]

“I propose that critical realism provides the stratified ontology required to sufficiently investigate knowledge and work in context. The intent is to make plausible the argument that the critical-realist position on the nature of the subject of inquiry is an improvement on existing perspectives and practices, most notably those articulated from a postmodernist stance ….” [Michael A. Evans, “Progress Toward a Critical-Realist Perspective: Using Neo-Institutional Theory to Analyze & Explain the Influence of Context on Knowledge and Work.” Presented at the 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference. Critical Realism: Progress and Challenges (stream). University of Camridge. Cambridge, England. July 4th–6th, 2005. Pages 1-21. Retrieved on June 12th, 2016.]

“To begin, neo-institutional theory … provides a means to explain the legitimacy of particular types of knowledge and work that satisfy organizational strategic needs. For example, a request for technical assistance from a sailor must be deemed legitimate by an SME [civilian subject-matter expert] to gain attention. SME expectations can best be met by framing requests in terms that convey a competent technician on the other end.… Moreover, neo-institutional theory addresses regulative and normative elements of organization that forge legitimacy …. Regulative elements refer to coercive institutional structures and routines that ensure compliance and conformity by organizational members.” [Michael A. Evans, “Chasing a Fault across Ship and Shore: Explaining the Context of Troubleshooting in the U.S. Navy.” Performance Improvement Quarterly. Volume 19, number 2, 2006. Pages 211-229.]

“The analysis builds on recent discussions in neo-institutionalism aligned with critical realism, in order to refine theoretical arguments on reflexivity while providing tools for future empirical research in the sociology of professions.…

“… Different contributions by neo-institutionalism, in particular those built on the concepts of agency and reflexivity, provide helpful analytical tools for our argument. Briefly, agency has been adopted to discuss individual engagement in organisations as an embedded process that links past, present and future events …, while reflexivity relates to the logic sustaining the course of action through which individuals deliberate in relation to objective circumstances ….”

[Tiago Correia, “Doctors’ reflexivity in hospital organisations: The nexus between institutional and behavioural dynamics in the sociology of professions.” Current Sociology. OnlineFirst edition. April, 2016. Pages 1-20.]

“There are two varieties of realism, Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic realism; both give priority to ontology rather than the epistemology generally privileged by positivism, and both argue that our methods of understanding the world and the forms of the theory we use are based on the nature of the realities we are trying to understand. Sociology has to deal with different realities: at the very least, social structures and acting individuals. Archer starts with the more traditional debates between collectivism and individualism and traces them to more contemporary debates about agency and structure, which she finds more useful.” [Ian Craib, “Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach.” Review article. Contemporary Sociology. Volume 26, number 5, September 1997. Pages 656-657.]

“… to advance the ‘internal conversation’ as the process of mediation ‘through’ which agents respond to social forms – fallibly and corrigibly, but, above all, intentionally and differently – is to attribute three properties to their reflexive deliberations. The ‘internal conversation’ is held to be (a) genuinely interor, (b) ontologically subjective, and (c) causally efficacious.” [Margaret S. Archer. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Page 16.]

“The central assumption made here is that our emotions are among the main constituents of our inner lives. They are the fuel of our internal conversation and this is why they matter.…

“… the object is … to show how irreducible properties of our human selves interact with our sociality and that their interplay is significant by virtue of the inner dialogue and its outcomes.”

[Margaret S. Archer. Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pages 194-195.]

“The present book deals … with strongly reflexive processes and its concern is with reflexive deliberations about matters that are primarily and necessarily social. Reflexivity itself is held to depend upon conscious deliberations that take place through ‘internal conversation.’ The ability to hold such inner dialogues is an emergent personal power of individuals that has been generally disregarded and is not entailed by routine or habitual action.” [Margaret S. Archer. Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Page 3.]

“In Being Human, Margaret Archer sets out to reclaim humanity, which she avers is ‘at risk’ of being ‘ontologically undermined’ and reduced by postmodernists to the effects of discourse and society. Archer presents an alternative ontology, drawing on critical realism, in which both humans and structures have causal powers. Human powers emerge through engagement with three different orders of reality: natural, practical and social.” [Thembi Luckett, “Unsettling Humanity: A Critique of Archer’s Being Human.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 7, Issue 2, October 2008, pages 297-313.

“Relationists prefer to talk about ‘selves,’ or ‘persons as powerful particulars’ (Rom Harré); Realists about people in their ‘concrete singularity’ (Roy Bhaskar). In themselves these terminological differences are not important and I will try to respect this shared squeamishness by not using the noxious term ‘individual.’

“What is important is whether or not our singular selves are credited with their own properties and powers – potentialities, liabilities, capabilities, creativity, suffering, intentionality, and reflexivity inter alia – and where and how these are held to originate. At first glance, Relationists and Realists appear to give the same answer. These originate from our human embodied constitution and life in the real world with which we necessarily have to interact in order to survive and, better, thrive….

“However, the most contentious of concepts turns out to be ‘the world’ itself. To Realists, this signifies the whole natural world, constituted of nature, material culture, and social discourse, making for the natural, practical, and discursive orders with which humans ineluctably have to achieve accommodation. Conversely, for Relationists, there is a slippage. Practice may be our ‘primary mode’ of being in the world, but primacy is quickly withdrawn from the world and attached to the discursive order. The effect is that singular subjects are cut off from direct contact with and influence from their interplay with the natural and the practical orders because these are mediated to them by the discourse of others.”

[Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer. The Relational Subject. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Kindle edition.]

“This chapter aims to show how relational sociology – in connection with critical realism – sees social change, understood as social morphogenesis, in advanced societies. The idea of applying the morphogenetic conceptual framework to society comes from far away. Its initial analogy with the field of biological life is evident.… A new version has been given by M. S. Archer … whose critical realist approach I share.” [Pierpaolo Donati. Transcending Modernity: The Quest for a Relational Society. Bologna, Italy: Cesis—Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna. 2014. Page 57.]

“The novelty introduced by the relational approach … lies in seeing SC [social capital] as a quality of social relationships, rather than as a distinctive quality of individual or social and cultural structures, or as their mutual mix. Obviously, individual and structures ‘make’ social relationships (various types of SC), but the latter are an emergent phenomenon in opposition to their determining factors.” [Pierpaolo Donati, “Social Capital and Associative Democracy: A Relational Perspective.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 44, number 1, 2013. Pages 24-45.]

“We must come up with a new theory of difference (in personal and social identity) which allows us to understand and handle it in a relational way. Since the distinction is a reflexive operation, we are directed back to the ways in which reflexivity removes and judges differences. I will make three fundamental distinctions: dialogical reflexivity, binary reflexivity, and relational reflexivity.” [Pierpaolo Donati, “A Multicultural Society Needs a Relational Reason.” Privately published. Undated. Retrieved on December 4th, 2015.]

“In this paper, contrary to the transactional approaches, I argue that we cannot have a proper relational sociology unless we see the social relation as an emergent effect of a process of social morphogenesis. From the point of view of a critical realist relational sociology (henceforth CRRS), social morphogenesis is a form of surplus of society with respect to itself.” [Pierpaolo Donati, “Manifesto for a critical realist relational sociology.” International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie. Volume 25, number 1, 2015. Pages 86-109.]

“[Margaret S.] Archer’s [work] suffers from wrongfully making her a ‘disciple’ of Roy Bhaskar, when in fact the first statements of both their approaches appeared simultaneously in 1979.” [Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer. The Relational Subject. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Kindle edition.]

“The starting point I assume … is that the object of sociology is neither the so-called ‘subject,’ nor the social system, nor equivalent couplets (structure and agency, life-worlds and social system, and so forth), but is the social relation itself. However obvious it may seem, this statement has far-reaching implications.” [Pierpaolo Donati. Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Pages 4-5.]

“The subject of the relationship between religion and democracy is notoriously one of extreme complexity. In history there have been democracies which have arisen and have drawn nourishment from a religious input, and there have been democracies which have fought religion. Some democracies have favoured one religion alone, and other democracies have been opposed to all religions. It is more difficult to find democracies which have tolerated or had a positive approach towards different religions and promoted harmonious relations between them.” [Pierpaolo Donati, “Religion and Democracy: The Challenge of a ‘Religiously Qualified’ Public Sphere.” Polish Sociological Review. Number 138, 2002. Pages 147-172.]

“… [There is] variety within critical realism, as witnessed both by the differences between authors (such as [Margaret] Archer, [Roy] Bhaskar, [Dave] Elder-Vass, [Andrew] Collier, [Philip] Gorski) and by each theorist’s own personal trajectory. For instance, Roy Bhaskar initially referred to ontological reality in connection with philosophical realism (philosophy of science), originating in Marxism and naturalism, but later took other paths.” [Pierpaolo Donati. Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Page 102.]

“Three issues of generic importance to the realist enterprise are common to critical realism and [Pierpaolo Donati’s] relational sociology and will be taken as given. First, both are strongly committed to emergence and to the importance of emergent properties and powers in explanatory accounts of the social order. Second, under their own descriptions, both endorse the ‘three pillars’ of realism: a stratified social ontology, epistemological relativity, and judgemental rationality. Third, they conjointly deny Anthony Giddens’s view that ’social relationships … [are] abstractions from our repetitive or routinized behaviour’ based on rule-following, which has priority and indispensability for our relations.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Critical Realism and Relational Sociology: Complementarity and Synergy.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 2, June 2010. Pages 199-207.]

“In this introduction to [Pierpaolo] Donati’s relational sociology I have … chosen to focus on its foundational theorizing, necessarily dropping both the themes more closely connected to the changes in contemporary society and, even more regrettably, comparison with other perspectives of contemporary social theory. But I cannot refrain from mentioning, however briefly, the astonishing confluence of Italian relational sociology and English critical realism, notably as theorized by Margaret Archer. Sooner or later all true realisms end up converging and acknowledging one another, no matter the differences in their research routes and the cultural context they come from.” [Emmanuele Morandi, “Introductory Outlines to Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational Sociology, Part 1.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 2, 2010. Pages 208-226.]

“The ‘idealistic’ way has been tried, and now, in full awareness that it leads only to impasse, but nonetheless taking advantage of this experience, it is of pivotal importance for sociological thought to recover possession of the social experiences from which it gets its objectivity and its cultural and scientific disposition.… What is needed now, as [Pierpaolo] Donati clearly points out, is not a ‘new’ social theory alongside many others, capable of remedying – perhaps with some ‘readjustments’ – the prior failures, but to start from the experience we have of social reality, that is, to start from our being-relation.” [Emmanuele Morandi, “Introductory Outlines to Pierpaolo Donati’s Relational Sociology, Part 2.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 1, 2011. Pages 100-121.]

As realists, Donati and Archer want to say that such relationships are emergent realities with their own causal powers to act down on those related by them. In the first place, such relationships generate relational goods like trust, support, collabouration, and safety. These all are common goods in the special sense that their enjoyment is non-distributive; the trust, for example, that married partners once enjoyed cannot be parcelled out among them if and when they divorce.” [Douglas V. Porpora, “The Relational Subject.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 4, 2016. Pages 419-425.]

“In this article, I will … [be] basing my arguments on what is called ‘critical realist relational sociology.’ …

“… I speak of ‘relational subject’ to refer to the human person in as much as s/he is apprehended in the making of these relations. As soon as we observe the human individual ‘in relation’ to others, we see a ‘relational I’ that not only acts and is involved as Self in these relations, but re-elaborates itself in/through/with these relations.”

[Pierpaolo Donati, “The ‘Relational Subject’ According to a Critical Realist Relational Sociology.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 4, 2016. Pages 352-375.]

“Critical realism is a relational philosophy because it examines the interplay between different objects and strata, arguing: that the world is characterized by emergence, that is situations in which the conjunction of two or more features or aspects gives rise to new phenomena, which have properties which are irreducible to those of their constituents, even though the latter are necessary for their existence.… Society is more than the sum of its parts, and the nature of society reacts back to affect the individuals and other factors (such as material and social resources) that make society possible.” [Leesa Wheelahan, “Competency-Based Training, Powerful Knowledge and the Working Class.” Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. Karl Maton and Rob Moore, editors. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2010. Pages 93-109.]

“… a relational approach that sees the people and the parts as different and irreducible to each other is able to focus on the processes of interplay between different components. It is also able to explain how individuals are transformed through this interplay. Both critical realism and activity theory argue that agency can be transformed, but critical realism differs from activity theory because it sees this transformation as the consequence of a relational process between irreducible components, whereas activity theory privileges the social. I think this is not a necessary consequence of the theoretical premise underpinning activity theory, and that it could be enriched by aspects of critical realism.” [Leesa Mary Wheelahan, “Blending activity theory and critical realism to theorise the relationship between the individual and society and the implications for pedagogy.” Studies in the Education of Adults. Volume 39, number 2, autumn 2007. Pages 183-196.]

“The paper draws on my continuing PhD work, which is a defence of the role of knowledge in the curriculum, through a synthesis of [Basil] Bernstein’s theories and critical realism. The paper focuses on Bernstein’s later work on the structures of knowledge (with less emphasis on the pedagogic device). I argue that Bernstein’s analysis is a powerful tool for understanding VET [vocational education and training] in Australia, but it is not enough on its own. Bernstein presents a compelling case for the social basis of disciplinary knowledge, but this can be strengthened with a critical realist argument concerning the epistemic basis of disciplinary knowledge.” [Leesa Mary Wheelahan, “A Bernsteinian & realist synthesis to critique instrumental & constructivist theories of knowledge & learning.” Presented at the 4th International Basil Bernstein Symposium. Rutgers University–Newark. Newark, New Jersey. July 6th–9th, 2006. Pages 1-24. Retrieved on May 12th, 2016.]

“A relational theoretical approach to values-based inquiry understands individual agent’s actions as nested within layers of structural contexts that are infused with complex power dynamics …. Built into a relational approach to research to research on moral distress is the assumption of a dynamic interplay between structures and agents.

“Foundational to the belief that there is a dynamic relationship between structure and agency is accepting that structures and agents are both open systems with the capacity to change and be changed …. The original definition of moral distress suggested that nurses were unable to enact their moral agency when confronted by external constraints …. This definition could not accommodate for the complex relationship that exists between structure and agency ….

“… We argue in this paper that critical realism provides a promising philosophical framework for researchers to theorize about these relationships beyond what is immediately empirically evident, and can provide a more comprehensive explanation of how structures and agents come together in contingent ways, resulting in the experience of moral distress.”

[Lynn C. Musto, “Moving from conceptual ambiguity to knowledgeable action: using a critical realist approach to studying moral distress.” Nursing Philosophy. Volume 17, issue 2, April 2016. Pages 75-87.]

“With regard to paradigms, the following are especially popular and important in mixed methods research (MMR): pragmatism …, transformativism …, dialecticalism …, and critical realism …. Each of these well-known paradigms brings something important to the conversation.…

“… Dialectically, DP [dialectical pluralism] uses back-and-forth disputation and examination and can include the dynamic logic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—synthesis/integration is a key requirement of successful equal-status MMR. Dialogically, DP involves continual and equal dialogue and discussion. Hermeneutically, DP involves the continual process of interpretation and building on past interpretations.… In short, the purpose of this article is to articulate a philosophy/theory of DP as a way to obtain high-quality MMR process and results.”

[R. Burke Johnson, “Dialectical Pluralism: A Metaparadigm Whose Time Has Come.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research. OnlineFirst edition. October, 2015. Pages 1-18.]

“I discuss each paradigm—pragmatism, transformative-emancipation, dialectics, and critical realism—while focusing explicitly on the implications that each offers for mixed methods inquiry. I chose these paradigms in particular because these are perspectives typically discussed in mixed methods literature ….

“I focus my discussion on these four paradigmatic perspectives: pragmatism, transformative-emancipation, dialectics, and critical realism. These were chosen based on their representation in discussions about paradigms by methodologists in mixed methods as well as their potential implications. In the following subsections, I discuss each in more detail, drawing from both theoretical and empirical research, with particular attention to the contributions of each to mixed methods inquiry.”

[Peggy Shannon-Baker, “Making Paradigms Meaningful in Mixed Methods Research.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Volume 10, number 4, October 2016. Pages 319-334.]

“The researchers adopt a critical realist view which recognizes the significance of both material and discursive constraints on the production of experience …. This methodological position was chosen because it was thought particularly important to acknowledge the material influence of the genuine suffering experienced by participants as well as the chemical effects of antidepressants themselves. In addition, it was important to recognize that material experiences such as these are also interpreted within and transformed by the social discourses that surround medication use and the construction of masculinity.” [Kerry Gibson, Claire Cartwright, and John Read, “Conflict in Men’s Experiences With Antidepressants.” American Journal of Men’s Health. OnlineFirst edition. March, 2016. Pages 1-13.]

“CRITICAL REALISM IN PROPERTY RESEARCH

“Critical realism (CR) is a branch of philosophy often used when analysing real world phenomena and is primarily concerned with understanding the meaning in human actions. This type of non-positivist method is seldom used in property research as most researchers in this discipline favour of the ‘value-free, detached observation’ of positivist methods ….

“CR basically divides reality into three levels – the knowledge and beliefs about a social phenomenon that occurs at level of the actual experiences, the events that cause them, and the causal mechanisms that drive these events ….”

[Pamela Wardner, “Explaining Mixed-use Developments: A Critical Realist’s Perspective.” Presented at the 20th Annual Pacific-Rim Real Estate Society Conference. Christchurch, New Zealand. January July 19th–22nd, 2014. Pages 1-24. Retrieved on June 11th, 2016.]

“We apply a critical realist perspective on urban environmental risk to examine the factors associated with perceived vulnerability. Critical realism assumes that risk events are shaped by causal mechanisms and specific local conditions. In the context of this study, causal mechanisms could include population pressure, rural—urban migration, poverty and social—political processes, already highlighted above; local conditions could include location, seasonality, infrastructure, land use, tenure status, income levels, adaptation mechanisms and social–demographic factors, which have hitherto not been empirically analysed.” [John Bosco Isunju, Christopher Garimoi Orach, and Jaco Kemp, “Hazards and vulnerabilities among informal wetland communities in Kampala, Uganda.” Environment & Urbanization. Volume 28, number 1, 2015. Pages 275-293.]

“People come to know nature as a socially constructed concept in two senses; not only do they shape nature by social practices as [Karl] Marx was aware, but nature is also experienced and given meaning through the mediation of cultural discourses and representations.… This is a common sense view of reality and is the basis of a socially sensitive realist philosophy called critical realism developed by [Roy] Bhaskar …. This philosophical perspective has an ontology claiming that reality is socially constructed whilst maintaining that underlying structures and mechanisms of the real world determine social arrangements and understandings …. Seen like this, critical realism mitigates the detrimental influences of strong forms of constructivism … that assume the biophysical world is purely a human construct, and the narrowly calculative rationality of positivism that treats knowledge as simply the accumulation of sense-experiences. It follows that a critical realist epistemological perspective depends on the building of models of understanding of these structures and mechanisms that, were they to act and exist in the postulated way, would account for the phenomena examined ….” [Malcolm Plant, “Critical Realism: a Common Sense Philosophy for Environmental Education?” Presented at the 26th annual conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe. Stockholm, Sweden. August 27th–September 1st, 2001. Retrieved on June 11th, 2016.]

“Despite some awareness of the need to examine the nature of Protestant pastoral power, the project was never completed. This article attempts to sketch in one important aspect of that tradition, the practice of self-examination, but why might this be important? …

“… Just as the careful merchant kept books of account which were regularly inspected so that they would know their position at any time, so the committed Christian should keep records to facilitate the vital practice of self-examination.…

“… Over time the attributes of what it meant to be an adherent to the faith inevitably changed, but the commitment to self-examination, albeit against changing standards, remained.”

[Alistair Mutch, “Pastoral Power and Governmentality: From Therapy to Self Help.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 3, 2015. Pages 268-285.]

“In this introduction we have advanced a relational sociology of organizations that seeks to address a number of key concerns with the way in which organization studies has been developing. We have advocated an historically and institutionally grounded approach which both recognizes and explores the constraining and enabling character of social structures and the prospects of agency on the part of social actors.… By depth we mean that phenomena exist at different levels and change at different rates.” [Alistair Mutch, “Situating Organizational Action: The Relational Sociology of Organizations.” Organization. Volume 13, number 5, September 2006. Pages 607-624.]

“Margaret Archer … argues that the Enlightenment model of the person presumes that means-end rationality precedes action, whereas in fact, many rational explanations for action emerge after engaging in action. Prayer and liturgy can thus be considered constitutive ends practices because relationships with others and with the supernatural are not something people pursue just as a means to another end, but are rather seen as goods in and of themselves. In the circular process of developing and expressing relational intimacy through religious practices, the means and the end are joined. Repeated interactions do not just build the relationship; in a very real way those interactions are the relationship.” [Margarita A. Mooney and Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber, “Prayer and Liturgy as Constitutive-Ends Practices in Black Immigrant Communities.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 44, issue 4, 2014. Pages 459-480.]

“The sociology that I term neo-structural assumes that behaviour, in this context, is largely determined, on the one hand, by more or less conflicting categorical (macro and meso) affiliations, and on the other hand, by the system of economic and symbolic interdependences between these conflicting actors. The term ‘structural’ refers here to the observed regularities in the relations and multiple socio-economical exchanges, formal and informal, between these individual and organizational actors with divergent interests and at the same time relations of multiple and multilateral interdependencies. Contemporary neo-structuralism is different from the structuralism of the 1960s because it relies on a theory of individual and collective action. I suggest here that it is quite close to [Margaret S.] Archer’s brand of structuralism, co-evolving with agency and culture.…

“… I will argue that it is possible to conceptualize and measure ‘Morphogenesis Unbound’ (MU) as a dynamic and multilevel – both individual and organizational – phenomenon ….

“… collective action at two vertically interdependent levels of agency is also a story of ‘emancipation’ from the influence of the other level, and either catching up with this other level as it stands, or creating a new emergent structure (or more modestly, a new sub-structure). The lag between the two can be considered the main source of morphogenesis and the generalization of lags the cause of MU: structuration at one level drives structuration at the other in mostly conflicting, chaotic, and unequal ways. Time to adjust and adapt are not always available; enormous waste and disorganization may characterize the multilevel structuration process.”

[Emmanuel Lazega, “‘Morphogenesis Unbound’ from the Dynamics of Multilevel Networks: A Neo-structural Perspective.” Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society. Margaret S. Archer, editor. New York: Springer International Publishing imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. 2014. Pages 173-191.]

“This article uses a critical realist position to consider some of the perspectives that others have used to approach the subject of inter-organizational exchange networks. It is argued that Realism is useful for combining certain perspectives on the subject, and case study evidence is used to demonstrate how this combination is useful for interpreting real situations. The outcome, it is argued, is a tentative movement towards a Realist approach to the subject of inter-organizational exchange networks that concentrates on the specific forces that determine the forms of social action observed.

“Inter-organizational exchange networks, which have also been referred to as ‘network’ or ‘clan’ forms, are specific social structures associated with sustained and continuous contracting between two or more organizations.”

[Steve Vincent, “Really dealing: a critical perspective on inter-organizational exchange networks.” Work, employment and society. Volume 19, number 1, 2005. Pages 47-65.]

“After having conceptualized the pertinent explanandum as ‘foreign policy actions’—a stipulation with fundamental metatheoretical implications flowing from the philosophy of action …—I … [have] proposed that the explanation of such actions is most fruitfully pursued in terms of a logically tripartite approach consisting of an intentional, a dispositional, and a structural dimension of explanation ….

“This brings us … to the morphogenetic approach advocated by [Margaret S.] Archer …. By embracing this analytic conception my intention is by no means to supplant the framework for explaining foreign policy actions previously outlined. Rather, it should be seen as underlying it, and as such indicating the reciprocal interplay over time—in terms of developmental patterns or cycles—that exists between structure and action in a given foreign policy system.”

[Walter Carlsnaes, “The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy Analysis.” International Studies Quarterly. Volume 36, number 3, September 1992. Pages 245-270.]

“The American pragmatists thought the inner dialogue was the defining feature of the self …. For them the self is an internal community or network, communicating within itself in a field of meaning.…

“Inner speech is a streamlined version of outer speech, characterized by short cuts and speaker peculiarities.…

“… The study of inner speech was stalled in discussions of [George Herbert] Mead’s theory of self. Now the structure of inner speech is begnning to be understood, a host of examples are available to show its texture, and empirical research is beginning to appear (especially that of [Margaret S.] Archer …).”

[Norbert Wiley, “Inner Speech as a Language: A Saussurean Inquiry.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 36, issue 3, 2006. Pages 319-341.]

“Social learning (SL), i.e. the collective action and reflection that occurs among stakeholders as they work towards a mutually acceptable solution to a problem pertaining to the management of human and environmental interrelationships …, lies at the heart of such multi-stakeholder processes. Intermediation, therefore, in general implies a (social) mechanism for facilitating SL, i.e. participatory processes of social change, through shared learning, collaboration and the development of consensus about the action to be taken (including innovations to be explored).” [Alex Koutsouris, “Facilitating Agricultural Innovation Systems: a critical realist approach.” Studies in Agricultural Economics. Volume 114, 2012. Pages 64-70.]

“In this section, I align … [a] critical realist account of social exclusion with research methods which are not simply descriptive but critical in nature too. This is carried out through a tripartite framework for data collection and analysis built around the separation of the empirical, actual, and real of social reality, and using in-depth qualitative research methods, moving from the descriptive to more critical data analysis. Attention is also given to important ethical factors concerned with research with young people, and this includes issues of access, payment and data protection.” [Clive Sealey. Social Exclusion and Young People: A Critical Realist Strong Late Modern Analytic. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Institute of Applied Social Sciences, College of Social Sciences, University of Birmingham. Birmingham, England. April, 2009. Pages 111-112.]

“Qualitative research methods focussing on the direct measurement of social exclusion provide a theoretically and methodologically consistent approach which also underlies [British] New Labour’s weak conceptualisation of social exclusion. This leads to a tripartite framework centred on critical realist the domains of reality and built around a modified form of the Diary: Diary-Interview Method research method as the main mode of data collection. This functions as a good approximation of participation observation methods, and so provides the potential for descriptions of socially structured situations.” [Clive Sealey. Social Exclusion and Young People: A Critical Realist Strong Late Modern Analytic. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Institute of Applied Social Sciences, College of Social Sciences, University of Birmingham. Birmingham, England. April, 2009. Page 127.]

“This paper uses a critical realist theory of reflexivity to argue that the teaching and assessment of writing must account for the different ways that students manage and make decisions in their writing.…

“… First, I consider the writer as a self-conscious designer of text, which foregrounds their reflexive and agentic position as writer. Next, I use [Margaret S.] Archer’s … theory of reflexivity to explain the ways in which writers mediate objective (contextual structures) and subjective (personal) conditions to make decisions in writing, how such decisions can maintain or subvert the status quo, and the different reflexive modalities that can be ascribed to writers.” [Mary Ryan, “Reflexive writers: Re-thinking writing development and assessment in schools.” Assessing Writing. Volume 22, 2014. Pages 60-74.]

“The methodological implications of critical realism’s relational construction of society are acute. Such a construction necessitates social scientific research that addresses phenomena with respect to the contexts in which they occur. The phenomena under study will, in virtually all cases, result from a combination of driving forces existing within social structures and stemming from the human activities that occur within these social contexts. [Roy] Bhaskar explains such a situation by stating that social phenomena are ‘conjunctionally determined, and, as such, have to be explained in terms of a multiplicity of causes.’” [J. Jackson Ewing, “A Way in the Wilderness: Using Critical Realism to Navigate Environmental Security’s Methodological Terrain.” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. Volume 5, number 7, 2010. Pages 305-316.]

“The purchase of taking a morphogenetic approach to religion as belief system lies in the understanding which can be gained of the mechanisms impacting strategic positioning of religious institutions in society.… The second-order relations at the institutional level of analysis of CEPs [cultural emergent properties] in the above include an external and an internal body of CEPs relative to that of the Church. In addition the Church is pressed by its own structural relations to the state and the socio-cultural integration of people. When belief systems are distilled as a separate dimension of analysis we can investigate the consequences of logical relations among beliefs for the social interaction taken up by their proponents.” [Caroline Hoel. Morphogenetic Approaches to Religion: Understanding Religion from the Perspective of Margaret Archer. Master’s thesis. Department of Religion, Philosophy and History of the University of Agder. Kristiansand and Grimstad, Norway. 2010. Page 97.]

“… not only might this [the military] be a more useful metaphor for many contemporary organizations, but also that simplistic uses of military metaphor divert our attention away from the functions that management hierarchies play. The discussion is embedded within a critical realist account of metaphor, arguing for both its value and the need for its further development.…

“… I have suggested that an approach based on critical realism offers us the resources to interrogate our use of metaphor more closely, because it stresses the need to explore the relationship between metaphor and its external referents, and because it supplies a persuasive account of how to approach those external referents.”

[Alistair Mutch, “Organization Theory and Military Metaphor: Time for a Reappraisal?” Organization. Volume 13, number 6, November 2006. Pages 751-769.]

“… the interpretive dimension of a feminist critical realist approach also demonstrates that such material structures do not predetermine or produce a singular regime of the power effects of these texts in question.…

“I suggest that a trans/national feminist perspective on the representation of the Third World woman does not need to rest on a binary opposition between an authentic speaking subaltern or an unrecoverable subject lost in webs of power and domination.… Multinational productions of cultural texts are not intrinsically authentic or resistant because of their presumed hybridity. However, they are also not unitary in the meanings and power effects they produce.”

[Leela Fernandes, “Reading ‘India’s Bandit Queen’: A Trans/national Feminist Perspective on the Discrepancies of Representation.” Signs. Volume 25, number 1, autumn 1999. Pages 123-152.]

“The research was conducted from a feminist critical realist epistemological standpoint. Critical realism affirms the existence of reality, both material, psychological and environmental, but at the same time recognizes that this experience is always mediated by culture, language and political interests rooted in factors such as sexuality, race, gender or social class …. Being grounded in a feminist standpoint means acknowledging that women’s voices and experiences are silenced, distorted and obscured in a phallocentric or patriarchal culture.” [Jane M. Ussher and Julie Mooney-Somers, “Negotiating Desire and Sexual Subjectivity: Narratives of Young Lesbian Avengers.” Sexualities. Volume 3, number 2, 2000. Pages 183-200.]

“The transcriptions were analyzed by the first author using thematic analysis, that is, the extraction of common themes in interviews in order to identify patterns, similarities, and differences …. The process of analysis was informed by a feminist critical realist approach … that situates the subjective experiences and understandings recounted in the interviews within their social and political contexts, and recognizes the influence of prevailing discourses on violence and gender.… This study provides an important but relatively narrow viewpoint on service responses to women’s use of violence and its findings may not be generalizable to other stakeholders.” [Bridget Mottram and Michael Salter, “‘It’s an Ethical, Moral and Professional Dilemma I Think’: Domestic Violence Workers’ Understandings of Women’s Use of Violence in Relationships.” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. Volume 31, number 2, 2016. Pages 192-206.]

“Crucially, from the critical realist point of view the contingent and infinitely complex character of the actual does not mean there is no structure or necessity pertaining to reality. It is here that critical realism offers an important alternative to the poststructuralist tendency to see complexity and contingency as evidence that there are no systematic or necessary connections in reality.” [Lena Gunnarsson. The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist ontology of sociosexuality. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“… I contend that it is possible to see the gendered subject as a changing and multi-dimensional product of social and discursive processes, while nevertheless comprehending this social product as real, and as irreducible to the process of its production.” [Lena Gunnarsson. The Contradictions of Love: Towards a feminist-realist ontology of sociosexuality. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“In this article I attempt to reconcile two seemingly conflicting theorizations of love, the one elaborated by Roy Bhaskar as part of his philosophy of metaReality and Anna G. Jónasdóttir’s historical materialist-radical feminist theory of ‘love power.’ While Bhaskar emphasizes the essentially non-dual character of love, envisioning it as a ‘no-lose situation,’ Jónasdóttir stresses the antagonistic features structuring love relations by conceptualizing love as a productive power of which men tend to exploit women. Rather than seeing these accounts as mutually exclusive I show that they can be reconciled by aid of the general ontology elaborated by Bhaskar in his philosophy of metaReality.” [Lena Gunnarsson, “Love – Exploitable Resource or ‘No-Lose Situation’?: Reconciling Jónasdóttir’s Feminist View with Bhaskar’s Philosophy of MetaReality.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 4, 2011. Pages 419-441.]

“If womanhood is typically thought of as a reified property contained in each female individual, the tools of critical realism allow for a radically different understanding. According to the critical realist perspective, people exist only by virtue of the relations and forces that constitute them, through the medium of structural positions.… The position as woman will make its occupant apt to act in ways commonly understood as feminine and experience things that males do not tend to experience.” [Lena Gunnarsson, “A Defence of the Category ‘Women.’” Feminist Theory. Volume 12, number 1, 2011. Pages 23-37.]

“The theorization and explanation of any socially constructed oppressive structure need to be rooted in my view in some notion of a ‘natural ontological order.’ Such a reference to natural necessities is needed not only for explaining howpower structures can get a hold over people, but also for specifying the ways in which the natural ontological order imposes absolute constraints on the forms that oppressive structures can take, ultimately creating a conatus to getting rid of the oppressive structure.

“… patriarchal gender relations are typically legitimized by reference to the natural ontological order, hence it is rather unsurprising that feminists are a bit wary of nature.”

[Lena Gunnarsson, “Nature, Love and the Limits of Male Power.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 3, June 2015. Pages 325-332.]

“Critical realism offers a robust metatheoretical basis for challenging poststructuralist tendencies towards relativism, subjectivism, cultural reductionism, anti-realism and anti-naturalism, while embracing important poststructuralist insights such as the fact that social reality is partly constituted by discourse and human subjectivity, and that knowledge is always fallible. As such, it should be attractive for the growing lot of feminists searching for alternatives to poststructuralism. More specifically, critical realism, as well as the Marxist tradition in which it is rooted, has a long tradition of conceiving of the social and human as part of nature, while not reducible to it. As such, it should be an invaluable resource for feminist naturalists.” [Lena Gunnarsson, “The naturalistic turn in feminist theory: A Marxist-realist contribution.” Feminist Theory. Volume 14, number 1, 2013. Pages 3-19.]

“If independence cannot cope with dependence, every sign of need and dependence must be dealt with in violent ways that attempt to control that on which one depends. The dialectic of control is bound to intensify since, inasmuch as suppressing one’s dependence means suppressing part of one’s own wholeness, the self based on such suppressions is, paradoxically, more acutely dependent on its ‘outside’ for being whole than the self that reconciles independence with dependence.” [Lena Gunnarsson, “The Dominant and its Constitutive Other: Feminist Theorizations of Love, Power and Gendered Selves.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 1, February 2016. Pages 1-20.]

“A hidden ethic of human needs …

“Feminism makes claims about the nature of social relations, and adduces various sorts of evidence for these.…

“A realist approach (and an ethically naturalist one) is therefore essential to the feminist project. To deal with the poststructuralist challenge, this realism needs to be critical.”

[Caroline New, “Feminism and Critical Realism.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 1, issue 1, July 1998. Pages 2-4.]

“… if it were always illegitimate to move from facts to values, it would be the case that whatever we believe to be true of the world, we can consistently hold any value position – a view satirised by [Roy] Bhaskar as proposing the slogan ‘Keep Science out of Politics’ ….

“We are increasingly discovering our global interrelatedness and interdependence, which exposes the weakness of the reasons offered for restricting moral communities to anything less than the whole species. We know that in many respects, human beings of all cultures and backgrounds have similar needs. Moral realism permits a definition of oppression as the systematic mistreatment (in terms of human needs) of groups of people, usually justified with reference to their supposed nature. It permits concepts of emancipation and liberation which (as in much feminist theory) go beyond, and sometimes even conflict with, the aspirations of the groups in question.”

[Caroline New, “Sociology and the case for realism.” The Sociological Review. Volume 43, number 4, November 1995. Pages 808-827.]

“Emancipatory dialectics neglected …

“I do not have the space here to elaborate how disidentification can usefully be re-thought via [Roy] Bhaskar’s ‘dialectic of desire to freedom’ …. However, I would like to lay special stress on the dialectic of the ‘education of desire’ ….”

[Gary MacLennan, “Aesthetics and the Dialectic of Desire to Freedom: Comment on Beech and Roberts.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 1, issue 2, July 1998. Pages 19-22.]

“We begin this article with a description of our project before offering an overview of the literature on both poetic inquiry and critical realism. We then elaborate on the process of writing and analysis found in each poetic re-construction of the women’s narratives, concluding with some reflections on the place of a poetic, critical realist representation of research findings.…

“… Poetic inquiry allowed us to analyze, re-construct and re-present the written transcripts, providing a three-dimensional, embodied voice to women who had been made invisible, marginalized and silenced in their newfound country.”

[Shawn Renee Hordyk, Sonia Ben Soltane, and Jill Hanley, “Sometimes you have to go under water to come up: A poetic, critical realist approach to documenting the voices of homeless immigrant women.” Qualitative Social Work. Volume 13, number 2, 2014. Pages 203-220.]

“Categorial realism

“The reality of categories in the world and independent of our knowledge of them has always been fundamental to [Roy] Bhaskar’s thinking.…

“… we do indeed have two categorisations of being, and in their train, two kinds of categorial realism. One is the kind of realism that looks for existing, real categories in the natural or social world. The other is a realism about the truth of a real category, that is, ‘its alethic ground or fundamental categorial structure.’ In short, categorial realism refers to real categories, but also to ideal real categories.”

[Nick Hostettler and Alan Norrie, “Do You Like Soul Music?” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 2-8.]

“It is time to travel East and to take a look at one of the most compelling logical systems that originated there: the logical dialectics of the Buddhist Madhyamika School. Nagarjuna is regarded as the founder of this school, one of the most important in the Buddhist tradition. The method Nagarjuna and his followers employed could be called a critical dialectical procedure. It consists in analysing and criticizing the philosophical assumptions and arguments of opponents by demonstrating their incoherence or internal contradictions, hence their untenability.…

“All in all, this Madhyamika-style reasoning may seem very abstract and too remote from everyday reality to be useful, but it is not.”

[Jan Straathof, “Logical Meanderings: West and East.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 8-11.]

“I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha,

“The best of teachers, who taught that

“Whatever is dependently arisen is

“Unceasing, unborn,

“Unannihilated, not permanent,

“Not coming, not going,

“Without distinction, without identity,

“And free from conceptual construction.”

[Nagarjuna. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. Jay L. Garfield, translator and commentator. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. Page 100.]

“… if my contention that Nāgārjuna’s philosophy is a mere restatement of the empiricist and pragmatic philosophy of the Buddha, the form of Buddhism introduced into China would also be the same as the original teachings of the Buddha with no paradigm changes. And this may account for the survival of Buddhism along side the equally pragmatic philosophy of Confucianism, whereas it failed to survive in India in the face of a very strong idealistic tradition. The prevalent view—that Buddhism, because of its idealistic character, got absorbed into the idealistic tradition in India and failed to remain as a separate entity—needs careful scrutiny, especially when a leading philosopher like Nāgārjuna is not seen to advocate such an idealistic view.” [David J. Kalupahana in Nāgārjuna. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way. David J. Kalupahana, translator and annotator. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1986. Pages 8-9.]

“Nyaya-Vaisesika’s concepts of ontology and epistemology seem to be similar to those of [Karl] Marx. Nyaya-Vaisesika is a full-scale philosophical system that has contributed significantly to the realist discourse of the Hindu philosophical tradition. Nyaya and Vaisesika are two different schools which are commonly treated together due to their fundamental agreement on a wide range of issues. Nyaya deals with epistemological questions and Vaisesika specialises in ontological issues.…

“In fact, in some senses Nyaya-Vaisesika explores the concept of ontology more exhaustively than Marx.”

[Manindra Nath Thakur, “Debating Realism(s): Marxism and Nyaya-Vaisesika.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 5, issue 1, May 2002. Pages 50-55.]

“Ultimate concern perhaps is the concept closest to what we mean by moral purpose. Named by theologian Paul Tillich, ultimate concern cern refers to whatever we make the central concern of our lives. Our ultimate concern is that to which we are not just committed but ultimately mately committed—above all else—and from which in turn we derive our ultimate fulfillment. Like a moral purpose, an ultimate concern is something to which we are emotionally tied, and like a moral purpose, an ultimate concern can be more or less encompassing. From a theological perspective, Tillich suggests, it is idolatrous for us to make an object of ultimate concern anything that is not truly ultimate.” [Douglas V. Porpora. Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Kindle edition.]

“An ultimate concern is that to which we are not just committed but ultimately committed – above all else – and from which in turn we derive our ultimate fulfilment.… The question is how high our ultimate concerns reach and whether, specifically, those ultimate concerns are broad enough to encompass the plight of oppressed others. To the extent that our ultimate concerns terminate with our own families and with what in America are called family values, then the oppression of others will likely fall outside the universe of our moral concern.” [Douglas V. Porpora, “The Sociology of Ultimate Concern.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 1, July 2000. Pages 10-15.]

“[Douglas V.] Porpora’s book Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life is centrally concerned with the question of identity and moral purpose and what he diagnoses as a deep and pervasive disengagement from ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the good, and the true. We have shunned posing the questions of how we should live, how we should be, questions which are vital to a deeper realisation of the human project, and capable of elevating our moral horizons and connecting us to a larger vision of the good life beyond our narrow preoccupations and local communities.” [Rachel Sharp, “Religious Sociology’s Holy War.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 2, 2001. Pages 45-49.]

“There is … [a] problem associated with humanism’s identification of humanity with rationality. The problem concerns the ontological status of rationality. If we think of rationality broadly as reasoned or minded behaviour, we – at least we critical realists – think of it as occupying an emergently irreducible level of activity. Although we critical realists use the word mechanism, we think of human behaviour as teleological or goal-directed as opposed to mechanistic in a purely physicalist sense, and we do not think the former can be reduced to the latter.” [Douglas V. Porpora, “Dehumanization in theory: anti-humanism, nonhumanism, post-humanism, and trans-humanism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Latest–articles edition. July, 2017. Pages 1-15.]

“… in this book, our argument for interdisciplinarity starts from ontology, namely, multimechanismicity (a multiplicity of mechanisms) in open systems; and moves to epistemology, namely multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, intradisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. We assume the presence of a necessary laminated system, which is a stratified totality, constituted by emergent levels. Any explanation will need reference to each level, hence the need for anti-reductionism and interdisciplinarity alike. The necessary laminated system involves an internal relation between the levels or elements of a system, constituting a specific form of holistic causality. This suggests the existence of polymorphous presence, where the effects of a change or an intervention in one part of a system can be detected in all the other parts of the system, at all its levels. These effects may be of varying weight or import and contrary to one another.” [Roy Bhaskar, Berth Danermark, and Leigh Price. Interdisciplinarity and Wellbeing: A Critical Realist General Theory of Interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2018. Page 17.]

“I draw upon Richard Wright’s Black Boy as a counter to ‘narratives of specificity.’ Wright also operates at the local level, but he situates it within the global. He articulates what I call an ‘aesthetics of crisis’ because he demonstrates that daily life is the site of contradictions for a racially structured and exploitative social order. If race is deployed to maintain and justify an asymmetrical division of labor, then its very deployment in daily life exposes the fault line of dominant ideologies. The claims of the liberal democratic state are contradicted by the daily life of African-Americans.” [Robert Young, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an ‘Aesthetics of Crisis.’” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 2, issue 1, July 1999. Pages 6-11.]

“A habitus (positioned practices) is a mediating link between individuals’ subjective worlds and the socio-cultural world into which they are born and which they share with others.… [T]he habitus can be seen as the ‘site of the internalization of reality and the externalization of internality.’

“Thus social practices are produced in, and by, the encounter between: (1) the habitus and its dispositions; (2) the constraints and demands of the socio-cultural field to which the habitus is appropriate or within; and (3) the dispositions of the individual agents located within both the socio-cultural field and the habitus.… [We than place habitus] within [Roy] Bhaskar’s stratified complex social ontology ….

[Colin Wight. Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Page 49.]

“In this piece I have chosen to use the term ‘scientific realism’ as opposed to ‘critical realism.’ Scientific realism is a position in the philosophy of science. Critical realism is generally associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar, and uses scientific realism to develop a particular approach to social science. Not all scientific realists embrace Bhaskar’s account of the social world. But all scientific realists would, I think, accept the critique of instrumentalism contained in this piece, hence my use of scientific realism as opposed to critical realism.…

“At the heart of the SR [scientific realist] account of science is the view that the entities postulated by mature scientific theories (electrons, genes, viruses, dark matter, black holes, etc.) are believed by scientists to be real. If scientists did not believe them to be real, how do we explain attempts to split atoms, provide cures for viruses, or the search for dark matter?”

[Colin Wight, “A Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the Can-Opener Won’t Work!” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 35, number 2, 2007. Pages 379-398.]

“In this book, I draw together philosophical insights and a proposed bio-psycho-social (BPS) ontology, along with similarities identified in the existing sport coaching research literature across disciplines, to develop a ‘specific’ sport coaching ontology. The resultant embedded, relational and emergent (ERE) model offers the following ontological components: embeddedness, goal-orientation, resource, reasoning, reflecting, strategizing, action and outcome. These ontological features are inclusive of ontologies assumed by the main disciplines. For example, cognition relates to individual resource and reasoning; behaviour relates to strategizing and action; social and relational features are captured through the resources, reasoning, strategies and actions embedded with contextual features of any layered sport coaching ecology. It is this ‘specific’ ontology that provides the basis for an interdisciplinary account.

“The approach provides a causal and critical account of sport coaching. It provides a framework that explores ‘what coaches choose to do and how they are influenced (by wider/social factors) to choose what they do’ …. It provides a way of navigating other dichotomies and dualisms in sport coaching research.”

[Julian North. Sport Coaching Research and Practice: Ontology, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2017. Page 19.]

“Based on a critical realist approach which appreciates the formation of identity over a lengthy timeframe, the findings of this study reveal that the WEA’s [Workers’ Educational Association’s] identity has always been a contested site of struggle, and subject to powerful internal and external influences that result in an organisation that is not so much in crisis, as in contradiction.” [Samantha Jayne Davis. Workers’ Educational Association: A Crisis of Identity? Personal Perspectives on Changing Professional Identities. Ed.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Leeds Metropolitan University. Leeds, England. June, 2013. Page i.]

“… such practices which promote democracy in the classroom by encouraging the ‘student-as-tutor’ and ‘tutor-as-student,’ operate on a radically different concept of knowledge which is based on an emancipatory ontology that contrasts sharply with the positivist and passive concepts that dominate education today, and which see knowledge as ‘fixed,’ or a commodity. This radical alternative sees knowledge as an action oriented process of collaboration and co-production between learners and tutors, who, through dialogue, make explicit their own individual assumptions about a subject, to arrive at a deeper, critical, understanding of a world that is constantly moving and changing ….” [Samantha Jayne Davis. Workers’ Educational Association: A Crisis of Identity? Personal Perspectives on Changing Professional Identities. Ed.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Leeds Metropolitan University. Leeds, England. June, 2013. Page 107.]

“… this paper contributes to the theoretical and methodological enrichment of SAP [strategy-as-practice] by introducing and illustrating an Archerian [Margaret S. Archer’s] approach to the practice of strategy. By maintaining the ontic differentiation between structure and agency this approach renders the conditions of action analytically separable from the action itself, thereby facilitating the analysis of their interplay, one upon the other, at variance through time, in strategy formation and strategizing. In this manner, insight into the discrete actions of strategic agents is revealed, offering SAP an analytical grasp upon the constraints and enablements which foster change—social and strategic—or the maintenance of the status quo.” [Andrea Herepath, “In the loop: A realist approach to structure and agency in the practice of strategy.” Organization Studies. Volume 35, number 6, 2014. Pages 857-879.]

“Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist philosophy, the author argues that we can think of intersectional categories as well as different ontological levels as both distinct and unified and elaborate on the significance of the dialectical notion of unity-in-difference for intersectional studies.…

“… Giving some examples of ways of arguing in different areas of feminist thought that seem to be premised on a view of separateness and inseparability as mutually exclusive, I show how Bhaskar’s dialectic, centring round the figure of unity-in-difference, can counter unproductive dualisms between separateness and unity.…

“… What underpins … dualities is the notion of unity-in-difference, which challenges what I see as the most basic and problematic of all dualisms, that between separateness and inseparability itself ….”

[Lena Gunnarsson, “Why we keep separating the ‘inseparable’: Dialecticizing intersectionality.” European Journal of Women’s Studies. Creative Commons. March 2015. Pages 1-14.]

“It should, first of all, be said of [Roy] Bhaskar’s proposal that it does indeed represent the completion (or at least one possible completion) of the Hegelian-Marxist project. Specifically, it is the completion of a whole line of reasoning within the dialectical tradition (a line of reasoning which goes back to Heraclitus) which gives priority to chaos, change, and contradiction. Historically this trend has scored points by attacking the opposing Parmenidean trend which gives priority to unity and stasis. But this whole way of framing the debate is anachronistic.” [Anthony Mansueto. Doing Justice: Knowing God, Volume 4. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2011. Kindle edition.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar …, for example, argues that after an early infatuation with the democratic revolutions, [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel resigned himself to the status quo and became a de facto apologist for Prussian absolutism, mapping out a strategy by means of which it might hegemonize the revolutionary intelligentsia. This verdict is not, however, really fair. His own pretensions to the contrary, Hegel was, after all, finite and a person of his time.” [Anthony Mansueto. The Journey of the Dialectic: Knowing God, Volume 3. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2010. Page 270.]

“What would have been required, specifically, was a generalization of the concept of teleology to embrace contradiction and disintegration, along something like the lines that would later be proposed by Hegel and Marx. According to such a view, change is indeed driven by teleological attraction, and is therefore fundamentally a process of progressive development towards ever-higher degrees of organization.” [Anthony Mansueto. The Ultimate Meaningfulness of the Universe: Knowing God, Volume 2. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“Philosophy was reduced to what Roy Bhaskar has called ‘underlaboring’ … for other disciplines: investigating the conditions of their possibility, clarifying linguistic confusions, etc.” [Anthony Mansueto. The Death of Secular Messianism: Religion and Politics in an Age of Civilizational Crisis. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2010. Kindle edition.]

“… I have also tried to construct … [a] Marxist mode of abstraction which can examine the unique ideological properties of distinct spatial forms. The advantage of this is the ability to link together the internal and contradictory properties of spatial objects so that we arrive at both an organic analysis and a conjunctural analysis. The battle for hegemony is not merely a battle for the strategic use of space – it is also a battle for non-humanist contradictory spatial forms.” [John Michael Roberts, “Realistic spatial abstraction? Marxist observations of a claim within critical realist geography.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 25, number 4, 2001. Pages 545-567.]

“At an abstract level … capitalism is based purely on the profit motive and labour exploitation. Indifferent to human needs, this structural imperative maintains the superiority of profit over and above eradicating negative social practices like oppression, pollution, poverty, and so on …. These abstract properties of the totality of capitalism will be refracted in concrete settings at lower levels of abstraction and which includes their refraction into academic research practice from where academic knowledge is created.…

“… [Roy] Bhaskar’s … dialectical work reorients how causal mechanisms should be conceptualised. It now becomes possible, for example, to think about mechanisms as being moments of dialectical connections in totalities and moments of specific dialectical contradictions. That is to say, mechanisms can be theorised as being dialectical and contradictory, and this changes the methodological focus of how we think about mechanisms in social research in a way which at least provides some plausible rebuttals to critics. Bhaskar’s later dialectical work thus leaves us with a way of rethinking critical realism in a manner that dialecticises mechanisms in relation to history.”

[John Michael Roberts, “Critical Realism, Dialectics, and Qualitative Research Methods.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 44, number 1, 2014. Pages 1-23.]

“This paper seeks to make a contribution to debate on the epistemological base of housing studies. I argue that there are benefits from seeking an approach that combines key features of critical realist and standpoint feminist positions. Debate in housing studies’ cognate disciplines suggests that these theoretical stances are not inconsistent and I find principles for their being used in concert. The paper shows how those principles are taken forward in parts of the literature. I identify the extent of exposure of housing studies to critical realist and feminist meta-theoretical debate and suggest the analytical implications of a feminist realist approach.” [Madhu Satsangi, “Synthesizing Feminist and Critical Realist Approaches to Housing Studies.” Abstract. Housing, Theory and Society. Volume 30, issue 2, 2013. Pages 193-207.]

“The analytic approach was situated within a critical realist framework … that allowed us to talk about socially produced meanings but still understand these as having some relationship to material or experiential reality for people. A critical realist’s understanding of the body posits that meanings are ‘artificial’ in the sense that they are not natural but are real in that they represent perceived truth for people and society ….

“Our research provides … [a] strand of inquiry into the social construction of (gendered) bodily desires and practices, and one which resonates with existing scholarship.”

[Virginia Braun, Gemma Tricklebank, and Victoria Clarke, “‘It Shouldn’t Stick Out from Your Bikini at the Beach’: Meaning, Gender, and the Hairy/Hairless Body.” Psychology of Women Quarterly. Volume 37, number 4, 2013. Pages 478-493.]

“[Joseph A.] Schumpeter was wary of the determinism to which simple empirical historical accounts can lead and recognises that causal factors do not always produce the same observable results. There is much in Schumpeter’s call for ‘critical systemization’ of historical facts that resonates with critical realism.

“Therefore we argue that critical realism offers the most suitable research framework for addressing many aspects of Schumpeter’s plea.”

[Jerry Courvisanos and Stuart Mackenzie, “Addressing Schumpeter’s Plea: Critical Realism in Entrepreneurial History.” School of Business, University of Ballarat, working paper 003-2011. Victoria, Australia. 2011. Retrieved on December 12th, 2015.]

“Economic historians and economic theorists can make an interesting and socially valuable journey together, if they will. It would be an investigation into the sadly neglected area of economic change.” [Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Creative Response in Economic History.” The Journal of Economic History. Volume 7, number 2, November 1947. Pages 149-159.]

“… I believe that a feminist critical realism can contribute to the study of gender and space …. Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, “Feminist Critical Realism: A Method for Gender and Work Studies in Geography.” Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. By John Paul Jones III, Heidi J. Nast, and Susan M. Roberts, editors. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1997. Page 146.]

“… critical realism can theorize social structures such as patriarchy (at the ‘real’ level) ….

“As philosophy and as methodology, critical realism moves from the concrete realm of human experience to successively higher levels of abstraction to reveal the necessary causal properties of social structures that are revealed under specific (contingent) conditions …. Through this process, called ‘retroduction,’ the causal powers of social structures can be separated from the ‘unnecessary’ or contingent circumstances under which those powers are realized …. ‘Mechanisms’ that bring the necessary powers into play can also be identified. At the highest level of abstraction are social structures such as gender relations and the capital-labor relation.”

[Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, “Feminist Critical Realism: A Method for Gender and Work Studies in Geography.” Thresholds in Feminist Geography: Difference, Methodology, Representation. By John Paul Jones III, Heidi J. Nast, and Susan M. Roberts, editors. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1997. Page 149.]

“Specifically, a feminist politics of recognition requires a critical hermeneutic elaboration of [Satya] Mohanty’s observation—rooted in critical realist theory—that social and cultural identities are both socially constructed and real, sources of both knowledge and mystification, to varying degrees ….

“Among social theorists, the tendency to reduce issues of cultural difference to matters of social subordination is evident in otherwise instructive approaches to cultural identity put forward by critical realists Satya Mohanty … and Margaret S. Archer …. Thus, Archer defines ‘agents’ (i.e., social identity groups, generally) ‘as collectivities sharing the same life-chances’ …, and Mohanty considers gender and racialized identity as his chief examples of cultural identities ….

“That said, critical realists like Mohanty point a way beyond an uncritical acceptance of situated agents’ self-understandings. They insist that we can grasp how people’s social identities inhibit as well as facilitate knowledge through a theoretical account of how the more persistent social structures and power relationships situating people … shape our self-understandings ….”

[Bruce Baum, “Feminist Politics of Recognition.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Volume 29, number 4, summer 2004. Pages 1073-1102.]

“Roy Bhaskar … [refers to] the epistemic fallacy – a leveling of reality to concepts and a denial of ontology.… The general thesis that female and male bodies can only be understood in relation to one another seems irrefutable. But I will suggest that female and male are properties presupposing or relating to one another ontologically and not merely in language and culture.… The relativity of sexual difference is a relativity structured in part in nature. The fundaments of sexual meaning are located in some of the relational features of perceivable form. Sexual drive and mood are not simply artifacts of linguistically or culturally imposed norms, although they most certainly interact with, and are influenced by, these norms.” [Carrie Hull. The Ontology of Sex: A critical inquiry into the deconstruction and reconstruction of categories. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 113.]

“If one of the purposes of critical realism is to underlabour for the sciences then underlabouring for the science of persons might well be an extremely important role it can play. Above all I regard the scientific feasibility of arguing from a realist, action-based approach to the human mind as intrinsic to [Ronald] Fairbairn’s own assumptions.” [Graham Clarke, “Fairbairn and Macmurray.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 2, issue 1, 2003. Pages 7-35.]

“In addition to the therapeutic relationship, other potential barriers and facilitators to positive therapeutic change for people with intellectual disabilities should be considered. For example, the impact of cognitive abilities on a person’s capability to benefit from therapy has been debated …. Whether lessons learned in therapy are integrated into the client’s life through the support of their carers may be worth investigation ….

“… Critical realism with a constructionist influence … was the framework that grounded the research, and this position assumes that a ‘reality’ exists, even though we cannot fully capture it.”

[Sarah Ramsden, Anna Tickle, David L. Dawson, and Samantha Harris, “Perceived barriers and facilitators to positive therapeutic change for people with intellectual disabilities: Client, carer and clinical psychologist perspectives.” Journal of Intellectual Disabilities. Volume 20, number 3, 2016. Pages 241-262.]

“If one accepts a critical realist analysis of psychological science …, the basic problem confronting therapeutic science is that important therapeutic phenomena exist only in actual therapeutic contexts, and yet it seems impossible to test and verify causal theories of psychotherapy and therapeutic change in these settings. Further, so long as therapeutic science or inquiry aims to produce practical results that might guide practitioners, some sort of causal claims (even if only implicit) seem inevitably to be an aim of such study. It now is generally accepted by most epistemologists of social and psychological science that conceptual understanding, rather than instrumental prediction and control, constitutes the appropriate goal for such science. Thus, few now expect therapeutic science to furnish tight prescriptions that can be followed algorithmically to produce desired therapeutic ends across different contexts, clients, problems, therapists, and societies/cultures.” [Jack Martin, “The Problem with Therapeutic Science.” Journal of Psychology. Volume 127, issue 4, July 1993. Pages 365-374.]

“The critical realist explanation of the diffusion of international norms of sexual non-discrimination advanced in this book consists of three interrelated components: structural–agential interaction, contentious discursive interaction and power relations.

“The central argument of this study is that, while the gender-biased corporate identity of the state is a prime obstacle to diffusion, there are particular conditions conducive to the diffusion of particular norms of sexual non-discrimination, and these preconditions emerge as a consequence of historically and locationally specific structural–agential interaction. Social interaction resulting in a change to state practices may occur within and/or between the international and domestic spheres.”

[Lynn Savery. Engendering the State: The international diffusion of women’s human rights. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 4.]

“Social exclusion is a moral state in undermining people’s integrity. Social exclusion thus requires moral responses. A reconciliation of differences between previously opposed groups is one such response that creates a community within which there is space to value those differences that are mutually respectful. Any expression of difference that harms others, such as with sectarianism, racism, sexism, and ethnic cleansing is morally unacceptable. Those differences of belief, culture, gender, and ethnic practice that are not discriminatory, however, highlight the richness of being human. An inclusive society values the demonstration of those differences that nurture the mutual well-being of diversity.” [Lynn Savery, “The Harm of Dualism.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice. Volume 17, issue 2, April 2005. Pages 231-237.]

“… being pregnant and having a baby typically changes self-identity, by presenting a special reminder of intricate connections between reproduction, gender, law, culture, family relationships, and expectations of female nurture.” [Lynn Savery, “Bodies, selves, and moral responsibilities.” Women’s Studies International Forum. Volume 22, number 1, 1999. Pages 89-96.]

“In this book [Engendering the State: The international diffusion of women’s human rights], Lynn Savery’s central argument ‘is that the gender-biased corporate identity of many states represents the most significant barrier to diffusion’ … of these norms. Theoretically, her position is that in relation to these norms, neoliberalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, sociological institutionalism and constructivism do not adequately ‘explain the diffusion of international norms of sexual non-discrimination into domestic state practices’ …. Instead, she posits critical realism as the perspective most likely to offer an analytical understanding of the triggers that either facilitate or prevent both the diffusion of and the efficacy of particular norms. Savery’s argument is broken down into three intersecting aspects of structural-agential interaction, contentious discursive interaction and power relations.” [Elisabeth Porter, “Engendering the State: The international diffusion of women’s human rights.” Review article. Social Identities. Volume 17, number 1, January 2011. Pages 163-165.]

“… [The] Law of Culture … [is] the domain or terrain of language, and is not therefore antagonistic to a delimited, realist-strategic notion of discourse ….

“For my sense of realism, critical realism, and the notion of the ‘intransitive’ in particular, see Roy Bhaskar’s restatement of his position ….”

[Robert Miklitsch, “The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism: Discourse and Institutionality in Laclau and Mouffe, Resnick and Wolff.” Social Text. Number 45, winter 1995. Pages 167-196.]

“The main title of this book, Total Freedom, may be of good sound to some ears, since it is partially an exercise in euphemism, but it actually signifies a movement ‘toward a dialectical libertarianism,’ that is, a movement toward a dialectlcal approach to libertarian social theory. I am fully aware that both ‘dialectics’ and ‘libertarianism’ have negative connotations within certain usually opposed intellectual circles. Nevertheless, this book seeks to reclaim radical social theorizing in the name of liberty. It stresses the necessity of context, the ‘totality’ of systemic and dynamic connections among social problems (hence, ‘total’) that beckon toward fundamentally libertarian solutions (hence, ‘freedom’). In this unity. we might give new meaning to the credo that Marxist social theorist Roy Bhaskar … that ‘dialectic … is the pulse of freedom.’” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2000. Page 1.]

“I hope that my dialectical-libertarian ambitions will challenge scholars to explore the mutual implications of dialectics and libertarianism. Dialectics can provide libertarianism with the contextual support for a conception of freedom that is not merely political or economic but also psycho-epistemological, ethical, and cultural. And libertarianism can release dialectics from the influence of those who cannot distinguish mere blinkered totalitarianism from context-keeping and the genuine aspiration for a radical, comprehensive view of society and social change.” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Reply to Roderick Long: Dialectical Libertarianism: All Benefits, No Hazards.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Volume 3, number 2, spring 2002. Pages 381-399.]

“The three books in my ‘Dialectics and Liberty trilogy’—of which Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical is the second part—seek to reclaim dialectical method from its one-sided use in Marxist thought, in particular, by clarifying its basic nature and placing it in the service of a radical libertarianism.

“The first book in my trilogy is Marx, Hayek, and Utopia …. It drew parallels between Karl Marx, the theoretician of communism, and F. A. Hayek, the Austrian ‘free market’ economist, by highlighting their surprisingly convergent critiques of utopianism and their mutual appreciation of context in defining the meaning of political radicalism.

“Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, the second book in the trilogy, details the approach of a bona fide dialectical thinker in the radical libertarian tradition, who advocated the analysis of social problems and social solutions across three distinctive, and mutually supportive, levels of generality—the personal, the cultural, and the structural ….

“The third book and final part of the trilogy, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, was published in 2000 …. It offers a rereading of the history of dialectical thinking, a redefinition of dialectics as indispensable to any defense of human liberty and as a tool to critique those aspects of modern libertarianism that are decidedly undialectical and, hence, dangerously utopian in their implications.”

[Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Second edition. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2013. Page 11.]

“Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical proposed a daring idea—that Rand had absorbed a dialectical orientation from her teachers. Because there was not much archival information available at the time that I authored my book, I was compelled to ‘combine significant factual evidence with a certain degree of reasonable speculation’ …. The recovered transcript provides more persuasive evidence of Rand’s exposure to some of the finest dialectically-oriented Russian scholars of the Silver Age.… We now have a clearer picture of the high caliber of Rand’s education; indeed, the quality of her undergraduate coursework was on a par with current doctoral programs in the social sciences—minus the dissertation requirement.” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “The Rand Transcript.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Volume 1, number 1, fall 1999. Pages 1-26.]

“In her published and unpublished writings, [Ayn] Rand frequently recommended [Ludwig von] Mises’s works to all those seeking a better understanding of economics.” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Ayn Rand Among the Austrians: Introduction.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Volume 6, number 2, spring 2005. Pages 241-250.]

“Despite their differences, both [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich August von] Hayek embrace a profoundly anti-utopian mode of inquiry. Marx identified this method as dialectics. His own use of dialectical conceptual tools represented the apotheosis of genuinely radical social theorizing. Indeed, Marx’s insightful critique of his utopian contemporaries was a reflection of this dialectical approach.…

“… this book suggests that the dialectical approach is not a peculiarly Marxist legacy; it is the birthright of anyone who seeks a more integrated view of social reality than that offered by arid, one dimensional, ahistorical, utopian models of human behavior. By noting elements of a common dialectical, anti-utopian sensibility in Marxian and Hayekian thought, this book begins a worthwhile dialogue between disparate theoretical traditions, aiming for an articulation of their respective contributions and limitations. Through such interaction, each tradition can critically reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of its opponent—and of itself.”

[Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Marx, Hayek, and Utopia. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1995. Pages 2-3.]

“In the Fall of 1999, the first issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS) was published, beginning a biannual scholarly discussion of Ayn Rand: her work, her life, her impact, and her legacy. Since then, we have published over 250 essays, written by over 130 authors, working across many disciplines and specialties.” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies: The Best is Yet to Come.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Volume 12, number 1, August 2012. Pages 1-3.]

“My own Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, published in 1995, was central to the Chronicle and Lingua Franca studies …. The … book rooted [Ayn] Rand’s intellectual development in Silver Age Russian thought and reconstructed her Objectivist philosophy as a radical dialectical project.” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Recent Work: Ayn Rand.” Philosophical Books. Volume 44, issue 1, January 2003. Pages 42-52.]

“In my view … there is more work to be done—because dialectic, as conceived by Platonists, Hegelians, and Marxists, has for too long been wedded to a kind of organicism that emphasizes synoptic knowledge of a totality. Such synopticism undermines the dialectical project because it presumes an illusory acontextual vantage point on history. By reconstructing dialectic, libertarians, who have long been vilified for their alleged ahistorical atomism, might wrest it from its exclusive contemporary association with the left. By elucidating a dialectical sensibility in the works of key classical- and neo-liberal thinkers, I am engaging self-consciously in a subversive strategy.” [Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Are we all dialecticians now? Reply to MacGregor and Friedman.” Critical Review. Volume 12, number 3, summer 1998. Pages 283-299.]

“[Chris Matthew] Sciabarra’s book attempts to conjoin dialectics with libertarianism to produce total freedom. He is led to this seemingly odd conjunction by a concatenation of concerns. He sees dialectics as the logic or method most attentive to contexts and libertarianism as a radical political ideology of freedom. He sees the opportunity to free dialectics of its totalitarian (including Marxist) overtones and libertarianism of its apparent irrelevance, which is the more galling now that once-popular Marxism has failed as radical social theory. He wishes to combine his own academic appreciation of the dialectical elements of [Karl] Marx’s method with his long-standing love of libertarian ideas.” [Peter G. Stillman, “Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.” Review article. The American Political Science Review. Volume 96, number 1, March 2002. Pages 193-194.]

“Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom is subtitled ‘Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism,’ which suggests why it might be of interest to some working in the Austrian tradition. But the title and subtitle might obscure the fact that what awaits the reader inside is of even greater interest to Austrians than it might first appear.… What Sciabarra offers inside is a dual reinterpretation of both dialectic philosophy and radical libertarianism that weaves the two together to formulate the subject matter of the subtitle: a dialectical approach to libertarianism. In doing so, he relies a great deal on the Austrian scholarship of the last 10 to 15 years to establish the dialectical underpinning of a theory of the market. The book offers a new way to think about the applicability of Austrian theories of the market to broader questions of social theory, and in turn challenges Austrians to be more consciously aware of those connections. The result is a book that is a major contribution to both liberal social theory and, as a by-product, Austrian economics.” [Steven Horwitz, “Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.” Review article. The Review of Austrian Economics. Volume 17, number 4, 2004. Pages 457-461.]

“The critical realist perspective—whereby causality is the capacity, tendencies and forces, which could be acted upon—has questioned this notion of causality emphasising invariant relations among social events. Even the force of gravity can be counteracted and this encounter can take various forms.…

“Thus, structure includes, in addition to material environment, social relations generated by the actors’ enactment of the material relations.…

“Against ‘… living with social policy in the real time,’ there are various other routes, derived from the history of dialectics of resistance and incorporation that gave rise to the cooperative organisations. The journey of rural cooperatives tells us that the strategic options derived from various contextual needs can generate different sources of social support.”

[Vikash N. Pandey, “State, Society and Organisation Discourse: Post-Welfare Regime And Sociological Imagination.” Sociological Bulletin. Volume 50, number 2, September 2001. Pages 252-265.]

“A new materialism is making its appearance in social theory, almost in spite of the advances that phenomenological and neo-Marxist anthropologists in particular … have made in destabilizing its underlying Lockean paradigm. As set out by [Roy] Bhaskar, for example, it asserts that ‘all reality, and human reality specifically, is essentially material’ …. This position, which Bhaskar has labelled ‘critical realism,’ requires that we begin with perception and with stimuli in the outside world in establishing ‘the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry,’ including social objects, as phenomena existing and acting independently of scientists and their activity ….” [Debbora Battaglia, “Retaining Reality: Some Practical Problems with Objects as Property.” Man. Volume 29, number 3, September 1994. Pages 631-644.]

“Making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds, or rather, it is about making specific worldly configurations—not in the sense of making them up ex nihilo, or out of language, beliefs, or ideas, but in the sense of materially engaging as part of the world in giving it specific material form.” [Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books. 2007. Page 91.]

“In addition to all the various iteratively reconfiguring ways that electrons, indeed all material ‘entities,’ are entangled relations of becoming, there is also the fact that materiality ‘itself’ is always already touched by and touching infinite configurations of possible others, other beings and times.” [Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Volume 23, number 3, 2012. Pages 206-223.]

“Measurements are material-discursive practices of mattering. And phenomena are contingent configurations of mattering. At the heart of quantum physics is an inherent ontological indeterminacy. This indeterminacy is only ever partially resolved in the materialization of specific phenomena: determinacy, as materially enacted in the very constitution of a phenomenon, always entails constitutive exclusions (that which must remain indeterminate). Now, it’s one thing for matter to materialize differently according to different measurement practices, but is there some way in which the specificity of measurement practices matters if we’re measuring the void, when the void is presumably nothing?” [Karen Barad. What Is the Measure of Nothingness?: Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH. 2012. Page 7.]

“… there are some parallels between [Karen Barad’s] agential realism and critical realism. Both agree that there is a reality that exists apart from the humans that perceive it. Both also agree on the ontological nature of realism and they admit a tremendous amount of empirical constructivism. Where they sharply differ however, is in their conceptualization of interpenetration. As it concerns the social and the material, agential realism would argue that there is no ontological distinction between the two (hence the portmanteau ‘sociomaterial’): ‘To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence’ [Barad] …. By contrast, critical realism would argue that the social and the material are indeed separate entities that are put into relationship with one another and come to appear inseparable through human activity occurring over time. The main crux of the difference in theoretical foundation offered by agential realism and critical realism is that the former treats the ‘sociomaterial’ as something that pre-exists people’s perceptions of it while the latter argues that the ‘social’ and the ‘material’ are independent entities that become ‘sociomaterial’ as they are put into relationship with one another through human action.” [Paul M. Leonardi, “Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality.” Information and Organization. Volume 23, 2013. Pages 59-76. Retrieved on October 4th, 2015.]

“‘Sociomateriality’ refers to a range of perspectives on the problematic relationship between people and technology that has recently gained traction in the learning technology literature. Sociomaterialists typically draw on actor network or agential realist approaches to the understanding of technology. The ways these approaches understand the world, we argue, have limitations and we propose an alternative approach to conceptualising the complex relationship between people, artefacts and organisation drawing on critical realist perspectives on technology. This approach accepts that our understandings of a particular technology are mediated by our theories both of a technology’s inherent material and nonmaterial properties and of its social situation. It also recognises that aspects of the natural world are autonomous from our understandings and that these are inherent in our technologies. We suggest a similar autonomy for the underlying mathematics which structure the possibilities of the digital world.” [Steve Walker and Sarah Davies, “Examining hybrid digital/material resources in networked learning: a critical realist approach.” Abstract. Ninth International Conference on Networked Learning. April 7th–9th, 2014. Edinburgh, Scotland. Pages 315-322. Retrieved on October 4th, 2015.]

“A welcome focus on the importance of the material in social and organizational life has seen considerable interest in ‘sociomateriality’ …. In particular, I will argue that some approaches, particularly those grounding their work in the philosophy of science of Karen Barad, have some key weaknesses which make them less useful in approaching some of the combinations of the social and the material that characterise contemporary organizational life.…

“… It is my contention that there are large questions to be asked of this philosophical approach, which for present purposes we might term ‘strong’ sociomateriality, questions which I ask using the resources of another philosophical tradition, that of critical realism.”

[Alistair Mutch, “Sociomateriality – Taking the wrong turning?” Information and Organization. Volume 23, 2013. Pages 28-40.]

“When Mutch does discuss [Karen] Barad’s work …, it is to offer an outline of a few of her concepts and then criticize them for inadequately dealing with two ideas that are central to critical realism: emergence and stratification, and structure and agency …. He then finds – not surprisingly given his starting point – that agential realism does not offer the same resources for addressing these issues as does critical realism. In developing agential realism, Barad’s agenda has never been to offer a blueprint for ‘how to carry out concrete social analysis’ …. Berating agential realism for supplying ‘a shaky foundation’ to social science … is simply misplaced. Suggesting as much is akin to censuring critical realism for offering a shaky foundation to geological analysis.” [Susan V. Scott and Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Sociomateriality – taking the wrong turning?: A response to Mutch.” Information and Organization. Volume 23, 2013. Pages 77-80.]

“From an agential realist perspective, nothing (neither people nor objects) have any inherent properties; rather any properties that are attributed to a ‘thing’ are seen to be a relational effect, produced and performed in and through the network of relations. On the other hand, from a critical realist perspective human and material agencies exist independently, but it is their synergistic interaction, which produces effects as they ‘act on’ each other …. Since both philosophical perspectives are presented as sociomaterial, we consider each as we turn to identify how we can incorporate emotions into our sociomaterial theorizing.” [Mari-Klara Stein, Sue Newell, Erica L. Wagner, and Robert D. Galliers, “Felt quality of sociomaterial relations: Introducing emotions into sociomaterial theorizing.” Information and Organization. Volume 24, 2014. Pages 156-175.]

“We conclude that far from being a ‘conservative’ form of sociomateriality, it is clear that CR [critical realism] is something different and incompatible with SM [sociomateriality] …. Instead of inseparability, it [critical realism] holds to dualism. Instead of anti-essentialism, it [critical realism] holds to the concept of innate powers. Instead of performativity providing the boundaries and relationships, CR holds that the boundaries are essential to the entity and are a function of its internal nature.” [Michael J. Cuellar, “Critical Realism as a Sociomaterial Stream of Research: A Response to Niemimaa.” Undated privately published paper. Pages 1-7. Retrieved on December 27th, 2015.]

“In this paper, I have argued that much of the organizational studies literature disregards or ignores the everyday materiality of organizing, and I have advocated a shift in our thinking about materiality in organizations. Specifically, I propose that we recognize that all practices are always and everywhere sociomaterial, and that this sociomateriality is constitutive, shaping the contours and possibilities of everyday organizing. The examples of Google and BlackBerry mediation are the (still-visible) manifestations of organizational practices become increasingly entangled with emerging sociomaterialities.” [Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work.” Organization Studies. Volume 28, number 09, 2007. Pages 1435-1448.]

“As [Karen] Barad … puts it, ‘Agencies are not attributes [of either humans or nonhumans] but ongoing reconfigurations of the world.’ Thus, an important challenge for research going forward is developing ways of thinking and talking about the social and material worlds as inseparable, as constitutively entangled.” [Wanda J. Orlikowski and Susan V. Scott, “Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization.” The Academy of Management Annals. Volume 2, number 1, August 2008. Pages 433-474.]

“[Karen] Barad … argues for a performative metaphysics that shifts the focus away from ‘independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties’ to practices, matters of doings/actions that perform particular phenomena. Phenomena, on this account, are ‘ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata’ that are enacted in material-discursive practices …. From such a performative perspective, technologies have no inherent properties, boundaries, or meanings, but are bound up with the specific material-discursive practices that constitute certain phenomena. In contrast to the ‘Cartesian cut’ that enacts a determinate ontology with inherent distinctions and boundaries, Barad … argues for ongoing and dynamic ‘agential cuts’ that perform and stabilize/destabilize particular distinctions, boundaries, and properties within phenomena in practice.” [Wanda J. Orlikowski, “The Sociomateriality of Organizational Life: Considering Technology in Management Research.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 34, number 1, 2009. Pages 125-141.]

“By introducing the identity of IS [information science] as a ‘human science’ as opposed to that of a natural science, we illuminate an interstitial gap in knowledge which IS inhabits. To address this gap, we posit sociomateriality as a perspective that offers IS a distinct identity as an academically and socially relevant field by uncovering and enabling research into the entanglement of humans, information, and technologies.…

“… the sociomaterial perspective is longer merely a research method. Sociomateriality focuses research on the emergence of every element within the IS phenomenon. Through the holism engendered in sociomateriality, the novelty, emergences, and performativity of IS becomes the dominant discourse. From this discourse the identity of the IS field emerges as disciplinary ideal allowing IS concepts and novel problems to be addressed.”

[Nik R. Hassan and Dirk S. Hovorka, “Sociomateriality and IS Identity.” Presented at the 22nd Australasian Conference on Information Systems. Sydney, Australia. November 29th–December 2nd, 2011. Pages 1-10. Retrieved on May 9th, 2016.]

“Without going so far as to propose sociomateriality as the defining identity of the IS [information science] field, as suggested by [Nik R.] Hassan and [Dirk S.] Hovorka …, we acknowledge that this new lens offers a way of challenging and expanding the prevailing modus operandi of the theoretical foundations of the relationships between artefacts and agency, technology and practice.…

“Sociomateriality has contributed to a renewal of the debate about the theoretical foundations of the IS discipline. Such a debate is essential in a field where scholars struggle to reconcile the human/social and the technological dimensions of IS, and to investigate them in an inclusive and consistent way.”

[Karlheinz Kautz and Tina Blegind Jensen, “Debating sociomateriality: entanglements, imbrications, disentangling, and agential cuts.” Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. Volume 24, number 2, 2012. Pages 89-96.]

“I call my proposed ontoepistemological [ontological-epistemological] framework ‘agential realism.’ …. Importantly, agential realism rejects the notion of a correspondence relation between words and things and offers in its stead a causal explanation of how discursive practices are related to material phenomena. It does so by shifting the focus from the nature of representations (scientific and other) to the nature of discursive practices (including technoscientific ones), leaving in its wake the entire irrelevant debate between traditional forms of realism and social constructivism. Crucial to this theoretical framework is a strong commitment to accounting for the material nature of practices and how they come to matter. [Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books. 2007. Pages 44-45.]

“What is it about the materiality of bodies that makes it susceptible to the enactment of the intertwined forces of biology and history? To what degree does the matter of bodies have its own historicity? Are social forces the only ones susceptible to change? If biological forces are in some sense always already historical ones, could it be that there is also some important sense in which historical forces are always already biological?” [Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books. 2007. Page 65.]

“Agential realism is an epistemological and ontological framework that extends [Niels] Bohr’s insights and takes as its central concerns the nature of materiality, the relationship between the material and the discursive, the nature of ‘nature’ and of ‘culture’ and the relationship between them, the nature of agency, and the effects of boundary, including the nature of exclusions that accompany boundary projects. Agential realism entails a reformulation of both of its terms – ‘agency’ and ‘realism’ – and provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman factors in the production of knowledge, thereby moving considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates. Significantly, a more robust understanding of materiality follows from this framework, one that enables feminists and other liberatory theorists to take account of the ways in which ‘matter comes to matter,’ including the active role of material constraints and conditions within a theoretical framework that acknowledges poststructuralist and Marxist insights exposing matter’s multiple modes of ‘mediation.’” [Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Volume 10, number 2, summer 1998. Pages 87-128.]

“Matter is a wild exploration of trans* animacy, self-experimentations/self-re-creations, not in an autopoietic mode, but on the contrary, in a radical undoing of ‘self,’ of individualism. Ever lively, never identical with itself, it is uncountably multiple, mutable. Matter is not mere being, but its ongoing un/doing. Nature is agential trans*materiality/ trans-matter-reality in its ongoing re(con)figuring, where trans is not a matter of changing in time, from this to that, but an undoing of ‘this’ and ‘that,’ an ongoing reconfiguring of spacetimemattering in an iterative reworking of past, present, future integral to the play of the indeterminacy of being-time.” [Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Volume 21, number 2-3, 2015. Pages 387-422.]

“Agency, on an agential realist account, does not require a clash of apparatuses, (as [Judith] Butler once suggested) such as the contradictory norms of femininity, so that we are never successful in completely embodying femininity, because there are contradictory requirements. Agential realism does not require that kind of clash of apparatuses, because intra-actions to begin with are never determining, even when apparatuses are reinforcing. Intra-actions entail exclusions, and exclusions foreclose determinism. However, once determinism is foreclosed this does not leave us with the option of free will. I think we tend to think about causality and questions of agency in terms of either determinism on the one hand, or free will on the other. Cause and effect are supposed to follow one upon the other like billiard balls, and so we got into the habit of saying that we do not really mean this in a causal sense. And I think to some degree, causality has become a dirty word, as realism is/was. And so I am trying to get people to talk about causality again, because I think that it is very, very important. If we have a group of people where we find that there is a lot of cancer in a certain community, I want to know something about the nature of that community and about causal relationships, because if I am at Love Canal in the United States, a populated area where a bunch of toxins were dumped and the people were getting cancers, then I might want to evacuate people. On the other hand, if I am at the Mayo Clinic, where they are treating cancer patients and there are a lot of people with cancer, it is not the thing to do. I really want us to specify more carefully the different kinds of causalities, and how to think causality again. And that is partly what I mean by the notion of ‘intra-action’ as proposing a new way of thinking causality. It is not just a kind of neologism, which gets us to shift from interaction, where we start with separate entities and they interact, to intra-action, where there are interactions through which subject and object emerge, but actually as a new understanding of causality itself.” [Karen Barad in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press imprint of Michigan Publishing. 2012. Creative Commons. Pages 54-55.]

“I am struck by the intimacy of feminist science studies’ engagement with science. Indeed, the approach I find most intriguing, fruitful, grounded, rigorous, and delightful is when feminist science studies is of the science, materially immersed in and inseparable from it.” [Karen Barad, “On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Volume 23, number 3, 2012. Pages 206-223.]

“Opening with evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s famous quote ‘The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose,’ Bruce Bagemihil writes that the world is ‘teeming with homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered creatures of every stripe and feather’ ….

“… Queer is not a fixed determinate term; it does not have a stable referential context, which is not say that it means anything anyone wants it to be.… What if queerness were understood to reside not in the breech of nature/culture, per se, but in the very nature of spacetimemattering?”

[Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. Volume 19, number 2, spring/summer 2011. Pages 121-158.]

“On [Niels] Bohr’s account then, there is an intimate relationship between discourse and materiality that goes beyond the frequently repeated refrain that writing and speaking are material practices. Bohr argues that this materialist understanding of concepts, in combination with the empirical finding that there is a quantum discontinuity, undermines the notion of an inherent fixed (apparatus-independent, Cartesian) subject-object distinction.” [Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today. Volume 3, number 2, 2010. Pages 240-268.]

“My aim is to contribute to efforts to sharpen the theoretical tool of performativity for science studies and feminist and queer theory endeavors alike, and to promote their mutual consideration. In this article, I offer an elaboration of performativity—a materialist, naturalist, and posthumanist elaboration—that allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing ‘intra-activity.’ It is vitally important that we understand how matter matters.” [Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs. Volume 28, number 3, spring 2003. Pages 801-831.]

“Agential realism takes social constructivist insights and those of performative alternatives in science studies and political theory, and reads them through other insights, including [Niels] Bohr’s philosophy-physics. Bohr’s insights are key because his own proto-performative materialism asks after the conditions of possibility of the crucial social practices of meaning making.” [Karen Barad, “Erasers and erasures: Pinch’s unfortunate ‘uncertainty principle‘” Social Studies of Science. Volume 41, number 3, June 2011. Pages 443-454.]

“… I am quite aware that the ubiquitous appropriation of quantum theory makes it dangerous material to handle these days, and the addition of feminist theory to my list of concerns seems to be quite enough to detonate the explosive …. In a sense, to accomplish my task I need to ‘rescue’ quantum theory from both its overzealous advocates and its unreflective practitioners.… It is not my intention to contribute to the romanticizing or mysticizing of quantum theory. On the contrary, as a physicist, I am interested in engaging in a rigorous dialogue about particular aspects of specific discourses on quantum physics and the implications.” [Karen Barad, ”Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction.” Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, editors. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers imprint of Springer Science+Business Media. 1996. Page 166.]

“… [We] require an understanding of the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena, an accounting of ‘nonhuman’ as well as ‘human’ forms of agency, and an understanding of the precise causal nature of productive practices that takes account of the fullness of matter’s implication in its ongoing historicity. My contribution toward the development of such an understanding is based on a philosophical account that I have been calling ‘agential realism.’ Agential realism is an account of techno-scientific and other practices that takes feminist, antiracist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, science studies, and scientific insights seriously, building specifically on important insights from Niels Bohr, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Vicki Kirby, Joseph Rouse, and others.” [Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Material Feminisms. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, editors. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 2008. Pages 120-154.]

“In an attempt to bypass the problems generated by the dichotomy opposing realism and social constructivism, 1 propose a framework for analyzing the nature of these distinctions and their consequences. I call such an alternative agential realism. Agential realism is an epistemological and ontological framework that provides an understanding of science as ‘material-discursive’ practices. These practices are recognized as being productive rather than merely descriptive. However, what is produced is constrained by particular material-discursive materialism factors and not arbitrarily construed. Agential realism theorizes agency in a way that acknowledges that there is a sense in which ‘the world world kicks back’ (i.e., nonhuman and cyborgian forms of agency in addition to human ones) without assuming some innocent, symmetrical form of interaction between knower and known.” [Karen Barad, “Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices.” The Social Studies Reader. Mario Biagioli, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1999. Page 2.]

“An emerging approach … [from Karen Barad] is that of considering Social Agency in personal experiences as the only manner in which subjects and objects can be understood, not as separate entities that come together, but as a whole entity emerging thorough social encounters. Here, negotiation is an intra-action between the elements of such social agential entity …. In this form of materialist constructivism Barad … suggests that we need an account of the relations between humans and nonhumans based on their asymmetries and differences. This implies that people and autonomous, reactive objects construct agential entity (or agency) within the material stance in which they are situated, according to the physical and social abilities they have, and the history of their transactions.” [Alessandro Pollini, “A theoretical perspective on social agency.” AI & Society: Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication. Volume 24, 2009. Pages 165-171.]

“… the research question of this thesis is: can agential realism constitute a methodology which allows for the construction of a new historical project for liberation theology? The elaboration of this research question will allow me to introduce a new concept in theology, namely ‘agential realism,’ a concept hitherto only used in the context of critical (feminist) theory and the metaphysics of new materialism. My hypothesis is that agential realism has unprecedented capacity to grasp and understand reality in its complexity, and allows for practical applications of acquired insights in favour of balanced social, political, and economical solutions, based on ethical concerns.” [Kristien Justaert. Agential Realism as a Methodological Foundation for a New Historical Project of Liberation Theology. Thesis for the degree of Master of Theology and Religious Studies. Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven). Leuven, Flanders, Belgium. August, 2015. Page ix.]

“[Karen] Barad … draws our attention to the energetics of electromagnetic ‘communication,’ which she finds demonstrated in such phenomena as the ‘step leaders’ of lightening bolts.” [Anna Munster, “Transmateriality: Toward an Energetics of Signal in Contemporary Mediatic Assemblages.” Cultural Studies Review. Volume 20, number 1, March 2014. Pages 150-167.]

“In [Karen] Barad’s terms, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations, i.e., relations without pre-existing relata. The relata exist only within phenomena ….” [Karlheinz Kautz and Tina Blegind Jensen, “Sociomateriality at the royal court of IS: A jester’s monologue.” Information and Organization. Volume 23, 2013. Pages 15-27.]

“… utilizing agential realism helps us recognize how the notions of ‘human dignity’ or ‘posthuman’ dignity arise from our ‘intra-actions’ in the world we live in, which includes much more than simply humans and posthumans.” [Linda MacDonald Glenn and George Dvorsky, “Dignity and Agential Realism: Human, Posthuman, and Nonhuman.” The American Journal of Bioethics. Volume 10, issue 7, June 2010. Pages 57-58.]

“What struck me about [Karen] Barad’s text on first read is the way it enables questions that certain forms of feminist politics and ethics might preclude. If, as Barad encourages us to do, we’re to take very seriously what is now an axiomatic presumption within feminist and cultural studies work; that the identities of nature and culture are somehow implicated and co-constituting, then what is to stem a line of questioning that might ask after matter’s dynamic role in its social and political configurations?” [Peta Hinton, “The Quantum Dance and the World’s ‘Extraordinary Liveliness’: Refiguring Corporeal Ethics in Karen Barad’s Agential Realism.” Somatechnics. Volume 3, number 1, 2013. Pages 169-189.]

“… weaving together science studies and feminist theory, Karen Barad and Susan Heckman [sic; Hekman] have described a new relationship between discursive practices and material reality (against previous stances privileging the former). Barad has argued for an agential realism grounded on the inseparability (entanglement) of intra-acting human and non-human entities inspired by the scientific and philosophical works of Niels Bohr, and against those feminist stances (specifically, Judith Butler’s performative conception of materiality) implicitly perpetuating the mistaken vision of independent domains when privileging the discursive over the material.” [Fabio Gironi, “Between Naturalism and Rationalism: A New Realist Landscape.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 3, July 2012. Pages 361-387.]

“Agential realism as [Karen] Barad defines it provides a powerful alternative to the dominant orthodoxy of linguistic constructionism. Barad’s assertion is that postmodernism and poststructuralism claim to deconstruct dichotomies such as nature/culture and material/discursive; but in fact they fail to do so, instead privileging the culture/discourse side of the dichotomies.” [Susan Hekman. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 2010. Page 74.]

“Our sociomaterial approach offers a powerful lens for thinking differently about issues that were previously displaced or regarded separately. By choosing a different starting point—entangled material-discursive practices—we make specific material enactments core to our research priorities and analyses. The agenda of agential realism encourages us to ask: How and when do information systems make a difference? By working through the concepts that we have drawn upon in this paper—entanglement, material-discursive practices, agential cuts, and performativity—our analysis encompasses a particular understanding of materiality that offers different terms of reference for studying practice.” [Susan V. Scott and Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Entanglements in Practice: Performing Anonymity Through Social Media.” MIS Quarterly. Volume 38, number 3, September 2014. Pages 873-893.]

“Karen Barad … has developed the concept of agential realism as an epistemological and ontological framework, at least in part inspired by her reading of [Niels] Bohr. Agential realism takes into account that the practices of the sciences are not only descriptive but also productive. Yet, they are not mere social constructions but ‘constrained by particular material-discursive factors’ …” [Antje Jackelén, “Science and Religion: Getting Ready for the Future.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. Volume 38, number 2, June 2003. Pages 209-228.]

“What … is the relation between agential realism and social constructionism? In pivoting my discussion around the Cartesian subject/object split, I have been suggesting that what is usually called the inner world of our consciousness can, from within the dynamics of the agential cuts we enact within our performative expressions, be directly materially related to what we usually call the outside world of separate nameable things. Thus we can, perhaps, see agential realism and social constructionism as two sides of the same coin. But better, much better, is to hear what is said or written (in the course of our trying to articulate what will show up in our attempts to implement them) as two different embodied voices in a continuous, unending dialogical and thus continually creative intra-relation with each other.” [John Shotter, “Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 24, number 3, 2014. Pages 305-325.]

“So this [the definition of ‘discourse’ inspired by Michel Foucault] is the foundation of the concept of agential realism, the concept designating [Karen] Barad’s theoretical framework: Agential for the conceptualization that everything does something, that everything is performative and has agency—nothing is delimited, everything is always in intra-activity with something else, and Realism as the concept for the fact that the agentiality has real effects. Consequently, realism is not about representation of something substantialized or something that is already present as the difference between subject and object, between materiality and discourse. Realism is about real effects of intra-activity. And these effects become elements in further ongoing intra-activities.” [Lis Højgaard and Dorte Marie Søndergaard, “Theorizing the complexities of discursive and material subjectivity.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 21, number 3, 2011. Pages 338-354.]

“Karen Barad has … developed an agential realist theory to ethics, ontology, and epistemology. One central tenet is that biological matter should not be defined as determinist nature. Rather, the ‘material dimensions of agency’ … should be considered, whereby agency derives from the intra-actions of matter and meaning with other matter and meaning. Barad … uses the term ‘intra-action’ as opposed to interaction to define material-discursive practices, through which the relation between materiality and meaning emerges. The term ‘material-discursive practices’ points to Barad’s … assumption that the discursive is always material and the material always discursive.” [Grit Höppner, “Embodying of the self during interviews: An agential realist account of the non-verbal embodying processes of elderly people.” Current Sociology. December, 2015. Pages 1-20.]

“What I will explore in this article, to contribute to this non-representational theoretical trajectory—and what Barad offers in exchange for representationalism—is the ethico-onto-epistemology of agential realism, which proposes the ontological inseparability of what are commonly perceived to be pre-existing and distinct entities. In the case of the selfie, then, the presumed to be separate entities of body, camera, self, space, and image are considered as a whole entangled phenomenon and their boundaries, and thus distinction from one another, emerge from within the phenomenon.” [Katie Warfield, “Making the Cut: An Agential Realist Examination of Selfies and Touch.” Social Media + Society. April-June, 2016. Pages 1-10.]

“In an analysis that combines critical theory with physics, Karen Barad … offers an epistemology for comprehending ‘things’ (matter) that does not depend on a notion of ‘truth as a faithful reflection of a static world of being’ …. Barad develops what she terms ‘agential realism’ to refer to (amongst other things) the nature of scientific and other social practices, the nature of reality, the nature of matter, and the relationship between the material and the discursive in epistemic practices. Agential realism seeks to move beyond the traditional division between ‘realism’ and ‘social constructivism.’” [Myra J. Hird, “New Feminist Sociological Directions.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie. Volume 28, number 4, autumn 2003. Pages 447-462.]

“I interpret [Karen] Barad as developing a revised conception of metaphysical natu- ralism. The crucial point at which she departs from other naturalists is in the conception of nature itself as disclosed through scientific work. The familiar naturalisms treat nature in terms of regularities, laws, causal powers, or causal-functional roles. Nature so conceived is anormative. The semantic and epistemic normativity governing how one ought to think and talk about the natural world, and the ethical or political normativity of how one ought to act within it, must be understood as either arising from or reducible to an anormative natural world. Although she does not put the point in quite this way, I take Barad to claim instead that nature as revealed by the sciences. is itself normatively constituted.” [Joseph Rouse, “Barad’s Feminist Naturalism.” Hypatia. Volume 19, number 1, winter 2004. Pages 142-161.]

“And for comparative relativism. The various flavors of extraterrestrial relativisms I have discussed here exist at the uneasy interface of speculative realism and agential realism, with ‘reality’ at once abstracted away from human and organismic concerns and never quite achieving escape velocity.” [Stefan Helmreich, “Extraterrestrial Relativism.” Anthropological Quarterly. Volume 85, number 4, fall 2012. Pages 1125-1139.]

“[Karen] Barad, following a trend in technoscience as well as in some science and technology studies, seeks to extend agency to the objects of science (typically nonhuman bodies) as well as to the means science and technology use to view and formulate the world around them. She is inspired both by the physicist Neils Bohr and his theoretical considerations of the nature of materiality and by [Judith] Butler’s materialization (… an extension of Foucauldian and Lacanian logic). Barad introduces her own term, ‘agential realism,’ to represent a marriage of Bohr’s rejection of Newtonian realism (akin to the Cartesian subject) and Butler’s release of the body from material binds.” [Annette Burfoot, “Human Remains: Identity Politics in the Face of Biotechnology.” Cultural Critique. number 53, winter 2003. Pages 47-71.]

“The quest for a ‘theory of everything’ may be said to have begun with Newtonian mechanics ….

“… The approach that seems most promising in this context is the realist point of view characterising the ‘agential realism’ of Karen Barad, and the ‘reality of possibility’ concept of Ruth Kastner.…

“In Kastner’s ‘possibilist interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function associated with observation is interpreted as the outcome of a transaction with a possibility, which outcome makes something definite, in the same way as in the present analysis.”

[Brian D. Josephson, “A Structural Theory of Everything.” Mind-Matter Unification Project, Cavendish Laboratory. Cambridge, England. 2015. Pages 1-6.]

“… [The] ‘Possibilist Transactional Interpretation’ or PTI, is extended to the relativistic domain.…

“… PTI is based, not on elimination of quantum fields, but rather on the time-symmetric, transactional character of energy propagation by way of those fields, and the assumption that offer and confirmation waves capable of resulting in empirically detectable transfers of physical quantities only occur in couplings between field currents. However, in keeping with this possibilist reinterpretation, the field operators and fields states themselves are considered as pre-spacetime objects.”

[Ruth E. Kastner, “The Possibilist Transactional Interpretation and Relativity.” Foundations of Physics. Volume 42, issue 8, August 2012. Pages 1094-1113.]

“Sociomaterialism relies on the concept of agential realism to take into account individual perceptions and uses of IT [information technology] artifacts. Agential realism is based on Karen Barad’s work …. A key tenet of agential realism is the concept of ‘agency,’ which is based on the relationship of an individual and an artifact. In this view, a technical artifact can be understood by how people use and interact with it. Like other sociomaterialists, Barad saw artifacts as shaping people and people shaping artifacts in interactions comprising the relationship. Barad further noted that researchers create artifacts to observe and measure the world around them, and that an individual’s perception of reality is nothing more than renditions of reality created by the instruments used to observe a phenomenon. Thus researchers’ views of reality are constructed inter-subjectively with the tools and processes used to describe phenomena. For example, astronomers created radio-telescopes to measure electromagnetic disturbances generated during celestial events. Since humans cannot detect these signals through their visual or audio senses, patterns in radio waves are converted to sounds or graphed as sine functions to provide a representation of changing amplitudes and frequencies.” [Mark-David McLaughlin, “Beyond Sociomaterial: An Alternative Approach to Theorizing About Digital Artifacts.” Presented at the Twenty-first Americas Conference on Information Systems. Fajardo, Puerto Rico. August 13th–15th, 2015. Retrieved on May 14th, 2016.]

“An alternative view of sociomateriality assumes a substantialist ontology, especially in [Paul M.] Leonardi’s … critical realist framework, where people and artefacts are conceptualized ‘as separate and self-contained entities that interact and affect each other’ …. In this article, we adopt Leonardi’s framework on sociomateriality in our analysis of identity regulation processes.” [Géraldine Paring, Stéphan Pezé, and Isabelle Huault, “‘Welcome to the whiteboard, the new member of the team’: Identity regulation as a sociomaterial process.” Organization. OnlineFirst edition. January, 2017. Pages 1-22.]

“In this article, I want to translate the tenets of what Karen Barad has called ‘agential realism’ for the purpose of constructing a diffraction apparatus, through which students might produce situated knowledges. To briefly summarize, agential realism is a methodology developed by Barad in which she draws on the philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr, the post-structuralist thinking of Michel Foucault, the material-semiotics of Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to develop a posthuman elaboration upon this thought.” [Sofie Sauzet, “Thinking through Picturing.” Teaching With Feminist Materialisms: Teaching with Gender. European Women’s Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms.. Peta Hinton and Pat Treusch, editors. Utrecht, The Netherlands: ATGENDER, The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. 2015. Pages 37-51.]

“Thinking of the swing in terms of entanglement means that the interaction of the elements that form the swing (the small plank, the ropes, the branch of the tree) could better be conceived of as an intra-action, following Karen Barad, since the combination of those elements is a precondition for, rather than the result of, the action.” [Annette Arlander, “From interaction to intra-action in performing landscape.” Artnodes: Ejournal on Art, Science and Technology. Number 14, November 2014. Pages 26-33.]

“… how are we entangled in existence? [Karen] Barad talks about intra-actions between phenomena that are material, discursive, human, nonhuman, corporeal and technological, without privileging one over the other and brings this together to understand ways to make matter matter. This is the basis of her theory of agential realism and how she maintains we are of the world not in the world.” [Sally Northfield. Canvassing the emotions: Women, creativity and mental health in context. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). College of Arts, Victoria University. Victoria, British Columbia. April, 2014. Page 56.]

“… according to [Karen] Barad, scientific knowledge is no haphazard construction that is independent of what is ‘out there’, since this is not separate from us, and given a specific set of constructed cuts, some descriptive scientific concepts are well defined and can be used to reach reproducible results. But: These results cannot be decontextualized. The possibility of objectivity does not hinge upon the belief in an observer-independent external reality. On the contrary, given that there is no observer-independent reality, holding on to the dogma that observer-independency and externality is a necessary prerequisite for objectivity is what threatens to undermine the possibility of objectivity.…

“Barad’s intra-active agential realism is a form of constructivism that is not relativist, but relationalist. It agrees with relativism in its repudiation of absolutist conceptions of reality, truth, and knowledge, but rejects relativism’s typical one-sided over-emphasis of the constitutive role of the human subject. Instead it shares and, through its post-humanist stance, radicalizes [John] Dewey’s trans-actional idea of the entanglement of the organism-in-environment-as-a-whole.”

[Matz Hammarström, “On the Concepts of Trans-action and Intra-action.” Action, Belief and Inquiry: Pragmatist Perspectives on Science, Society and Religion. Ulf Zackariasson, editor. Helsinki, Finland: Nordic Pragmatism Network. 2015. Creative Commons. Pages 174-186.]

“Karen Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism,’ conceives matter as ‘substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency’ …. Agency itself is not connected to an agent, an individual subject, but it is rather a process of ‘enactment’ in which material entities coemerge simultaneously, shaping what we call ‘phenomena.’ [Serenella Iovino, “Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature About the ‘New Materialisms’ and Its Implications for Ecocritical Theory.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. Volume 3, number 1, 2012. Pages 134-145.]

“… I will marshal supportive evidence for my claim that śūnyatā [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, शून्यता, “emptiness”] is not a Buddhist construct, but is a universal truth accessible from within alternative worldviews. I will do so through an analysis of Karan Barad’s ‘agential realism.’ Barad’s position is formulated with respect to contemporary theoretical physics and is an attempt to tease out the overlooked, yet profound, implications of the results of quantum experiments. I will argue that agential realism is functionally equivalent to the Madhyamaka [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, मध्यमक] and reaches the same radical conclusion regarding the impossibility of inherent existence.” [Robert McGuire. The Madhyamaka Speaks to the West: A philosophical analysis of śūnyatā as a universal truth. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Religious Studies, School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent. Canterbury, England. October, 2015. Page 16.]

“[George Herbert] Mead’s integration of mental experience with physical bodies (organisms) was an early example of what feminist and physicist [Karen] Barad … has termed “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” or a joining together of naturalistic interpretations with discursive interpretations of reality – an effort to wed materialist and idealist frameworks into a holistic theoretical framework and to forge a link between metaphysics and empiricism.” [Chris Francovich, “A Meadian Approach to Radical Bohmian Dialogue.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. June, 2016. Pages 1-31.]

“I use agential realism to think through points of potential and actual connection between feminist theory and fashion studies; I am employing it as a methodological tool, albeit one with material implications. Though it may seem a far-fetched connection, I maintain that Barad’s carefully elaborated theoretical apparatus can be of great use to feminist theorists of fashion. It allows us to elaborate upon clothing and fashion as simultaneously material and discursive phenomena that are relentlessly interpretive and that, precisely because of their intimacy, as ‘objects,’ with human bodies, call into question the dualism of subject and object.” [Ilya Parkins, “Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion: Karen Barad’s Agential Realism.” Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 23, number 58, December 2008. Pages 501-515.]

“This dissertation fundamentally relies on [Karen] Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway … which deploys Danish theoretical and quantum physicist Niels Bohr’s ‘philosophy-physics’ in the development of a novel, performative theoretical framework called agential realism, which I explain, explore, and deploy in the analysis of placentations. Bohr was concerned with quanta, entities that correspond empirically to neither particles nor waves. Finding that measurement resolves this wave-particle duality, where one type of apparatus measuring a light beam produces patterns associated with particles, and another, patterns associated with waves, Bohr reasoned that ‘agencies of observation’ provide the conditions for the possibility of observed phenomena in the first place ….” [Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa. Placentations: Agential Realism and the Science of Afterbirths. Ph.D. dissertation. Queen’s University. Kingston, Ontario. August, 2014. Page 13.]

“The relational basis of the original proposal for a sociomaterial perspective in our discipline … has triggered counterviews and competing proposals, leading to multiple uses of the term ….” [Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic, Robert D. Galliers, Ola Henfridsson, Sue Newell, and Richard Vidgen, “The Sociomateriality of Information Systems: Current Status, Future Directions.” MIS Quarterly. Volume 38, number 3, September 2014. Pages 809-830.]

“The idea that matter possesses agency is of central significance in the new materialisms.… This is evident for instance in the theory of ‘agential realism,’ developed by the feminist thinker and quantum physicist Karen Barad—one of the key-figures of the new materialisms—in her groundbreaking work Meeting the Universe Halfway …. Reality, Barad maintains, is a symmetric entanglement of material and discursive processes. Here the word ‘matter’ ‘does not refer to an inherent, fixed property of independently existing objects;’ rather, Barad concedes, ‘“matter” refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization’ ….” [Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@. Volume 1, number 1, 2012. Pages 75-91.]

“… Karen Barad is interested in ‘entanglement’ as a way of comprehending the ontology and epistemoiogy of phenomena. [Donna] Haraway’s approach is through biology and evolutionary theory, whereas Barad employs her training as a physicist to detail the concept of entanglement as it developed within physics.” [Myra J. Hird, “Feminist Engagements with Matter.” Feminist Studies. Volume 35, number 2, summer 2009. Pages 329-346.]

“However great the contrasts exhibited by atomic phenomena under different experimental conditions, such phenomena must be termed complementary in the sense that each is well defined and that together they exhaust all definable knowledge about the objects concerned. The quantum-mechanical formalism, the sole aim of which is the comprehension of observations obtained under experimental conditions described by simple physical concepts, gives just such an exhaustive complementary account of a very large domain of experience.” [Niels Bohr, “On Atoms and Human Knowledge.” Daedalus. Volume 87, number 2, spring 1958. Pages 164-175.]

“It is interesting to note that, although the assumption of a limited divisibility of substances goes back to antiquity, it was up until quite recent times considered to be a hypothesis for which no direct verification could be obtained. With the great progress in chemistry and physics in the last centuries, atomic ideas proved yet more fruitful, and in particular it was found possible to develop statistical mathematical methods of treating the average behavior of systems consisting of a large number of particles and in this way to account for the empirical laws of thermodynamics.” [Niels Bohr, “Mathematics and Natural Philosophy.” The Scientific Monthly. Volume 82, number 2, February 1956. Pages 85-88.]

“… the impossibility of subdividing the individual quantum effects and of separating a behaviour of the objects from their interaction with the measuring instruments serving to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear implies an ambiguity in assigning conventional attributes to atomic objects which calls for a reconsideration of our attitude towards the problem of physical explanation. In this novel situation, even the old question of an ultimate determinacy of natural phenomena has lost its conceptional basis, and it is against this background that the viewpoint of complementarity presents itself as a rational generalization of the very ideal of causality.” [Niels Bohr, “On the Notions of Causality and Complementarity.” Dialectica. Volume 2, number 3/4, 1948. Pages 312-319.]

“… the spatial continuity of our picture of light propagation and the atomicity of the light effects are complementary aspects in the sense that they account for equally important features of the light phenomena which can never be brought intodirect contradiction with one another, since their closer analysis in mechanical terms demand mutually exclusive experimental arrangements. At the same time, this very situation forces us to renounce on a complete causal account of the light phenomena and to be content with probability laws based on the fact that the electromagnetic description of energy transfer remains valid in a statistical sense.” [Niels Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1958. Page 5.]

“According to our present conceptions, an atom of an element is built up of a nucleus that has a positive electrical charge and is the seat of by far the greatest part of the atomic mass, together with a number of electrons, all having the same negative charge and mass, which move at distances from the nucleus that are very great compared to the dimensions of the nucleus or of the electrons themselves. In this picture we at once see a striking resemblance to a planetary system, such as we have in our own solar system. Just as the simplicity of the laws that govern the motions of the solar system is intimately connected with the circumstance that the dimensions of the moving bodies are small in relation to the orbits, so the corresponding relations in atomic structure provide us with an explanation of an essential feature of natural phenomena in so far as these depend on the properties of the elements. It makes clear at once that these properties can be divided into two sharply distinguished classes.” [Niels Bohr, “The structure of the atom.” Nobel lecture. December 11th, 1922. Pages 7-43.]

“The formidable means of destruction which have come within reach of man will obviously constitute a moral menace to civilization unless, in due time, universal agreement can be obtained about appropriate measures to prevent any unwarranted use of the new energy resources.… In fact, only international control over every undertaking which might constitute a danger to world security will in future permit any nation to strive for prosperity and cultural development without constant fear of disaster.” [Niels Bohr, “A Challenge to Civilization.” Science. Volume 102, number 2650, October 1945. Pages 363-364.]

“The ideal of an open world, with common knowledge about social conditions and technical enterprises, including military preparations, in every country, might seem a far remote possibility in the prevailing world situation. Still, not only will such a relationship between nations obviously be required for genuine progress on progress of civilization, but even a common declaration of adherence to such a course would create a most favorable background for concerted efforts to promote universal security.” [Niels Bohr, “Open Letter to the United Nations.” Science. Volume 112, number 2897, July 1950. Pages 1-6.]

“… [We are presented] with a situation concerning the analysis and synthesis of experience which is entirely new in physics and forces us to replace the ideal of causality by a more general viewpoint usually termed ‘complementarity.’ The apparently incompatible sorts of information about the behavior of the object under examination which we get by different experimental arrangements can clearly not be brought into connection with each other in the usual way, but may, as equally essential for an exhaustive account of all experience, be regarded as ‘complementary’ to each other.” [Niels Bohr, “Causality and Complementarity.” Philosophy of Science. Volume 4, number 3 July 1937. Pages 289-298.]

“The inadequacy of our ordinary theoretical conceptions has become especially apparent from the important results which have been obtained in recent years from the theoretical and experimental study of the laws of temperature radiation. You will therefore understand that I shall not attempt to propose an explanation of the spectral laws; on the contrary I shall try to indicate a way in which it appears possible to bring the spectral laws into close connection with other properties of the elements, which appear to be equally inexplicable on the basis of the present state of the science. In these considerations I shall employ the results obtained from the study of temperature radiation as well as the view of atomic structure which has been reached by the study of the radioactive elements.” [Niels Bohr. The Theory of Spectra and Atomic Constitution: Three Essays by Niels Bohr. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 1922. Page 4.]

“We have advanced a relational ontology to guide our analysis of the processes and modalities that produce socionature within a critical realist perspective by examining how human subjectivities and social power direct the production of socionature. We have described how local elites exercised hegemony through control of the law—the most objective form of state power—to significantly restrict the political space in which colonias residents could demand domestic water service. Legal exclusion from water governance districts and specializing governance institutions for domestic water service further defined access to domestic water in market terms.” [Wendy Jepson and Heather Lee Brown, “‘If No Gasoline, No Water’: Privatizing Drinking Water Quality in South Texas Colonias.” Environment and Planning A. Volume 46, number 5, May 2014. Pages 1032-1048.]

“… it [this paper] contrasts assemblages with the ontology of entities, emergence, and causal powers offered by critical realism, and building on this offers a critique of ANT’s [actor-network theory’s] ontology, a critique with two interwoven strands: first, a comparative strand, developed by contrasting it with a more conventional realist alternative, and second, a strand of immanent critique, arguing that in the end, ANT’s ontology fails to match up to the standards set by ANT’s own rhetoric.…

“… For critical realists, human beings are also entities with emergent properties and causal powers, and in this respect, they are thoroughly analogous with material objects. There is no fundamental dualism of subject and object; we are all inhabitants of one continuous nature.”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “Disassembling Actor-network Theory.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 45, number 1, 2015. Pages 100-121.]

“This paper has sought to engage openly and constructively with actor network theory from a critical realist perspective. There are two strands to its argument. On the one hand, I have sought to identify things that realists can learn from actor network theory. On the other, this paper has presented a robust critique of the limitations placed on actor network theory by its ontological commitments, and in particular by the multi-dimensional absence of a depth ontology.…

“Given the ontological chasm between these two traditions [Bhaskarian critical realism and actor netowrk theory], synthesis appears out of the question, but I hope this paper has demonstrated that constructive critical engagement is worthwhile.”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “Searching for realism, structure, and agency in Actor Network Theory.” The British Journal of Sociology. Volume 59, issue 3, September 2008. Pages 455–473.]

“Critical realism’s ontology … provides a coherent framework for the scientific tasks of political economy, but this does not in itself solve the substantive scientific questions: every causal power, and every event, requires investigation of the empirical evidence as well as theoretical analysis of the mechanisms involved before an explanation can be developed. To produce not just one explanation but an entire political economy is thus an enormous task. To produce one from scratch would be unthinkably daunting. Fortunately there is already a great deal of material that can be reused and built on. On the other hand, there have always been thinkers who have stood outside the mainstream and Marxist traditions: heterodox economists of many stripes, social theorists, economic sociologists and economic anthropologists, for example. These thinkers have generated important material that already casts light on many of the mechanisms at work in various sectors of the economy. And on the other, even some of the work done in the two central traditions can be disembedded from its context and used to construct a more realist analysis of the phenomena concerned. We can simultaneously draw on both of these traditions while rejecting their core assumptions.

“This political economy of practices is also therefore a pluralist political economy, in several respects. From the scientific perspective, it recognizes a plurality of economic forms that must be analysed in different ways; it accepts contributions from a plurality of traditions of socio-economic thinking; and it accepts the need for a plurality of methods in order to investigate and analyse economic phenomena. From the normative perspective it advocates a continuing diversity of economic forms and the development of a plurality of new ones. And from the political perspective it recognises that there is no end point for the diverse economy, but only a perpetualy changing mix of practices and as a consequence we will have a permanent need for political pluralism: a healthy polity of debate over which alternatives should rise in the mix and which should fall.”

[Dave Elder-Vass. Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2016. Pages 20-21.]

“Let us begin with a definition of giving. I shall use this term in what I take to be its everyday sense, that is a voluntary transfer of goods or services from one party (the donor) to another (the recipient, or recipients) that is not accompanied by an immediate transfer in return. On this basis we can also define the gift economy: the gift economy consists of transfers of goods and services that take the form of giving and productive activity that is undertaken with the intention of giving the product.…

“… a number of scholars have discussed the relation between critical realism and Marxism ….”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “Giving and Social Transformation.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 3, June 2014. Pages 261-285.]

“A norm circle is the group of people who are committed to supporting a particular norm, by endorsing and enforcing it in their relations with others. All normative social institutions, I have suggested, are the causal products of norm circles, which have the causal power to increase the tendency of human individuals to comply with the norms that they support. The mechanism by which they do this is as follows: the members of the norm circle endorse and enforce the norm, for example by praising or rewarding those who comply with it and by criticising or punishing those who do not.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Debate: Seven Ways to be A Realist About Language.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 44, volume 3, 2013. Pages 249-267.]

“… we would place a much greater emphasis on people’s use of linguistic resources to do many things other than conform to and recycle the language practices of their norm circles. The properties of grammatical languages make possible exponential creative constructions and interactions, including the infant’s holophrases and neologisms, the subtle pragmatics of sarcasm and irony, humour, evasions, lies, puns, poetry, etc.” [Alison Sealey and Bob Carter, ”Response to Elder-Vass: ‘Seven Ways to be A Realist about Language.’” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 44, volume 3, 2013. Pages 268-281.]

“… neither linguistic systems nor norm circles could be universal and complete explainers of all or indeed any linguistic phenomena, and I certainly do not make such claims for norm circles, as you seem to suggest I do. For any given linguistic phenomenon, the correct causal explanation may involve many other factors as well as either (or, logically, both) of these.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Reply to Sealey and Carter on Realism and Language.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 44, volume 3, 2013. Pages 282-287.]

“In my account of culture we do face an ‘ideational environment’ of sorts, but one that consists not of ideas but of a set of normcircles, and the awareness they create of ideas that those around us share and endorse (or reject). So far I have tended to think of these norm circles as composed of people, but our discussion has prompted the thought that these norm circles may be hybrid entities, complexes of both people and intelligibilia; that the combination of these two produces a tendency for individuals to live according to particular cultural standards (i.e. socio-cultural interaction). The ideas that people extract from their interactions with intelligibilia may influence them, just as those that are communicated to them verbally may do.… [T]he Bible and the Qur’an are striking examples.” [Dave Elder-Vass in Margaret S. Archer and Dave Elder-Vass, “Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 15, number 1, 2012. Pages 93-115.]

“The problem of explaining massively complex phenomena raises several distinct though inter-related issues.… Essentially, norm circles are groups of people, and I argue that we follow normative standards, when we do, as a result of the influence that these groups have on us.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Developing Social Theory Using Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 1, 2015. Pages 80-92.]

“I want to highlight a potential tendency, a temptation, one which equally applies to myself and which many of you may recognize. I have chosen [Dave] Elder-Vass’s work because he is perhaps the best known of the latest generation of realist social theorists.…

“… Elder-Vass’s key claim is that norm circles are an important aspect of a realist social ontology and are then significant in terms of articulating a critique of alternatives to realism and in mediating the compatibility of those alternatives – in this case social construction. As such, it is the significance of norm circles as a contribution to realist social ontology that is of primary importance to the further significance of the project.”

[Jamie Morgan, “What is Progress in Realism? An Issue Illustrated Using Norm Circles.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 2, April 2014. Pages 115-138.]

“This paper has refined [Margaret S.] Archer’s account of the emergence of social structure by complementing her focus on morphogenesis with a synchronic relational account of emergence, and showing how this can be applied to at least some social structures. In particular, it has advanced the redescription argument to show that, even though we can sometimes explain how social structures work in terms of individuals and the relations between them, this does not entail that social structures can be eliminated from the explanation of social behaviour. Social structures have causal powers in their own right, which arise from the combination of individuals and relations that constitute them, but which are different from the causal powers that would be possessed by these same individuals if they were not organised into these social structures. They are therefore causal powers of the structures and not of the individuals.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “For Emergence: Refining Archer’s Account of Social Structure.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 37, number 1, 2007. Pages 25-44.]

“This paper offers a reply to the three generous and stimulating responses by Douglas Porpora, Charles Varela, and Anthony King to my earlier paper ‘For emergence: refining Archer’s account of social structure’ ….

“… In these two papers I have argued that social entities like organisations and normative communities have causal powers in their own right—powers that their human members would not have if they were not organised into such entities.… This does not entail support for other notions of social structure, such as the idea that society as a whole somehow has causal effects; nor does it entail denying causal powers to human individuals.”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “Social Structure and Social Relations.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 37, number 4, 2007. Pages 463-477.]

“Although emergence is widely relied on as a response to this problem of reductionism and dualism, most notably by critical realists and by complexity theorists, there has been relatively little systematic explanation in these traditions of its ontology. Partly as a consequence of this, there are a variety of discrepant usages of the concept in the literature. Hence, it is necessary before building an argument on the foundation of an emergentist ontology to clarify which version of emergentism is being advocated.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Luhmann and Emergentism Competing Paradigms for Social Systems Theory?” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 37, number 4, December 2007. Pages 408-432.]

“Emergence occurs when an entity possesses one or more ‘emergent properties.’ An ‘emergent property’ is one that is not possessed by any of the parts of the entity individually, nor when they are aggregated, without a structuring set of relations between them. Perhaps the commonest illustration of emergence in the literature is the example of water, which has been used to illustrate this point as far back as John Stuart Mill. The properties of water are clearly very different from those of its components oxygen and hydrogen when these are not combined with each other in the specific form that constitutes water. One cannot, for example, ‘put out a fire with oxygen and hydrogen.’” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Emergence and the Realist Account of Cause.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 2, 2005. Pages 315-338.]

“If we wish to understand the role of emergence in individual events, and the relations between causes at different emergent levels, then, the correct account of individual events is inherently stratified. We need to recognise that the events which populate [Roy] Bhaskar’s ‘domain of the actual’ are downwardly-inclusive and multi-levelled. This clearly corresponds to Bhaskar’s conception of the actual as that domain of reality in which a vast range of particular causes interact to cause events. And on my account the actual includes not only events that are unobserved by virtue of the absence of an observer, but also those levels of downwardly-inclusive events that are unobserved by virtue of operating below (or above) the perceived levels of reality.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Re-examining Bhaskar’s Three Ontological Domains: The Lessons from Emergence.” Presented at the 8th annual meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism. Cambridge, England. August 17th–19th, 2004. Pages 1-15. Retrieved on May 20th, 2016.]

“What is true of natural science is all the more true of social science. While [Roy] Bhaskar has acquired a reputation mainly as a philosopher of science, his ultimate interest is social; he is trying to come up with the philosophical ground for a theory of human emancipation, a way of squaring scientific knowledge with the idea of human freedom. Here, too, the ultimate message is one of humility: Critical Realists hold that it is possible to preserve the notion of a social reality and, therefore, of a science able to make true statements about it—but only if one abandons the sort of positivist number—crunching that passes for science among most current sociologists or economists, and gives up on the idea that social science will ever be able to establish predictive laws.” [David Graeber. Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2001. Page 5cc3.]

“… naturalists are extremely skeptical of any claims about reality that are not justified by scientific methodology, explanation, and the like.

“Naturalists believe that they are justified in this posture because of the success of science vis-à-vis other fields of inquiry. Many naturalists are also guided by belief in the unity of science. Roy Bhaskar asserts that ‘naturalism may be defined as the thesis that there is (or can be) an essential unity of method between the natural and the social sciences’ ….”

[J. P. Moreland, “Naturalism and Libertarian Agency.” Philosophy & Theology. Volume 10, number 2, 1997. Pages 353-383.]

“Naturalists believe that they are justified in this posture because of the success of science vis-à-vis other fields of inquiry. In addition, some naturalists justify this standpoint by appealing to the unity of science, though this argument is employed less frequently today than it was a few decades ago. For example, in the late 1970s, Roy Bhaskar asserted that ‘naturalism may be defined as the thesis that there is (or can be) an essential unity of method between the natural and the social sciences.’” [J. P. Moreland. Consciousness and the Existence of God: A theistic argument. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page 4.]

“Critical realism … takes a much more structural view of governance [than social constructionism] in which the constraining impact of extant domination systems and organizational control regimes is assigned much greater ontological and epistemological – and hence theoretical – priority. Here, overriding analytical and explanatory significance is attached to the institutionalized frameworks of power relations that constitute the ‘structures of dominancy’ within which specific governance mechanisms, programs and practices emerge and are, eventually, legitimated as stabilized regulative orders that take on an obduracy and resilience which make them very difficult to modify, much less transform ….” [Tim Newton, Stan Deetz, and Mike Reed, “Responses to Social Constructionism and Critical Realism in Organization Studies.” Organization Studies. Volume 32, number 1, 2011. Pages 7-26.]

“In order to comprehend the relation between work-life-experiences and learner identity it is critical to apply a theoretical framework sensitive to the relation between work and identity …. Several traditions in social science and humanities are explicitly preoccupied with this. I have included two perspectives, both defining the identity-process as dialectic; a life-historical approach rooted in critical theory … and [Margaret S.] Archer’s … critical realistic approach and her concepts of natural, practical and social concerns.…

“The study demonstrates how the application of a dialectic concept of learner identity formed, maintained or transformed through involvement in a specific work-life can widen our understanding of unskilled work as a certain condition for engaging in lifelong learning.”

[Sissel Kondrup, “Work-life Experience and Learner Identity.” Presented at the 32nd National Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE)/ L’Association Canadienne pour l’Étude de I’Éducation des Adultes (ACÉÉA). June 3rd–5th, 2013. Proceedings. Pages 303-309. Retrieved on May 21st, 2016.]

“… few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of [Dave] Elder-Vass …, [Tuukka] Kaidesoja … and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be (and in practice implicitly are) based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes.” [Gabe Ignatow, “Theoretical Foundations for Digital Text Analysis.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 1, 2015. Pages 104-120.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s theory is necessarily an emergentist theory of science (or as he calls it, synchronic emergent powers materialism – henceforth SEPM). As stated above, we can say that the depth of reality, and stratification of the sciences, indicates that there is a real stratification in the world between/amongst generative mechanisms. Chemistry and biology are stratified. Chemistry is a necessary condition for biology to occur, but it is not a sufficient one. The generative mechanisms and structures that develop in biology are sui generis. Although these mechanisms develop out of other ones, they are capable of acting back upon one another. So given the nature of people, qua human beings, society and the ability to perform social science, develop out of our biology.” [Christopher Byron. Critically Developing Real Capabilities. M.A. thesis. College of Arts and Science, University of North Florida. Jacksonville, Florida. Page 24.]

“In this article, I attempt to unravel the intricacies of public diplomacy, global communication and world order through the lens of the theory of living systems and Eastern philosophy. However, for those who are steeped in the Enlightenment?s view of science and rationality, both Eastern philosophy and the new physics (quantum mechanics and relativity) may appear to be nonsense. Therefore, to justify my ?nonsense?, I must begin with a summary of the new physics.…

“… Roy Bhaskar …, the protagonist of critical realism, advocates the path of critical naturalism, which aims to sublate dialectical polarities to derive a general position. In retrospect, I see my attempt to conflate these two theoretical approaches as a sublating exercise.”

[Shelton A. Gunaratne, “Public Diplomacy, Global Communication and World Order: An Analysis Based on Theory of Living Systems.” Current Sociology. Volume 53, number 5, September 2005. Pages 749-772.]

“The argument draws upon and develops two key concepts found in the work of [Michel] Foucault and in critical realism: the ‘extra-discursive’ and ‘emergence.’ By developing an account that sees delinquents as neither wholly the outcome of (Foucaultian) ‘technologies,’ ‘programmes’ or ‘strategies,’ nor as (critical realist) ‘ontologically distinct’ entities, an analysis can instead be made that understands delinquents as constituted by their imbrication in an immanent and contingent field of power relations that forms—but does not determine—them as a distinct group.” [Nick Hardy, “Foucault, Genealogy, Emergence: Re-Examining The Extra-Discursive.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 41, issue 1, 2010. Pages 68-91.]

“… [It] will require a certain amount of exegesis in order to extract the building blocks I want to reuse from [Michel] Foucault’s work, and a certain amount of critique in order to separate them from the material to be discarded. Once thus reclaimed, what these materials will be used to construct is a realist ontology of discourse and thus a realist explanation of how discourse may be causally viable. Such an account offers the possibility, above all, of showing how the causal significance of discourse can be reconciled with the causal significance of subjects and that of non-discursive social practices.

“… It [the rebuilding] will therefore combine those blocks raided from Foucault’s construction with others from quite different sources. Most significant amongst these will be an ontology and a theory of emergent causal powers drawn from the early work of Roy Bhaskar …, and an analysis of normativity and social structure that I have developed ….”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “The Causal Power of Discourse.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 41, number 2, 2010. Pages 143-160.]

“Realism and social constructionism are often regarded as opposing traditions in social theory, and indeed even as mutually contradictory. This book, however, develops and substantiates the critical realist argument that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists.” [Dave Elder-Vass. The Reality of Social Construction. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Page 3.]

“… [Roy] Bhaskar’s work on the concept dependence of social structure makes it eminently clear that critical realism implies some kind of social constructionism …. I hope that this book will encourage more realists to embrace a moderate social constructionism and indeed to recognise that many of them already do so implicitly; that it will encourage social constructionists to recognise the value of realism and their own need for it; and that it will show those with no previous commitment to either tradition that they can be combined fruitfully.” [Dave Elder-Vass. The Reality of Social Construction. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Page 7.]

“This paper proceeds from the belief that social constructionism’s potential is best realised by separating it from the anti-realist baggage it has often been expected to carry, and linking it instead to an explicitly realist ontology of the social world: the philosophy of critical realism, developed originally by Roy Bhaskar … and adopted by a range of sociologists … and indeed other social scientists …. Although both realists and anti-realists have sometimes seen critical realism as being in conflict with social constructionism, there are good reasons for thinking that this is not the case. Or, to be more precise, there are good reasons to think that it is not in conflict with some varieties of constructionism. On the contrary, I will argue, a realist constructionism can be a more coherent and potentially a more valuable constructionism.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Towards a realist social constructionism.” Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas. Volume 70, 2012. Pages 9-24.]

“This book adopts a critical realist perspective. In particular, it advocates a perspective on emergence and cause that is closely related to that developed by Roy Bhaskar in A Realist Theory of Science …. Contemporary critical realism, however, is a somewhat diverse school of thought, and my approach to it is selective. While I strongly endorse his critiques of empiricist and postmodernist thought, I am less than convinced by some of the other strands of Bhaskar’s own thinking. I reject his theory of explanatory critiques …, I doubt the need for a dialectical turn in critical realism, and like many critical realists I am highly sceptical of the more recent spiritual turn in his thought ….” [Dave Elder-Vass. The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Page 11.]

“I conclude that [Dave] Elder-Vass has failed to demonstrate that social structures have causal powers in their own right: he has shown neither that they have causal powers in their own right in the substantial, interesting sense discussed by contemporary metaphysicians, nor that they have causal powers in their own right in the diluted and misleading sense defended by Elder-Vass. The latter sense requires the truth of the redescription principle, but I have argued that this principle is utterly problematic and I have indicated that Elder-Vass himself at times appears to implicitly reject it.” [Tobias Hansson Wahlberg, “Elder-Vass on the Causal Power of Social Structures.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 44, number 6, December 2014. Pages 774-791.]

“I am … seeking to counter the kinds of strong constructionism that have considerable influence in our field [psychotherapy]; for example, that of [Kenneth] Gergen …, whose constructionism is, in his words, ‘ontologically mute.’ His argument, following [Michel] Foucault, is that because the world outside our ideas (ontology) cannot be thought of – or spoken of – independently of our constructions, we are bound by discourse and it follows that on the question of reality itself we are necessarily silent. As a guide to identification, strong positions often use the term realities.

“By contrast, weaker or moderate constructionisms assume that it is only beliefs about reality that are socially constructed …. These kinds of constructionism are more likely to distinguish between that which depends on how we think about it and that which does not. This distinction is, for example, drawn by Simone de Beauvoir … in her famous statement that, while one may be born female (what [John] Searle … calls a ‘brute fact’) one becomes a woman (through the social construction of gender). Strong constructionists tend to deny that distinction on the grounds that everything depends on how we think about it. Consistently with this, strong constructionists … see no compatibility between constructionism and realism. (Realism is the philosophy that reality exists independently of all our thoughts and ideas about it and assumes that knowledge can, under some circumstances, adequately represent the world as it is). Following [Christian] Smith … and [Dave] Elder-Vass …, I argue that a rapprochement is not only possible between moderate realism and moderate constructionism, it is also desirable – the most coherent synthesis currently on offer being critical realism. Only the extreme positions on the realism-constructionism continuum …. namely, naive realism and strong constructionism, offer no potential for bridging.”

[David Pocock, “A philosophy of practice for systemic psychotherapy: the case for critical realism.” Journal of Family Therapy. Volume 37, issue 2, April 2014. Pages 167-183.]

“Critical realism shares with social constructionism the study of how beliefs are socially constructed on the basis of power and sociocultural contingencies, but in addition CR [critical realism] includes two features that constructionists have intentionally ignored (euphemistically called bracketing, suspending, etc.).

“The first involves the unintended consequences of particular beliefs ….

“Second, beliefs are influenced not only by sociocultural contingencies but also by biophysical ones.”

[Raymond Murphey, “Thinking across the Culture/Nature Divide: An Empirical Study of Issues for Critical Realism and Social Constructionism.” Critical Realism and the Social Sciences: Heterodox Elaborations. Jon Frauley and Frank Pearce, editors. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press. 2007. Page 145.]

“While I find [Dave] Elder-Vass’ criticisms of strong social constructionism to be quite convincing, I do not share his misgivings about [Margaret S.] Archer’s arguments in favor of social realism. On the contrary, I find them quite powerful. The standard arguments against the mind independence of social reality all rely on a rhetorical elision between ‘individual minds’ and ‘all minds.’ While there can be no social reality that is independent of ‘all minds’ considered collectively, there is a social reality that is independent of ‘individual minds’ considered singly. The social world can exist independently of any single mind—and does so before our births and after our deaths.” [Philip Gorski, “As Critical Realism Meets Social Constructionism.” Review article. European Journal of Sociology. Volume LIV, number 3, 2013. Pages 461-465.]

“Strong social constructionism rejects the idea of correspondence between representation and the real.… A weak constructionist perspective, e.g. such as can be found in some forms of critical realism, would argue that although it can never be proven whether representations succeed in exact correspondence, it is possible to move towards correspondence of the real.” [Ted Fuller and Krista Loogma, “Constructing futures: A social constructionist perspective on foresight methodology.” Futures. Volume 41, 2009. Pages 71-79.]

“If contingency is the first sticking point [in science], the second one is more metaphysical. Constructionists tend to maintain that classifications are not determined by how the world is, but are convenient ways in which to represent it. They maintain that the world does not come quietly wrapped up in facts. Facts are the consequences of ways in which we represent the world. The constructionist vision here is splendidly old-fashioned. It is a species of nominalism. It is countered by a strong sense that the world has an inherent structure that we discover.” [Ian Hacking. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999. Page 33.]

“Antirealism is not a single doctrine but comes in different versions. For this discussion, the two most important are, first, the view that all reality consists in conscious states, and, second, the view that reality is socially constructed, that what we think of as ‘the real world’ is just a bunch of things constructed by groups of people. To have labels, let us call the first view ‘phenomenalist idealism,’ and the second ‘social constructionism.’” [John R. Searle. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1995. Page 183.]

“… some postmodernists make the strong claim that the world is entirely socially constructed by the human mind – or, in other words, the world ‘lies in the eyes of the beholder’ …. A few postmodernists … are unwilling to make such a strong claim and adopt – what Fleetwood (2005) calls – a ‘weak social constructivist’ or ‘weak social constructionist’ position postulating that only a part (but not all) of the world is socially constructed and admitting the existence of extra-discursive phenomena. This ‘weak’ version of social constructivism is acceptable to critical realists.” [Filipe J. Sousa, “Metatheories in Research: Positivism, Postmodernism, and Critical Realism.” Organizational Culture, Business-to-Business Relationships, and Interfirm Networks. Arch G. Woodside, editor. Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 2010. Pages 455-503.]

“An argument is made for [Roy] Bhaskar’s critical realism as a more coherent, accountable and enabling philosophy of practice for systemic psychotherapy than the kinds of strong constructionism and pragmatism that are currently powerful in our field.…

“… my main argument that a moderate constructionism is necessary but not sufficient as a metatheory for systemic psychotherapy practice. It is necessary because it offers a realistic description of how language shapes our perceptions of the world; it describes how historical and cultural contexts influence what counts as knowledge; and it offers a compelling account of the relationship between knowledge and power ….”

[David Pocock, “A philosophy of practice for systemic psychotherapy: the case for critical realism.” Journal of Family Therapy. Volume 37, issue 2, April 2014. Pages 167-183.]

“We define systemic therapy as a form of psychotherapy that (1) perceives behavior and mental symptoms within the context of the social systems people live in; (2) focuses on interpersonal relations and interactions, social constructions of realities, and the recursive causality between symptoms and interactions; (3) includes family members and other important persons (e.g., teachers, friends, professional helpers) directly or indirectly through systemic questioning, hypothesizing, and specific interventions; and (4) appreciates and utilizes clients’ perspectives on problems, resources, and preferred solutions ….” [Kirsten von Sydow, Ruediger Retzlaff, Stefan Beher, Markus W. Haun, and Jochen Schweitze, “The Efficacy of Systemic Therapy for Childhood and Adolescent Externalizing Disorders: A Systematic Review of 47 RCT.” Family Process. Volume 52, number 4, 2013. Pages 576-618.]

“The goal of systemic is always to see a problem not as the result of characteristics found within an individual, but to view that person’s history in situ – to observe the relationship [between] structures and condtions. Even then the cause-effect relationship can be viewed linearly: Because the parents have a hidden conflict …. Thus, the problem is seen as its cause. In early systemic approaches this was the norm. But contextualization can also introduce the circular perspective, which factors in the effect the problem has on the context …. This highlights the reciprocal stabilization effect [that] the system and the symptom have.” [Andreas Fryszer and Rainer Schwing. Handbook of Systemic Psychotherapy. Bristol, Connecticut: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC. 2014. Page 64.]

“In systemic therapy, the problem is understood from within the context – not from within the personality of one or more of system members. In systemics, one is usually concerned with the present and future. The past plays less of a role, but does occur as part of a developmental process of a system.” [Andreas Fryszer and Rainer Schwing. Handbook of Systemic Psychotherapy. Bristol, Connecticut: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC. 2014. Page 196.]

“I have argued that we need to reconcile liberal psychotherapist values with a critical realist perspective when working with religious fundamentalism. [David] Pocock reminds us that we need our realist ontology. Without it, little can be said about how the therapist decides which ideas need to be brought into the dialogue in the therapeutic process …. We need to use our patience, spiritual humanism and humility as well as the more fashionable ‘curiosity’ when working in these contexts ….” [Hannah Sherbersky, “Family therapy and fundamentalism: One family therapist’s exploration of ethics and collaboration with religious fundamentalist families.” Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Volume 21, number 3, 2016. Pages 381-496.]

“The starting point is … the critical realist perspective. Realists agree that knowledge is socially constructed and discursive. They do not, however, restrict their investigation to the study of discourse.…

“From a realist perspective, the dynamics of nature are significant and merit inclusion in the analysis. For example, discrepancies between socially constructed conceptions and their referents can result in inadequate social constructions ….”

[Raymond Murphy, “Nature’s Temporalities and the Manufacture of Vulnerability: A study of a sudden disaster with implications for creeping ones.” Time & Society. Volume 10, number 2/3, 2001. Pages 329-348.]

“The present paper integrates constructionism and realism by incorporating into the analysis both problematic socially constructed practices and interpretations, as well as autonomous material dynamics of nature that can be more threatening if incorrectly interpreted. The paper brings together constructionism and realism from a critical realist starting point …. I would refer to this approach as constructionist realism.…

“I … have attempted to bridge the nature/culture divide in an argument that can be ail-too briefly summarized as follows. Humans socially construct their conceptions and practices (including those concerning nature and risk), as well as technologies, according to their culture and power. They are not, however, pure discursive spirits in a material vacuum, but instead embodied beings embedded in a biophysical world. Social constructions occur on both the discursive level—the focus of social constructionist analysis—and on the material level—as [certain] critical realists … demonstrate.”

[Raymond Murphy, “Disaster or Sustainability: The Dance of Human Agents with Nature’s Actants.” Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology. Volume 41, issue 3, August 2004. Pages 249-266.]

“A critical realist constructionist standpoint would assert that, whilst we are only able to access the world through our representations of it, a ‘real’ world does exist independently of these representations …. Since the objects and practices in the world are likely to have different properties, discourse is seen to act as a referent system, discerning objects and practices on a differential basis, however imperfectly, partially, tangentially, or implicitly this might be …. Rather than the world being entirely inaccessible to human theorising, objects and practices might be accounted for to some degree, at least referentially …. Whilst referent systems are created by human beings, they concurrently shape our experiencing in accordance with the properties of the world to which they refer, constituting a ‘discursive accomplishment’ …. Observations and experiences are generated in accordance with underlying and relatively enduring conceptual, social, and material structures, which make some constructions of objects and practices more likely than others …. As a result, the world is seen to be physically and socially organised in ways that constrain what it is possible to say or do.… [A]ll aspects of our environment that influence action in this way should be granted ontological status.” [Tom Graham. Values and ethics in counselling psychology training and practice: Discourses amongst final year trainees. Doctor of psychology thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Psychology, University of Roehampton. London, England. 2013. Page 45.]

“… [Karl] Marx’s own dialectic of organic/inorganic relations came to be transformed in his later works (given the path-breaking scientific developments that these thinkers represented) into a theory of ecological contradiction that took into account the ‘metabolic rift’ between human beings and nature and the need for ‘restoration’ of sustainable ecological relations ….

“… [Roy] Bhaskar’s work is critical realist in that it takes into account the epistemological question as raised most notably in [Immanuel] Kant’s three critiques (i.e., it does not represent a naive abandonment of epistemology—its reduction to mere mechanical reflection—as in positivism). But, Bhaskar’s approach remains critical realist. In the tradition of critical materialisms and realism in general, it rejects what Bhaskar … termed the ‘epistemic fallacy’ that all philosophy can be reduced to epistemology (ways of knowing), and ontology can thus be rejected.”

[John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, “Marx and the Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations.” Organization & Environment. Volume 14, number 4, December 2001. Pages 451-462.]

“What arises from [Karl] Marx’s materialist dialectic of organic/inorganic relations, then, is an understanding of the ecological rift that forms the foundation of modern capitalist society. This rift can only be eliminated through a replacement of class-exploitative production, property, and market relations with a system of cooperative-democratic worker-community control over the conditions of production—a system that, predicated on the transcendence of the alienation of nature and labor, alters the human relation to the earth in ways that encourage sustainable and proecological forms of human development.” [John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, “The dialectic of organic/inorganic relations: Marx and the Hegelian philosophy of nature.” Organization & Environment. Volume 14, number 3, December 2000. Pages 403-425.]

“John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett’s article, “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations” (2000) provides valuable exposition of Marx’s text on the humanity-nature relation. [Karl] Marx’s materialismwas a path-breaking exemplar of how to think about that vexed interface. Far too often, conversations about humanity-nature links elicit public confusion or intellectual hostility. For example, my own discipline of sociology is at a total loss when it comes to articulating the connection. Now, I take this to be an inevitable outcome of the industrial division of labour, under which form of social organization—a highly gendered one—people become alienated from the material ground that sustains their bodies and forms their sensibilities. My response to Foster and Burkett sets out to show how this alienation scars not only everyday life but theoretical production as well, including that of Marx.” [Ariel Salleh, “Sustaining Marx or Sustaining Nature?: An Ecofeminist Response to Foster and Burkett.” Organization & Environment. Volume 14, number 4, December 2001. Pages 443-450.]

“In its most general sense materialism claims that that the origins and development of whatever exists is dependent on nature and ‘matter,’ that is, a level of physical reality that is independent of and prior to thought. Following British philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar we can say that a rational philosophical materialism as a complex worldview comprises:

[John Bellamy Foster. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2000. Page 13.]

“[Karl] Marx … clearly indicated that nature and society are irreducible. One cannot and should not be subsumed within the other. The choice here is not between monism and dualism. Rather, an open-system, materialist dialectic—focused on mediation and totality and taking into account the heterogeneous character of reality and integrative levels—provides the only meaningful critical-realist basis for analysis. Moreover, this cannot be accomplished by mere contemplation but requires the unification of theory and practice, in the context of the working out of real material relations.…

“Dialectical-critical realism serves as a basis for analyzing material relations, especially those associated with capitalism’s ‘alienated mediation’ of humanity and nature.…

“… As critical realist Roy Bhaskar wrote, ‘we survive as a species only insofar as second nature respects the overriding constraints imposed upon it by first nature. From this nature, although it is always historically mediated, we can never, nor will ever, escape.’”

[John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Marxism and the Dialectics of Ecology.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 5, October 2016. Pages 1-17.]

“Not all Marxist ecologists are willing to embrace the notion of the dialectics of nature, even when qualified by a critical realism/critical materialism.” [John Bellamy Foster, “The Dialectics of Nature and Marxist Ecology.” Dialectics for the New Century. Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2008. Pages 50-82.]

“As a concept, ‘nature’ gives rise to serious difficulties for philosophy, encompassing both ontology (the nature of being) and epistemology (the nature of thought). Since Immanuel Kant, it has been emphasized that human beings cannot perceive ‘things in themselves’ (noumena) and thus remain dependent on a priori knowledge, which is logically independent of experience. It is therefore customary within academic philosophy today either to take an outright idealist stance and thus to give ontological priority to the mind/ideas, or to subsume ontology within epistemology in such a way that the nature (including the limits) of knowledge takes precedence over the nature of being. In contrast, natural scientists generally adopt a materialist/realist standpoint by emphasizing our ability to comprehend the physical world directly. Concerned with growing ecological crises, most ecological activists today take a similar stance, implicitly stressing a kind of ‘critical realism,’ as in the work of Roy Bhaskar, that rejects both mechanical materialism (e.g. positivism) and idealism.” [John Bellamy Foster, “Nature.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 1, May 2016. Pages 19-24.]

“Our argument here is that environmental sociology cannot afford to embrace a strong social constructionism and to expel realist views. Indeed, a sociology of ecology that can serve as a counterpart to environmental sociology must embody a degree of realism. At the same time, a crude positivism that ignores epistemology and social construction in favor of naturalistic determinism is worse than useless. Neither the epistemic fallacy, which reduces ontology to epistemology, nor the ontological fallacy, which reduces epistemology to ontology, is acceptable. Ecological analysis in general depends on the development of a strong dialectical objectivism or dialectical critical realism—what we have termed here realist constructionism …. To address earthly questions regarding the social–nature relation requires such an approach to grapple with the history and emergence of a dynamic world.” [John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Sociology of Ecology: Ecological Organicism Versus Ecosystem Ecology in the Social Construction of Ecological Science, 1926-1935.” Organization & Environment. Volume 21, number 3, September 2008. Pages 311-352.]

“We … develop an integrated critical realist constructionism that takes both materiality and embodiment into account. Here the physical, material body and its corporeal processes are recognised but it is acknowledged that their meanings are socially constructed, subject to change culturally and historically.… Thus, we sought to explore embodied experience by asking people explicitly to recall their lived embodied sensations, feelings and states when they consumed alcohol. As we were also interested in the inherently social nature of drinking and how these subjective experiences were interwoven with the social, we conducted discussion groups with people who were friends or work colleagues and who drank together occasionally.” [Antonia C. Lyons, Carol Emslie, and Kate Hunt, “Staying ‘in the zone’ but not passing the ‘point of no return’: embodiment, gender and drinking in mid-life.” Sociology of Health & Illness. Volume 36, number 2, 2014. Pages 264-277.]

“A non-relativist approach to social contructionist research needs to adopt a critical realist position with regard to the question of ‘knowledge.’ Critical realism subscribes to epistemological relativism only insofar as it acknowledges ‘the impossibility of knowing objects except under particular descriptions’ ….

“Non-relativist social constructionist research constitutes a challenge to its practitioners. It requires a strong interdisciplinary orientation, the ability to work with others who may not agree with us and the willingness to take responsibility for the social and political consequences of our work.”

[Carla Willig, “Beyond appearances: a critical realist approach to social constructionist work.” Social constructionist psychology: A critical analysis of theory and practice. David J. Nightingale and John Cromby, editors. Buckingham, England, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Open University Press. 1999. Pages 37-51.]

“… in focusing upon people’s use of certain ways of talking to construct different kinds of social relationship, this book is concerned with a special dialogical or conversational version of social constructionism …, one that l have called a rhetorical–responsive version. Why I have called it this, is because I want to claim that our ability as individuals to speak representationally – that is, to depict or describe a unique state of affairs (whether real or not), as we please, independently of the influences of our surroundings – arises out of us first and primarily speaking in a way that is responsive to the others around us.” [John Shotter. Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1993. Page 6.]

“… those of us more directly concerned with the activities of ordinary, everyday social life – and who wonder, like [Gaston] Bachelard, how an intelligible world is fashioned from seemineg dreamlike, disorderly material – may find that, instead of the ‘things’ ontology [Roy] Bhaskar proposes, an ontology consisting in an ‘ecology of formative activities’ is much more suitable.… [A]n ontology of social ‘structures’ and psychological ‘rules’ characterizing its material ‘resistances’ and ‘enablements,’ an ontology of morally contested ‘intransigences’ and ‘empowerments’ embodied both in people and the social practices within which they have their social identities may be a more revealing social ontology …. None of all this could have been said, however, without the ‘enablements’ provided by Bhaskar’s own work in this area. He has fashioned a wholly new context for argumentation about social ontology, and because of this, his ‘voice’ merits enormous critical attention in all the human sciences, in the new (I?) ‘tradition of argumentation’ now developing.” [John Shotter. Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1993. Page 78.]

“… the complex dynamic realities which here we are calling chiasmically organized are not constituted from causally related parts, nor from any rationally related parts relations between the elements that might go into a construction, thus ‘anything goes.’ …

“The word ‘reality’ is like any other word in our language, and as such, we must learn to use it properly.… I want to argue that if we want to hang on to the word reality, and I for one do, then it must be used in totally new ways. Reality can no longer be restricted to what we might call a purely ‘local’ meaning, for the nonlocal implications of the chiasmic ordering of our perceptual contacts with our surroundings suggest that what happens in one region of space is inevitably related with other, often very distant, regions of our lives ….”

[John Shotter, “Cartesian Change, Chiasmic Change: The Power of Living Expression.” Janus Head. Volume 6, number 1, 2003. Pages 6-29.]

“… there is Pico della Mirandola’s (1463-1494) discourse ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’ (1486). It’s a marvelous little piece, because he’s saying that by the time God created human beings, God had run out of patterns, models for them. Thus God said to human beings: ‘it’s your task to make yourselves, and you have the choice of ascending to the angels or descending to the beasts, that is up to you.’ You could say he was the first social constructionist.” [John Shotter in Carla Guanaes-Lorenzi, Pedro Pablo Sampaio Martins, Clarissa Mendonça Corradi-Webster, Kátia de Souza Amorim, Emerson Fernando Rasera, and Murilo dos Santos Moscheta, “Envisioning a Participatory Democracy: An Interview with John Shottter.” Psicologia em Estudo. Volume 18, number 3, July-September 2013. Pages 561-569.]

“The ‘inner scales of measurement’ we imaginatively construct for ourselves—in which we compare and contrast what is already known to us from our past experiences with what we seem now in particular to be facing—are not measurable in quantitative terms ….” [John Shotter, “In Search of Phronesis: Leadership and the Art of Judgment.” Academy of Management Learning & Education. Volume 13, number 2, 2014. Pages 224-243.]

“While it is in existence, practice, teaching and research can all be enfolded within each other, while one informs and creates the other in a ever-evolving, generative fashion. Both inquiry and learning in this process thus becomes a matter of ‘practical authorship’ … in which teachers and students, managers and workers, researchers and practitioners, all co-construct that which they create and learn together. But in such a process, it is not only the participants’ shared circumstances that are refined and further developed, participants also change in their identities – for the changes within them are not only epistemological, they are also ontological ….” [John Shotter, “Understanding Process From Within: An Argument for ‘Withness’-Thinking.” Organization Studies. Volume 27, number 4, 2006. Pages 585-604.]

“Instead of leading us to look into them more closely, to try to get a sense of the detailed inter-relationships in terms of which they actually have their unique being, we do the opposite – we at first turn ourselves away from them while we cudgel our brains in an attempt to construct an appropriate theoretical schematism, i.e., an order constituted of homogeneous parts into which to fit them …. We thus impose our own framework upon the phenomena before us, a framework that is not itself a part of nature at all, and in doing so, we eradicate all the already existing internal relations within them – we reduce them to a (picture-able) system of parts that are external to each other.” [John Shotter, “Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual Inquiry: From ‘Aboutness’-Thinking to ‘Withness’-Thinking in Everyday Life.” Janus Head. Volume 8, number 1, 2005. Pages 132-158.]

“Dialogically structured activities involve the creating and bringing into existence of what is uniquely new, what has never existed before. And it is this aspect of our experience I want to explore further here, and to point out why it is so crucial to our becoming, once again (like an infant), dialogical in our encounters with the others and ‘othernesses’ around us – an experience which, as we grow into the dominant or official ideology of the authoritative others around us, we tend in our more deliberate activities to forget.” [John Shotter, “On being dialogical: An ethics of ‘attunement.’” Context. Volume 137, February 2015. Pages 8-11.]

“Even the most complex of ‘man-made’ systems, machines for instance, are constructed piece by piece from objective parts; that is, from parts which retain their character unchanged irrespective of whether they are parts of the system or not.” [John Shotter. The Short Book of ‘Withness’ Thinking. London: KCCF. 2005. Pages 43-44.]

“Living processes … are certainly not constructed piece by piece; on the contrary, in an unbroken process of reproduction, while older forms die, new embryonic forms are created which grow into more mature forms.” [John Shotter, “Responsive Expression in Living Bodies: The power of invisible ‘real presences’ within our everyday lives together.” Cultural Studies. Volume 18, number 2/3, March/May 2004. Pages 442-459.]

“… a realistic constructivism provides a … satisfactory conception of personal constructs. According to this view, we no longer think that personal constructs are either true or false, rather they are divided into true and false in accordance with the grasp of reality reflected in our best theories. In other words, having provided a theory of truth, we are ready to compare different personal constructs with the grasp of reality involved in the theory in terms of their correspondence with that grasp. Furthermore, this conception of constructivism makes it possible to talk of the approximation of personal constructs to reality.” [Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast, “Toward a More Realistic Constructivism.” Advances in Cognitive Science. Volume 4, number 2, 2002. Pages 45-57.]

“… [Roy Bhaskar] refers to … ‘categorical realism.’ By this term, he tries to go beyond [Immanuel] Kant’s view that categories are only features of our phenomenal world. Instead, Bhaskar holds that these categories refer to the realities of the world per se …. Even though I like Bhaskar’s ‘reclaiming reality’ [a reference to Bhaskar’s book by that title] and going beyond the phenomenal world, it is doubtful that all categories can be considered as constitutive of realities of the world without tracing any constructive elements in them in terms of human language and concepts. Of course, as I mentioned, Bhaskar holds that there are layers for reality and this layered structure makes it difficult to achieve the reality straightforwardly. However, it seems that for Bhaskar achieving the reality in the long run is possible. In what I refer to as constructive realism, … only a proportion of reality as such can be achieved. That is to say, our human language and emotions provide us with a ‘refractive index,’ to put in optics terms, indicating that we can claim only a proportion of reality.” [Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast in Michael A. Peters, “Islam, Philosophy and Education: A Conversation with Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast.” Analysis and Metaphysics. Volume 12, 2013. Pages 195-209.]

“[Richard] Rorty admired both hermeneutic and therapeutic activities, identifying these as the main functions of edifying philosophers, and contrasted them with the work of constructive philosophers, who try to build a coherent system of thought ….” [Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast, “Richard Rorty’s Conception Philosophy of Education Revisited.” Educational Theory. Volume 64, number 1, 2014. Pages 75-98.]

“… the transcendental God-related meaning is only partly constructive as it is, on the other hand, exploratory. Without adding this supplementary part, the meaning will be merely a human-made entity.” [Khosrow Bagheri Noaparast, “Physical and spiritual education within the framework of pure life.” International Journal of Children’s Spirituality. Volume 18, number 1, 2013. Pages 46-61.]

“The model applies what could be called a realist-constructivist view, indicating its partial similarities with social constructivism, and foundation on critical realist tenets.

“It recognises that

[Gordon Brown, “The Ontological Turn: Reconceptualising a Teacher Education Course using a Realist Framework.” Proceedings of the 2007 Australian Teacher Education Association National Conference. University of Wollongong. Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. July 3rd–6th, 2007. Pages 42-61. Retrieved on January 3rd, 2016.]

“… the view is that a ‘there’ actually exists out there (see … [Roy] Bhaskar … [and Margaret S.] Archer …). This perspective contrasts with the logical positivist-empiricist notion that we can only know what we observe … and the postmodern-deconstructivist notion that, because all social knowledge is discursively created, no social structures can exist out there independent of our discourses about them ….

“… A realist constructivism would … serve to help rehabilitate idealism by requiring as its corollary a self-consciously idealist constructivism and by contending that the study of ideals, as well as ideas, is integral to a full understanding of international politics. The original constructivist starting point was more a critique of the ‘structural’ part of structural realism than of classical realism; the former allows much less scope for incorporating moral ideals than the latter. The classical realist argument is that to have an impact, any politics of moral ideals must be tempered by a politics of power.”

[J. Samuel Barkin, “Realist Constructivism.” International Studies Review. Volume 5, number 3, September 2003. Pages 325-342.]

“… [One construcivist variant] is grounded in the philosophical doctrine of scientific realism, particularly the work of Roy Bhaskar. The writings of Alexander Wendt and David Dessler exemplify this … genre. Scientific realism, according to Wendt, offers the possibility of a wholly new ‘naturalistic’ social science. On its basis, it is no longer necessary to choose between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ accounts of social action and social order—not because social science is made to emulate the natural sciences, as it was under the old naturalistic monism, but because there is little difference in their respective ontologies to begin with. Scientific inquiry of both material and social worlds deals largely in nonobservables, be they quarks or international structures, and much of the time even the intersubjective aspects of social life exist independently of the mental states of most individuals that constitute it. I call this naturalistic constructivism.” [John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together?: Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge.” International Organization. Volume 52, number 4, autumn 1998. Pages 855-885.]

“This paper reports on a teacher education initiative that seeks a more effective approach to a commonly used treatment of education foundations, particularly the sociology and philosophy of education. The initiative takes as its starting points a critique of education foundation practices in at least two universities and the standpoint that the main rationale for including education foundations is to (morally) influence learning outcomes in schools. The ‘vehicle’ or ‘mechanism’ for this re-conceptualisation is a developing theory of the Learning Environment, used by the author and others, which takes the Learning Environment to be not simply the location of learning but the total conditions that enable and constrain learning.…

“… CR [critical realism] rejects the model of explanation in positivism, which is that an event is explained when it can be deduced from initial conditions and a natural law (defined as a pattern of events). It also rejects the model of explanation in postmodernism/poststructuralism, which is a social (and therefore fallible) exchange that resolves puzzlement. An explanation in CR is a socially produced (and therefore fallible) account of the way a generative mechanism or tendency produces an event ….”

[Gordon L. Brown, “Student teachers and critical approaches to education: re-imagining the ‘other’ through a reimagining of the learning environment.” Proceedings of the 2007 Australian Teacher Education Association National Conference. University of Wollongong. Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. July 3rd–6th, 2007. Pages 62-70. Retrieved on May 12th, 2016.]

“… I set out and defend an ontology of integration and differentiation using the concepts and theories of the philosophy of critical realism. Armed with an ontology of structures, causal mechanisms, powers, liabilities and tendencies, I provide a coherent justification for integrating knowledge from different disciplines. I argue that it is because the objects of scientific inquiry are all causal objects – their commonality – that they can be integrated (through their relations with each other), and that it is because their powers and liabilities have different effects that they can be differentiated and so studied separately.

“… it is important to recognize that the process of integrating knowledge through interdisciplinary research need not be organized on a collective basis – that is, where a team of researchers from different scientific backgrounds works together on a common problem.”

[Dominic Holland. Integrating Knowledge Through Interdisciplinary Research: Problems of theory and practice. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Page 8.]

“In this book, Dominic Holland provides a welcome and valuable assessment of the muddled status of contemporary interdisciplinarity. As a political economist he is well-positioned to make this assessment because his discipline has, perhaps more than most, made a valiant yet largely unsuccessful attempt to achieve interdisciplinarity. His main thesis is that it is untenable to attempt to achieve interdisciplinarity within the frameworks of positivism, interpretivism and postmodernism and he instead argues that critical realism solves many of the aporetic tensions that currently abound. In essence, Holland’s book underlabours for the current practices of interdisciplinarity and thus attempts to bring the practice of interdisciplinarity into line with the theory of it.” [Leigh Price, “Integrating Knowledge through Interdisciplinary Research: Problems of Theory and Practice.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 320-322.]

“… transcendental realists like [Roy] Bhaskar … posit two criteria for reality, one perceptual and one causal, and assert that entities are real, even if they are misperceived or unperceived, by virtue of their exertion of causal force independent of the activity of human inquirers ….

“… As the ‘levels of reality’ position asserts, the physical, biological, and sociocultural world simultaneously constrains and enables the emergence and interpretation of human psychological kinds.

“The reality of psychological phenomena within other levels of reality allows psychologists to warrant claims concerning their interpretative findings by tapping into, and participating within, systems of meaning and practice extant in relevant historical, sociocultural contexts.”

[Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman, “Psychology’s Reality Debate: A ‘Levels of Reality’ Approach.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Volume 19, number 2, 1999. Pages 177-193.]

“… we have chosen sociologist Margaret Archer’s social realism … with its critical realist underlabouring as an analytical framework through which to view HE [higher education] as a social field.…

“Semantic density (SD) in this study is used to identify the degree of condensation or density of meaning contained in a concept. A concept that condenses a number of meanings can be characterised as having relatively strong sematic density (SD+), whereas a concept that embodies fewer meanings can be characterised as having weaker semantic density (SD-).”

[Jo-Anne Vorster and Lynn Quinn, “Towards shaping the field: theorising the knowledge in a formal course for academic developers.” Higher Education Research & Development. Volume 34, number 5, 2015. Pages 1031-1044.]

“… [My proposed definition of learning emphasizes] the role of the student-as-actor who personifies the student role with their own biography and concerns. They learn through the disjuncture: ‘when we can no longer presume upon our world and act upon it in an almost unthinking manner,’ when the situational logic in which we find ourselves is one of contradiction. Learning thus emerges from our relations with all three orders of reality: learning emerges through work, practice, on our part. Learning changes us as actors, which affects the group to which we belong as agents, and influences our identity as persons.” [Kevin Williams, “Rethinking ‘Learning’ in Higher Education.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 3, July 2012. Pages 296-323.]

“Critical pedagogy is a broad school that combines critical theory and critical educational theory.…

“Critical pedagogy and youth and community work have always been philosophies of action, and as such have not always paid due attention to their philosophical tensions …. However, these are not just philosophical concerns – they impact on our praxis. As we have seen, we need to be clear on the nature of the knowledge we are trying to co-create. We are seeking to have resonance with others, but we do not want to create dogma.… Critical realism means we can invoke human nature as a motivator for pedagogues as it is a ghost in the machine that means hegemony, while powerful, is not monolithic.”

[Mike Seal, “Critical Realism’s Potential Contribution to Critical Pedagogy and Youth and Community Work: Human Nature, Agency and Praxis Revisited.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 263-276.]

“… we will be content to provide an abbreviated account drawn from the ‘dialectical critical realism’ of Roy Bhaskar. This has the merit of being rooted firmly within Marxist theory whilst being simultaneously sensitised to the multifarious semantics of the concepts noted above.…

“The phrase, the ‘pedagogy of the privileged’ possesses a double referent. In the first place, it refers to the student body, which is primarily bourgeois, and includes all the usual pedagogical elements which we may narrowly conceive as critical pedagogy. It should, however, go without saying that critical pedagogy is simultaneously conceived in its more expansive sense – as concerned with resisting the reproduction of capital and power elites.”

[Mark Cresswell, Zulfia Karimova, and Tom Brock, “Pedagogy of the Privileged: Elite Universities and Dialectical Contradictions in the UK.” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies. Volume 11, issue 4, November 2013. Pages 25-50.]

“Advocates of critical pedagogy reject empiricist, positivist, and post-modern approaches in favor of a critical realist paradigm where scholars pursue research that includes praxis as the basis of science and emancipatory knowledge …. According to Roy Bhaskar, ‘critical realists argue for an understanding of the relationship between structures and human agency that is based on a transformational conception of social activity’ ….” [Dean Braa and Peter Callero, “Critical Pedagogy and Classroom Praxis.” Teaching Sociology. Volume 34, October 2006. Pages 357-369.]

“Emancipatory teaching can be seen as scientific to the extent that any other Theory is scientific, but there will always be the possibility that student cynicism will result from our ideological blindness, one which itself keeps us from recognizing the results of our work in a world that doesn’t match our own understanding of it.…

“… In short, a realist view of the sciences does not conflate the contingency of description (an epistemological question) with the contingency of the object of description (an ontological question); does not see the natural sciences as rendering the human sciences redundant (or vice versa) but rather sees a role for each in the work of what [Roy] Bhaskar calls ‘underlaboring’ for practical work in the world; and understands a connection between the ability to produce knowledge of objects and structures that in effect produce and guide human life, and the possibility for humans to become emancipated from those structures that render them unfree.”

[Michael Bernard-Donals, “Liberatory Pedagogy, Conceptual Knowledge: Toward Reconciling Two Views of Science with Praxis.” symplokē. Volume 4, number 1/2, 1996. Pages 153-173.]

“Two models are examined and discussed in particular depth herein: (i) the stress-strain-coping- support (SSCS) model, which focuses on the stress and strain of affected family members and their coping strategies …, and (ii) the social-ecological (SE) model, which focuses on how addiction unfolds in a social world, and the process of fragmentation and reintegration of close relationships ….

“These two viewpoints can be related to the distinction between psychological and social mechanisms of reality, and between agency and structure as separate strata.”

[Anne Schanche Selbekk, Hildegunn Sagvaag, and Halvor Fauske, “Addiction, families and treatment: A critical realist search for theories that can improve practice.” Addiction Research & Theory. Volume 23, issue 3, May 2015. Pages 196-204.]

“Seeing addiction as a learning disorder accounts for this paradox far better than either a disease model of complete slavery to drugs or a moral model of completely free choice. If what changes in the brain during addiction are the areas that set priorities, this will skew the ability to choose well, but it will not eliminate it. Any attempt to address addiction through public policy, whether it involves designing rehabs or treating people who are committing predatory crimes during their addictions, must recognize these facts.” [Maia Szalavitz. Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 2016. Page 276.]

“This paper outlines the basis of a theoretical approach to the study of ‘education’ around the globe. Our approach, one we have called a Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education – or CCPEE – is inspired by the work of a growing number of social scientists who have sought new ways of understanding modern social formations, their social relations and subjectivities, by bringing political economy into a productive conversation with the cultural turn ….

“In line with the critical realist ontology …, we view an education ensemble as a particular kind of social world made up ‘…of various layers of structures and generative mechanisms’ …. In other words, an education ensemble has to be seen as a unity of multiple determinations. Given its stratified ontology, not all of what goes on in any education ensemble is visible.”

[Susan L. Robertson and Roger Dale, “Towards a ‘critical cultural political economy’ account of the globalising of education.” Globalisation, Societies and Education. Volume 13, number 1, 2015. Pages 149-170.]

“CCPEE [Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education] allows one to make explicit the struggles and conflicts between discourses, practices and institutions of schooling, and the impact these have on the on-going social contract …. Aligned with a critical realist ontology, [Susan L.] Robertson and [Roger] Dale … have developed a series of ‘education moments̻ that can help to guide such exploration ….” [Mieke T. A. Lopes Cardozo and Ritesh Shah, “A conceptual framework to analyse the multiscalar politics of education for sustainable peacebuilding.” Working paper number 25. Education and International Development. University of Amsterdam. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 2016. Pages 1-28.]

“… the central theoretical arguments related to relevant research on project marketing and generative mechanisms in critical realism are briefly outlined. After that, we present an illustration of mechanisms in project marketing. Finally, we suggest ways in which our approach can be realized in future empirical field studies.…

“… The generative mechanisms that we postulate as underlying a successful project marketing process are: (1) project construction, (2) project implementation, and (3) project leveraging and referencing.”

[Jaakko Aspara, Joel Hietanen, Pekka Mattila, Antti Sihvonen, and Henrikki Tikkanen, “Generative mechanisms in project marketing – an agenda for inquiry.” Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science. Volume 23, number 2, March 2013. Pages 196-212.]

“In approaching ontological and epistemological questions, this study draws primarily from critical realism. A central tenet of critical realism is that a world independent of our knowledge of it and of scientific inquiry exists …. Stemming from this, reality is understood as being stratified. Following [Roy] Bhaskar …, reality can be stratified into three domains: the real, the actual and the empirical. This enables us to explain how and in which domain causal powers, events and experiences take place ….” [Antti Sihvonen. New product development capability – A mechanism perspective. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of marketing, Aalto University. Espoo, Finland 2014. Page 44.]

“The purpose of this study is to propose an empirically grounded examination of how new product development capability functions through the associated mechanisms. Specifically, new product development can be understood as being constitutive of the organizational and strategic processes through which and organization develops new products. To understand this capability, mechanisms depict movement from initial conditions into an outcome … and thus provide explanations of how the capability functions.” [Antti Sihvonen. New product development capability – A mechanism perspective. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of marketing, Aalto University. Espoo, Finland 2014. Page 10.]

“… it is certainly the case that Big Bang theory remains the most dominant form of cosmology, in popular and scientific accounts alike. How do the three elements of the ‘constellation’ [society, subjectivity, and the cosmos] outlined at the start of this paper help us make sense of how this still very influential theory came into being? Consideration of Big Bang cosmology has rarely included consideration of social relations and forms of subjectivity. What are the implications for this cosmology of ‘absenting the absence’ of these considerations?” [Peter Dickens, “Society, Subjectivity and the Cosmos.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 1, December 2011. Pages 5-35.]

“… the historical materialist tradition has largely failed to develop a central part of Marx and Engels’ original perspective, one which is capable of making a considerable contribution to environmental sociology as a whole, not just its historical materialist variant.… This [the key conceptual category in Karl Marx’s theoretical analysis] is ‘metabolism’ (‘Stoffwechsel’). Marx used the concept of metabolism to outline the human relation to nature through labour ….

“… [Regarding] our theoretical starting point of Stoffwechsel, the kinds of social relation formed by our kind of society in the process of exploiting external nature are having serious impacts on humanity’s internal nature; on, that is, human beings’ causal powers.”

[Peter Dickens, “Changing Nature, Changing Ourselves.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 2, July 2001. Pages 9-18.]

“Metabolism, or Stoffwechsel, refers to the material exchange or interaction between human beings and nature.… [T]he key feature of Stoffwechsel is not simply the labour process inaugurated by ‘man’. ‘Metabolism’ simultaneously refers to the changes effected on her or himself (on, that is, her or his own nature) in the process of modifying nature’s powers.” [Peter Dickens, “Marx and the Metabolism between Humanity and Nature.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 40-45.]

“We maintain that, in order to understand the dialectic between social and physical worlds, an ontology is necessary that explains how insights from both the social and physical sciences can be combined. We recognize that causal mechanisms operate on a number of different levels within the universe, and argue that the job of the social scientist is to work with the knowledge produced by physicists and the like, combining that with sociological understanding. The result of this should be a theory that reduces the universe to neither the merely physical nor the purely social. These points are related to the fundamental tenets of critical realism as outlined by Roy Bhaskar and others ….

“… this book … has been arguing for a ‘cosmic sociology’ focussed on dialectical relationships between the universe and society on Earth. Placing society in its cosmic context helps us understand that the cosmos has long been central to social order. This is true both of societies in the past, whose relationship with the cosmos has largely been imaginative, and of the present era of global economic, cultural and political expansion. But it is also key to the next phase of imperialist expansion: that of humanizing outer space. Second, this conclusion also attempts to draw out some future implications for the politics of cosmic imperialism. It examines briefly the roles of social movements and of intellectuals in contesting how we understand and interact with the universe, and establishing new counter-hegemonic ideologies. This leads to a discussion of a ‘public’ sociology of the universe and its responsibility to oppose the use of the universe by powerful vested interests. Understanding and explaining the causal powers underlying cosmic imperialism is a first step towards opening up alternative, socially more enlightened, ways of humanizing the cosmos.”

[Peter Dickens and James S. Ormrod. Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Google Play edition]

“This article represents one step towards developing a sociology of humanity’s relationship with the cosmos.…

“… The kind of internal nature made in the process of environmental study and transformation has important effects on how external nature is in turn considered and therefore treated.… The aim of this article is to suggest ways in which this idea, which is central to sociology, can be usefully extended to encompass human relationships with the universe or cosmos (we use the terms interchangeably), as opposed to just external nature here on Earth.”

[Peter Dickens and James S. Ormrod, “Outer Space and Internal Nature: Towards a Sociology of the Universe.” Sociology. Volume 41, number 4, August 2007. Pages 609-626.]

“The paper is informed by critical realist epistemology and [Karl] Marx’s theory of the subsumption. Such a fusion leads to a key assertion. Capital tends to modify the powers of human biology in its own image.…

“… ‘Real’ subsumption is the thoroughgoing transformation of labour processes and the relations of production under distinct social and technological conditions. ‘Real’ subsumption, therefore, alludes to workers losing their autonomy. Their work is governed by the movements of the capitalist’s machine. Seen in the wider context of Marx’s historical materialism, the subsumption of labour to capital is the process by which human internal nature is changed while social relations are made to transform external nature into the things people need.”

[Peter Dickens, “Linking the Social and Natural Sciences: Is Capital Modifying Human Biology in Its Own Image?” Sociology. Volume 35, number 1, February 2001. Pages 93-110.]

“This book is partly about the physical reconstruction of nature by society. But it is also about the reconstruction of our knowledge of nature and our relations with it. The current organisation of knowledge about these relations (or, more accurately, its chaotic disorganisation) is a key theme. Such fragmentation obviously brings a large number of benefits. Again, few would want to reject outright the advances made by modern societies in understanding the physical, natural and human worlds. And the more that we work on nature to produce the things wanted by human beings, the more we enable human beings to develop their own capacities for innovation and creativeness. But divisions of labour are at the same time seriously disabling. They mean severe failures to communicate between different areas of knowledge.” [Peter Dickens. Reconstructing Nature: Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1996. Page 6.]

“Peter Dickens’ new contribution to environmental sociology, Reconstructing Nature belongs to a category of innovative analysis that transcends the old ideological battles between the proponents of [Karl] Marx’s humanism and those of his historicism, looking instead to reconcile these aspects of Marx’s work in his naturalism. Dickens situates his analysis at a particular juncture within this literature—the intersection of epistemology and ontology—by posing the following question: how does the fragmentation of knowledge about nature that characterizes modern capitalist societies mediate our material relationship to nature? The answer, he argues, lies in understanding the alienation of humans from the natural world, the source of which can be found in the ubiquitous productive and social divisions of labor that characterize modernity.” [Eliza Darling, “Reconstructing Nature: Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour.” Review article. Journal of Political Ecology. Volume 5, 1998. Pages 1-5.]

“… all species have basically common needs. But different species have different ways of satisfying those needs. What we call ‘human culture’ is constituted by particular methods and means which humans have developed as a means of flourishing and reproducing. The approach therefore makes a crucial distinction between the general needs of all species and the ways they are activated. This does not privilege people as necessarily possessing a special something extra.” [Peter Dickens. Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. 1992. Page 88.]

“Realism in the form I am using it here (what [Roy] Bhaskar calls ‘critical realism’) stratifies different levels of knowledge. At the most abstract levels are, for example, laws of thermodynamics, those generating the development of organisms within a ‘field’ and the generative mental structures underlying what is sometimes called ‘human culture.’ Here, a critical realist epistemology recognises the liabilities, general ways of acting or emergent powers of objects as outlined by theories in those areas. But it would also insist on an understanding of observable phenomena being dependent on knowledge or information of a more contingent, often less abstract, kind. The latter combines with the more abstract understandings to result in observable events or ‘conjectures’ – ‘the new biology,’ for example – and provides insights into how organisms and biological life have for countless generations reproduced or changed themselves within fields of other organisms or mechanisms. Social theory’s main contribution is to offer other types of understanding which often deeply impinge on but which remain largely contingent to these processes which are the theories of life concerning the biological and physical sciences. But even theories of capitalism can of course be couched in relatively abstract ways. [Karl] Marxʼs; discussion of the capitalist mode of production, for example, clearly moved between different levels of abstraction.

“There are in fact a number of themes in realism. Those outlined here are largely a reflection of Bhaskar’s and [Andrew] Sayer’s.… Critical or ‘transcendental’ realism is a type of epistemology now finding increasing application in the social sciences, largely as a reaction to positivism and empiricism.”

[Peter Dickens. Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press. 1992. Page 176.]

“Enlightenment science revived: critical realism …

“… In some instances, like the mechanisms of the physical world, they are being made to operate in ways that are dangerous. In such was, ‘the risk society’ is being actively created. The key point here about critical realism is its recognition of reality, independent of discourse and language.

“… Critical realism certainly draws on Enlightenment-style attempts to develop general, scientific understandings of the world. But Enlightenment-style attempts are made less dogmatic, more open to criticism from non-scientists, more self-critical, more open to alternative research methods and, where necessary, critical of the processes it is examining.”

[Peter Dickens. Society and Nature: Changing our Environment, Changing Ourselves. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2004. Pages 19-20.]

“Why has … [the] culture of narcissism developed? There are three interlocking reasons ….

“First, changes in the labour market can indeed give the impression that adults are free roving agents who are not dependent on anything or anybody.…

“The development of the narcissistic personality type is also enabled by the development of ‘the network society.’ …

“Finally, high levels of consumption again ensure that influential and wealthy sectors of the community can remain relatively oblivious to the outside world.”

[Peter Dickens, “Changing our environment, changing ourselves: critical realism and transdisciplinary research.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. Volume 28, number 2, 2003. Pages 95-105.]

“[Peter] Dickens calls in the aid of psychoanalytic theory, in the shape of [Sigmund] Freud’s notion of narcissism. Dickens follows Christopher Lasch …, as well as Ian Craib (1994) and Kathryn Dean (2000) in making use of the idea of a ‘culture of narcissism’ to characterise what they see as pathological consequences of current social and economic trends for individual well-being. Narcissism is a particular form of self-experienced autonomy, characteristic of early infancy.” [Ted Benton, “Peter Dickens: Late Capitalism, Nature, and Mental Life.” Changing our Environment, Changing Ourselves: Nature, Labour, Knowledge and Alienation. James S. Ormrod, editor. London: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature. 2016. Pages 15-35.]

“Careful study of the consequences of our attempts to master nature leads only to a renewed appreciation of our dependence on nature. In the face of this evidence, the persistence of fantasies that envision technological self-sufficiency for the human race indicates that our culture is a culture of narcissism in a much deeper sense than is conveyed by journalistic slogans like ‘me-ism.’ No doubt there is too much selfish individualism in American life; but such diagnoses barely scratch the surface.” [Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1979. Page 245.]

“Society is increasingly humanizing the cosmos. Satellites have for some time been central to the flow of information, to surveillance, and to the conduct of warfare. As these examples suggest, however, the humanization of the cosmos is primarily benefiting the powerful. These include major economic and military institutions. Furthermore, the forthcoming commodification and colonization of the cosmos is againlikely to enhance the interests of the powerful, the major aerospace companies in particular. The time has come to consider alternative forms of cosmic humanization. These would enhance the prospects of the socially marginalized. They would also allow humanity to develop a better understanding of the cosmos and our relationship to it.” [Peter Dickens, “The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 62, issue 2, November 2010. Pages 13-27.]

“The development of methodological tools for the formulation of and engagement with policy is only one potential contribution of critical realism to the field of curriculum change. Additionally, critical realism offers researchers the potential for the development of heuristics for the understanding of change contexts.” [Mark Priestley, “Whatever happened to curriculum theory? Critical realism and curriculum change.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society. Volume 19, number 2, July 2011. Pages 221-237.]

“Does CAL [critical action learning] have a specific ontology? Embryonic debates on CAL do not address this question directly, so allow me to suggest critical realism as a suitable partner. Critical realism is concerned with the interaction of human agency (i.e. actors’ choices, meanings and motivations) with the enabling and constraining effects of social structures (e.g. organizations, groups and families). Both spheres need to be accounted for in order to develop adequate explanations and appropriate interventions. Yet despite the growing popularity of critical realism in management and organization studies, it suffers from a number of weaknesses that a more explicit engagement with CAL could help overcome. First, the largely abstract debates that characterize critical realism are off-putting to many researchers, let alone practitioners. One struggles to establish how the sentiments of critical realism filter through to research and practitioner activity. A critical realist/CAL intervention would have to think through how theoretical concepts are understood and experienced by non-academic participants. Second, critical realism was conceived as a transformational and dynamic enterprise; it is committed to explanation and change. Yet, the most prominent contributions have dwelt on the embellishment of the philosophical position.” [Monder Ram, “Critical action learning: extending its reach.” Action Learning: Research and Practice. Volume 9, issue 3, 2012. Pages 219-224.]

“The paper deals with self-regulated learning from the perspective of critical-realistic philosophy. In this respect, it is focused on existing models of self-regulated learning, which it re-conceptualizes through the current categories of critical realism. We draw from the latest works by [Roy] Bhaskar, [H. Rom] Harré and [Dave] Elder-Vass.…

“A desirable outcome has been achieved over the past few decades under the term of self-regulated learning and is characterized as ‘the processes whereby learners personally active and sustain cognitions, affects, and behaviors that are systematically oriented toward the attainment of personal goals’ ….

“… The use of this approach [critical realism] allows us to see self-regulated learning as a phenomenon subdivided into different domains and levels of reality, and not as a unitary phenomenon with unified characteristics.”

[Jitka Jakešová and Jan Kalenda, “Self-regulated learning: Critical-realistic conceptualization.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences. Volume 171, January 2015. Pages 178-189.]

“Self-regulated learning strategies refer to actions and processes directed at acquisition of information or skills that involve agency, purpose, and instrumentality perceptions by learners. Undoubtedly, all learners use regulatory processes to some degree, but self-regulated learners are distinguished by (a) their awareness of strategic relations between regulatory processes or responses and learning outcomes and (b) their use of these strategies to achieve their academic goals. Systematic use of metacognitive, motivational, and/or behavioral strategies is a key feature of most definitions of self-regulated learners ….” [Barry J. Zimmerman, “Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement: An Overview.” Educational Psychologist. Volume 25, issue 1, winter 1990. Pages 3-17.]

“The value of self-regulation in school is readily apparent. Youngsters who can initiate learning tasks, set their own goals and select appropriate strategies for their completion, and then monitor and evaluate their own progress would be likely to achieve at higher levels than would their counterparts who are dependent on their teacher for carrying out these same functions.” [Rafael Risemberg and Barry J. Zimmerman, “Self-regulated learning in gifted students.” Roeper Review. Volume 15, issue 2, 1992. Pages 98-101.]

“First, in view of evidence that students’ perceptions of their academic efficacy increase during the junior high school years (in contrast to their perceptions of academic competence), teachers may wish to use instructional or assessment procedures that reduce social comparison and focus on task mastery to ensure optimal motivation. Second, evidence that gifted students display very high levels of self-efficacy precociously …. Third, the fact that gifted students made greater use of learning strategies designed to regulate personal processes, behavior functioning, and environmental events is noteworthy.” [Barry J. Zimmerman and Manuel Martinez-Pons, “Student Differences in Self-Regulated Learning: Relating Grade, Sex, and Giftedness to Self-Efficacy and Strategy Use.” Journal of Educational Psychology. Volume 82, number 1, 1990. Pages 51-59.]

“Critical realism, responding to the challenge of postmodernity, sought to reconstruct, in a more subtle and sophisticated form, the modern commitment to human reason, and thereby rehabilitate the legacy of the Enlightenment.” [Andrew Wright. Spirituality and Education. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Page 25.]

“… we have proposed five principles on which a critical spiritual education may be developed. These are:

[Andrew Wright. Spirituality and Education. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Page 104.]

“A reconceptualisation of Samoan spirituality as a philosophy of practice in early childhood education draws on understandings of critical realism which observe that the pursuit of knowledge is about continuously seeking in-depth understanding of reality …. This is not a solitary endeavour. One alone cannot construct personal values. [Andrew] Wright identifies four philosophical traditions in spiritual education: critical realism, post-modernism, materialism and romanticism. In contemporary spirituality, Wright outlines a variety of opportunities to guide people’s lives that occur within a collective mechanism. That is, people create within groups what is important to them and is meaningful.” [Vaovasamanaia Meripa Toso, “Reconceptualising spirituality as a philosophy of practice for Pasifika early childhood education in New Zealand: A Samoan Perspective.” The Journal of the Pacific Circle Consortium for Education. Volume 23, number 2, 2011. Pages 129-138.]

“How does spirituality, understood in the light of the previous chapter as concern for the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, manifest itself in British society? This chapter investigates a range of philosophical perspectives on contemporary spirituality. In doing so it rejects the stereotypical image of philosophy as a form of abstract speculation cut off from everyday experience, and instead suggests that the perspectives of materialism, romanticism, post-modernism and critical realism presented here play a formative role in the spiritual lives of children and young people.” [Andrew Wright. Spirituality and Education. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Page 25.]

“In this article I have argued that spiritual education cannot present the search for spiritual knowledge and truth as if it is either similar or superior to science. I have argued this for two reasons. First, applying [Roy] Bhaskar’s principle, that different fields of study establish different kinds of knowledge, a distinction needs to be made between the kinds of knowledge established by science, theology and my field of study, which is the discussion of spiritual truth across different faiths, which forms the basis for spiritual pedagogy within religious education.… Second, applying [Søren] Kierkegaard’s distinction between subjective and objective truth, spirituality and science offer ways to different kinds of truth, both offering distinctively different forms of vital knowledge.…

“But there are deeper reasons why spiritual pedagogy, particularly in multi-faith religious education, must show children and young people the profound difference between the nature of knowledge and truth in spirituality and science. It needs to be made explicit that spiritual diversity does not mean spiritual truths are held lightly.”

[Jacqueline Watson, “Science, spirituality and truth: acknowledging difference for spiritual dialogue and human well-being.” International Journal of Children’s Spirituality. Volume 14, number 4, November 2009. Pages 313-322.]

“It is argued that a critical democratic approach to education for spiritual development can offer inclusivity through engaging young people in a critical examination of worldviews appropriate to the pluralism to which young people are exposed and through which they can explore and develop their own spiritual identities.…

“I will … put forward an argument that takes up the ground between the critical realist approach of Andrew Wright and the democratic relativist approach of Clive Erricker, and argue for what I label a critical democratic approach to education for spiritual development, an approach which I consider can offer inclusivity.

“A critical democratic approach to education for spiritual development would be a worldviews education that would both critically inform and encourage choice.”

[Jacqueline Watson, “Spiritual development and inclusivity: the need for a critical democratic approach.” International Journal of Children’s Spirituality. Volume 11, number 1, April 2006. Pages 113-124.]

“The research on which this article is based adopted a critical realist approach. This approach was developed by [Roy] Bhaskar … and focuses on the structures, entities and mechanisms that constitute the social world ….

“Democratic atmosphere in an mono-grade inclusive classes has been found to be a prerequisite for inclusive pedagogy …. It could be concluded that democratization of class participation is significant for inclusion even in multigrade classes.

“While numerous studies on multi-grade classrooms have been conducted across the globe, the study on which this article is based attempted to conceptualise inclusive pedagogy within a multi-grade classroom and in disadvantaged rural classrooms in the South African context in particular.”

[T. M. Makoelle and and M. J. Malindi, “Multi-Grade Teaching and Inclusion: Selected Cases in the Free State Province of South Africa.” International Journal of Educational Sciences. Volume 7, number 1, 2014. Pages 77-86.]

“… the concept of ‘religion’ is socially constructed, but religion nevertheless exists, ‘out there’ in the world.…

“In broad strokes, … a critical realist account of ‘religion’ would be that the Reformation led Europeans to notice or realize that there were structural and functional similarities between the beliefs and practices of the different Protestant and Catholic churches.…

“An account of ‘religion’ like this one focuses on the interaction between self-interested perceptions of the world and the ideologically driven history of the concept.”

[Kevin Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?” Journal of The American Academy Of Religion. Volume 78, number 4, December 2010. Pages 1112-1138.]

“The present chapter does not aim to present a comprehensive account of critical religious education. Rather, it is concerned to establish a basic philosophical framework for the subject, informed by the under-labouring support of critical realism. The triumvirate of ontological realism, epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality identify three critical questions that inform the basic philosophy of critical religious education: what is reality ultimately like? What is the extent and scope of our knowledge of ultimate reality? How might our knowledge of ultimate reality be enhanced and expanded? Realistic answers to these questions enable the emergence of a philosophy of the subject that stands in continuity with the historical focus of traditional religious education, takes religious and secular worldview pluralism seriously, and strives to generate religiously literate pupils and a religiously literate society.” [Andrew Wright. Religious Education and Critical Realism: Knowledge, reality and religious literacy. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Google Play edition.]

“Though critical realism is closely associated with the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar …, it has roots in natural science and Christian theology.…

“Critical religious education rejects constructivism in favour of a ‘realistic’ pedagogy of learning. According to this theory, pupils learn by penetrating beneath the surface appearance of religions in a manner that opens up the possibility of their pre-given conceptual frameworks being transformed by their encounter with contrasting religious and secular truth claims.”

[Andrew Wright, “A Critically Realistic Pedagogy for Teaching the Abrahamic Religions.” Dialogue Australasia. Issue 21, May 2009. Pages 22-26.]

“The pedagogy of learning advocated here draws on the Variation Theory of Learning pioneered by Ference Marton, Professor of Education at Gothenburg University, and developed by an international network of scholars ….… We all experience the world partially and differently; learning expands our experiences and empowers us to respond to the world in new ways. In order to learn, we must experience variation by encountering objects, events, ideas and ‘ways of seeing the world’ that were previously unavailable to us. Since we are an integral part of the world we seek to understand better, learning is not a quest for some mysterious object ‘out there,’ but rather a process of expanding, enriching and deepening our experiences of that with which we are already engaged.” [Andrew Wright, “The Integrity of Students’ Theological Discourse: Critical Realism and the Variation Theory of Learning.” Hovering over the face of the deep: Philosophy, theology and children. Gertrude Yde Iversen, Gordon Mitchell, and Gaylor Pollard, editors. New York: Waxman Verlag GmbH. 2009. Google Play edition.]

“In this study, the main analytical approach is the critical realist method of the RRREIC schema proposed by Roy Bhaskar. The RRREIC schema serves as a guideline for a critical realist methodology dealing with interdisciplinary social science research. RRREIC is an acronym for

“Resolution (R1) of the phenomenon or event into its components, involving a multiplicity of causes that come together in a complex way to generate the phenomenon;

“Redescription (R2) of these component causes in an explanatorily significant way;

“Retrodiction (R3) of these causes to antecedently existing events or states of affairs;

“Elimination of alternative explanations;

“Identification of the generative causes; and

“Correction of earlier findings in the light of this analysis”

[Rasmus Steffansen, “Critical Realist Methodology Guiding Theory Development: The Case of the Norwegian Second Home Ownership Paradox.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 2, April 2016. Pages 122-141.]

“If transcendence and immanence are ontologically distinct, then knowledge of the Truth and eternal happiness must entail an epistemology of revelation and pedagogy of proclamation.” [Andrew Wright. Christianity and Critical Realism: Ambiguity, Truth and Theological Literacy. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“With regard to … God, Christians and non-Christians provide epistemically relative accounts of a common object, so that responses of faith and worship on the one hand, and responses of scepticism, indifference and resistance on the other, themselves constitute exercises of judgemental rationality vis-à-vis Christian truth claims in the public sphere. The central purpose of Christianity and Critical Realism was to attempt one small step in the direction of enhanced public religious, theological, metaphysical and spiritual literacy, in the hope that judgements of faith, scepticism, indifference and rejection may, in the future, be made in increasingly attentive, reasonable and responsible ways.” [Andrew Wright, “Realists Divided by Epistemic Relativism: Morgan on Naturalism and Triune Christianity.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 1, February 2016. Pages 72-91.]

“One of the things that concerns me in regard of critical realism is that there is a tendency to simply state the analytical distinctions and subsequent justifications in regard of ontology and epistemology, and to use this as a form of critique of noncritical realism or as the preamble to empirical work. Statements regarding the limits of knowledge, the processes of knowledge construction and then the specification of institutions and so on are used to make the core claim that reality cannot be reduced to how it is known, nor entirely (as identity) to concept dependence. As such, the limits are used to indicate that there can be a theory of being as well as a theory of knowledge – and so one cannot reduce ontology to epistemology.” [Andrew Wright, “Realists Still Divided by Realism?: Response to Wright.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 2, April 2016. 170-174.]

“A critical realist historiography operates with a hermeneutical triangle of reader, historian and referent, in which the dialectical interplay between the three seeks to bring the subjectivity of both historian and reader into an increasingly truthful relationship with objective historical events as these are mediated by historical evidence. Both primary and secondary historical texts generate traditions of interpretation.” [Andrew Wright. Christianity and Critical Realism: Ambiguity, Truth and Theological Literacy. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“Real(ist) authenticity is introduced as the universal human capacity to reflexively manage the inherent contradictions that arise between and across our intra- and interpersonal relationships at different levels of reality (i.e. the ego, embodied personality, and true self).…

“… For the ‬central concern of reflexivity, imposed by the reality principle, is theory-practice consistency, the most important criterion for philosophy, and human survival and flourishing, hence emancipatory axiology, alike.’ Such reflexive consistency lies at the heart of what I have so far introduced as real(ist) authenticity.…

“On a pragmatic level, being able to set and then hold ‘creative constraints’ is key to real(ist) authenticity (as it is to performing early music and, indeed, doing art).”

[Nick Wilson, “Managing Authenticity: Mission Impossible?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 3, June 2014. Pages 286-303.]

“An analysis of the emancipatory potential of science education, grounded in the philosophy of meta-Reality provides an interesting alternative to modernist and postmodernist accounts. The problem with both modernist and postmodernist conceptions of inquiry, based on [Roy] Bhaskar’s views, is that neither can sustain an idea of social critique, or of mechanisms associated with social transformation. However, following Bhaskar’s views, one may argue that a meta-Realist philosophy can provide the foundation for a critical science education.” [Michalinos Zembylas, “Science Education as Emancipatory: The case of Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of meta-Reality.” Educational Philosophy and Theory. Volume 38, number 5, 2006. Pages 665-676.]

“Themes and issues that will surface at different times in the book … [include] educational critique and transformation.” [David Scott. Education, Epistemology and Critical Realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 6.]

“… given that an explanation of the intransitive world has the potentiality to change it, then critique is used here to refer to making what is better by discarding inadequate and outdated notions and ideas.” [David Scott. Education, Epistemology and Critical Realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 112.]

“Roy Bhaskar’s theory of learning has the following elements. In basic critical realism what is said about learning is very much in terms of the development of beliefs. With dialectical critical realism, learning is understood as involving all the components of action, so there is learning at the level of values, learning at the level of wants, and of course, more generally, at the level of being.… Roy Bhaskar provided a model of learning, which he called ‘the unfolding of the enfolded.’ This model of the unfolding of the enfolded understands learning not so much as learning of something outside, but as the unfolding of an implicit potential that human beings have. The outside is still very important. The teacher is a catalyst; the teacher provides the conditions and means whereby the unfolding process occurs, but the changing emphasis is to see the human being as having from the outset an infinite potential. And what happens in life is that human beings realise or fail to realise some of their potentials. Most of the others are ignored or not called upon.” [David Scott with Roy Bhaskar. Roy Bhaskar: A Theory of Education. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. 2015. Page 63.]

“This book is intended to fill a gap in the literature of educational research. It aims to find an alternative to mathematical modelling and its unconsidered empiricist underpinnings on the one hand and hermeneutic or interpretive frameworks on the other. It is unashamedly realist, albeit in a transcendental sense. Roy Bhaskar …, writing twenty years ago, suggested that ‘both the dominant naturalist tradition, positivism, and its naturalistic hermeneutical foil rest on an ontology rendered obsolete by new collateral theories of philosophy and ideology.…’” [David Scott. Realism and Educational Research: New Perspectives and Possibilities. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 1.]

“Three versions of truth are identified: naive realism, radical relativism and transcendental realism. The epistemic fallacy is introduced and this serves as a structuring theme for the rest of the book. The framework for educational research introduced in this book has three dimensions: ontological, epistemological and methodological.” [David Scott. Realism and Educational Research: New Perspectives and Possibilities. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 5.]

“… as [Roy] Bhaskar … suggests, in his discussion of transcendental realism, those regularities so produced do not relate in a straightforward way to the causal mechanism which produced them. Indeed, those deeper-lying structures or causal mechanisms may actually contradict or be in conflict with their appearances. Those theorists who operate in closed systems do not have to cope with this problem; those who operate in open systems, however, have to distinguish between associational properties and causal mechanisms.” [David Scott. Realism and Educational Research: New Perspectives and Possibilities. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 45.]

“… [David] Scott aims to ‘fill a gap in the literature of educational research’ by providing a transcendental realist (as he prefers to call it) alternative to the false dichotomy of empiricism/hermeneutics ….

“… Scott’s critique of, in particular, school effectiveness research and mathematical modelling provide excellent examples of how critical realism can be utilised to show the practically inadequate and often vacuous philosophical bases of approaches dominating the educational research and policy agendas. Moreover, if one believes that critical realism begins at home, then it is perhaps surprising that until now there has been little explicitly realist work addressing education, which comprises its contexts and social conditions of existence. The appearance of Scott’s work [Realism and Educational Research: New Perspectives and Possibilities] is thus to applauded for beginning the task of opening up this mutually beneficial and long overdue dialogue.” [Karl Maton, “The Critical and Real Need of Educational Research for Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 1, July 2001. Pages 56-59.]

“… this study uses the content analysis technique … from a transcendental realism perspective ([Matthew B.] Miles and [A. Michael] Huberman … [and George A.] Vassilopoulos …) in contextualizing the data analyses and to explore the content or attributes of multiculturalism in the social work curricula of active social work schools listed ….

“… the data analyses influenced by the transcendental realism perspective found a generic terminology of the worldviews or beliefs prevalent in the geographical contexts of the study’s samples.… First, the worldviews are presented as reflected in social work curricula. Second, the similarities and differences are grouped together, with references to the content or attributes of multiculturalism. Third, from the pattern discovered in the data analyses, the study generated a theory and a new multicultural model for professional intervention in social work.…

“… the use of the transcendental realism orientation in the data analysis empirically highlighted the concrete content of multiculturalism in social work.”

[Thomas Akintayo, Juha Hämäläinen, and Sari Rissanen, “Global Standards and the realities of multiculturalism in social work curricula.” International Social Work. June, 2016. Pages 1-15.]

“Though our emphasis was deliberately procedural, we did not avoid epistemological issues. We claimed that such an arsenal could be epistemologically grounded in what is commonly called ‘transcendental realism’ ([Roy] Bhaskar … [H. Rom] Harré …). This is a ‘middle-ground’ epistemology that refutes correspondence theory, empirical probabilism, and predictive validity, while still making claims to verifiable explanation. This position incorporates some of the core components of causal idealism as well-socially generated meanings, intentionality and reflexivity, historicism—and thereby enables us to draw from both the psychometric and phenomenological traditions. Only at the extremes, we argued, are these traditions mutually exclusive.

“Methodologically, transcendental realism means staying close to the setting, defining variables in contextually meaningful ways, listening closely to how actors in the setting define the same phenomena, and grounding the inferred explanatory patterns in specific events and processes—not plastering regnant constructs onto them.”

[A. Michael Huberman and Matthew B. Miles, “Concepts and Methods in Qualitative Research: A Reply to Donmoyer.” Educational Researcher. Volume 15, number 3, March 1986. Pages 25-26.]

“Transcendental realism has its roots in the Kantian philosophy, a form of transcendentalism that permits subjects to be fully cognizant of all limitations of their mind, and adjust their cognition accordingly as they seek to understand the world as it actually exists (things-in-themselves). [Roy] Bhaskar … developed ‘transcendental realism,’ where the entities and mechanisms discovered by science are not simply beings. They are beings in terms of our access to these beings. Nevertheless, these mechanisms or beings exist regardless of human access to them.” [George A. Vassilopoulos, “The influence of transcendental realism during qualitative content data analysis in operational research.” (PMO) Project Management Office: The Philosophical research approach on project management. May 29th, 2011. Retrieved on June 7th, 2016. Online publication. No pagination.]

“… in their response to my article, [Matthew B.] Miles and [A. Michael] Huberman indicate that questions of meaning can be resolved empirically, but they again fail to indicate how such a view fits with the view that meanings are socially constructed—a view they claim to endorse. Instead of addressing this question, they tell us that theirs is a ‘middle ground’ epistemology (as if moderation were, in and of itself, a virtue) and they give us an impressive sounding label for their views: transcendental realism. We also are told that transcendental realism means several things methodologically, but unfortunately none of these ‘methods’ helps us resolve questions of meaning.” [Robert Donmoyer, “The Problem of Language in Empirical Research: A Rejoinder to Miles and Huberman.” Educational Researcher. Volume 15, number 3, March 1986. Pages 26-27.]

“… a critical realist meta-theoretical approach demands an explicit focus on the ontology of learning as a basis for research. In contrast to the reductionist tendencies of empiricist and interpretivist approaches critical realism provides a philosophical basis for a ontologically inclusive approach to the study of learning at a number of scales and levels. This ought to potentially include evidence from the more empirically focused disciplines including medicine, psychology, neuroscience, economics and from school effectiveness research as well as more sociological and anthropological evidence gathered using interpretive, qualitative techniques.” [Leon Tikly, “What works, for whom, and in what circumstances? Towards a critical realist understanding of learning in international and comparative education.” International Journal of Educational Development. Volume 40, 2015. Pages 237-249.]

“I rather side with critical realists … who view social constructionism with scepticism, and particularly oppose its proposition that all social reality is a product of language and discourse. I adopt in this study a realist ontology, which affirms the independent existence of trans-subjective realities, irrespective of our actual perception of them, and, as a corollary, a realist epistemology that claims that we can know trans-subjective realities immediately without the need for an intermediating intra-subjective medium. As [Roy] Bhaskar … posits, there are objects of knowledge that receive our action upon them – transitive objects – including theories, methods of inquiry, and the like, and there are those that do not – the intransitive objects, the reality of which does not depend on human activity.” [Maria Manzon. Comparative Education: The Construction of a Field. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The University of Hong Kong. Hong Kong, China. March, 2009. Page 59.]

“… this paper proposes the use of a critical realistic account of learning and technology, in particular Margaret Archer’s ‘three orders of reality’ and ‘personal Identity.’ …

“I shall introduce Margaret Archer’s … critical realistic account of ‘three orders of reality’ and her theorization of ‘personal identity’ to show how they may be applied to set the analysis of learning with (or without) technology in a ‘real-world’ setting and produce a context-rich analysis of e-learning.”

[Z. Li, “Natural, practical and social contexts of e-learning: a critical realist account for learning and technology.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Volume 29, 2013. Pages 280-291.]

“This article challenges this view that there is no ‘real’ context that pre-exists people’s actual practice with technology in learning settings and argues that these contexts may pose constraints to learning. It argues that although technology as a tool does not form a learning context (as part of structure) in its own right, a dismissal of the material properties of technology as a potentially constraining power in learning could prevent one from examining the contextual influence on learning with technology as a whole.… [T]here is a need for analytical dualism in order to explore learners’ own understanding and interpretations of technologies and their interplay with material properties of technology as configured in a particular learning context.” [Z. Li, “Rethinking the relationship between learner, learning contexts, and technology: a critique and exploration of Archer’s morphogenetic approach.” Learning, Media and Technology. 2014. Open Access. Pages 1-20.]

“A process perspective foregrounds the importance of understanding the activities, interaction and the length of time necessary to initiate, develop and maintain long term mutually beneficial relationships between exchange actors.…

“… process level research includes those researchers working on phase-based models of relationship development.…

“Taking a processual approach presents a number of challenges. A reason for this is that the researcher must attempt to maintain a process perspective consistently throughout the research.”

[Annmarie Ryan, Jaana Tähtinen, Markus Vanharanta, and Tuija Mainela, “Putting critical realism to work in the study of business relationship processes.” Industrial Marketing Management. Volume 41, issue 2, February 2012. Pages 300-311.]

“CR [critical realism] however is at odds with the epistemological commitments of SR [scientific realism] regarding the social context of agents. Following [Roy] Bhaskar’s Transformational Model of Social Action, CR goes far further down the structuration path than SR can readily countenance, particularly the more conservative interpretations of SR …. Bhaskar’s three-fold conception of social structures therefore requires a radically more meta-theoretical perspective for it to work within the aegis of SR ….” [Amelia Hadfield, “Scientific Realism, the EU, and EU Integration Theories.” Presented at the 49th annual convention of the International Studies Association. San Francisco, California. March 26th–29th, 2008. Pages 1-28. Retrieved on May 17th, 2016.]

“Science-informed environmental philosophy could be included in [Roy] Bhaskar’s definition of modernism. Bhaskar contrasts this acceptance of certain features of modernism with postmodernism. Those who wish to lessen the difference between human and non-human within environmental thinking accept some form of materialism even if not reductive materialism. Science, taken alone as a source of knowledge, encourages this form of thinking. Humans are then included in nature and not just at an organic level but even at a mechanical level, where the laws of classic physics become ultimately the dominant mode of all thinking.” [Helen Barnard. Nature, Human Nature and Value: A Study in Environmental Philosophy. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Wales. Cardiff, Wales. September 2006. Pages 265-266.]

“Since appearances can be deceiving, the realism of Roy Bhaskar is less concerned with empirical phenomena, a marked difference to positivism, than with the unobservable structures and mechanisms underlying and generating those phenomena. Bhaskar’s critical realism is based on a transcendental ontology, which is why originally he had termed it transcendental realism.

“Critical realism takes the world as objectively given but sees the theories about it as subject to historical, cultural and other influences, that is, as socially constructed. Hence Bhaskar links ontological realism with epistemological relativism.”

[Michael Vogel. Addressing Pedagogical Solitude. A Realist Evaluation of Organisation Development at a German Higher Education Institution. Ed.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Institute of Education, University of London. London, England. June 28th, 2014. Page 52.]

“The solution I am proposing is realist, in that it regards the world as not only there, but also knowable, at least to a certain degree and for most practical purposes. It is modest, in that it does not make the high claim that we can know things about the world perfectly, completely or infallibly, or that we can be 100% sure that one piece of knowledge is closer to the truth than another.…

“My solution is in two main parts. I begin with ‘transcendental realism,’ a philosophy of the natural sciences developed by [Roy] Bhaskar in his early work …, and recently refined by [H. Rom] Harré …. I also suggest how this can be made more rigorous, in places, with [Margaret S.] Archer’s … phenomenological understanding of how humans learn language in relation to material things. I then overlay this with Rom Harré’s … understanding of science as a ‘morally’ grounded discipline.

“The modest realist understanding of natural science, developed here, offers an extension to policy discourse theory that identifies how, and in what circumstances, natural science produces knowledge that is reliable and can be trusted for most practical purposes. If policy discourse analysts become trans-disciplinary, this modest realism gives them the means to discern the reliability of statements, within policy discourse, about the policy’s material objects. It also enables them to distinguish between genuine science and the personal values that are found deep within the expert reports that policymakers rely on for their knowledge of these material objects. It thereby enriches their understanding of what is driving what in a policy domain.”

[Ray Galvin, “Environmental policy discourse and its material objects: Bridging the gap with ‘modest realism.’” Working paper number 2011-02. The Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia. Norwich, England. 2011. Pages 1-25.]

“… the ‘critical realism’ of [Roy] Bhaskar … and [Andrew] Sayer … provide sound arguments for the view that, while all knowledge is socially constructed, the objects it seeks to represent are sufficiently real as to be able to hit back painfully at those who act in accordance with discourse that constructs them incorrectly.” [Ray Galvin, “Developing a critical model to evaluate the appropriateness of local body climate protection policies: the case of Freiburg.” Working paper number EDM 09-09. The Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), University of East Anglia. Norwich, England. 2009. Pages 1-21.]

“Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) related cognitive research has made significant contributions to explaining how proficient decision-makers handle dynamic and changing contexts and related Man-Machine systems ….

“… [Margaret S.] Archer’s … structuration theory has significant methodological advantages. Archer bases her theorizing on critical realist philosophy of science … where social relational and institutional structures (or ‘culture’) are seen as ‘real’ entities. This allows an analytical separation between structure and agency to better investigate their interaction. By applying Archer’s structuration theory to NDM research, this separation allows us to analyse of the interplay between social structure and cognitive powers ….

“Our proposed social-turn in NDM research proposes to use social structures as a methodologically lens to provide richer descriptions of NDM in real life social contexts. If this argument is accepted then NDM-related research needs to carefully position itself in relation to objectivist and subjectivist stereotypes.”

[Markus Vanharanta, “Social Structure in Naturalistic Decision Making.” Presented at the 9th biennial International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making. London, England. June 23rd–26th, 2009. Retrieved on December 18th, 2015.]

“A Morphogenetic Model of Emergent IT Use

“A brief explanation of the model follows. Legislative artefacts that embody the financial market and banking operations are inscribed in PAAs [personalised autonomous agents] as the technical objects or artefactual structures. The socioeconomic / cultural belief systems are also part of the inscribed IT artefacts, coupled with the organisational structures (i.e. the designers of the technology). These intrinsic structures have sui generis properties and powers that enable or constrain the emergent use of the technology at the structural elaboration phase of the model ….

“Despite the usefulness of morphogenetic model for emergent IT usage it does not provide explanation whereby the emergent macro pattern feeds back and influences the actions of micro agents to achieve a self-reinforcing positive feedback cycle ….”

[Ononiwu Chidi and Brown Irwin, “Theorisation in Critical Realist IS Research and its Implications on Structure and Agency Interplay: A Morphogenetic Approach.” Presented at the 21st European Conference on Information Systems. Utrecht University. Utrecht, the Netherlands. June 5th–8th, 2013. Pages 1-12. Retrieved on February 14th, 2016.]

“… since the Industrial Revolution, a new era, the Anthropocene has emerged, in which human activities push the Earth system beyond the stable environmental state which are potentially catastrophic for the planet.… Reflexing Anthropocene global changes in a globalising world must take into account the transboundary flows of people, materials, fuel and pollution. These are precisely the processes that are undermining and plundering the biospheric system.…

“Critical realism, a refinement over dialectical materialism, is a transdisciplinary approach; appreciates real but different structures and processes within the physical, biological and social spheres.… Roy Bhaskar’s reflections on transcendence towards concrete utopiasm ‘involves thinking how a situation or the world could be otherwise, with a change in the use of a given set of resources or with a different way of acting subject to certain constraints…. Radical intellectuals need to show in detail how alternative futures can be coherently grounded in the deep structures of what already exists, of what people already know and have. Without this exercise they will not be able to make out a persuasive case for change…’ ([Roy] Bhaskar …).

“Classical Marxists as well as liberals always regard utopia as unscientific. Critiquing their ideology and strategy are termed ‘utopian’ and their static and myopic world-views do not allow them to introspect about their disastrous/‘mal’utopian visions in the context of a warming world.”

[Arun G. Mukhopadhyay, “Towards a Just Safe World.” Presented at the annual meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism. Oslo, Norway. September 5th–7th, 2011. Pages 1-15. Retrieved on February 7th, 2016.]

“The vigorous debate on a transdisciplinary approach, evoked among scientists and philosophers, has been echoed by sociologists and educationists. For the purpose of this chapter, the focus is on contributions from science and philosophy. From the outset we apologise for the exclusion of the intellectual contributions by some of the outstanding thinkers in the domains of philosophy, sociology and education, since such an omission is counter-transdisciplinary. Here reference is made to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl.c. 500 BC), the Athenian philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC), recent philosophers such as Roy Bhaskar …, and many others who were part of this intellectual journey.

“The ideal is that, through the application of transdisciplinarity, the great intellectual leaders from different disciplines will ultimately contribute to the bigger debate – this will, inevitably include the arguments from the African Philosophers as well as other Philosophers of Science, Philosophers of Education and even scientists working in quantum physics.”

[Hester du Plessis, Leonard Martin, and Jeffrey Sehume. The Concept and Application of Transdisciplinarity in Intellectual Discourse and Research. Johannesburg, South Africa: Real African Publishers. 2014. Page 28.]

“The book [The Concept and Application of Transdisciplinarity in Intellectual Discourse and Research] situates the discourse of transcendence, in the form of an interconnected and holistic system, within the context of problems such as climate change, poverty, unemployment, and anomie. At the same time, it is transgressive in moving beyond older approaches and the privileging of Western precedents, although the authors devote a great deal of time to explicating those precedents. They portray a lineage reaching from ancient Greece to the foundational work of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant to 20ᵗʰ-century arguments against method by Paul Feyerabend, Hans-Georg Gadamar, and Sheldon Wolin to conceptual frameworks of Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, and Gary Gutting. Reaching the point at which ‘transdisciplinarity’ became a recognized term …, they highlight alignment of TD [transdisciplinarity] with complexity in the work of [Basarab] Nicolescu, Edgar Morin, Alfonso Moutuori, and Roy Bhaskar. The African lineage they trace spans ancient holistic cosmology and the contemporary work of Paul Cilliers, Dani Nabudere’s concept of Afrikology, and a repeated admonition to situate ‘transdisciplinarity at the specific institution’ ….” [Julie Thompson Klein, “Discourses of transdisciplinarity: Looking Back to the Future.” Futures. Volume 63, 2014. Pages 68-74.]

“Transdisciplinarity relates to ‘a strong form of interdisciplinarity’ …, or a socially applied interdisciplinarity …. It articulates multiple levels of reality and epistemologies that evolved in sustainability studies – such as Human Ecology, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Management, and Ecological Economics …. TD [transdisciplinarity] is a key asset for theoretical and practical studies that enable complex problems to be unfolded …, including within regional contexts …. TD is also characterized by pluralism and critical realism …, normative accountability …, and for the possibility to deliver a combination of diverse epistemologies, such as empirism …, and pragmatism ….” [Cláudia V. Viegas, Alan J. Bond, Caroline R. Vaz, Miriam Borchardt, Giancarlo Medeiros Pereira, Paulo M. Selig, and Gregório Varvakis, “Critical attributes of Sustainability in Higher Education: a categorisation from literature review.” Journal of Cleaner Production. Volume 126, July 2016. Pages 260-276.]

“It [this article] argues that critical health psychology has a distinct contribution to make in promoting public health as part of the broader movement for social justice and health.…

“… The purpose of this [critical] approach is to participate in the process of human emancipation. This perspective is concerned with exploring the connection between human action and the social and material conditions.…

“A socially activist health psychology participates in the broader movement to combat … growing inequalities and to create a more socially just society. In this they connect with those community and liberation psychologists who have been engaged in movements for social justice ….”

[Michael Murray and Blake Poland, “Health Psychology and Social Action.” Journal of Health Psychology. Volume 11, number 3, 2006. Pages 379-384.]

“… a range of alternative approaches have been developed …. These approaches can be classified into three basic categories: a-paradigmatic stance, multiple paradigm approach and the single paradigm approach. The first of these simply ignores paradigmatic issues altogether; the second asserts that alternative paradigms are not incompatible and can be used in the one research project and the third claims that both quantitative and qualitative research can be accommodated under a single paradigm.

“In this paper it will be argued that a single paradigm can indeed provide a justification for mixed methods.…

“[Andrew] Sayer … uses [Roy] Bhaskar’s … approach of ‘critical realism’ ….

“What these approaches have in common is a version of realism that recognizes the complexity of social phenomena by enabling a role for values and interpretive meaning while at the same time accepting explanation as a legitimate goal of social research.”

[Ralph Hall, “Mixed Methods: In Search of a Paradigm.” Conducting Research in a Changing and Challenging World. Thao Le and Quynh Lê, editors. New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc. 2013. Pages 71-78.]

“While contributing to the research paradigm debate, this paper also adds to the growing literature on MMR [mixed-methods research], and more specifically the use of critical realism (CR). In an attempt to address current illogical, ego-driven, narrow-minded paradigm wars, this paper strongly advocates the use of CR, a ‘middle-ground’ research philosophy. Critical realism, while allowing researchers to hold a preferred philosophical position, provides the opportunity to undertake MMR, which has greater potential of producing research likely to bring us closer to the ‘truth.’” [Kym Fraser, “Defeating the ‘paradigm wars’ in accounting: A mixed-methods approach is needed in the education of PhD scholars.” International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches. Volume 8, number 1, 2014. Pages 49-62.]

“Contemporary MMR is a kind of “big tent” in that researchers who currently use mixed methods come from a variety of philosophical orientations, including pragmatism, critical realism 𔅼, the dialectical stance …, the transformative paradigm …, and so forth. We believe that it is both unwise, and unnecessary, at this time to exclude individuals from the MMR community because they subscribe to different conceptual frameworks.” [Charles Teddlie and Abbas Tashakkori, “Common ‘Core’ Characteristics of Mixed Methods Research: A Review of Critical Issues and Call for Greater Convergence.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 56, number 6, 2012. Pages 774-788.]

“This paper examines home-dialysis decision making in people with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) from the perspective of critical realism. CKD programmes focus on patient education for self-management to delay the progression of kidney disease and the preparation and support for renal replacement therapy ….

“… We describe critical realism briefly here in terms of the following elements: (i) truth, (ii) ontology, (iii) causality, (iv) open systems, and (v) agency and structure, and consider the implications of each for healthcare decision-making.”

[Lori Harwood and Alexander M. Clark, “Understanding health decisions using critical realism: home-dialysis decision-making during chronic kidney disease.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, issue 1, March 2012. Pages 29-38.]

“Interviews were tape recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed from a perspective of interpretive critical realism.…

“The experience of injecting drugs in public places was described in terms of a sense of urgency, lack of privacy, and hygiene concerns. These were related to fears of being publicly exposed as drug injectors and feelings of shame.”

[Jennifer Mitton, “The experience of injecting drugs in public spaces was characterised by urgency, a need for privacy, hygienic concerns, and a sense of shame.” Evidence Based Nursing. Volume 11, issue 1, January 2008. Page 28.]

“The quantitative methodology is always associated to the positivism research paradigms while qualitative methodology is usually associated to the interpretive/critical realism research paradigms ….” [Mostafa Jafari, Peyman Akhavan, and Mohadeseh Nikookar, “Personal Knowledge Management and organization’s competency: a service organization case study.” Education, Business and Society. Volume 6, number 3, 2013. Pages 181-194.]

“Towards a critical realist framework for globalization studies

“The employment of a critical realist scientific approach to the problem of globalization would show the way to go beyond an analysis of master narratives and attempt to penetrate to the structured, historical reality of the real social processes and critically examine the claim of the necessary emergence of a globalized world. This may seem to some as very obvious and already widespread, but there is a great deal of discussion about globalization that either simply assumes its inevitability, or indeed its actual reality, or just reads the popular cultural discourse of the western media as if it exactly represented the socioeconomic structural reality, or is still groping towards a framework for studying social transformations. Globalization, like all such teleological narratives, has to be criticized and replaced by a constantly critical and self-critical social scientific perspective. This goal of constant criticism must be the regulator of our practice, while building explanations that are adequate to the complexities of the social world. A critical realist history of the present world would be able to investigate the globalization narrative for its antecedents, conceptual genesis and explanatory power derived from its verisimilitude.” [Christopher Lloyd, “Globalization: Beyond the Ultra-Modernist Narrative to a Critical Realist Perspective of Geopolitics in the Cyber Age.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Volume 24, number 2, June 2000. Pages 258-273.]

“What is the relation between [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz, [Immanuel] Kant, [Karl] Marx, [David ‘Émile’] Durkheim, [Marcel] Mauss, [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, [Gaston] Bachelard, [Georg] Simmel, [Ernst] Cassirer, [Karl] Mannheim, [Norbert] Elias, [Pierre] Bourdieu and [Roy] Bhaskar? What do they have in common? What are their ‘family resemblances’? They are all structuralists of sorts. This answer might seem surprising, but if we define structuralism as ‘a philosophical view according to which the reality of the objects of the human or social sciences is relational rather than substantial’ …, we can see, and perhaps even appreciate, that one way or another they all have contributed to the emergence of the paradigm of ‘relational realism’ which characterizes structuralist approaches in the human sciences.” [Frédéric Vandenberghe, “From Structuralism to Culturalism Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 4, number 4, 2001. Pages 479-497.]

“The opposition between ontological individualism (nominalism) and ontological holism (realism) corresponds to an equally profound opposition between methodological individualism and methodological holism. I aim to supersede these oppositions by proposing a dialectical synthesis of critical realism and comprehensive-hermeneutic sociology. Further, I believe that critical sociology should aim for a synthesis of the realist moment that characterizes ontological holism, both in its materialist (Marxist) and its idealist (hermeneutics) versions, and the constructivist moment that characterizes the phenomenological approach of methodological individualism. Put negatively, I believe that, above all else, a critical theory must refute the false rationalism of the utilitarian variant of methodological individualism since, as [George] Homans … showed clearly, in the end this variant is no more than a version of vulgar behaviorism.” Frédéric Vandenberghe. A Philosophical History of German Sociology. Carolyn Shread, translator. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 11-12.]

“… I wish to propose a sociological variant of [Gaston] Bachelard’s thesis of ‘enveloping movement’ …, used to describe the development of the sciences. Deviations towards adjacent metatheoretical permutations are not arbitrary; they are systematic. If the immanent movement of concrete negation driving the logic of sociological theory is understood, deviations can be presented as a dialectical enveloping movement which gradually resolves the internal problems of empiricism, subjectivism, and rationalism one after the other and eventually produces the synthetic, dialectical position of revised substantialism whose contours I shall now outline, and which, for lack of a better expression, I suggest we call ‘critical structurism.’” [Frédéric Vandenberghe. A Philosophical History of German Sociology. Carolyn Shread, translator. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 287-288.]

“Within the unknown world of the atom, would there thus be fusion between action and being? Between a wave and the corpuscle? Are we to speak of complimentary aspects or complimentary realities? Is it not a question of a cooperative act far more profound than that of the object and movement, of a complex energy where that-which-is and that-which-becomes converge?” [Gaston Bachelard, “Noumena and Microphysics.” David Reggio, translator. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. Volume 10, number 2, August 2005. Pages 73-78.]

“If the movement of a drop of condensed oil is observed under a microscope, it can be determined that, through the contrary action of an electrical field and of gravity, an electron has the characteristics of mass and energy.” [Gaston Bachelard, “Noumenon and Microphysics.” Bernard Roy, translator. The Philosophical Forum. Volume 37, issue 1, March 2006. Pages 75-84.]

“… methodological structurism tries to tie the micro and macro levels of social analysis together, without subordinating either to the other, by giving an account of how human personality, intentions, and actions interact with culture and structure to determine causally each other and social transformations over time. To do this it is essential that there be a model of humans as social agents. As I have argued, agential persons have innate causal powers to affect intentionally and unintentionally their own actions and bring about changes in the world. Action is thus socially structuring. But structure pre-exists individual actions and conditions them.” [Christopher Lloyd, “Realism, structurism, and history: Foundations for a transformative science of society.” Theory and Society. Volume 18, number 4, July 1989. Pages 451-494.]

“Each of the methodologies that are either implied by or imply these ontologies directs attention to how society and its history should be studied. Methodological individualism concentrates on the powers of individuals, with social change being studied as the patterned result of behavioral or intentional motivations. Methodological holism sees social change as the consequence of forces originating in the social whole. Methodological structurism concentrates on the transforming interactions of people and their environment, both of which have powers.” [Christopher Lloyd, “The Methodologies of Social History: A Critical Survey and Defense of Structurism.” History and Theory. Volume 30, number 2, May 1991. Pages 180-219.]

“The term ‘methodological structurism’ is not widely employed but the more common term ‘methodological institutionalism’ seems to mean almost the same thing. Methodological structurism says that social and behavioral explanations both have to be approached from the dual perspectives of action and structure. Unlike methodological individualism and holism it refuses either explanatorily to reduce social phenomena to individuals or to subsume social phenomena under holistic categories. Methodological structurism mutually implies the theory of sociological structurism.… Without a structurist theory of society and action there is no proper place for history and without history there is no genuine sociological explanation, as I shall further argue in a moment.…

“Partial or approximate versions of methodological and sociological structuring can be found in the work of several prominent social theorists and historians active today, in spite of different terminologies. There is space here only to mention the examples of Anthony Giddens, Alain Touraine, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Harrington Moore, and Norbert Elias. Of these only Giddens has explicitly adopted a term for his theory (‘structurationism’) that comes close to my term ‘structurism.’ He has extensively articulated a general theoretical framework for social explanation, the core of which is what he sees as a duality rather than a polarity between action and structure. Touraine has a similar theory that he refers to as ‘action sociology’ and conceives of the social process as ‘the self-production of society’ over time.”

[Christopher Lloyd, “Realism and Structurism in Historical Theory: A Discussion of the Thought of Maurice Mandelbaum.” History and Theory. Volume 28, number 3, October 1989. Pages 296-325.]

“The critical realist science of society must fundamentally be historical, for its prime objective should be to investigate the real historical character of social structures of various scale and the actions, events, and processes that take place within and so are enabled by structures but also transform structures. Human collective and individual agency is the basic social structuring force at work.… Realist social science has to be built on a methodology for investigating the structuring process. Many such investigations have been made and are being made and the structurist methodology has now been extensively articulated.” [Christopher Lloyd, “For Realism and against the Inadequacies of Common Sense: A Response to Arthur Marwick.” Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 31, number 1, January 1996. Pages 191-207.]

“The general term ‘structurism’ is used in preference to “structuralism.’ I retain the latter to refer to particular methodologies that have been explicitly called ‘structuralist,’ especially the French version stemming from [Ferdinand de] Saussure and [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, which, I argue …, is a form of holism. Methodological structurism is not a form of holism, which indeed it explicitly rejects.” [Christopher Lloyd, “The Methodologies of Social History: A Critical Survey and Defense of Structurism.” Footnote. History and Theory. Volume 30, number 2, May 1991. Pages 180-219.]

“… Social Science History as envisaged here is a critical realist research program in which the constant dialectic of structure, agency, and social reproduction, in multiple settings of behavior and culture – what can be called methodological structurism – strives to improve our knowledge incrementally and critically. The aim of constant improvement of understanding is the motivation and goal for research. The socio-political agenda of this research program is one of critique of intellectual and social power and domination …. A kind of progressive, radically liberal, social democratic politics is implicated in the idea of the methodological structurist agenda.” [Christopher Lloyd, “From Interdisciplinarity to Social Science History and Beyond: A Radical View.” Keynote address to 10th–Anniversary Seminar. Institute for Advanced Social Research, Tampere University. October 16th, 2013. Retrieved on January 17th, 2016.]

“The essence of all evolutionary theories is the idea that a very long-run process of change and history is one in which certain fundamental features of a structure are preserved while others change. This of course involves the development and acceptance of a taxonomy of the subparts or natural kinds that constitute a system and the development of a conceptualisation of structures as being naturally structured in reality, à la the philosophy of critical realism and the methodology of structurism.” [Christopher Lloyd, “From Universal History to Holocene History: From the Teleologies of Modernism to the Darwinism of Long-Run Societal Transformation.” Presented at the 19th World Congress of Historical Sciences. Oslo, Norway. August 9th, 2000. Pages 1-21. Retrieved on January 17th, 2016.]

“Arguing from the perspective of relational structurism, Christopher Lloyd maintains that culture ‘plays a vital role in motivating, channelling, and even dominating human agency.’ He believes that ‘social structuring processes … have their origins as much in the beliefs, rituals, and ideologies of people,’ that is culture, ‘as in the material, political, and geographical connections between them.’ But Lloyd also warns against conflating culture with structure. Culture includes ways of life, systems of belief, and customary habits and how these are transmitted (via language, artifacts, imitation, and example); social structures are institutionalized rules of behavior (as distinct from behavior) that ‘define the relations, status and roles of people.’” [Douglas Booth, “Theory: The Foundation of Social Change?” Sport History Review. Volume 34, 2003. Pages 103-132.]

“… [In] From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics, [Dimitris] Milonakis and [Ben] Fine advance what they refer to as methodological structurism. Let me say immediately that I largely agree with Milonakis and Fine’s proposal to employ something like methodological structurism – although I think it is better described as a social ontology than a method. Unfortunately, however, they overlook a significant body of contemporary social theory that is readily available for the new generation of political economists to draw upon. I have in mind critical realism. As a keen advocate of critical realism, I should tell the reader explicitly that I am hardly a disinterested commentator on this matter. Nonetheless, many readers (critical realists or otherwise) will be astonished to find that Milonakis and Fine could write a section outlining an appropriate methodology for political economy and hardly mention critical realism – although it does get the odd mention in their two volumes.” [Steve Fleetwood, “‘From Political Economy to Economics’ and Beyond.” Historical Materialism. Volume 20, issue 3, 2012. Pages 61-80.]

“In contrast to these extreme methodological stances [methodological individualism and methodological holism] on the question of the relationship between structure and agency, where either one pole or the other is deemed to determine everything in the social cosmos, the methodological structurist approach favoured here occupies a middle ground between these two poles ([Christopher] Lloyd …). From the perspective of methodological structurism, although the social whole is given analytical primacy, this is done without totally disregarding the role of human agency, as in some extreme forms of methodological holism. The social is taken as a point of departure, and social entities assume an autonomous existence, independent from their individual members. This is so in two senses: first, the social whole is more than a mere aggregation of its individual parts (members), as methodological individualists would have it; and, second, the social whole significantly influences and conditions the behaviour or functioning of its parts, but does not totally determine them. At the same time, agency (both individual and collective) is not a passive responder to the structural imperatives but is actively involved in the shaping of these structures.” [Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine. From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Page 154.]

“In terms of epistemology both [Catholic social thought and critical theory] can be categorized as realist in opposition to functionalism, behaviouralism and interpretism. In Catholic theology this realism tends to be rooted in natural law philosophy dating back to [Thomas] Aquinas’ reworking of Aristotle, while for contemporary critical theorists it is grounded in a theory of language. With respect to methodology both CST [Catholic social thought] and critical theory completely reject methodological individualism (which is presupposed by neoliberal economic theory) and favour some form of structurism over holistic conceptions of the nature of society. The social ontologics of both are also similar, rejecting holist, behaviouralist and symbolic social ontologics in favour of some form of structuralism. The latter conceptualizes society as a loosely integrated structure whose behaviour is organized by sets of institutionalized rules, roles and relations, but whose properties and powers are the historically emergent product of collective action and understanding by individuals and social groups through time ([Christopher] Lloyd …).” [Darryl Reed, “Critical theory and the Catholic Church’s ambivalence about capitalism.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 22, issue 2, February 1995. Pages 19-39.]

“Take … Christopher Lloyd’s ‘methodological structurism’ ….

“According to Lloyd’s structurist ontology (an unfortunate term in some respects, because of its resemblance to ‘structuralist,’ from which it differs significantly) ‘persons have agential power, structures have conditioning power.’ Lloyd suggests that historians now widely practice methodological structurism without articulating its underlying assumptions.”

[Philip Pomper, “Historians and Individual Agency.” History and Theory. Volume 35, number 3, October 1996. Pages 281-308.]

“‘Realism’ once named the opposite of nominalism, but the word now means a lot of things, even in technical philosophy. One philosopher, preoccupied by issues raised by Michael Dummett, tells me that nobody nowadays uses ‘realism’ as the opposite of nominalism. So I will take a name that because of its ugliness no one else will use, and speak of inherent-structurism. I suppose that most scientists believe that the world comes with an inherent structure, which it is their task to discover.” [Ian Hacking. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999. Pages 83-84.]

“In recent years, the literature concerning Critical Realism in the social sciences has been growing fast. For example, the work of Margaret Archer … is very influential in social theory and sociology; in economics, we have Tony Lawson …, Steve Fleetwood … and others; in international relations theory, you can find David Dessler …, Walter Carlsnaes …, Heikki Patomäki …, etc.; and in history and historical sociology we have Christopher Lloyd …. The ontological and methodological intuitions of Lloyd’s structurism will be identified, and I will point to some of structurism’s weaknesses and propose possible reconceptualisations.…

“… I will present an ontological framework, called causal fundamentalism, which supports our reconceptualisation of the idea of structurism, i.e. the holistic individualism. Causal fundamentalism states that the higher level causal regularities – chemical, biological, psychological, and social – supervene on the regularities and background conditions that obtain at the physical level. Therefore, all non-physical causal regularities supervene on the regularities and related conditions that actually obtain at the physical level ….

“… Causal fundamentalism will turn out to be illuminating in at least three ways. First, it clearly distinguishes the individual level from the structural level …. Second, we can develop a more sophisticated framework of possible explanatory strategies, as we take many levels (from the physical to the biological, psychological and the social) into account in the ontological framework. Third, it offers us the possibility to analyse analogies between the structure–individual debate in the philosophy of history, and the mind–body debate in the philosophy of mind.”

[Jeroen Van Bouwel, “Questioning structurism as a new standard for social scientific explanations.” Graduate Journal of Social Science. Volume 2, issue 1, 2004. Pages 204-247.]

“We have argued that some Critical Realists (e.g., Roy Bhaskar and Tony Lawson), with their heavy ontological furniture justified by a transcendental argument, commit themselves to a similar way of reasoning about the relation between social ontology on the one hand and explanations on the other hand …. Their attempt to justify the claim that the world has indeed the form argued for in transcendental realism does not convince, or, better, does not convince us more than other standpoints in the unending battle of metaphysical intuitions we experience in the debate on the best explanation. They all start with certain a priori or necessary truths concerning social ontology be it justified by ‘metaphysical commonplaces,’ (questionable) transcendental arguments or political convictions, and, then, the methodological consequences seem to follow ‘automatically’ from the ontological stance.” [Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber, “De-Ontologizing the Debate on Social Explanations: A Pragmatic Approach Based on Epistemic Interests.” Human Studies. Volume 31, 2008. Pages 423-442.]

“Making claims about causal interaction presupposes a frame of reference that settles the level of description, the spatial scale and the timescale that will be used. The level of description determines the kinds of system we talk about (e.g. individuals or groups of individuals, macroscopic objects or elementary particles). The spatial scale determines the smallest unit of distance, and thus determines whether two systems are or are not in adjacent spatial regions (they are if the distance between them is smaller than the smallest unit of distance).” [Erik Weber, Jeroen Van Bouwel, and Leen De Vreese. Scientific Explanation. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. 2013. Page 19.]

“In the social sciences, the small-grain preference advises to look for detailed individualistic micro-foundations that replace macro-level structural accounts. The close-grain preference is a matter of favoring explanations that provide the detailed mediating mechanisms in causal chains across time. Explanations satisfying this preference will not leave any substantial temporal gaps in the causal chain leading to the event that is explained.” [Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber, “Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 32, issue 4, December 2002. Pages 437-449.]

“As two doctoral candidates in a health and rehabilitation sciences program, we describe in this paper our respective paradigmatic locations along a quite nonlinear ontological-epistemological-axiological-methodological chain.…

“… [David L.] Morgan … discussed the Ontology-Epistemology-Axiology-Methodology framework as the ‘metaphysical paradigm,’ under which metaphysical considerations are the primary drivers of inquiry.”

[Ryan DeForge and Jay Shaw, “Back- and fore-grounding ontology: exploring the linkages between critical realism, pragmatism, and methodologies in health & rehabilitation sciences.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, issue 1, March 2012. Pages 83-95.]

“Although … [the] tripartite linkage of ontology, epistemology, and methodology is the most common version of what I am calling the metaphysical paradigm, another philosophical concept, axiology, also appeared in some summaries of this paradigm ….” [David L. Morgan, “Paradigms Lost and Pragmatism Regained: Methodological Implications of Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Volume 1, number 1, January 2007. Pages 48-76.]

“… if [Roy] Bhaskar’s system is to have any significance as a system or his intentional emancipative axiology remain uninterrupted, his work normally called critical realism should technically be read as ‘critical realism and Meta-Reality’ ….” [Dudley Alexander Schreiber. Joined-up knowledge for a joined-up world: Critical realism, philosophy of meta-reality and the emancipation in/of anthropological spirituality – an exploration of confluence. Masters in Theology dissertation (U.S. English, thesis). Department of Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology. University of South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa. 2015. Page 65.]

“Perhaps one might say, a moment of self-revelation in a moment of transcendental identification with that text. In other words objectivity must be fundamentally and logically available to our subjectivity. What I have described must be the condition of possibilities for any intelligible epistemological advancement for it signifies the interior cohesion of the moment of will and intellect, in the rational and ontological conditions for truth and consistency essential for science. Our sociologically based constructs should perhaps take a de-centred or non-localised role, set against a conceptual re-totalising of ontology and with it the intentional emancipative axiology implicit in our rational needs and wants.” [Dudley Alexander Schreiber. Joined-up knowledge for a joined-up world: Critical realism, philosophy of meta-reality and the emancipation in/of anthropological spirituality – an exploration of confluence. Masters in Theology dissertation (U.S. English, thesis). Department of Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology. University of South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa. 2015. Page 168.]

“… the emergent critical realism systems approach endorses P.4 [the intelligibility of the world as a consequence of the stratification of reality into the Real, the Actual, and the Empirical domains] and automatically includes P.1 through P.3 [the organized complexity of the intelligible world, the intelligible world approached through systemic lenses and intersubjective social construction, and the application of theoretically coherent systemic lenses to the intelligible world].

“… we claim that competitive and conflictive perspectives posed for the IS [information systems] discipline can be dissolved under a critical realism view ….”

[Manuel Mora, “Integrating the Fragmented Pieces of IS Research Paradigms and Frameworks: A Systems Approach.” Information Resources Management Journal. Volume 20, issue 2, 2007. Pages 1-22.]

“… the emergent critical realism systemic stance … [is] endorsed by [Roy] Bhaskar’s philosophy …. [Manuel Mora, “Integrating the Fragmented Pieces of IS Research Paradigms and Frameworks: A Systems Approach.” Emerging Systems Approaches in Information Technologies: Concepts, Theories, and Applications. David Paradice, editor. Hershey, Pennsylvania: Information Science Reference imprint of IGC Global. 2010. Pages 182-203.]

“… purely ontological irreducibility … [is] the intuition that the world consists of sui generis strata no matter what anybody thinks or knows about it.…

“… there are … many who understand emergence in a Bungean [viz., Mario Bunge] or Bhaskarian [viz., Roy Bhaskar] vein – as a mainly or even purely ontological, conceptualization-independent matter which has little or nothing to do with what anybody knows about anything ….

“I abstracted three major intuitions of emergence: contingently epistemological irreducibility, even-in-principle irreducibility, and purely ontological (i.e., conceptualization-independent) irreducibility.”

[Tero Piiroinen, “Three Senses of ‘Emergence’: On the Term’s History, Functions, and Usefulness in Social Theory.” Prolegomena: Journal of Philosophy. Volume 13, number 1, 2014. Pages 141-161.]

“From the critical realist perspective, a structure of coordination incorporates many elements. These include formal or informal means of aligning interdependent activities…, the individuals engaged in this work, the positions that these individuals hold within the organization and related to the focal effort, and the resources available to them to pursue the identified objectives. Structure also captures the policies and rules … for the coordination mechanism that impact the participants engaged in the effort to achieve organizational objectives through interdependent work.” [Clay K. Williams and Elena Karahanna, “Causal Explanation in the Coordinating Process: A Critical Realist Case Study of Federated IT Governance Structures.” MIS Quarterly. Volume 37, number 3, September 2013. Pages 933-964.]

“The paper argues that a critical realist perspective can contribute to a critique of evidence-based practice, while at the same time not abandoning the idea of evidence altogether.… [T]he paper proposes that evidence can properly be claimed for critique and emancipatory projects ….

“The epistemological argument at the centre of the evidence-based practice debate relates to the practice in systematic review of giving precedence to data from experimenter-manipulated controlled (preferably with random assignment) trials.…

“… The ‘logic’ of evidence-based practice and a rigorous systematic review in a realist reconstruction should involve causation, ontology and generalisation.”

[Sue Clegg, “Evidence-Based Practice in Educational Research: A Critical Realist Critique of Systematic Review.” British Journal of Sociology of Education. Volume 26, number 3, July 2005. Pages 415-428.]

“Academic development has emerged as an important new field of practice in higher education, with its own privileged discourses, networks, conferences and distinctive forms of practice. I have chosen to use the generic description ‘academic development’ throughout the article, although some developers prefer the term ‘educational development,’ and others, increasingly rarely, call themselves ‘staff developers.’ The term ‘academic development’ has the advantage of indicating the broad concerns of developers with academic practice more generally.” [Sue Clegg, “Forms of knowing and academic development practice.” Studies in Higher Education. Volume 34, number 4, June 2009. Pages 403-416.]

“… she [Margaret S. Archer] insists on the importance of the embodied human being, the primacy of practice—Marx’s ‘continuous practical activity in a material world’ ….” [Sue Clegg, “The problem of agency in feminism: a critical realist approach.” Gender and Education. Volume 18, number 3, May 2006. Pages 309-324.]

“The demands for scientific underpinning in social work practice are currently expressed in terms of the advance towards Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) ….

“Our social existence comprises innumerable aspects that are often either difficult to predict or unpredictable. The same may be said about social work practice, because it is carried out under what is regarded as ‘open conditions’ in the perspective of critical realism, which the author of this article is an adherent of ….”

[Björn Blom, “Knowing or Un-knowing? That is the Question: In the Era of Evidence-Based Social Work Practice.” Journal of Social Work. Volume 9, number 2, 2009. Pages 158-177.]

“Patriarchy theorists claim that the power of their analysis derives from its ability to redescribe the diverse acts covered by the term ‘child sexual abuse’ together with other acts directed against women – rape, violence, harassment and to theorise them all as evidence of the general tendency whereby all men keep all women in a state of subjugation.…

“A critical realist theory of science is optimistic in its conceptualisation of the relationship of science to action. But bad science can produce bad morality. In the case of child sexual abuse the illiberal conclusion of many feminists is tied to the inadequacies of patriarchy theory. The moral starting point for the research programme into child sexual abuse fixes it, and the appeal to moral not scientific definitions prevents adequate reconceptualisation. All acts with children under a certain age are bad and therefore all should be counted together. My argument for better science is not based on an indifference to children’s suffering but on a view of science that connects understanding to change; the contribution of philosophy to the process is to provide the basis for critique.”

[Sue Clegg, “Studying Child Sexual Abuse: Morality or Science?” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 66, spring 1994. Pages 31-39.]

“… I belong … [to] critical (structural) realism ….

“… A structural realist perspective, as summarised by A. [Andrew] Sayer, stresses that ‘the view of the world is differentiated and stratified consisting not only of events but objects, including structures, which have powers and liabilities capable of generalising events.’ Other features we stress here refer to the independence of reality from our knowledge; the fallibility and theory-based character of knowledge; the production of any other kind of knowledge as a social practice – realism thus clearly requires a ‘sociology of knowledge perspective.’ Structural realism (SR) then, as a particular focus within realism recognises a relative hierarchy among the objects of social reality and recognises structures in the form of relatively durable social relations as being of a potentially higher causal order. This does not mean that structures are pre-existing to social phenomena; in fact, structures are institutionally mediated and historically as well spatially reproduced through both collective and strategic individual action.”

[Frank Moulaert, “Framing social innovation research: A Sociology of Knowledge (SoK) Perspective.” Social Innovation: Collective action, social learning and transdisciplinary research. Frank Moulaert, Diana MacCallum, Abid Mehmood, and AbdelIllah Hamdouch, editors. Newcastle upon Tyne, England (Newcastle University): Katarsis. May 31st, 2010. Pages 211-218.]

“The research design comprised a critical realist and institutional analysis of a qualitative comparative-intensive case study located within the Welsh Government and NHS Wales. Encompassing seven health boards and 21 hospitals, the study focused on the local implementation of three focal interventions selected from the 1000 Lives+ national patient safety programme: (i) Improving Leadership for Quality Improvement; (ii) Reducing Surgical Complications; and (iii) Reducing Health-care-Associated Infection. Case site selection criteria centred on a two-stage sampling strategy.” [Andrea Herepath, Martin Kitchener, and Justin Waring, “A realist analysis of hospital patient safety in Wales: applied learning for alternative contexts from a multisite case study.” Health Services and Delivery Research. Volume 3, issue 40, September 2015. Pages i-242.]

“In the context of building a critical realist interface to institutional theory, an ontological problem therefore surfaces. Institutional logics—as a construct that draws upon such habits, rules, norms, and patterns of human activity—abandons the ontic differentiation between structures, agents, and their ensuing practices. In this paper, the interface to institutional theory is thus further informed by assigning facets of structure to their relevant ontological strata.… Accordingly, the conception of institutional depth within the given temporal and spatial context is refined by disaggregating the institutional structure into its inherent schema and resources ….” [Andrea Herepath and Martin Kitchener, “Change and Resistance in Welsh Postgraduate Medical Education: A Critical Realist Analysis.” Presented at the 7th Biennial International Conference in Organisational Behaviour in Health Care (OBHC). University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England. Mind the Gap: Policy and Practice in the Reform of Health Care. April 11th–14th, 2010. Retrieved on December 16th, 2015.]

“The core argument in this article is that addressing social ontology is a necessary precursor to developing models and empirical accounts of socio-technical systems. We have promoted in this article social theory of the human role in socio-technical system performance that accounts for the functional stability of such systems, and may also support the possibility of productive intervention and redesign. We have shown how [Roy] Bhaskar’s … philosophy can be applied for theorising the partially hidden social reality of a socio-technical system, which is a needed endeavour if we are to develop an improved social science for understanding and managing such systems.” [Kenneth A. Pettersen, Nick McDonald, and Ole Andreas Engen, “Rethinking the role of social theory in socio-technical analysis: a critical realist approach to aircraft maintenance.” Cognition, Technology & Work. Volume 12, issue 3, September 2010. Pages 181-191.]

“… the … ontology and epistemology of … ‘critical realism’ (developed by Roy Bhaskar) … is concerned above all with the material bases of power.” [Nick Couldry and Mark Hobart, “Media as Practice: A Brief Exchange.” Theorising Media and Practice. Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill, editors. New York: Berghahn Books. 2010. Page 77.]

“Philosophically, we adopt a neo-empiricist stance, underpinned by a critical realist ontology and epistemology, locating our typology in the space between post-positivism and constructivism–interpretivism ….

“Building on the extant literature, we define development as an unfolding process of growth that occurs in various ways along multiple trajectories at different levels of analysis, influenced by context and leading to a range of positive outcomes.…

“… we present a two-by-two typology that differentiates four types of development.…

“… Acquisitive development is grounded in the literature on cognitive development theory, theories of expertise, behaviorism, theories of skill acquisition, and social learning theories.…

“… The autonomous type [autonomous development] envisages development as a process that is centered on the autonomous individual.…

“…The dialogic type [dialogic development] envisages development that is emergent, involves coparticipation, mutual constitution, and sensemaking.…

“… cultures that promote trust, cross-functional networks, and risk-taking will support networked development …

[Thomas N. Garavan, David McGuire, and Monica Lee, “Reclaiming the ‘D’ in HRD: A Typology of Development Conceptualizations, Antecedents, and Outcomes.” Human Resource Development Review. Volume 14, number 4, 2015. Pages 359-388.]

“Deliberative dialogue (DD) is a knowledge translation (KT) strategy … that can be integrated into health research as a means of generating rich data and bridging research with action. It can be a powerful tool for responding to complex policy or practice challenges because it offers possibilities for empirical evidence to be considered in context alongside the tacit knowledge(s) of participants.…

“Falling most comfortably within the spectrum of action-oriented qualitative research …, and assuming there is a ‘something’ that can be changed, aligns well with a critical realist ontology that accepts the existence of a ‘real world … independent of our perceptions, theories, and constructions’ …. Critical theories are also compatible with these assumptions …. Critical realists assume relativist or constructivist epistemologies ….”

[Katrina M. Plamondon, Joan L. Bottorff, and Donald C. Cole, “Analyzing Data Generated Through Deliberative Dialogue: Bringing Knowledge Translation Into Qualitative Analysis.” Qualitative Health Research. Volume 25, number 11, 2015. Pages 1529-1539.]

“While this study does not criticize slimmers, or specific people ‘helping’ others to lose weight, there is a critical realist argument directed at the social construction of fatness as a massive public and private problem.…

“… Certainly, my treatment of gender and McDonaldization is streamlined. As will be seen, many data foreground weight-related issues among ordinary men, but the social study of masculinities is not of sustained and detailed concern. ‘Bringing in’ men is obviously important because, among other things, social scientific literature on bodyweight mainly focuses upon women …. My main point on masculinities, however, is that there is a need to critique the male-coded war on fat rather than ‘centre’ the perceived shortcomings of modern men who are living through a socially manufactured crisis that is most likely to hurt women and girls …

[Lee F. Monaghan, “McDonaldizing Men’s Bodies?: Slimming, Associated (Ir)Rationalities and Resistances.” Body & Society. Volume 13, number 2, 2007. Pages 67-93.]

“McDonaldization offers powerful advantages. In fact, efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control through nonhuman technology (that is, technology that controls people rather than being controlled by them) can be thought of not only as the basic components of a rational system but also as the powerful advantages of such a system. However, rational systems inevitably spawn irrationalities.…

“… McDonald’s and other purveyors of the fast-food model spend billions of dollars each year detailing the benefits of their system. Critics of the system, however, have few outlets for their ideas. For example, no one sponsors commercials between Saturday morning cartoons warning children of the dangers associated with fast-food restaurants.”

[George Ritzer. The McDonaldization of Society. Eighth edition. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2015. Google Play edition.]

“Critical realism … argues that those attempting to steer future events, for example planners, are unavoidably involved in the construction of a ‘concrete Utopia’—not in the pejorative sense of the word, but because they cannot avoid choosing certain paths rather than others, and this necessarily has a value dimension.

“A good example of such work on a ‘concrete Utopia’ is, I would argue, the project currently being undertaken by Friends of the Earth Europe (Friends of the Earth Europe, 1995), which seeks to define the future paths for each European country, on the basis of fair global allocations of ‘environmental space.’ This draws on concepts such as trend breaches and sustainability gaps—very much within the overall field of thinking examined here. The exercise is at the same time economic, social and political, not simply environmental. It is both an understanding of past trends, and absolutely prescriptive.”

[Tim Marshall, “Futures, Foresight and Forward Looks: Reflections on the Use of Prospective Thinking for Transport and Planning Strategies.” The Town Planning Review. Volume 68, number 1, January 1997. Pages 31-53.]

“A Western society on its way towards sustainability, using a revenue neutral ecological tax reform as one key tool, will with high probability face declining unemployment rates due to the keynesian effects of the transformation investments necessary. Although environmental politics is no substitute for labour politics and its successes should not be measured in terms of jobs created, there will be – at least in the West – a significant impact. Since this will decrease the pressure on public budgets due to decreasing social spending, we propose to use this opportunity to decrease the public debt to make sure there is still state intervention possible once the GNP begins to decline due to the reduced raw material throughput, causing a decline in taxation revenues as well. The latter however will take thirty years and more to happen, leaving appropriate time for all necessary adjustments.” [Lisbeth Bakker, Ralf Behrensmeier, Stefanie Böge, Stefan Bringezu, Manfred Fischedick, Tamara Hammer, Eckard Hildebrandt, Friedrich Hinterberger, Harry Lehmann, Christa Liedtke, Fred Luks, Jürgen Malley, Thomas Merten, Roland Pareyke, Rudolf Petersen, Torsten Reetz, Phillip Schepelmann, Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, Martin Schüssler, Helmut Schütz, Eberhard K. Seifert, Joachim H. Spangenberg, Meike Spitzner, Ursula Tischner, Uta von Winterfeld, and Gerrit De Wit. Towards Sustainable Europe: A Study from the Wuppertal Institute for Friends of the Earth Europe. Second revised edition. Joachim H. Spangenberg, editor. Wuppertal, Germany: Wuppertal Institute for Friends of the Earth Europe. June, 1996. Page 20.]

“This paper sets out a distinctive theoretical approach and substantive agenda for the study of power relations and elite ruling in organization studies. It draws on a realist ontology … and a neo-Weberian analytical framework … to inform the development of its core analytical conceptualizations and their deployment in three illustrative case histories of changing forms of elite power and control ….

“If the focus of elite analysis shifts exclusively towards a field-level or culturally based approach – in which the interstitial power networks that emerge from the complex mosaic of horizontal interactions and interrelations between coalitions or alliances of expert groups become the overriding explanatory priority – then the underlying structural mechanisms that generate and sustain the wider set of vertically stratified elite power relations within which the latter are embedded will be lost from analytical view and substantive concern.”

[Michael I. Reed, “Masters of the Universe: Power and Elites in Organization Studies.” Organization Studies. Volume 33, number 2, 2012. Pages 203-221.]

“… we have argued that a CR [critical realist] perspective would enable a pluralistic and contextualized scholarship.… Previous research has highlighted the need to establish a more democratically accountable form of management research that is evaluated by those whose lives and professions in organizations are directly affected in so many ways by management education …. This would involve focusing attention on managing as an activity that we all do in our personal and occupational lives and how the knowledge produced in business schools is consumed in the world of work. From this perspective, business research could aim to synthesize the often-competing demands of pragmatics, ethics and morality ….” [Jawad Syed, Peter A. Murray, and John Mingers, “Beyond rigour and relevance: A critical realist approach to business education.” Management Learning. Volume 41, number 1, 2009. Pages 71-85.]

“Critical realism exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself on what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds discursive accounts of mentation in social practices. The problem is that those sympathetic to mainstream psychology are also appealing to ‘realism’ to warrant it as a science and to discredit critical research which situates psychological phenomena. Our use of critical realism calls for an account of how psychological facts are socially constructed within present social arrangements and for an analysis of the underlying historical conditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex.’ Only by understanding how the discipline of psychology reproduces notions of individuality and human nature, a critical realist endeavour, will it be possible to transform it, and to socially construct it as something different.” [Ian Parker. Critical Discursive Psychology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2002. Page 57.]

“I did once, I admit, think that ‘critical realism’ might be a useful framework, but it does now seem to be too badly comprised, not only through its attempt to recast all the worst of experimental and psychoanalytic psychology in the language of critical realism (in an account of relatively enduring structures of cognition and personality development and so on) but also through its recent turn to spirituality (in which the ‘discovery’ of ‘meta-reality’ has at least, not too late we hope, revealed the character of critical realism as a hermetic discursive system) which will only serve to encourage all the more those who did hope that looking into psychology would help them to see into the deepest vaults of the soul.” [Ian Parker. Psychology After the Crisis: Scientific paradigms and political debate. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Pages 125-126. Or: Ian Parker, “‘This World Demands our Attention’: Ian Parker in Conversation With Dimitris Papadopoulos and Ernst Schraube.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research. Volume 5, number 3, article 14, September 2004. Creative Commons. Pages 1-12.]

“I am not interested in building a bridge between the two approaches [constructionism and realism], and perhaps I have been misunderstood on this question. Insofar as I have tried to build a bridge, it has been between those who have worked with constructionist approaches to engage in a critique of psychology and some kind of linkage with radical politics. And, at the same time I have wanted to build some kind of bridge between those who are repulsed by the liberal relativism of much constructionist work in psychology who as a consequence turn to realism and some kind of linkage with radical politics. The simplest (and misleading, of course) formula for this is to say that constructionism is the most radical stance to take with respect to the domain of psychology as lived experience (that is, the range of phenomena that psychologists try to comprehend in their research), and realism is the most radical stance to take with respect to the discipline of psychology as an institutional and ideological practice (that is, the organised theoretical frameworks of knowledge and methodological procedures used to understand the others, the ‘non-psychologists’). You need some version of constructionism to respect the variety of activities and experiences that may be ‘psychology’ for people of different cultures and different periods of history (and, crucially here, the different forms of culture that are in the process of being constituted in the process of resistance to capitalist society), and you need some form of realism to take seriously the way that the discipline of psychology functions as one of the ideological apparatuses of contemporary capitalism (and not only ideological, for it has a directly coercive aspect as well).” [Ian Parker, “‘This World Demands our Attention’: Ian Parker in Conversation With Dimitris Papadopoulos and Ernst Schraube.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research. Volume 5, number 3, article 14, September 2014. Web. No pagination.]

“We have to take care, then, to distinguish between a ‘critical realist psychology’ which serves those who want to rescue the discipline from the wave of critiques in the last 30 years, and ‘critical realism in psychology’ – a critical realism in and against psychology – which focuses on what psychology does to people and challenges each and every claim to truth that is deployed to make it more efficient.…

“Critical realist psychology would temper objections to most psychology so far, provide an account of the ‘individual’ subject to complement work in other disciplines, offer comfort to psychoanalysis as if it were the lost truth, and respect the rules of scientific debate in the psychological community as if it were not riddled with political agendas.”

[Ian Parker, “Against relativism in psychology, on balance.” History of the Human Sciences. Volume 12, number 4, 1999. Pages 61-78.]

“The contributors to this book do not represent the whole spectrum of relativist and realist positions that psychology now houses and uses to buttress its disciplinary practices. We have not included conservative relativists who care nothing for the social implications of their arguments or who imagine that everything in the world and human nature can be made and remade at will, or conservative realists who simply care for the scientific status of psychology and for the philosophical arguments that can be recruited to support it against those who wish to change it. Our contributors’ starting point is a critical, or what some would prefer to term reflexive inquiry into psychology which is sympathetic to radical research and which would want to situate critical debates in the broader context of debates occurring in the human sciences. There is between them, though, a range of arguments and disagreements about how best to be critical or reflexive. The structure of the book provides one way of making sense of the differences.” [Ian Parker, “Realism, Relativism and Critique in Psychology.” Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism. Ian Parker, editor. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1998. Pages 1-9.]

“What we can say for sure is that in this book, the individual chapters by leading and emerging scholars around the world plot the development of a critical perspective on different elements of the host discipline of psychology. The book addresses most separate areas of psychology, aspects of ‘critical psychology’ that transcend the divisions between areas of research that mark the discipline, and the variety of cultural and political standpoints that now make critical psychology into a vibrant, contested terrain of debate. You will notice that as we try to encompass the multiplicity of competing sub-fields of psychology, pretend to offer overarching frameworks, and bring different cultural perspectives into the frame, we are already betraying what an impossibly grandiose project we are tangled in.” [Ian Parker, “Introduction: Principles and positions.” Handbook of Critical Psychology. Ian Parker, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Pages 1-9.]

“… there is something more than a simple assumption that language gives us access to reality, though that notion of reality and realistic appraisal of things in the world is important enough as an index of rationality. The concern with language disturbances as the observable manifestations of mental disorder makes of language itself a symbolic system that should facilitate communication between subjects – there is therefore something necessarily ‘symbolic’ and ‘imaginary’ to it – but it seems now to also have its own independent existence as something resistant to representation, ‘real.’” [Ian Parker. Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Page 29.]

“The connection between the moral aspect and the political aspect of the research – marked in the well-worn phrase ‘moral-political’ – drew attention to the way that our everyday treatment of others is intimately linked to wider social forces. We are always participating in the activity of either reproducing the way the world is or transforming it ([Roy] Bhaskar …). It is, of course, quite possible to engage in this activity unthinkingly – blithely unaware or simply uncaring – or deliberately, and it is that careful deliberate thinking through of what might happen in our research, and reflection on what did happen, that may enable our research to be genuinely radical.” [Ian Parker. Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research. New York: Open University Press imprint of McGraw-Hill Education. 2005. Page 13.]

“Marxist theory has recently been wedded to a realist epistemology, which is to say that it looks to relatively enduring structures in the natural and social orders which permit and inhibit forms of action. To say that these are relatively enduring’ is to treat them as susceptible to change, and to emphasise the way that any human activity affects structures of the social order in a two-fold manner. This is a notion that we capture, borrowing from Roy Bhaskar …, in the phrase ‘reproduction and transformation.’ Every activity reinforces or destabilizes, validates or disturbs existing systems of power.” [Ian Parker, “Discursive resources in the Discourse Unit.” Discourse Analysis Online. Volume 1, number 1, 2003. Pages 1-11.]

“We assume that where there is power there is resistance, and that in every dominant practice there are contradictions and spaces for us to work to challenge and change the existing state of affairs. Mainstream psychology is incoherent, and that incoherence is one of the sources of our strength. For example, a psychological test that is used to stigmatize failing children may also be used to rescue a child from a ‘special’ school …. Similarly, an attention to the structure of the nuclear family may also be a lever against biological psychiatric diagnosis.” [Ian Parker, “Critical Psychology: Four Theses and Seven Misconceptions.” Hellenic Journal of Psychology. Volume 5, 2008. Pages 99-115.]

“[Ian] Parker et al’s Critical Textwork [Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism] returns to ontology, though here the implications and assumptions are more implicit.… Analytic horizons are expanded and there are many possibilities here for innovative developments. Each author considers contemporary methods, and suggests alternative approaches on a theoretical as well as a methodological level. A brief note of concern raised by Parker in the introduction—that of the translation of the visuaUphysical to the written—is, however, a pervasive problem. Although addressed by each author, it is never developed beyond the acknowledgement stage.” [Sally Wiggins, “The Truth Is Out Where?” Theory & Psychology. Volume 11, number 6, December 2001. Pages 857-859.]

“For some time now Ian Parker and colleagues have been developing a distinctive and complex position in psychology. It has become something of a discrete perspective in critical psychology, with its own publications, workshops, courses and now a house journal.

“We started with the suggestion that critical realism serves as a safety curtain, or firewall, to prevent the incendiary mix of theories, positions and claims that make up the Parker-complex from bursting into flame. We have noted how Parker turns and misdescribes relativism into a full-scale perspective to facilitate turning the much more important (for him) construction of critical realism as an equal and opposite perspective.”

[Jonathan Potter, Derek Edwards, and Malcolm Ashmore, “Regulating criticism: some comments on an argumentative complex.” History of the Human Sciences. Volume 12, number 4, 1999. Pages 79-88.]

“First, with respect to an ethos of change, [Karl] Marx … insisted that understanding the world necessarily entails changing it. The consequent refusal of any essentialism is underpinned by a dialectical mode of interrogation of reality which attends to and simultaneously facilitates transformation of social relations. This ontological commitment – to dialectical movement rather than to discrete essences – is displaced as the Stalinist bureaucracy crystallises, and relations become fixed in place, often with an appeal to identity categories such as ‘the proletariat’ and its leadership; and it is the appeal and the identity that is the problem rather than the category as such …. Second, with respect to the expansion of democracy, Marxist interpretation is also an intervention designed to bring the working class and its allies up against the limits of capitalist exploitation and then through a necessary break from those limits in proletarian revolution. This democracy is defined as self-determination by associated producers of the organisation and distribution of natural and creative resources. This endeavour is betrayed by Stalinism; democratic centralism inside the workers’ movement is replaced by centralisation of decision-making and prohibition of opposition in the rest of society ([see Leon] Trotsky …).…

“Radical libertarian attempts to break out from the binary of capitalism and Marxism – in surrealism, situationism, postmodernism or Deleuzian territorialisation of these projects – have failed to outflank capitalism, for now it relies upon and can satisfy the desire those projects promised …. Each of these political alternatives aimed to break with the problematic of representation, representation as picture of the world that does violence to what it depicts – as if every word is the murder of the thing – and representation as deputising of authority to those who mediate the process of change and the institution of democracy ….”

[Ian Parker. Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Pages 116-117.]

“… [There] is Marxism, which has a distinctive view of reality as something that emerges historically through contradiction, a reality which changes through a process of tension and conflict between different social classes. One problem is that sometimes Marxism is used to talk about class struggle as if other forms of oppression are unimportant, despite the fact that there was much early work in the Marxist tradition on the relationship between public and private power …. A second problem is that sometimes Marxism in the social sciences is reduced to a methodological approach known as ‘dialectical materialism’, an approach which was turned into ideological mystification by the bureaucrats working under Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s. However, there is a rich variety of traditions in Marxism that aim to connect with other visions of understanding and emancipation, and there are many different ways of connecting these traditions of Marxism with traditions in psychology …. A particularly important connection today is with studies of language and the ‘social construction’ of reality. Some of the studies using [Michel] Foucault’s work, for example, treat language as if it floats above reality, as if it cannot be analysed separately from it …, and Marxism is now useful methodologically to insist that the language we use is woven into reality, and that this reality is historically constructed so it can be transformed for the better.” [Ian Parker. Qualitative Psychology: Introducing Radical Research. New York: Open University Press imprint of McGraw-Hill Education. 2005. Page 4.]

“The ‘new paradigm’ debates set the scene for the particular new forms of ‘qualitative psychology’ that have developed today in the English-speaking world, whether that is discourse analysis or action research or the attempt to discover the real meanings for people’s actions using phenomenological or psychoanalytic approaches. The debates also set the scene for researchers to make a choice between wanting to improve psychology or whether to dismantle it. The term ‘critical psychology’ today spans a broad spectrum of work that includes research governed by either of those choices.

“On the one hand, there are many ‘critical psychologists’ who want to value people’s accounts and to build an alternative psychological way of exploring meanings for action. It is understandable that as a reaction to the dehumanizing treatment of people as if they were objects, the logic of the new paradigm arguments should be read as meaning that we should for ‘humanistic’ purposes treat people as if they were human beings rather than for ‘scientific’ purposes. The ‘new paradigm’ revolution slogan ‘for scientific purposes treat people as if they were human beings’ … was conceptually linked by Rom Harré to semiological approaches outside psychology and then to the realism of Roy Bhaskar …, one of Harré’s former students, and so the ‘scientific’ claim here was very important.”

[Ian Parker. Psychology After the Crisis: Scientific paradigms and political debate. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Pages 22-23.]

“What we call reflexive performance, involves agents not only identifying the structures, institutions, mechanisms, rules, resources, etc., deemed to enable or constrain wider organizational performance, but also constructing strategies to use them to pursue their personal goals. No social structure (etc.) is constraining or causal tout court. Whether social structures enable or constrain depends upon the nature of the relationship between it and the individual drawing upon it.” [Anthony Hesketh and Steve Fleetwood, “Beyond Measuring the Human Resources Management-Organizational Link: Applying Critical Realist Meta-Theory.” Organization. Volume 13, number 5, September 2006. Pages 677-699.]

“In response to the demise of positivist rationality, different theoretical traditions have proposed alternative formulations of the way in which human beings construct their realities: discourse (social constructionism), self-interventions (critical realism), and the potentials of human consciousness (the humanist tradition).… It is argued that a multimode perspective is consequently needed to provide an integrative framework that identifies in a systematic manner the different facets of client experience.

“It is important to note that these paradigms are in their infancy, and consequently are still being developed and refined. Nonetheless, the three positions outlined above are generally regarded as competing alternatives. Using the example of clients’ experience of psychotherapy, the aim of this paper is to argue that they describe complementary rather than conflicting perspectives.… Consequently, we advocate a multimode view of how human beings construct their worlds.”

[Aubrey Baillie and Sarah Corrie, “The Construction of Clients’ Experience of Psychotherapy Through Narrative, Practical Action, and the Multiple Streams of Consciousness.” Human Relations. Volume 49, number 3, March 1996. Pages 295-311.]

“… [In critical realism], reality is conceived of in terms of a stratified ontology, where what we can experience is only the tip of the iceberg of reality. In other words, the world is made of layers, namely the empirical (what we experience), the actual (where things happen although we do not experience them), and the real (where the generative mechanisms exist) ….

“… Thus, while I aim to establish a realist account of psychiatric nursing, I reject the positivist account of reality as a method of achieving this.”

[Christopher Littlejohn, “Critical realism and psychiatric nursing: a philosophical inquiry.” Journal of Advanced Nursing. Volume 43, number 5, 2003. Pages 449-456.]

“… [The] method of realist review can, to a larger extent than standard systematic reviews, explain how context influences the outcomes of interventions. This method seems most appropriate for our evaluation of social accountability interventions.

“Realist synthesis is rooted in realism and critical realism within philosophy and the social sciences. It is a logic of inquiry that is theory driven and that facilitates an explanation of what works, for whom, in what circumstances and in what respects.…

“Critical realism as explained by Bashkar [sic; Roy ‘Bhaskar’] begins with the notion that scientific inquiry is more than observation and the measurement of facts. It starts from an assumption about complexity.”

[Elsbet Lodenstein, Marjolein Dieleman, Barend Gerretsen, and Jacqueline E. W. Broerse, “A realist synthesis of the effect of social accountability interventions on health service providers’ and policymakers’ responsiveness.” Systematic Reviews. Open access. Volume 2, number 98, December 2013. Pages 1-10.]

“What happens, as with policies and programs, when someone or some institution tries to steer change? The same dynamic persists. The intervention sits alongside other structures (organisations, communities) that clamour for the agents’ attention. Some agents will choose to respond to the program and in so doing will subtly change the nature of the intervention and its place in social structure. Realist evaluation and realist synthesis attempt to retain this idea of the stratified and temporal unfolding of change. Programs and their effects cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of society. They are shaped by and shape history.” [Geoff Wong, Gill Westhrop, Ray Pawson, and Trish Greenhalgh. Realist Synthesis: RAMESES Training Materials. Oxford, England: Realist And Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES). July, 2013. Page 15.]

“A realist synthesis (or realist review – these terms are synonymous) applies realist philosophy to the synthesis of findings from primary studies that have a bearing on a single research question or set of questions. Methodologically, reviewers may begin by eliciting from the literature the main ideas that went into the making of a class of interventions (the program theory). This program theory sets out how and why a class of intervention is thought to ‘work’ to generate the outcome(s) of interest.” [Geoff Wong, Trish Greenhalgh, Gill Westhorp, Jeanette Buckingham, and Ray Pawson, “RAMESES publication standards: realist syntheses.” BMC Medicine. Volume 11, number 21, 2013. Pages 1-14.]

“Some meta-narrative reviews are not flagged as such in the title and/or are inconsistently indexed and, hence, are difficult to locate in searches. Most authors currently use the term ‘meta-narrative review.’ No consensus was reached by our Delphi panel on whether ‘review’ or ‘synthesis’ should be the preferred term, and there seemed no good reason to impose one or the other term.” [Geoff Wong, Trish Greenhalgh, Gill Westhorp, Jeanette Buckingham, and Ray Pawson, “RAMESES publication standards: meta-narrative reviews.” BMC Medicine. Volume 11, number 20, 2013. Pages 1-15.]

“Realist synthesis attempts to distil what can be learned about the body of evidence that has been assembled, about context mechanism patterns …. Realist synthesis will even countenance drawing on poor research.” [Nick Tilley. Crime Prevention. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 176.]

“This working paper is an introduction to a new method of conducting systematic reviews of the evidence base – namely, ‘realist synthesis.’ …

“The paper presents an introductory overview of realist synthesis as applied to the review of primary research on healthcare systems, and so responds to the requirements of these assorted commissions.”

[Ray Pawson, Trisha Greenhalgh, Gill Harvey, and Kieran Walshe, “Realist synthesis: an introduction.” Research Methods Programme paper 2/2004. Economic and Social Research Council. Swindon, England. August, 2004. Pages i-vi and 1-46.]

“This report uses a realist review, which is a theory-based method, to address the questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ certain rural retention interventions work better in some contexts and fail in others. The authors applied this method to the papers included in the first literature review prepared by the WHO Secretariat as a background paper for the launching of the programme. Through applying a realist perspective to the review of these retention studies, a greater understanding is gained of the contextual factors and the main mechanisms that triggered the effects of retention strategies.” [Marjolein Dieleman, Sumit Kane, Prisca Zwanikken, and Barend Gerretsen, “Realist review and synthesis of retention studies for health workers in rural and remote areas.” Technical report number 1. World Health Organization. Geneva, Switzerland. 2011. Pages i-v and 1-20.]

“Realist review is a relatively new strategy for synthesizing research which has an explanatory rather than judgemental focus. It seeks to unpack the mechanism of how complex programmes work (or why they fail) in particular contexts and settings.” [Ray Pawson, Trisha Greenhalgh, Gill Harvey, and Kieran Walshe, “Realist review – a new method of systematic review designed for complex policy interventions.” Journal of Health Services Research & Policy Volume 10, supplement 1, 2005. Pages 21-34.]

“Realist review exposes and articulates the mechanisms by which the primary studies assumed the interventions to work (either explicitly or implicitly); gathers evidence from primary sources about the process of implementing the intervention; and evaluates that evidence so as to judge the integrity with which each theory was actually tested and (where relevant) adjudicate between different theories.” [Trisha Greenhalgh, Elizabeth Kristjansson, and Vivian Robinson, “Realist review to understand the efficacy of school feeding programmes.” The BMJ. Volume 335, October (27th) 2017. Pages 858-861.]

“Realist review methodology can be applied in combination with a complex system lens on published literature to produce a knowledge synthesis that informs a prospective change effort in large-system transformation. A collaborative process engaging both research producers and research users contributes to local applications of universal principles and mid-range theories, as well as to a more robust knowledge base for applied research.” [Allan Best, Trisha Greenhalgh, Steven Lewis, Jessie E. Saul, Simon Carroll, and Jennifer Bitz, “Large-System Transformation in Health Care: A Realist Review.” The Milbank Quarterly. Volume 90, number 3, 2012. Pages 421-456.]

“For this realist review, we have decided to include only those evaluations whose quality was rated moderately satisfactory or better. It was to ensure that the evaluations that meet the specific set of standards to allow equal comparison were analysed.” [Takaaki Miyaguchi and Juha I. Uitto, “A Realist Review of Climate Change Adaptation Programme Evaluations – Methodological Implications and Programmatic Findings.” Occasional papers series. Independent Evaluation Office. United Nations Development Programme. New York. 2015. Pages 1-20.]

“We conducted a realist systematic review in order to develop an up-to-date and practical conceptual framework for understanding intermediate care, and try to identify ‘what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why?’

“Comprehensive literature searches yielded 10,314 citations of which 1,828 related to our working definition of intermediate care.”

[Mark Pearson, Harriet Hunt, Chris Cooper, Sasha Shepperd, Ray Pawson, and Rob Anderson. Intermediate care: a realist review and conceptual framework. Final report. Southampton, England: Service Delivery and Organisation Programme of the National Institute for Health Research. 2013. Page 10.]

“Realist review methodology has been applied to primary research as well as systematic reviews on the evidence for interventions as diverse as: retention of health workers in remote areas and implementation of routine screening for intimate partner violence. The approach is applicable here as sexual violence in conflict and crisis is a complex social and legal problem.” [Jo Spangaro, Chinelo Adogu, Anthony B. Zwi, Geetha Ranmuthugala, and Gawaine Powell Davies, “Mechanisms underpinning interventions to reduce sexual violence in armed conflict: A realist-informed systematic review.” Conflict and Health. Open access. Volume 9, number 19, 2015. Pages 1-14.]

“The approach proposed by [Ray] Pawson and [Nick] Tilley is rooted in a realist perspective of social change. Social phenomena are constructed both by the actions of individuals and by their understanding of such phenomena—individuals who in turn are constrained and enabled by social structures.” [Emilie Robert, Valéry Ridde, Bruno Marchal, and Pierre Fournier, “Protocol: a realist review of user fee exemption policies for health services in Africa.” BMJ Open. Volume 2, number e000706, 2012. Pages 1-7.]

“Systematic reviews typically focus on the minimization of bias, often at the expense of the details that relate to the complexity and context of interventions, which become detached from the findings and are then in danger of being overly simplified and even misleading. Realist inquiry avoids this danger by taking an explanatory approach that examines the mechanisms of how programs work, without assuming that future interventions would work in precisely the same way as those reviewed.” [Brendan McCormack, Joanne Rycroft-Malone, Kara DeCorby, Alison M Hutchinson, Tracey Bucknall, Bridie Kent, Alyce Schultz, Erna Snelgrove-Clarke, Cheyl Stetler, Marita Titler, Lars Wallin, and Valerie Wilson, “A realist review of interventions and strategies to promote evidence-informed healthcare: a focus on change agency.” Implementation Science. Volume 8, number 107, 2013. Pages 1-12.]

“Realist synthesis is a research methodology developed as an alternative to a systematic review as a means to better understand the complexities of social interventions …. It builds on the stream of program evaluation that examines the logic or theory underpinning any given program and uses multiple methods to test the program theory ….” [Barbara Hunter, Lynda Berends, and Sarah MacLean, “Using Realist Synthesis to Develop an Evidence Base from an Identified Data Set on Enablers and Barriers for Alcohol and Drug Program Implementation.” The Qualitative Report. Volume 17, number 1, January 2012. Pages 131-142.]

“A realist synthesis follows similar stages to more familiar forms of systematic review … with some particular features that distinguish it. Notably a realist synthesis derives its focus from a negotiation between the study commissioners and the researchers.” [Brendan McCormack, Belinda Dewar, Jayne Wright, Robert Garbett, Gill Harvey, and Kay Ballantine. A Realist Synthesis of Evidence Relating to Practice Development: Final Report To NHS Education For Scotland and NHS Quality Improvement Scotland. Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland: National Health Service Scotland. May, 2006. Page 15.]

“Realist synthesis (also known as realistic synthesis or realist review) is a relatively new ‘approach to reviewing research evidence on complex social interventions which provides an explanatory analysis of how and why they work (or don’t work) in particular contexts or settings.’ Realist review and synthesis ‘can combine theoretical thinking and empirical evidence’ in a form that can be of value to decision and policy makers. As such, realist synthesis is associated with evidence-based policy and practice but has a potential role in the synthesis of qualitative studies.” [N. Ring, K. Ritchie, L. Mandava, and R. Jepson, “A guide to synthesising qualitative research for researchers undertaking health technology assessments and systematic reviews.” Healthcare Improvement Scotland. Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland. January, 2011. Pages 1-32.]

“This research used a systematic realist review approach. A systematic review is a form of qualitative research which focuses on one research question and builds upon collecting evidence supporting that question. It aims to provide an exhaustive summary of all the common themes that come out of the literature available revolving the research question. A realist review provides explanation aimed at discerning what works for whom, in what circumstances and in what respect. The final outcome of a realist review is more explanatory than judgemental.” [The People that Deliver Initiative, “Human Resource Development in Supply Chain Management of Health Commodities – A realist review of UN sources.” The Australian Institute for Sustainable Communities, University of Canberra. Bruce, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. August, 2014. Pages 1-61.]

“A realist review adopts a theory-driven approach to evidence synthesis, underpinned by a realist philosophy of science and causality. Causal explanations are expressed as contingent relationships between mechanisms (changes in participants’ reasoning or resources), context (contingencies) and outcomes, often abbreviated to context-mechanism-outcome configuration (CMO) to show how particular contexts or conditions trigger or fire mechanisms to generate an observed outcome.” [Jo Rycroft-Malone, Christopher Burton, Beth Hall, Brendan McCormack, Sandra Nutley, Diane Seddon, and Lynne Williams, “Improving skills and care standards in the support workforce for older people: a realist review.” BMJ Open. Volume 4, number e005356, 2014. Pages 1-7.]

“Realist review provides an ‘explanatory rather than judgemental focus’ and is specifically designed to work with ‘complex programmes’ …, which in this study was identifying how approaches to nursing workforce policy and planning had changed over time and what the impact of devolution had been on nursing workforce policy and planning across the UK. Furthermore, realist review provides a means of ‘explaining the relationships between the context in which the intervention is applied, the mechanisms by which it works and the outcomes which are produced’ ….” [Pauline Milne. Devolution and nursing workforce policy and planning in the four countries of the United Kingdom, 1997-2009. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Queen Margaret University. Musselburgh, Scotland. 2013. Page 103.]

“Realist reviews draw on the ideas of critical realism, which seeks to take the complexity of causal relations into account when explaining social interactions. Specifically, we espouse the insights of realistic evaluation. This operationalises the causal ontology of critical realism in the evaluation of interventions by seeking to explain the processes involved between the introduction of interventions … and the outcomes that are produced.” [Angela Higgins, Peter O’Halloran, and Sam Porter, “Management of Long Term Sickness Absence: A Systematic Realist Review.” Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation. Volume 22, number 3, September 2012. Pages 322-332.]

“This article explores the critical realist review, an approach to research that is underpinned by the critical realist methodology.… We engage with both realist and critical realist methodologies, and argue that a critical realist review offers an important contribution to knowledge because it places emphasis on arenas of influence that may not be empirically observable. A literature-based critical realist review, done well, can be highly relevant to health care studies and social interventions generally, and has convincing claims to be as robust and illuminating as other, more conventional methodological approaches ….

“… The critical realist review is an organic process, an intellectual and personal journey in which the pathway is created as a direct result of the researcher’s critical choices, while the destination similarly cannot be known until it is reached.”

[Alison Edgley, Theodore Stickley, Stephen Timmons, and Andy Meal, “Critical realist review: exploring the real, beyond the empirical.” Journal of Further and Higher Education. 2014. Pages 1-15.]

“Critical realist review focuses on explaining outcomes in natural settings and exploring how different mechanisms and context factors influence outcomes. We selected a critical realist approach to understand the community effectiveness of culturally appropriate education interventions on diabetes outcomes. Specifically, this realist review provided guidance for a large 2-year community-based research project involving over 60 Somali, Nepalese, Punjabi and Latin American community leaders and diabetes prevention and education programme leaders.” [K. Pottie, A. Hadi, J. Chen, V. Welch, and K. Hawthorne, “Realist review to understand the efficacy of culturally appropriate diabetes education programmes.” Diabetic Medicine. Volume 30, issue 9, September 2013. Pages 1017-1025.]

“The review draws on critical realist philosophy. Critical realist approaches distinguish between three aspects of the world that co-exist but are distinct—empirical (experiences), actual (events), and real (generative mechanisms). This distinction implies notions of relativity—the same event can be perceived differently, influenced by different mechanisms, or the same underlying mechanism might lead to different events in varying contexts.… According to critical realism, different generative mechanisms are not necessarily equally comparable as they operate on different levels of abstraction, and thus a variety of concepts are necessary to deal with relationships and mechanisms operating on different levels.” [Ivaylo Vassilev, Anne Rogers, Caroline Sanders, Anne Kennedy, Christian Blickem, Joanne Protheroe, Peter Bower, Sue Kirk, Carolyn Chew-Graham, and Rebecca Morris, “Social networks, social capital and chronic illness self-management: a realist review.” Chronic Illness. Volume 7, 2011. Pages 60-86.]

“This article reports on the design of a critical realist review that worked to deal with complexity in a social system. The review examined documents that reported on related projects conducted at points in time and documents that traced the development of two educational initiatives in Singapore over time.…

“The review aimed to marshal existing evidence about the workings of the standards for authentic achievement and pedagogy used to investigate the effectiveness of school restructuring efforts in North America, in Queensland, Australia, and implemented in a modified version in Singapore.”

[Denise E. De Souza, “Critical Realism and Realist Review: Analyzing Complexity in Educational Restructuring and the Limits of Generalizing Program Theories Across Borders.” American Journal of Evaluation. Volume 37, number 2. 2016. Pages 216-237.]

“Methods/Design: This is a qualitative longitudinal study informed by a critical realist review. The participants will be individuals identified as having mild-moderate dementia and informal carers. The in-depth interviews will occur at three points over the course of 18 months as they use the passport. This will be supplemented by analysis of the content of the passports and information from health and social care providers on the daily practicalities of using the passport in a range of healthcare settings.

“Discussion: By using a critical realist review and a qualitative, longitudinal approach, the study allows for the assessment of a complex intervention in a manner which goes beyond evaluating the basic efficacy of the passport, but looking more deeply at how it worked, for whom, and in what context. It has the potential to develop new data on how interventions improve communication across a range of service providers, while encouraging health and social care professionals to respect and encourage the development of self-management and retention of personhood throughout the progression of life-limiting illnesses.”

[Gerard Leavey, Aine Abbott, Max Watson, Stephen Todd, Vivien Coates, Sonja McIlfactrick, Brendan McCormack, Bethany Waterhouse-Bradley and Emma Curran, “The evaluation of a healthcare passport to improve quality of care and communication for people living with dementia (EQuIP): a protocol paper for a qualitative, longitudinal study.” BMC Health Services Research. Volume 16, 2016. Open access. Pages 1-6.]

“Until recently, there has been little published systematic empirical research into business coaching. This article reports on a systematic, critical review of 111 published empirical papers investigating business coaching theory, processes, and outcomes. The present article identifies a significantly larger body of empirical research than covered in previous reviews and uses a Systematic Review methodology (SRm) to conduct a comprehensive review of the available empirical evidence into business coaching effectiveness focusing on implications for theoretical development, practice (within human resource development) and further research in this area.…

“For this article, empirical research is defined as ‘the process of developing systematized knowledge gained from observations that are formulated to support insights and generalizations about the phenomena under study’ …. Based on this definition and, consistent with both … a critical realist research approach, the review included both quantitative and qualitative research.”

[Anna Blackman, Gianna Moscardo, and David E. Gray, “Challenges for the Theory and Practice of Business Coaching: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence.” Human Resource Development Review. Volume 15, number 4, December 2016. Pages 459-486.]

“The authors of this qualitative systematic review draw on a wide range of experience including dental public health, public health nutrition, political theory, health services research, and health psychology. The authors are in agreement with recent recommendations to reduce sugar intake in young children but are aware from clinical experience that many caregivers find it difficult to do so in practice. We began with the hypothesis that this may be due to the many nonnutritive roles that sugary drinks and snacks have in family life. The ontological and epistemological approach taken by the authors is critical realist …. That is to say, we accept that a ‘real world’ does exist beyond our construction of it, but that its understanding, as presented here, is inevitably based on the perspectives and constructions of the participants and authors of the primary studies, as well as our own points of view.” [Deborah Anne Moore, Tom Lloyd Goodwin, Paul R. Brocklehurst, Christopher J. Armitage, and Anne-Marie Glenny, “When Are Caregivers More Likely to Offer Sugary Drinks and Snacks to Infants? A Qualitative Thematic Synthesis.” Qualitative Health Research. Early–view edition. October, 2016. Pages 1-15.]

“More effective work with perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) can be built upon a better understanding of how and why they change their behavior. This article presents a systematic narrative review of female IPV survivor perspectives on the changes brought about by IPV perpetrator programs. Fourteen databases and web search engines were searched and 16 articles reporting relevant qualitative findings were identified.…

“A number of methods for synthesizing qualitative research have emerged over the past decade …. This review takes a critical realist approach …. The synthesis, of primary study findings, therefore acknowledges multiple realities as offered by the multiple theoretical perspectives found in this area of research. In addition, given that the primary studies used in this review employ a variety of qualitative methods, it follows that the method of synthesis was interpretive rather than aggregative ….”

[Tony McGinn, Brian Taylor, Mary McColgan, and Susan Lagdon, “Survivor Perspectives on IPV Perpetrator Interventions: A Systematic Narrative Review.” Trauma, Violence & Abuse. May 2015. Pages 1-17.]

“Following several other IS [information systems] scholars …, the thematic analysis approach was adopted to conduct the literature review. Such an approach engages researchers’ thoughts to systematically scope, identify, and categorize conceptual content of prior studies and identify relationships among the categories …. To do this, a 4-phase critical realist review argumentative strategy and its description … was proposed. Argumentative strategy as used here is the ‘[l]ogical structures in the argumentation enacted in … [this chapter], the order of the components of the author’s argument’ in organizing and synthesizing the literature review ….

“Phase 1: A typology of existing theoretical/thought perspectives gear toward synthesizing the of the literature and write-ups.…

“Phase 2: Inferring and identification of the core concepts as generative mechanisms/factors from the synthesized literature.…

“Phase 3: Theory-lead [sic; Theory-led] thematic coding to develop conceptual framework.…

“Phase 4: Establishing theoretical coherence and recontextualization.”

[Ononiwu Chidi Gerard. Mechanisms for Emergent Usage of Adaptive Information Systems: A Critical Realist Case of e-Financial Systems in South Africa. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town. Cape Town, South Africa. July, 2015. Page 51.]

“Using the method of qualitative metasynthesis, this study analyzes 49 qualitative studies to interrogate how high-stakes testing affects curriculum, defined here as embodying content, knowledge form, and pedagogy.… [T]he findings of the study suggest that the nature of high-stakes-test-induced curricular control is highly dependent on the structures of the tests themselves.…

“I approach this study from within the critical realist tradition, which holds that a real world exists objectively outside human perception, that this world is to varying extents knowable through human cognition, and that this world is in fact changeable relative to our knowledge of it.”

[Wayne Au, “High-Stakes Testing and Curricular Control: A Qualitative Metasynthesis.” Educational Researcher. Volume 36, number 5, 2007. Pages 258-267.]

“The realist synthesis is underpinned by a realist philosophy of science ([Roy] Bhaskar …). In applied critical realism, society is studied as an open system with an emergent understanding of causality. Realists are particularly concerned with the interplay between social structures and human agency on many levels …. A realist review, however, does not necessarily seek to explain all these levels. An underlying assumption is that all interventions are based on a theory, or several theories concerning how change comes about. Using such underlying program theory or theories as a starting point, in this case the wilderness therapy treatment milieu model …, the realist synthesis seeks to explain why and how a ‘family of programs,’ such as wilderness therapy, work or do not work in particular circumstances.” [Carina R. Fernee, Leiv E. Gabrielsen, Anders J. W. Andersen, and Terje Mesel, “Unpacking the Black Box of Wilderness Therapy: A Realist Synthesis.” Qualitative Health Research. OnlineFirst edition. June, 2016. Pages 1-16.]

“Within the wilderness experience genre, a specific type of wilderness program is emerging — wilderness therapy. Wilderness therapy distinguishes itself from the larger group of wilderness experience programs through application of more targeted clinical and therapeutic methods in wilderness environments. Such therapeutic interventions usually involve treating adolescents’ emotional, behavioral, psychological, and substance use issues …. In this wilderness therapy approach, adolescents are immersed in wilderness or comparable lands, practice group living with peers, and undergo individual and group therapy sessions as well as educational and therapeutic curricula including social skills training and backcountry skill development ….” [Keith C. Russell and Jen Farnum, “A Concurrent Model of the Wilderness Therapy Process.” Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning. Volume 4, number 1, 2004. Pages 39-55.]

“Wilderness therapy (WT) has been utilized as an alternative treatment modality for adolescent clients with emotional, behavioral and substance use problems …. WT utilizes human-powered expeditions set in isolated wilderness areas that include individual and group counseling integrated with challenging activities like outdoor living skills and adventure recreation activities …. WT programs are often assumed to work with adolescent clients only and not with the family while the adolescent is in treatment, yet have been described by researchers as being delivered from a family-systems perspective ….” [Nevin J. Harper, Keith C. Russell, Rob Cooley, and Jacqueline Cupples, “Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Expeditions: An Exploratory Case Study of Adolescent Wilderness Therapy, Family Functioning, and the Maintenance of Change.” Child Youth Care Forum. Volume 36, 2007. Pages 111-129.]

“… wilderness therapy has emerged as a treatment option designed to address problem behaviors, typically through immersion in natural environments, individual and group therapy, and adventure recreation …. According to a recent nationwide survey …, there are more than 100 wilderness therapy programs operating in the United States that serve more than 10,000 clients and their families annually. Despite the growth of this treatment type, researchers have only begun attempting to systematically understand wilderness therapy.” [Michael C. Caulkins, Dave D. White, and Keith C. Russell, “The Role of Physical Exercise in Wilderness Therapy for Troubled Adolescent Women.” The Journal of Experiential Education. Volume 29, number 1, 2006. Pages 18-37.]

“Our critical realist approach was to empirically connect the processes of how and why entrepreneurial net[work] behaviour occurred in light of internal and external conditions, including applicable contingencies.…

“The entrepreneurial social capital described in this article seems to be more robust than that defined by most research to date. The value of a more robust notion of social capital is an important contribution because of the entrepreneurial context and usage that lead us to these findings. Entrepreneurs are very close to free agents, particularly in contrast to managers in large organizations. How entrepreneurs create and destroy their social capital (i.e. activities) has normative and prescriptive value for managers.”

[James L. Bowey and Geoff Easton, “Entrepreneurial Social Capital Unplugged: An Activity-based Analysis.” International Small Business Journal. Volume 25, number 3, 2007. Pages 273-306.]

“The time is ripe to re-analyse the works of Gramsci – to strip him of all vestiges of liberalism – as a way to identify which elements of the Neo-Gramscian framework retain their utility as tools to better understand the dynamics of the world order. This, underpinned by the materialist critical realist philosophy of science …, together with further insights on the ‘logic’ of capital and hegemonic transitions offered by Karl Marx, David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, amongst others, forms the basis of the Neo-Neo-Gramscian perspective on world order forward here.…

“The Neo-neo-Gramscian theoretical perspective adopted in this thesis as indicated evolves out of the Marxist materialist conception of history. Marxism has always claimed to span three levels: philosophical, theoretical and practical; where dialectical materialism is generally understood as [Karl] Marx’s philosophy of science, grounding theoretical pronouncements which are used to inform political practise.

“Critical realism in no way seeks to replace dialectical materialism but rather to enrich its interpretation, to help compensate for a philosophical vacuum arguably afflicting not just Marxist theory but social theory in general.

“Importantly though, and to reiterate the basic point, critical realism is located only at the level of philosophy (i.e. at the trans-historical level) – performing, as ascertained, a philosophical under-labourer role for theory – and hence does not favour any particular political programme or particular theory (witness its recent application in a broad range of traditional disciplinary fields, such as economics, politics, geography, law and sociology).”

[Jonathan Pass. Towards a Post-Hegemonic World Order?: A Neo-Neo Gramscian Perspective. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Pablo de Olavide University. Seville, Spain. 2015. Pages 15-16.]

“Whilst community is often viewed in the conventional sense of neighbourhood or village in social capital theory, young people often identify with a number of other communities including those associated with their school, families and interests.” [Thilo Gunther Boeck. Young People and Social Capital: An Exploration. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). De Montfort University. Leicester, England. April, 2011. Page 42.]

“… I have argued that within any social investigation it is important to have a clear social ontology. As such, a question arises as to whether there is a specific research strategy which is better suited than others for tackling the exploration of social capital and young people. Drawing on critical realist approaches and especially [Derek] Layder’s ‘Domain Theory,’ this study has adopted a view of the social world that is stratified and differentiated. Layder’s four domains take into account the depth, richness and complexity of social reality and thus, children and young people are seen as individuals at the centre of multiple systems.” [Thilo Gunther Boeck. Young People and Social Capital: An Exploration. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). De Montfort University. Leicester, England. April, 2011. Page 112.]

“… the [critical realism] position has been expanded through a series of meta-theoretical ‘methods’ texts (including … [Derek] Layder …).” [Charles Crothers, “Let’s Get Real: Developing Realist Approaches within the Philosophy of Science.” South African Journal of Philosophy. Volume 18, issue 2, 1999. Pages 211-222.]

“First, what I call the ‘theory of social domains’ (otherwise referred to as ‘domain theory’) deals with the problems surrounding the individual–society, agency–structure and macro–micro dualisms. The discussion naturally covers different facets of many of the issues and authors that have already figured prominently in this book.….

“The second emphasis is on creating practical social research strategies related to the development of social theory – what I term ‘adaptive theory’ – and which focuses on more empirical dimensions of agency–structure (macro–micro) connections.”

[Derek Layder. Understanding Social Theory. Second edition. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2006. Page 272.]

“Realism views both the world and science (and hence social science) as stratified; different sciences focus on different aspects of the world. Thus, ‘the social sciences focus on the structures produced by human agency, studying how these relate to each other and to enduring practices’ whilst ‘social psychological science focuses on individuals in their interaction with one another and with social institutions and how this activity relates to the larger social structures’ …. Similarly, within sociology itself [Roy] Bhaskar distinguishes between human agency and social structures as quite different aspects of social reality.” [Derek Layder. The Realist Image in Science. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1990. Page 15.]

“… let me indicate in a provisional and necessarily simplified manner what I am referring to when I speak of the ‘domains’ of social life in the context of a ‘theory of social domains.’ There are four principal domains and I refer to them in the following terms: psychobiography, situated activity, social settings and contextual resources. The elements that bind these domains together are social relations and positions, power, discourses and practices.… [I]t is important to point out that the domains are related to each other not only as ‘layers’ of social life within the same time unit, but also as stretched-out over time and space.” [Derek Layder. Modern Social Theory: Key Debates And New Directions. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Page 2.]

[Derek Layder. Sociological Practice: Linking Theory and Research. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1998. Pages 132-133.]

“Both [Anthony] Giddens … and [Roy] Bhaskar … have argued that ontological questions (about the nature of social reality) are prior to epistemological ones about validity. However, in my view both kinds of question – the nature of reality and how we come to know it – are inextricably bound together and this has important implications for the manner in which we go about research, the sorts of research problems we pose and the questions we ask.” [Derek Layder. Sociological Practice: Linking Theory and Research. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1998. Pages 22-23.]

“Ontologically (the nature of reality) the research was informed by a critical-realist position or perspective ….” [André Du Plessis. The introduction of cyberhunts as a teaching and learning strategy to guide teachers towards the integration of computer technology in schools. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Port Elizabeth, South Africa. March, 2010. Page 18.]

“Connectivism is based upon networking principles, the key being simplicity. Simplicity within the network context implies that two elements are required to create a simple network: nodes and connections …. Thus, for a network to be established, at least two nodes have to be connected or linked. When a connection or connections have been established or created, information can start to flow from one node or domain to another in any direction …. Learning can thus be defined as ‘the process that occurs when knowledge is transformed into something of meaning (and will then generally result in something that can be acted upon). During this process, learning is the act of encoding and organising nodes to facilitate data, information, and knowledge flow’ ….” [André Du Plessis. The introduction of cyberhunts as a teaching and learning strategy to guide teachers towards the integration of computer technology in schools. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Port Elizabeth, South Africa. March, 2010. Pages 67-68.]

“In presenting connectivism as a ‘learning theory for a digital era,’ I detailed learning as the act of forming networks …, enabling adaptability of learning agents, and attendant emergence. These basic ideas represent key concepts of complexity views of learning.” [George Siemens, “Connecting.” Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity in Education. Volume 4, number 1, 2007. Pages 107-109.]

“Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

“Connectivism is driven by the understanding that decisions are based on rapidly altering foundations. New information is continually being acquired. The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information is vital. The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical.”

[George Siemens, “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.” International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Volume 2, number 1, 2005. Pages 3-10.]

“Analytics … can be applied to assist scientists, researchers, and academics to make sense of the connective structures that underpin their field of knowledge. The methods of science and the questions investigated have rapidly changed as large data sets have become available. Early attempts to manage knowledge through classification systems (such as early attempts by Yahoo to organize the web into categories) have now been replaced by the big data and algorithmically driven approach of Google. The emphasis on large quantities of data for discovery has important implications for education.” [George Siemens, “Learning Analytics: The Emergence of a Discipline.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 57, number 10, 2013. Pages 1380-1400.]

“With the TMSA [transformational model of social activity] in place (that is an explanation model of social reproduction and transformation) we can now explore the notion of generative mechanism. It turns out that identifying and analysing generative mechanisms is the main aim of a realist social science and is applicable to a health sector management practice. First, however, it is necessary to establish the efficacy of intentions as causes.…

“This article has primarily been an attempt to set out the underpinning theory and scope of a critical realist approach to health sector management.… The practical outcomes of this realist ethical positioning have not so far been systematically registered, as it, so far, has not been practised. The application of critical realism to management theory and practice is at its dawn. This is both an opportunity and a difficulty.”

[Jim Connelly, “A realistic theory of health sector management: The case for critical realism.” Journal of Management in Medicine. Volume 14, number 5/6, 2000. Pages 262-271.]

“This study provides a contribution to the field of men and masculinity. It seeks to contribute to approaches for conceptualising masculinity, focussing on a conceptualisation that bridges the gap between theories which define masculinity as a specific identity and those which avoid normative definitions. The thesis proposes a critical realist analysis of masculinity, which simultaneously explains the common patterns of men’s behaviour while acknowledging the multifarious nature of men’s identities.” [Marcus Lumb. A Critical Realist Analysis of Masculinity: Men Gravitating to a Dominant Masculine Norm. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University Of Huddersfield. Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. 2012. Page 10. Retrieved on December 21st, 2015.]

“The qualitative study reported here was part of the emergent phase of a critical realist Explanatory Theory Building Method consisting of three phases of research: 1) emergent phase; 2) construction phase; and 3) confirmation phase. The emergent phase of theory building moves from the empirical observations and interpretations of the persons involved towards the development of theoretical concepts. [John Eastwood, Lynn Kemp, and Bin Jalaludin, “Explaining ecological clusters of maternal depression in South Western Sydney.” BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. Volume 14, number 47, 2014. Pages 1-15.]

“We describe a critical realist Explanatory Theory Building Method comprising of an: 1) emergent phase, 2) construction phase, and 3) confirmatory phase.…

“… Explanatory theory building uses inductive, abductive, retroductive and deduction as the central forms of reasoning moving from description of the concrete, to the abstract, and back to the concrete ….

“Both Emergent and Confirmatory modes of theory building remain supported by the Explanatory Theory Building approach. The Explanatory Theory Building approach uses deductive logic and confirmatory approaches.”

[John G. Eastwood, Bin B. Jalaludin, and Lynn A. Kemp, “Realist explanatory theory building method for social epidemiology: a protocol for a mixed method multilevel study of neighbourhood context and postnatal depression.” SpringerPlus. Volume 3, number 12, December 2014. Pages 1-12.]

“The study reported here is part of a larger multilevel research programme that utilises critical realist mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology to build a theoretical model of the mechanisms by which multilevel factors might influence the developmental origins of health and disease ….” [John G. Eastwood, Bin B. Jalaludin, Lynn A. Kemp, and Hai N. Phung, “Bayesian hierarchical spatial regression of maternal depressive symptoms in South Western Sydney, Australia.” SpringerPlus. Volume 3, number 55, 2014. Pages 1-10.]

“We have recently described a protocol for a study that aims to build a theory of neighbourhood context and postnatal depression. That protocol proposed a critical realist Explanatory Theory Building Method comprising of an: (1) emergent phase, (2) construction phase, and (3) confirmatory phase.…

“… The meta-theory of critical realism is used here to generate and construct social epidemiological theory using stratified ontology and both abductive and retroductive analysis. The findings will be applied to the development of a middle range theory and subsequent programme theory for local perinatal child and family interventions.…

“… The study demonstrates that critical realism can provide the necessary meta-theoretical philosophy for the generation of social epidemiology theory. The stratifying of reality demands that the researcher examines and explains unobserved generative forces (i.e., social isolation) that shape experiences.”

[John G. Eastwood, Lynn A. Kemp, and Bin B. Jalaludin, “Realist theory construction for a mixed method multilevel study of neighbourhood context and postnatal depression.” SpringerPlus. Open access. Volume 5, issue 3, December 2016. Pages 1-26.]

“The study reported here is part of a critical realist mixed method multilevel study that seeks to identify and explain complex perinatal contextual social and psychosocial mechanisms that may influence the developmental origins of health and disease with a focus on the role of postnatal depression …. This paper aims to move beyond our previous quantitative descriptions of individual-level predictors of depressive symptoms by seeking the views of local mothers and practitioners to explain the mechanisms which might be involved.” [John G. Eastwood, Lynn A. Kemp, and Bin B. Jalaludin, “Being alone and expectations lost: a critical realist study of maternal depression in South Western Sydney.” SpringerPlus. Volume 4, issue 1, December 2015. Pages 1-15.]

“We present here the findings of a realist multilevel situational analysis of maternal depression. The purpose is to contribute to a realist theory building study that aims to explain neighborhood context, maternal depression, and the developmental origins of health and disease.…

“Critical realism and symbolic interactionism provide the meta-theory and philosophical roots for this realist multilevel situational analysis. The study reported here is part of a critical realist mixed method multilevel study that seeks to identify and explain complex perinatal contextual social and psychosocial mechanisms that may influence the developmental origins of health and disease with a focus on the role of postnatal depression ….”

[John Eastwood, Bin Jalaludin, and Lynn Kemp, “Each Is in Different Circumstances Anyway: A Realist Multilevel Situational Analysis of Maternal Depression in South Western Sydney, Australia.” SAGE Open. October–December 2016. Pages 1-14.]

“In this article we draw upon current scholarship to substantiate our claims for the insights that a ‘geo-historical’ approach to comparative analysis can provide into the qualities of this political competition and its concrete outcomes within Europe.…

“… A critical realist approach to explanation acknowledges the ‘double hermeneutic’ of social science, that, for example, the competing meanings crime control agencies attribute to their own work (their aetiologies of crime and the policy responses they presuppose) have to be interpreted using concepts from arguments among the social scientific community that are also subject to interpretation.”

[Adam Edwards and Gordon Hughes, “Comparing the governance of safety in Europe: A geo-historical approach.” Theoretical Criminology. Volume 9, number 3, 2005. Pages 345-363.]

“The articulation of an alternative hegemony consists of working-class counter-hegemonic struggles, forming a permanent alliance, a historic bloc, with popular struggles, transforming identities as ‘people’ aimed towards constructing a ‘popular will.’ This involves transforming relationships of different groups combined under the hegemony of the dominant class, by tactically engaging with the ethical and cultural form of the hegemony …. In contrast to the dominant notion of civil society, grounded in ahistorical individualism and universality, the orientation of an alternative hegemony is a rediscovery of civil society, expressing a social humanity, in a concrete humanism ([Roy] Bhaskar …).” [S. Janaka Biyanwila. Trade Unions in Sri Lanka under Globalisation: Reinventing Worker Solidarity. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The University of Western Australia. Perth, Australia. August, 2003. Page 69.]

“The research takes the form of transdisciplinary enquiry. Applying a critical realist perspective, relevant bodies of literature are reviewed, leading to the creation of a proposed analytical framework and an associated process model. It is proposed that together these comprise the tools to help the development of the ethical manager. Using a case study approach, the framework is first trialled among postgraduate professional MBA students. Based on initial research findings, a developed framework is then adapted and field-tested for relevance to practising managers in diverse organisational contexts, and potential further uses and applications considered.” [Roger Cook. Ethics at work: the discourse of business ethics: an investigation into ethical discourse in UK higher education and organisational contexts. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of West London. London, England. 2014. Page 4.]

“Very recently there has emerged a growth of interest in transdisciplinary enquiry as a means of tackling wicked problems …. This approach extends beyond multidisciplinary enquiry to seeking for synergies between different disciplines, hence the renaming of multidisciplinary enquiry. The approach faces many challenges, as there exists a ‘long list’ of reasons offered by subject specialists as to why analytical rigour is lost by those seeking to move beyond an established paradigm framing specific academic disciplines.” [Roger Cook. Ethics at work: the discourse of business ethics: an investigation into ethical discourse in UK higher education and organisational contexts. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of West London. London, England. 2014. Pages 52-53.]

“As historical data concerning the development of Norwegian education during the nineteenth century is examined, the main emphasis is on substantiating my hypothesis of dual integration between education and the church and state prior to the emergence of the state educational system. I also present an outline of how the cycle that started with dual integration of education with the state and church can be theorised, by introducing concepts from the second cycle of development in [Margaret S.] Archer’s theory—the cycle starting with the emergence of the state system.… Finally, reflecting on the kind of reasoning involved in making Archer’s educational theory more inclusive, I apply her theory of cultural morphogenesis through syncretism to one of the transforms in a more encompassing process of epistemological dialectic.” [Tone Skinningsrud, “Realist Social Theorising and the Emergence of State Educational Systems.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 2, August 2005. Pages 339-365.]

“A … reason [for the lack of engagement with the social sciences by ecclesiologists] is the difficulty identified by Gregory Baum, namely that sociology is a methodologically divided discipline. Thus the first question one should ask is which sociology should one use? Baum identifies four distinct approaches: positivist, functionalist, conflictualist, and symbolic interactionist. To these might be added the structurationist approach of Anthony Giddens and the critical realist approach of Roy Bhaskar.” [Neil Ormerod, “A Dialectic Engagement with the Social Sciences in an Ecclesiological Context.” Theological Studies. Volume 66, number 4, December 2005. Pages 815-840.]

“This specifically critical realist inquiry sought to identify influential qualities beyond what is immediately given or observable …. Critical realism argues that social reality has ontological depth and consists of domains of actual, empirical and real. That is, an actual phenomenon of the IMGs’ [international medical graduates’] integration may have produced various perceived (empirical) views, which can be further explained by relevant social structural or real underpinning factors.…

“Using a biographical, life-history methodology …, a semi-structured interview schedule was developed to investigate the factors that work towards IMGs settling into rural practice and life, and the barriers that prevent them from doing so. Consistent with the literature, the four main areas of focus centre on personal, professional, family integration and their broad interaction with the members of the community ….”

[Gil-Soo Han and John S. Humphreys, “Integration and retention of international medical graduates in rural communities: A typological analysis.” Journal of Sociology. Volume 42, number 2, 2006. Pages 189-207.]

“We argue that a critical realist view considers not only individuals’ lived experiences, but also essentially examines the social origins of illness and the allocation of health resources in the context of unhealthy working conditions, the market economy, social relations and social reality ….

“Just as Koreans in Sydney often categorize themselves as amnesty, skilled or business migrants, the medical doctors mentioned the health condition of Koreans with reference to these three categories.…

“These views are highly analytical, representing the lived experiences of Korean migrants and illuminating the generative mechanisms that explain the social origins of health and illness of Koreans ….”

[Gil-Soo Han and Carmel Davies, “Ethnicity, Health and Medical Care: Towards a Critical Realist Analysis of General Practice in the Korean Community in Sydney.” Ethnicity and Health. Volume 11, number 4, November 2006. Pages 409-430.]

“Positivist approaches tend to consider the objective and generally material dimensions of biofuel technology whilst postmodernist approaches tend to consider their subjective and social dimensions. Whilst hard determinism is usually avoided in contemporary accounts of technology, other ontological difficulties are left in its wake. The combination of different approaches within the biofuel debate is an unsatisfactory solution to the inadequacy of determinism and attention to the problem in situ, at the ontological level, is required. Critical realism and its dialectic account of technical activity combines a role for both objective materiality and the social construction of technology within an ontologically consistent framework.” [Philip Boucher, “What Next after Determinism in the Ontology of Technology?: Distributing Responsibility in the Biofuel Debate.” Science and Engineering Ethics. Volume 17, issue 3, September 2011. Pages 525-538.]

“Absence is a central concept in dialectical critical realism (DCR), and this book is concerned with the absence of children and childhood from almost any report, book or film on politics, economics, trade, armed conflict, housing, transport, climate change or any other major topic of public concern. Yet children and their interests are actually central to all these ‘adult’ matters.” [Priscilla Alderson. Childhoods Real and Imagined—Volume 1: An introduction to critical realism and childhood studies. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Google Play edition.]

“The book employs an effective strategy of firstly explaining [Priscilla] Alderson’s view of twelve key Bhaskarian doctrines, outlining a practical example of the split or absence in childhood studies, and then explaining what DCR can offer to resolve such recalcitrant problems. The most interesting and final part of each of these twelve sections explains what Anderson would have done, or now understands differently, in light of the tools offered by DCR.” [Brad Shipway, “Childhoods Real and Imagined—Volume 1: An introduction to critical realism and childhood studies.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 314-319.]

“The black defence lawyer Bryan Stevenson (2014) regards all young offenders under 18 years as children, highly anxious and emotional (one boy cried hysterically for an hour before he could speak to his lawyer).…

“To generalise from this example of criminal law, reasons for researching the broader politics of childhood include the overwhelming effects that adult-centric systems can have on children. Children’s ‘diminished culpability,’ which is related to diminished responsibility and power, makes them more vulnerable, and yet their experiences and needs may be hardly noticed. They may be dismissed and denigrated in adult systems as if they are irrelevant and should not be there. Childhood is the most vulnerable, impressionable and formative age group, the most susceptible to lasting and possibly lifelong effects of benefits and harms. Children and young people are often least able to speak for themselves, or to be listened to seriously, or to have powerful advocates. Adults who have already established their reputation, employment record and support contacts may more easily return to their former life after time in prison or mental hospital than young people, who must begin to create a life after such events. This is not to over-state child/adult differences. The difficulties apply for many adults too, but on average children are more likely to experience them.”

[Priscilla Alderson. The Politics of Childhoods Real and Imagined: Practical Application of Critical Realism and Childhood Studies. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Google Play edition.]

“With critical realism as a point of departure, the aim of this article is to suggest an alternative conceptualisation of generality. The central argument of this article is that scientific generalisations must take into consideration the domain of the deep structures of reality. Research should not be limited to observable empirical facts …. Instead, it should aim at identifying and gaining knowledge of the structures and the constituent mechanisms of the object under study. A vital argument is that qualitative media audience research has an inherent capacity to gain such knowledge.

“This article is delimited to discussing media audience research. The problem of generality certainly does not only concern this area of research. It could be discussed in other areas of investigation within the field of media and communication studies, or in other disciplines as well.”

[Göran Eriksson, “Rethinking the Rethinking: The Problem of Generality in Qualitative Media Audience Research.” Nordicom Review. Volume 27, number 1, 2006. Pages 31-44.]

“Perhaps surprisingly, critical realism has surfaced quite prominently in business-oriented marketing research and consumer behaviour studies …. It is furthermore salient in information and organization studies …, in social science teaching methods … as well as in a range of other disciplines …. It is an interesting topic to inquire into the observed reticence of deploying critical realism in sustainability governance, and not in the last place of deploying it to investigate the ascendency and withering of sustainability discourses over time.” [Jakob Geert Rozema. Sustainability Discourses on Controversial Infrastructure Development: Investigating their Mobilization in Environmental Impact Assessment. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia. March, 2014. Page 67.]

“This article uses the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion and a critical realist interpretation of objectivity to discuss two dialectics present in geography of religion literature: geography of religion versus religious geography, and politics versus poetics.…

“… I use objectivity and the insider/outsider problem, which is only one of the many debates present in the geography of religion literature that critical realism can effectively address, to rethink two others. Specifically, I seek to illuminate potential bridges for two dialectics: the division of the subdiscipline into geography of religion and religious geography and the distinction between the politics and poetics of religion.”

[Michael P. Ferber, “Critical Realism and Religion: Objectivity and the Insider/Outsider Problem.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 96, number 1, March 2006. Pages 176-181.]

“A Realist Analytical Framework

“If causal mechanisms are the source of explanatory power, then a reliable and efficacious analytical framework is necessary for ascertaining causality in the phenomena that we wish to understand. The explanation of how realism identifies causality below integrates realist assumptions with procedural sequence in order to produce a useful ordered framework that can, at least in principle, be used to explain social phenomenon. This framework is synthetically constructed from Berth Danermark and associates, Andrew Sayer, Collier, and [Roy] Bhaskar.”

[Stephen Armet, “Identifying causal mechanisms that explain the emergence of the Modern Dutch State.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 3, January 2013. Pages 301-335.]

“… an analytical framework is set out which attempts to embrace the methodological philosophical principles of critical realism, and represents a very different approach to the process of qualitative data analysis. The framework includes several stages of the research process that would be unfamiliar to a traditional deductive or inductive approach. This is because the aim is to develop a causal explanation in terms of the interplay between the distinct levels of ‘structure,’ ‘individuals,’ and ‘interaction’ that lead to the emergence of the concrete object of study ….

“… the devised critical realist analytical framework is applied in a schematic diagram. It draws upon the outcomes of the nursing practice study referred to throughout this paper, in order to illustrate the key critical realist methodological principles discussed above. In essence it represents a combination of [Margaret S.] Archer’s morphogenetic cycle (structure, interaction and structural elaboration) ….”

[Iain Crinson, “Nursing Practice and Organisational Change Within the NHS: A Critical Realist Methodological Approach to the Analysis of Discursive Data.” Methodological Innovations Online. Volume 2, number 2, 2007. Pages 32-43.]

“… this article asserts that most research already implicitly assumes an ontology compatible with the critical realist natural and social realism as well as the concepts of structures and generative mechanisms. This is not a surprise as critical realism emerged in part through the study of scientific practice.…

“… the critical realist notion of tendencies makes possible the reconceptualization of the technological determinism vs. the social construction of technology debate, effectively dissolving it. It is dissolved because the approach to knowledge accumulation it proposes asserts the importance of incorporating knowledge gained from each perspective.”

[Matthew Longshore Smith, “Overcoming theory-practice inconsistencies: Critical realism and information systems research.” Information and Organization. Volume 16, issue 3, 2006. Pages 191-211.]

“As firms act to meet competitive challenges, they separately vary their exposure to objectively real risks, and their subjective risk perceptions. Hence the ‘fit’ between each firm’s subjective risk map and its objective ‘riskscape’ is in constant flux. Realist thought, which emphasizes the separateness of mind from external reality, and sets itself the slow and painstaking task of improving the fit between the two, is therefore universally relevant for risk management. This simple ‘risk realism’ has value for academics wishing to analyse risk management practice and can provide useful working assumptions and procedural guidelines for practitioners.…

“Notably, competitive players themselves stand to benefit from greater mindfulness of this simple realist warning. Firms do not frame the competitive environment similarly …, neither do they have similar perceptions of those properties of the competitive environments that we might equate with ‘risk.’

“… Realists accept that how we perceive the world is highly dependent on pre-existing explanations of reality, even if those explanations are partial or unrealistic ….”

[Udechukwu Ojiako, Alasdair Marshall, Michelle A. Luke, and Max Chipulu, “Managing Competition Risk: A Critical Realist Philosophical Exploration.” Competition and Change. Volume 16, number 2, April, 2012. Pages 130-49.]

“This paper examines a type of voluntary risk-taking, orientation to risk and risk rhetoric, which we call ‘go(ing) for it.’ ….

“… ‘Go for it’ is an instruction to proceed, overcome hesitancy and capitalize on the present. In this lies its rationality, it recognizes that the demand for final certainty is paralysing and that reason needs supplementing with ‘character,’ ‘confidence’ and ‘commitment’. A go for it orientation demands the manifestation of a battery of virtues such as courage, emotional self-control and faith, which all contribute to the practical business of continuing to live despite the absence of guarantees. It is this relation between taking risks and constituting social virtues which is of fundamental importance for the positive reorientation of risk analysis.”

[John Parker and Hilary Stanworth, “‘Go for it!’ Towards a critical realist approach to voluntary risk-taking.” Health, Risk & Society. Volume 7, number 4, December 2005. Pages 319-336.]

“In order to analyze the possibility of an ontology of risk, one must first reckon with the concept of risk itself – its definition, if you will, absent the ontological question.… Risk is not a material thing, but an unrealized potentiality which is changed the moment the microscope of science is trained on it, the moment it is measured. In addition, by its own definition, risk is a normative assertion – it is a moralizing statement.…

“… one ontological understanding of risk for naturally occurring phenomena and one for the result of human practice is precisely what leading critical realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar advocates as a necessary precondition to account for what he terms the transitive qualities of the social ….”

[George S. Rigakos and Alexandra Law, “Risk, Realism and the Politics of Resistance.” Critical Sociology. Volume 35, number 1, 2009. Pages 79-103.]

“Risks are not, in-and-of-themselves, material things. Rather, they are statements of probability relating to future possible events …. [R]isks are not ontological statements. Instead, statements of risks are epistemological – they express estimates of future possible events.

“This position is guided by the philosophical postulates of critical realism …. According to Roy Bhaskar (arguably the leading proponent of this philosophical position), knowledge is, and will always be, socially mediated, to various degrees. Yet, in making this declaration, he is not reducing all of reality to a mere social construction. There is, for Bhaskar, an independent material reality – what he refers to as the ‘intransitive dimension’ – in which exist deep structures and causal tendencies. Bhaskar arrives at this position by way of transcendental deductive reasoning – by, if you will, standing [Immanuel] Kant (and his transcendental idealism) on his head.”

[Michael S. Carolan, “Risk, Trust and ‘The Beyond’ of the Environment: A Brief Look at the Recent Case of Mad Cow Disease in the United States.” Environmental Values. Volume 15, number 2, 2006. Pages 233-252.]

“Following an analysis of the concepts epiphenomenalism and elisionism, it is suggested that emergentist Realist Social Theory captures or describes a more coherent explanatory vision of social reality than other perspectives and nurse researchers are advised to consider its potential.…

“… this paper rejects the idea that ST [structuration theory] (an elisionary theory) represents an advance upon earlier individualist and structural (epiphenomenal) approaches. An alternative realist (emergentist) form of social theory is outlined which, it is claimed, better describes social reality.…

“Emergentism is a key concept in realist theory. For [Margaret S.] Archer, the concept describes the manner in which structure and agency (the parts and the people) are both ‘emergent strata of social reality’ …

“Several critical realist and analytic dualist themes are hereby introduced or suggested which enable morphogenetic theory to avoid explanatory conflation while recognizing the stratified, open, and nomic (undetermined) nature of causation in social reality.”

[Martin Lipscomb, “Rebutting the suggestion that Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory offers a useful framework for sociological nursing research: a critique based upon Margaret Archer’s Realist Social Theory.” Nursing Philosophy. Volume 7, issue 3, July 2006. Pages 175-180.]

“… [Charles Sanders] Peirce famously developed the notion of abductive inference or hypothesis making … and, likewise, critical realists valorise retroduction and retrodiction (forms of abduction) as key elements in the research process …. However, here the direction of their paths begins to separate.… Bhaskarian realism also requires that ideas about the world be supported by evidence. Yet because critical realism rejects, most forcefully in the social realm, the feasibility of establishing causal laws as traditionally understood in the physical sciences (the term nomic law is preferred), formal deductive and inductive testing is problematised. The important thing to recognise here is that despite close working similarities between Peircean pragmatism and critical realism, their methods of working, of inference making, are not necessarily coterminous.” [Martin Lipscomb, “Critical realism and realist pragmatism in mixed method research: the problematics of event identity and abductive inference.” Presented at American Educational Research Association Conference. New Orleans, Louisiana. April 8th–12th, 2011. Retrieved on February 22nd, 2016.]

“Although there is a somewhat pluralist conception of the political, behind it there is a conception of society as a structure of structures in which some are more important, more fundamental than others. The notion of a stratified reality in which different levels operate autonomously and inter-relate and in which some are more fundamental in their impact is derived from the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar ….

“… it … remains to identify the mechanisms by which social movements work and have the effects that they do. There is, at the moment, something of a consensus among scholars around a new synthesis which draws upon, and moves beyond, the competing schools of the 1970s. This model identifies the elements that combine to make a particular social movement a force in society.”

[Graham Willett, “‘Proud and Employed’: The Gay and Lesbian Movement and the Victorian Teachers’ Unions in the 1970s.” Labour History. Number 76, May 1999. Pages 78-94.]

“Security privatization takes several forms. They vary between societies and groups: security services can be purchased by states that employ private armies and by citizens who rent security guards; security goods, from alarms to Alsatians, likewise, constitute a growing market. This article looks at one specific form of private security, a combination of goods and services, perhaps a security lifestyle: ‘gated communities.’ …

“… The approach and method applied here, which is related to critical realism … and critical discourse analysis ….”

[Sven Bislev, “Privatization of Security as Governance Problem: Gated Communities in the San Diego Region.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. Volume 29, number 5, November–December 2004. Pages 599-618.]

“It is probably fair to say that ‘securitization’ was foremost a broad conceptual move. It went beyond conceptualizing security in objectivist terms – where threats are threats, security is security, and taking a careful look at political reality is all that is needed.…

“…I suggest that ‘securitization’ has been and can be coherently used as a causal mechanism.…

“… Consistent with the approaches adopted by critical realists and constructivists, it [‘the approach to causal mechanisms presented in this article’] takes a different understanding of causality (in a non-regular manner) and breaks out of the positivistic blackmail that asserts that explanation is either positivistic or no explanation at all.”

[Stefano Guzzini, “Securitization as a causal mechanism.” Security Dialogue. Volume 42, number 4-5, 2011. Pages 329-341.]

“… a critical realist approach to decision research is sketched out in … detail, using examples of decisions involving risk and uncertainty in both experimental and real world contexts. Mainly, the cognitive processes and mental representations underlying such decisions are discussed, as this is central to a critical realist perspective at the psychological level. Finally, some of the challenges that a decision research programme taking a critical realist approach might face are discussed, and it is compared to alternative broad approaches to decision research.” [Rob Ranyard, “A Critical Realist Perspective on Decisions Involving Risk and Uncertainty.” Polish Psychological Bulletin. Volume 45, number 1, 2014. Pages 3-11.]

“A CRITICAL REALIST APPROACH TO THEORY USE

“… [Roy] Bhaskar’s critical realist argument [is] that a theory is ‘better’ if it provides the ability to explain an organizational situation in more depth.”

[Philip J. Dobson, “Longitudinal Case Research: A Critical Realist Perspective.” Systemic Practice and Action Research. Volume 14, number 3, 2001. Pages 283-296.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar argues that the primary measure of the ‘goodness’ of a theory is in its explanatory power—from Bhaskar’s perspective, predictive use of theories is not possible in open social systems and therefore cannot be a measure of ‘goodness.’ From this point of view theory can only be used as an explanatory tool—explaining events in hindsight, with the predictive use of theory limited to identifying likely ‘tendencies.’” [Philip J. Dobson, “The Philosophy of Critical Realism—An Opportunity for Information Systems Research.” Information Systems Frontiers. Volume 3, number 2, June 2001. Pages 199-210.]

“This article suggests that the investigation of in-depth case studies requires firstly that the researcher addresses whether the research should involve description or explanation. Description suggests the adoption of an idealist philosophy whilst explanation suggests a realist approach. Once the decision to adopt description or explanation is made, the choice of theory then often comes down to the use of a grounded theory approach (no theory), a single theory, or multiple theories. Each of these approaches suggest different underlying assumptions regarding the research process and the research object under investigation.…

“Both approaches are from within an interpretive perspective, highlighting the importance of interpretation in research. An alternative approach is to argue that the research situation itself will suggest appropriate theories – a framework suggesting the importance of structure and agency is proposed …. This framework basically relies upon a critical realist perspective on research … – a perspective which attempts to recognise the subjective nature of knowledge and argues for the presence of underlying deep mechanisms and enduring structures within the social world.”

[Philip J. Dobson, “Approaches to Theory Use In Interpretive Case Studies – a Critical Realist Perspective.” Proceedings of the 10th Australasian Conference on Information Systems. December 1st–3rd, 1999. Wellington, New Zealand. Beverly Hope and Pak Yoong, editors. Pages 259-270. Retrieved on October 12th, 2016.]

“… a critical realist perspective on emancipation …

“For the critical realist emancipation involves the transformation of pre-existing social structures by self-determining agents.…

“For the critical realist it is not enough simply to identify the inequitable structures [although this Is a vital component of emancipatory practice), there also needs to be a practlcal commitment ….

“… For the realist emancipation is more than simply improving conditions within existing structural arrangements, emancipation implies the transformation of structures ….”

[Philip J. Dobson. Moving from interpretivism to critical realism in IS research: an exploration and supporting IT outsourcing example. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Edith Cowan University. Perth, Western Australia. January, 2003. Pages 264 and 270-271.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar himself tends to argue on an ontological level (he asks what kinds of entities – natural and social – exist) rather than on an epistemological one (that is, asking what different ways there are of arriving at knowledge). There are good reasons for this. If scientific method does not differ essentially from other ways of determining the probable truth of a state of affairs, then it is hard to see how there can be competing epistemologies.…

“… any investigator considering the available evidence should reach the same conclusion regardless of their age, gender, race or sexual persuasion. That is what we mean by objective truth.”

[Roger Caldwell, “How to Get Real.” Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. Issue 42, December 2015/January 2016. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The purpose of this paper is to argue that the school of thought known as Critical Realism and the thinkers involved in the current revival of interest in British Idealism would benefit from interacting with each other.…

“… my goal has … been … to indicate that the affinities between Critical Realism and Idealism, at least as it was understood in Britain around the turn of the last century, are striking, and that a ‘dialectical dialogue’ between these two viewpoints holds much promise. Since Lawson’s project holds out the best hope of rescuing economics for empty formalism, this dialogue should be pursued.” [Gene Callahan, “Critical Realism … or Critical Idealism?” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 37, number 11, September 2010. Pages 867-879.]

“… causal powers can reside at levels that emerge out of prior levels, which means, of course, that explanation by mechanisms does not imply reductionism …. We should be clear on what this means. To hold out the prospect of social explanation by conceptual and/or semiotic mechanisms does not represent an attempt to decouple these systems from material factors. What it does mean is that conceptual and/or semiotic systems can, potentially at least, play a role in social explanation; and themselves be subject to explanation.…

“… if as [Roy] Bhaskar … puts it, the aim of science is ‘the production of the knowledge of the mechanisms of the production of phenomena in nature that combine to generate the actual flux of phenomena of the world,’ then it follows that we can derive an account of laws not embedded within the covering-law model ….”

[Colin Wight, “Theorizing the Mechanisms of Conceptual and Semiotic Space.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 34, number 2, June 2004. Pages 283-299.]

“… rather than using one or another reductionist explanation for disability or other health issues, health is better understood as a laminated system in which generative mechanisms operate simultaneously at various levels (biological, social and psychological). Further, they argue that the importance of any particular factor varies from case to case. It is only by talking to people, I argue, that we can understand the temporal order and relative weight of various factors influencing mental illness. We can generalize about the factors involved in disability but need not construct a theory that specifies the interaction of variables across all or many cases.” [Margarita A. Mooney, “Human Agency and Mental Illness.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 4, 2016. Pages 376-390.]

“A critical realist position makes the project of this book possible and meaningful, though ambitious. I set out to compare various theories of the workings of the human mind with reference to their social assumptions and their political implications. I do this in the belief that both social theorists and political activists need to be informed by psychological theory. If they are not using psychological assumptions openly and deliberately, they will do so covertly and unawarely.” [Caroline New. Agency, Health And Social Survival: The Ecopolitics Of Rival Psychologies. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Pages 21-22.]

“Oppression militates against awareness of many aspect of social reality, while at the same time making the oppressed super-sensitive to some of the detailed mechanisms through which their mistreatment takes place. To the extent that invalidating messages enter the process of the construction of subjectivity, people have to address their own oppression as members of whichever groups, before they can realistically take on wider issues. Indeed, the recognition and naming of oppressive social relations is part of the awareness of reality, essential to realistic ecopolitics. Ecological movements that hardly include women, that have no specific understanding of how women’s position affects and is affected by environmental degradation, are seriously limiting the power of their analyses – as well as their ability to recruit women to their ranks.

“The radical suggestion that specific oppressions have to be addressed before wider ecological issues can be taken on … is reminiscent of [Abraham] Maslow’s hierarchy of needs …. I shall discuss in the last section of this chapter the seeming implication of all deficit models, that the more privileged are inevitably healthier and more effective ecopolitical agents and reconsider there the other radical position that being the agent of oppression also gravely interferes with awareness of inner and outer reality.”

[Caroline New. Agency, Health And Social Survival: The Ecopolitics Of Rival Psychologies. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Pages 227-228.]

“Very little research has attempted to examine accounts of causal mechanisms in PPD [postpartum depression].…

“The purpose of this study was to explore underlying causal mechanisms and the interplay of factors that explain postpartum mental health and illness using a critical realist approach. Critical realism acknowledges the causal importance of personal or agency factors (e.g. motivation, experience, meaning) and contextual or structural factors (e.g. place, cultural norms, gender inequalities) in influencing health outcomes, and the interplay of these factors ….”

[Wendy Sword, Alexander M. Clark, Kathleen Hegadoren, Sandra Brooks, and Dawn Kingston, “The complexity of postpartum mental health and illness: a critical realist study.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, number 1, March 2012. Pages 51-62.]

“… ‘mind’ is conceived here as a real, ontologically emergent property. Its distinctive property is consciousness, generated in the first instance by unconscious, non-conscious and conscious psychological mechanisms.…

“… the underlying mechanisms that explain consciousness are both deeper than andmore extensive than consciousness itself. They encompass a range of psychological mechanisms, which together constitute the irreducible ontological character of mind.…

“… The fact that many psychological mechanisms are specific to certain societies and cultural systems is sufficient indication of the supervening influence of the social on the psychological.”

[Ian Moll, “Psychology, Biology and Social Relations.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 1, August 2004. Pages 49-76.]

“There is a growing interest in critical realism (CR) in Information Systems (IS) research. This paper presents and discusses how critical realism can be an alternative philosophical underpinning for IS research. It briefly presents critical realism and how it can be used in IS research. Contemporary examples of how CR have been used in IS research are presented and discussed. The future use of CR in IS research is also discussed.” [Sven A. Carlsson, “Critical Realist Information Systems Research in Action.” Researching the Future in Information Systems. Mike Chiasson, Ola Henfridsson, Helena Karsten, and Janice I. DeGross, editors. Secaucus, New Jersey: Springer Science+Business Media. 2011. Pages 269-284.]

“An alternative to traditional positivistic models of social science as well as an alternative to post-approaches and post-theories is critical realism (CR). CR argues that social reality is not simply composed of agents’ meanings, but that there exist structural factors influencing agents’ lived experiences. CR starts from an ontology which identifies structures and mechanisms through which events and discourses are generated as being fundamental to the constitution of our natural and social reality. This article briefly presents CR and exemplifies how it can be used in IS research.” [Sven A. Carlsson, “Critical Realist Information Systems Research.” Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology. Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, editor. Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global. 2009. Pages 811-816.]

“This paper presents and discusses how critical realism can be an alternative philosophical underpinning for IS [information systems] research. It briefly presents critical realism and how it can be used in IS research. Contemporary examples of how CR [critical realism] have been used in IS research are presented and discussed. The future use of CR in IS research is also discussed.” [Sven A. Carlsson, “Critical Realist Information Systems Research in Action.” Future IS. 2011. Pages 269-284.]

“This paper points out some limitations and weaknesses in the current IS [information systems] design science research frameworks and suggests that critical realism (CR) could be a fruitful philosophical underpinning for IS design science research and an IS design science framework. We presented a framework based in critical realism and having a broader view on what types of knowledge IS design science research should produce. This broader view is a direct consequence of that we do not just focus the IT [information technology] artefact, but instead focus IS.” [Sven A. Carlsson, “Developing Information Systems Design Knowledge: A Critical Realist Perspective.“ The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methodology. Volume 3, issue 2. Pages 93-102.]

“They [the essays] examine how philosophers who have recognised the importance of antinomy (not necessarily by that name) have treated it. They think about how law in its Western liberal form fits within a broader philosophical context. The philosophers discussed in this part are predominantly in the modern dialectical tradition inaugurated by Hegel …, but [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s particular contribution to that tradition is read alongside that of [Theodor] Adorno … and [Roy] Bhaskar …. These three dialecticians are also brought into dialogue with the deconstructionist [Jacques] Derrida, who, I argue, is himself to be located within the dialectical tradition … The overall aim is to think about the conflict in critical legal theory between historical and ethical approaches. More specifically, how can questions of ethics, often treated as metaphysical, suprahistorical questions, be brought together with a socio-historical analysis, which often denies the significance of a metaphysical approach? The nature of the conflict between these two approaches is addressed in discussion of dialectical and deconstructive theory. Before moving on, let us identify this conflict between a metaphysical-ethical and a socio-historical critique more directly.” [Alan Norrie. Law and the Beautiful Soul. Portland, Oregon: Cavendish Publishing. 2005. Page 19-20.]

“His [Alan Norrie’s] overarching theme is the relationship between law and ethics. Law and the Beautiful Soul provides explorations of this theme in relation to legal theory and legal critique, and in relation to concrete dilemmas of reconciling law with moral demands. Underpinning and structuring these explorations of theoretical and practical legal dilemmas are, Norrie tells us, four key ideas. First, that western liberal law is essentially contradictory (or antinomial, in Norrie’s preferred term); second, this antinomialism is shaped by the socio-historical context of liberal law’s development, a context in which structural conflicts and contradictions are key elements. Moving from the nature of liberal law to the relationship between law and ethics, Norrie’s third key idea is that this sociohistorical shaping of law limits its ethical character and import; fourth, conversely law itself structures and limits the ethical possibilities in western liberal societies.” [Barbara Hudson, “Law and the Beautiful Soul.” Review article. Punishment & Society. Volume 8, number 2, April 2006. Pages 235-247.]

“… survivor guilt can operate to indicate a deep sense of metaphysical guilt in the human condition, and the argument has been that this conception can operate to ground a Jaspersian response to an Arendtian question. But, as noted above, we move here between two forms of actual, worldly guilt: that of the camp survivor (the victim) and that of the war criminal (the perpetrator), and these are two very different people.” [Alan Norrie, “Critical Realism and the Metaphysics of Justice.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 4, 2016. Pages 391-408.]

“A critical realist approach to BME [black and minority ethnic] entrepreneurship can and should draw variously on the perspectives outlined above [ethnic communities perspective, mixed embeddedness perspective, and Bourdieuan perspective].…

“This paper has aimed to offer some theoretical and methodological contributions to the debate about BME entrepreneurship. Theoretically, we have offered a critique of existing perspectives in this debate from the point of view of RST [realist social theory]. We have also outlined what a critical realist position can add. Existing perspectives were found to be wanting because they lack a rich view of social agency, which RST extrapolates. As a consequence, the paper has outlined how the use of RST might result in better analyses of the bricolage [construction] of BME entrepreneurs.”

[Steve Vincent, Rob Wapshott, and Jean Gardiner, “Putting the Agent into Research in Black and Minority Ethnic Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 4, August 2014. Pages 368-384.]

“I am in agreement with the principal tenets of critical realism, which I believe to be one of the most promising forms of scientific realism to have emerged in recent years, and the criticisms that I will make in this paper are therefore intended to strengthen rather than undermine this philosophical approach.…

“The modular nature of mechanism-based accounts is fully compatible with statistical techniques such as Structural Equation Modelling. Just as individual mechanisms can be combined theoretically (or ‘concatenated’) in order to provide a more complete account of a phenomenon, Structural Equation models can incorporate variables or structures that represent distinct generative mechanisms.”

[Jonathan Pratschke, “Realistic Models?: Critical Realism and Statistical Models in the Social Sciences.” Philosophica. Volume 71, 2003. Pages 13-38.]

“Roy Bhaskar … suggests that we should adjudicate between rival theories on the basis of their explanatory power, arguing that scientific explanation always comprises a process of abduction in which we hypothesize the existence of mechanisms or structures which could account for the phenomenon under study. Thus, in explaining the NATO war, we will inquire about the motives underlying Western intervention, the interests at stake, the nature of nationalism in the Balkans and the conflicts between the different actors involved.” [Jonathan Pratschke, “Kosovo, Imperialism and the Left: A Stratified Analysis of Responses to NATO’s War.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 2, issue 2, July 1999. Pages 14-19.]

“The process of discovering transdisciplinary ontology of Information Systems can be implemented by deploying a transcendental realism in ontology. The mentioned process aligned with considering the technological side of Information Systems as part of the core subject can change researchers view to the Information Systems. By changing the old view, researchers can relieve from the current diversity in the analysis of phenomenon of Information Systems resulted by the island form of theories and the difference in level or layer of approaching Information Systems.” [Amir Manian, Esmael Salahi Parvin, and Mohammad Hossein Sherkat, “Critical Realism in Transdisciplinary Information Systems Theorizing.” International Journal of the Humanities. Volume 19, number 4, 2012. Pages 33-53.]

“Like CR [critical realism], CHAT [Yrjö Engeström’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory] places evolving consciousness at the heart of human development ….” [Maureen Ellis. The Personal and Professional Development of the Critical Global Educator. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The University College of London Institute of Education. 2013. Page 55.]

“A critical realist (CR) perspective offers ontological (What is real?), epistemological (What can we know?) and axiological (What do we value?) bases as a foundation for an ecological humanism. In this way, CR helps harmonise the polyphony of global voices, towards coherent personal and professional development. CR ontology argues that ‘given that Science does or could occur, the world must be a certain way’ …. CHAT’s [cultural-historical activity theory’s] Rules allow consideration of systemic regulations, routines and resources which legitimise GE [global education], highlighting Discourse as a generative ideological power.” [Maureen Ellis. The Personal and Professional Development of the Critical Global Educator. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The University College of London Institute of Education. 2013. Pages 59.]

“… the discussion moves from CR [critical realist] philosophy to supporting critical socio- and psycho-linguistic theories, some practical discourse strategies and, eventually, to implications for CHAT [cultural historical activity theory] as an analytical framework for self- and negotiated evaluation of critical global educators. Drawing on interdisciplinary roots in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, psychology and the natural and social sciences, CR is prone to abstract conceptualisation, terminological mystification and accusations of density. Finally, the chapter turns to some limitations of CR and difficulties facing practitioners who might want to adopt a CR perspective in critical global praxis.” [Maureen Ellis. The Critical Global Educator: Global citizenship education as sustainable development. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Google Play edition.]

“The model … offers a Way, holistically incorporating transmissive, transactional and transformational Citizenship, towards ‘freedom’ as political efficacy. Critical Realism’s realist ontology, relativist epistemology, and moral judgemental rationality are encapsulated in [Yrjö] Engeström’s Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Centred on the semiotic, meaning-making, evolving stream of human consciousness, it integrates Citizenship for personal responsibility through civic republicanism to political justice for all.” [Maureen Ellis, “Personal and Professional Development of Critical Global Citizens.” Paper presented at Wayne University. Detroit, Michigan. 2012. Pages 1-14. Retrieved on June 15th, 2016.]

“Contemporary proposals for enhancing food security on the African continent strongly support the introduction and expansion of sustainable agricultural practices. However, little has been said about the learning innovations needed to establish and expand such practices. This article addresses this silence by utilizing the theoretical and methodological tools of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and critical realism to examine three case studies in southern Africa.…

“CHAT is an epistemological theory that posits that learning takes place through collective activities that are purposefully conducted around a common object. It has three main components: the system, learning, and development …. It uses systems-based thinking to gain insights about the real world. It is based on the proposition that learning is a social and cultural process that draws on historical achievements.”

[Mutizwa Mukute and Heila Lotz-Sisitka, “Working With Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Critical Realism to Investigate and Expand Farmer Learning in Southern Africa.” Mind, Culture, and Activity. Volume 19, number 4, 2012. Pages 342-367.]

“In CHAT [cultural historical activity theory] knowledge is viewed as contextual and transformative. It is generated through processes of reflexive investigation and learning. CHAT posits that learning takes place through collective activities that are purposefully conducted towards a common object.… The learning is facilitated by the use of conceptual and material tools, which help the learners to understand the object better.” [Mutizwa Mukute, “Dialectical critical realism and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT): Exploring and expanding learning processes in sustainable agriculture in workplace contexts.” Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change. Leigh Price and Heila Lotz-Sisitka, editors. London and New York: Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 190-211.]

“… [A] new yardstick is to be found in the radically increased societal character and productivity of work. In terms of activity theory, this means that in industrial capitalism it is increasingly difficult for the individual worker to grasp and master the total work activity in which he performs only comparatively small subordinated actions. The sheer volume as well as the technological, economic and organizational complexity of the production process of the plant or firm seem to be absolutely overwhelming for an individual. The whole machinery seems to run by itself, directed by scientific management and planning far beyond the reach of the worker. This immediate appearance gives plenty of nourishment for theories of dequalification.” [Yrjö Engeström. Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit. 1987. Page 118.]

“Critical Realist Activity Theory provides an exemplary contribution to the New Studies in Critical Realism and Education series by showing how the nature of learning is tantamount to the critical realist notion of the dialectic. The science of learning is too important to leave solely to the sciences; it needs philosophy as well.” [Iskra Nuñez. Critical Realist Activity Theory: An engagement with critical realism and cultural-historical activity theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“… the initial objective of Critical Realist Activity Theory (CRAT) is to enrich this level with the introduction of DCR [dialectical critical realism] …. The second objective is, as it has been developed up to now, to argue for a conceptualization of learning as a passage through the Bhaskarian dialectic …. The third objective of CRAT necessitates putting DCR into practice by showing that it can render a superior account of the historical development of concepts that are very important to Activity Theory (AT) (e.g., the concept of contradiction) by providing an in-depth critique of the philosophical roots of [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel and [Karl] Marx from which AT initially stemmed ….” [Iskra Nuñez. Critical Realist Activity Theory: CRAT. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Institute of Education, University of London. London, England. April, 2012. Page 221.]

“… activity theory agrees with [Roy] Bhaskar’s TMSA [transformational model of social activity], the idea that we are always already thrown into a structured social context that we did not create, but one that has real effects on us. This agreement appears in the duality of internalization and externalization as distinctly intertwined processes of socialization. It begins to show how the theoretical leaders of activity theory are starting to move towards critical realism. It is important to clarify that under the externalization–internalization duality, there are actually two dualisms at work. The first dualism is between social structure and agency. The second is between methodological collectivism and methodological individualism.” [Iskra Nuñez, “Transcending the Dualisms of Activity Theory.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 2, 2013. Pages 141-165.]

“Critical realism offers additionally the triad of concepts: ontological realism, epistemic relativity, and the possibility of judgmental rationality, which are collectively known as the holy trinity of critical realism.…

“The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential contribution of critical realism as an underlabourer for mathematics education. To achieve this objective, the critical realist notion of Achilles’ heel critique is drawn upon as a method. In the words of Bhaskar, this method ‘pinpoints the blindspot in a theory, usually at what appears to be its strongest point, and a series of Achilles’ heel critiques constitutes a dialectical phenomenology.’”

[Iskra Nuñez, “Philosophical Underlabouring for Mathematics Education.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14 number 2, April 2015. Pages 181-204.]

“This paper compares critical realism and activity theory, arguing that the two approaches can complement one another in forging a philosophically coherent yet practically attuned materialist framework for understanding IS [information systems] and the way it supports and transforms work activity. The notion of an activity system is presented as a significant development by activity theory of nascent critical realist research into technology and culture.” [David K. Allen, Andrew Brown, Stan Karanasios, and Alistair Norman, “How Should Technology-Mediated Organizational Change Be Explained? A Comparison of the Contributions of Critical Realism and Activity Theory.” MIS Quarterly. Volume 37, issue 3, September 2013. Pages 835-854.]

“Human persons themselves innately have all of the natural equipment to be the persons they are as persons, without any essential contribution from society or culture. Yet they remain radically dependent upon society for their natural personal potential to survive, grow, and thrive.” [Christian Smith. To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2015. Page 11.]

“The first two chapters present my opening case for critical realist personalism.… I argue that human beings as they exist in the world embody a particular constitution—they have a human nature rooted in nature more broadly. Human bodies interacting with their environments give rise through emergence to a constellation of powerful physical and mental capacities. Those capacities endow humans as real causal agents capable of intentionally affecting outcomes in the world. Those causal capacities interact in complex ways to give rise through emergence again to the ‘higher’ level reality of human personhood. Personal being subsists irreducibly at a level of existence that transcends the lower level elements that sustain it, being characterized by properties, abilities, and qualities unique to human personhood proper. In short, human persons are actual, new realities existent in the world and universe, what we might even think of—if we were not so allergic to the term—as embodied soul-like realities, emergent from the material world from which they arose.” [Christian Smith. What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 2010. Pages 15-16.]

“Many American sociologists will not only find it impossible to see the sacred project that sociology is—precisely because my argument above is correct—but they will also be unable to imagine any realistic alternatives. How else, they will wonder, can one be a well-educated, morally astute, politically engaged, world-transforming person and scholar if not by embracing and promoting the sacred project in question? Again, the lack of imagination and education here is evident. There is definitely at least one good alternative sacred project to the one that dominates American sociology. That vision is defined by critical realist personalism, which I and others have elsewhere been developing and defending.” [Christian Smith. The Sacred Project of American Sociology. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Page 199.]

“[John Levi] Martin is influenced by Ernst Cassirer, John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, Kurt Lewin, among others, while I have been shaped by Roy Bhaskar, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Margaret Archer, Andrew Sayer, and a variety of personalists. Martin is a Gestaltly-pragmatist field theorist, while I am trying to work out a critical realist personalism. Critical realism is not hostile to, and in fact on key points agrees with pragmatism, but to be sure, also does have some basic reservations about pragmatism.” [Christian Smith, “Fellow Traveler in Theoretical Frontiers.” Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. Volume 42, number 1, January 2013. Pages 1-16.]

“In this ambitious book [What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up], Christian Smith begins with a number of critiques of conventional social science (hence CSS), by which he means variables-oriented sociology. This has produced a shadow world in which variables, and not persons, are the real agents …, while all that we hold important when we think about ourselves in lived experience is ignored if not contradicted. This undermines any connection between our science and our ethics, and perhaps our ethics altogether.” [John Levi Martin, “Personal Best.” Contemporary Sociology. Volume 42, number 1, 2013. Pages 6-11.]

“I, too, like [Margaret] Archer and [Christian] Smith …, consider the self an ontological particular …. Along with Smith, I am happy to call myself a Personalist.” [Douglas V. Porpora. Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2015. Page 143.]

“Doug Porpora’s excellent book shows in clear prose and close argument why sociology cannot thrive in artificial isolation from philosophy, for it will make and depend upon philosophical assumptions, whether knowingly or not. The book is timely because it may mute the siren call of big data, which sounds innocent and exciting, but merely uses enhanced computing capacity to herd another generation back to sociology’s ancestral home: empiricism.” [Margaret S. Archer, “Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 4, 2016. Pages 425-431.]

“Douglas Porpora’s challenging book is for readers who are devoted to sociology but are troubled by current guiding assumptions and their negative effects. His concerns about American sociology raise questions about how far they apply in Britain too, when there is ever more need for social science to provide convincing valid information for the public and policy makers.

“Porpora summarises many current problems and disconnections in sociology into the following widely held myths. Ethnography and historical narrative can only explore and describe but not explain. Social research should be value-neutral. There is no truth, only relative social constructions. The most important scientific questions are empirical not conceptual. Sociology should replace conscious embodied individual agents with structures, variables, habitus, or with deconstructed or post-human agency. There is no difference between structure and culture or structure and action. And many sociologists can dismiss statistical analysis as being the distinct methodology of positivism.”

[Priscilla Alderson, “Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach.” The Sociological Review. OnlineFirst edition. March, 2017. Pages 1-3.]

“[Christian] Smith’s critical realism turns out to be a sort of nontheistic natural theology that will not admit any of the specifics of the ‘reality’ of human flourishing vis-à-vis the reconciled mode of human social life disclosed in Christ—even if Smith might believe that this constitutes part of what is normatively good for human persons. As such, it seems to me that Smith’s critical realism is insufficiently complex insofar as, a priori, it cannot (or will not) recognize aspects of human social ‘reality.’” [James K. A. Smith, “The (Re)Turn to the Person in Contemporary Theory—A Review Essay.” Christian Scholar’s Review. Volume XL, number 1, fall 2010. Pages 77-92.]

“Christian Smith’s To Flourish or Destruct is a thorough, sustained, and impassioned argument for what the author calls ‘critical realist personalism.’ This is an ontologically based theory of the person that grounds a humanist approach to the social sciences, more specifically sociology (Smith’s discipline). Drawing upon his own previous work, critical realism and Aristotelian ethics, Smith seeks to address three questions. The first is what basic motivations and interests generate and direct human action? The second asks what is by nature good for human beings? The third follows the second. If we identify basic goods for human beings and a tendency that they should pursue these, how do we account for bad actions in the world, actions that, as we know from too much experience, may be destructive and evil?” [Alan Norrie, “To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Latest–articles edition. June, 2017. Pages 1-8.]

“Critical realism is a postpositivist and post-Winchean philosophy of (social) science that was expressed originally in the form I appropriate here by the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar ….

“Post-Winchean means having assimilated the insights but worked past the shortcomings of Peter Winch’s seminal work, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy ….”

[Christian Smith. What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 2010. Page 66.]

“… the central problem of sociology, that of giving an account of the nature of social phenomena in general, itself belongs to philosophy. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, this part of sociology is really misbegotten epistemology. I say ‘misbegotten’ because its problems have been largely misconstrued, and therefore mishandled, as a species of scientific problem.

“The usual treatment of language in textbooks of social psychology shows the inadequacies to which this may lead. The problem of what language is is clearly of vital importance for sociology in that, with it, one is face to face with the whole question of the characteristic way in which human beings interact with each other in society. Yet the important questions are usually left untouched.”

[Peter Winch. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 43.]

“… our position is impeccable. It is not romantic, just rational. It is more scientific than the narrow disciplines that pass for sciences in today’s untransformed academies; because it includes all the science they include plus more. It includes more because it takes a wider view of nature and of social possibilities. Its wider view of nature is a critical realism that takes the object of natural science to be nature itself, as it really is.…

“… now indigenous knowledge systems are leading us back to meta-physics. The path back to metaphysics begins when ‘knowledge’ in the contexts of most human cultures turns out not to be the same as the so-called factual knowledge that modern Western universities mainly produce and disseminate, or at least pretend to produce and disseminate.”

[Howard Richards, “Human Development and the Transformation of the Academy.” Journal of Developing Societies. Volume 27, number 2, June 2011. Pages 201-206.]

“This paper uses a methodology based on the precepts of critical realism, retroductive enquiry and grounded theory to develop a metacompetency model which has the potential to increase the incidence of scientific entrepreneurship.…

“They [scientists and entrepreneurs] also need other higher-order attributes which allow them to relate to opportunities, to communicate within and between the realms of science and business and to lead others towards the realisation of an entrepreneurial vision. These attributes, along with those that are shared by scientists and entrepreneurs, are the underpinnings of metacompetencies.”

[Malcolm B. Menzies, “Researching scientific entrepreneurship in New Zealand.” Science and Public Policy. Volume 39, number 1, 2012. Pages 39-59.]

“Foucauldian and neo-Gramscian approaches enjoy considerable influence in research on the mutations of neoliberal governance in cities. However, both are prone to treating coercion as the antithesis of power, leading them to downplay the coercive modalities of neoliberalism. This paper applies the Gramscian theory of the integral state to correct the bias towards non-coercive power. The integral state rejects the power–violence dualism, depicting coercive and non-coercive modalities of power and counter-power as inhering in capitalist political economy.…

“From the perspective of the integral state, this position [the degeneration of the capitalist state] is unsustainable: not only because it dispenses with any critical-realist theory of crisis but also because it renders coercion invisible as a medium of power and redundant as a modality of counter-power. If coercion is eliminated from the picture, it becomes much easier to argue that the world can be changed without any direct confrontation with state and corporate power.”

[Jonathan Davies, “Rethinking urban power and the local state: Hegemony, domination and resistance in neoliberal cities.” Urban Studies. Volume 51, number 15, November 2014. Pages 3215-3232.]

“A critical realist position was assumed by the researcher, which asserts that there is an underlying reality but that this reality is investigated through subjective perceptions and interpretations ….

“The data collected from the interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. Thematic analysis is a method which allows for the identification, analysis and reporting of themes within a data set. This method provides a flexible approach to qualitative research and analysis ….”

[Jessica L. Douglas and Sally Benson, “Psychological consultation in a paediatric setting: A qualitative analysis of staff experiences of a psychosocial forum.” Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Volume 20, number 3, 2015. Pages 472-485.]

“This study used inductive thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with 40 women across a range of age, race and sexual orientation backgrounds to examine women’s experiences with sex during menstruation.…

“… I relied upon a critical realist framework that contextualized themes and patterns found in the transcripts.”

[Breanne Fahs, “Sex during menstruation: Race, sexual identity, and women’s accounts of pleasure and disgust.” Feminism & Psychology. Volume 21, number 2, 2011. Pages 155-178.]

“TA [thematic analysis] is designed to provide structure and order on a large amount of qualitative or narrative data so that it can be synthesized, interpreted and communicated in a logical manner to the research community …. A search for meanings in the narrative material takes place so as to identify important themes, categories, trends or patterns of concepts to ‘make sense’ of the data ….

“TA is congruent with the philosophical use of critical realism as it extends to the qualitative component or ‘arm’ of this research study …. This position is based on the premise that the critical realist view of the world takes account of subjectivist perspectives of social reality.”

“TA reflects the philosophical tenets of this study in maintaining coherence between its ontology, epistemology, methodology, methods and data analysis …

[Vincent Finn, “The Impact of a Cardiac Rehabilitation Programme (CRP) on the Quality of Life (QOL) of Older Cardiac Patients.” Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Huddersfield. Huddersfield, England. Pages 154-155.]

“Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis …. Due to the exploratory nature of the study, the themes identified were data driven, rather than attempting to test a specific overarching theory. In addition, analysis was conducted using the epistemology of critical realism ….” [Samuel M. Hall-McMaster, Gareth J. Treharne, and Catherine M. Smith, “‘The positive feel’: Unpacking the role of positive thinking in people with multiple sclerosis’s thinking aloud about staying physically active.” Journal of Health Psychology. OnlineFirst edition. July, 2015. Pages 1-11.]

“Our analysis takes a critical realist approach … whereby meaning is understood as constructed through language; however material reality is viewed as constraining the range of possible subject positions available for the individual. We viewed this as an ethical position, as it affirms the embodied reality of living with diabetes while recognizing that these accounts are socially constructed.” [Adam Jowett, Elizabeth Peel, and Rachel L. Shaw, “Sex and Diabetes: A Thematic Analysis of Gay and Bisexual Men’s Accounts.” Journal of Health Psychology. Volume 17, number 3, 2011. Pages 409-418.]

“Following the researcher immersing herself in the data, the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Philosophically and methodologically, the research and the analysis of the data were situated in the contextualist method of critical realism …, which ‘acknowledge the ways individuals make meaning of their experience, and in turn, the ways the broader social context impinges on those meanings, while retaining focus on the material and other limits of reality’ ….” [Karin du Plessis, “Factors Influencing Australian Construction Industry Apprentices’ Dietary Behaviors.” American Journal of Men’s Health. Volume 6, number 1, January 2012. Pages 59-66.]

“My initial interest in asexuality arose through two friends who identified as asexual.…

“The research itself was mixed-methods, combining semi-structured interviews with an open-ended online questionnaire and a thematic analysis of a variety of asexual forums, websites and blogs.”

[Mark Carrigan, “There’s more to life than sex? Difference and commonality within the asexual community.” Sexualities. Volume 14, number 4, August 2011. Pages 462-478.]

“In this analysis, we adopt a critical realist epistemology, which recognises the materiality of the body, and other aspects of experience, but conceptualises this materiality as always mediated by culture, language and politics …. This approach moves beyond the realism-constructionism, or mind-body, divide, and avoids the distinction between the subjective and objective, or mental and physical aspects of experience.…

“… This process follows … a ‘thematic decomposition,’ a close reading that attempts to separate a given text into coherent themes that reflect subject positions allocated to, or taken up by, a person …, with the term ‘decomposition’ indicating that the interview is recognised as a ‘living whole’”

[Jane M. Ussher, Janette Perz, and Emily May, “Pathology or source of power? The construction and experience of premenstrual syndrome within two contrasting cases.” Feminism & Psychology. Volume 24, number 3, 2014. Pages 332-351.]

“Our analysis focused on both semantic and latent features of the data, and we took a critical realist perspective to them. We used a primarily inductive approach to thematic analysis, where codes and themes were developed from the data content. In practice, this meant familiarisation of the survey responses through reading and re-reading, then a recursive coding of the data, where codes were returned to, improved upon, and revised as the coding process proceeded.” [Gareth Terry and Virginia Braun, “‘I think gorilla-like back effusions of hair are rather a turn-off’: ‘Excessive hair’ and male body hair (removal) discourse.” Body Image. Volume 17, June 2016. Pages 14-24.]

“… [There is an] analytical distinctness of relations ….

“… Perhaps it remains apt to describe the properties of wholes as emergent. Emergence, however, will not normally be the quality to emphasize. More generally important is the ontological reality and analytical distinctness of relational properties in the social realm.”

[Douglas Porpora, “On Elder-Vass: Refining a Refinement.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 37, number 2, 2007. Pages 195-200.]

“A … movement that gains influence and power of discernment over the last decades is the critical realist perspective in philosophy of social science according to [Roy] Bhaskar …, [Andrew] Collier … and others.

“Today, it is fashionable to see the person-centered approach in line with a constructivist position, which seems to fit perfectly to social practices like counseling and psychotherapy. There are different traditions of constructivist ideas, but many seem to play down a causal dynamic in the social world.… A critical realist perspective is compatible with a mild constructivist position: The objects of social research are socially produced and concept dependent in themselves while we cannot avoid socially defining them and approaching them in a theory-dependent way in the course of inquiry. But unlike postmodern and constructivist perspectives, it holds a strong ontological realism: There is an ontological objective existence of reality, independent of our beliefs and our knowledge about it.”

[David Haselberger and Robert Hutterer, “The Person-Centered Approach in Research.” Interdisciplinary Handbook of the Person-Centered Approach: Research and Theory. Jeffrey H. D. Cornelius-White, Renate Motschnig-Pitrik, and Michael Lux, editors. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. 2013. Page 331.]

“Person-centered, technology-enhanced learning (PCeL) combines the person-centered approach to learning as stated by Carl Rogers with elements of modern technology …. PCeL aims to provide a climate for significant, whole person learning that addresses learners’ intellect, social skills, personality and feelings within the confines of conventional curricular structures …. Technology is hereby utilized as aid and tool to facilitate and to increase the efficiency of experiential learning.” [David Haselberger and Renate Motschnig, “Students’ perceptions on experiential learning in a person-centered atmosphere.” Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society. English-language edition. Volume 7, number 3, 2011. Pages 63-74.]

“… the old concept of ‘client-centered therapy’ has been transformed into the ‘person-centered approach.’ In other words, I am no longer talking simply about psychotherapy, but about a point of view, a philosophy, an approach to life, a way of being, which fits any situation in which growth—of a person, a group, or a community—is part of the goal.” [Carl Rogers. A Way of Being. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 1995. Google Play edition]

“The process of psychotherapy, as we have come to know it from a client-centered orientation, is a unique and dynamic experience, different for each individual, yet exhibiting a lawfulness and order which is astonishing in its generality.” [Carl Rogers. On Becoming a Person. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 1995. Google Play edition.]

“For more than ten years a group of therapists to whom the labels ‘nondirective’ and ‘client-centered’ have been applied have observed a characteristic process of change in those clients who appear to have been helped by their interviews. This process appears to remain relatively unchanged, though we think that we know better how to create the conditions for it and how to enable it to proceed more deeply. Nevertheless, this relatively stable phenomenon remains the basis of all our thinking.” [Carl Rogers, “A Current Formulation of Client-Centered Therapy.” Social Service Review. Volume 24, number 4, December 1950. Pages 442-450.]

“It has seemed clear, from our clinical experience as well as our research, that when the counselor perceives and accepts the client as he is, when he lays aside all evaluation and enters into the perceptual frame of reference of the client, he frees the client to explore his life and experience anew, frees him to perceive in that experience new meanings and new goals.… To me it appears that only as the therapist is completely willing that any outcome, any direction, may be chosen—only then does he realize the vital strength of the capacity and potentiality of the individual for constructive action.” [Carl Rogers, “The Attitude and Orientation of the Counselor in Client-Centered Therapy.” Paper presented to the Minnesota Chapter of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology. November 4th, 1948. Journal of Consulting Psychology. Volume 13, number 2, 1949. Pages 82-94.]

“It seems to be genuinely disturbing to many professional people to entertain the thought that this client upon whom they have been exercising their professional skill actually knows more about his inner psychological self than they can possibly know, and that he possesses constructive strengths which make the constructive push by the therapist seem puny indeed by comparison. The willingness fully to accept this strength of the client, with all the re-orientation of therapeutic procedure which it implies, is one of the ways in which client-centered therapy differs most sharply from other therapeutic approaches.” [Carl Rogers, “Significant Aspects of Client-Centered Therapy.” American Psychologist. Volume 1, number 10, October 1946. Pages 415-422.]

“… what do I mean by a person-centered approach? For me it expresses the primary theme of my whole professional life, as that theme has become clarified through experience, interaction with others, and research. I smile as I think of the various labels I have given to this theme during the course of my career—nondirective counseling, client-centered therapy, student-centered teaching, group-centered leadership. As the fields of application have grown in number and variety, the label ‘person-centered approach’ seems the most descriptive.

“The central hypothesis of this approach can be briefly stated.… It is that the individual has within him or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering the self-concept, basic attitudes, and his or her self-directed behavior—and that these resources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided.”

[Carl Rogers, “The Foundations of the Person-Centered Approach.” Education. Volume 100, number 2, 2001. Pages 98-107.]

“It could be argued that all the major schools of psychotherapy have phenomenological-based structures that constitute both ontological and ontic descriptions of being. Both [Carl] Rogers’s and [Sigmund] Freud’s metapsychologies arguably represent the kind of blueprint to which [Emily van] Deurzen-Smith referred. These might be considered different views of the noematic core ([Edmund] Husserl …) of human psychology or approximations of the truth or reality of psychological makeup ([Andrew] Collier …). Such perspectives suggest that various therapeutic systems simply use different languages to describe the same psychological phenomenon; I have explored this principle in relation to transactional analysis ….” [John Nuttall, “The Existential Phenomenology of Transactional Analysis.” Transactional Analysis Journal. Volume 36, number 3, July 2006. Pages 214-227.]

“Studying collective identity representations using a critical realist approach enabled the complexity of organizational relations to be captured in a manner that exposes the effects of power dynamics and preexisting cultural and structural entities.… There is room in a body of critical organizational literature for further uses of this approach in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the dynamics existing between volunteers and the organizations that use their services and to inform policy and planning in this area. The findings open the way for dialogue and action for new solutions.” [Christine Stirling and Rosalind Bull, “Collective Agency for Service Volunteers: A Critical Realist Study of Identity Representation.” Administration & Society. Volume 43, number 2, 2011. Pages 193-215.]

“Autopoiesis provides a model of how phenomena (which we may now call social phenomena) emerge from the complex (and non-linear) interplay between the heterogenous (in having unique ontogenies) agents (people) that make it up. Complexity then allows us to explain the resulting dynamics by describing the generative processes that link empirical observation and causal actuality. Social systems can be seen as a specific class of complex systems and it is autopoiesis that clarifies the distinguishing characteristics of this class, in particular the linguistic/reflexive character of social agents.

“In the synthesis of autopoiesis and complexity we have a basis for understanding the mechanics and dynamics of sociality. The two are linked in that it is possible to demonstrate the basis for common epistemological and ontological roots and implications. Together they suggest an adoption of ontological realism and epistemological relativism and hence a position consistent with the philosophy of critical realism.”

[Chris Goldspink and Robert Kay, “Bridging the micro–macro divide: A new basis for social science.” Human Relations. Volume 57, number 5, 2004. Pages 597-618.]

“… the book operates on two levels. The first, a mostly modest project, involves transposing many of the ideas and insights of critical realism into the criminological enterprise. The second level is more ambitious: it aims to fashion a fairly fundamental critique and rethink of the direction of criminology itself. The ultimate aim is to reestablish realist criminology and contribute to the development of a more critical and progressive approach to crime and punishment; an approach aimed at reducing suffering, abuse, exploitation and victimisation while improving the operation of the criminal justice system and thereby contributing to the goal of achieving greater social justice. These ideals may be lofty, but they are achievable, although they require a major rethink of how theory, methods and practice are linked.” [Roger Matthews. Realist Criminology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2014. Page 10.]

“A significant contribution that realist criminology has made to an understanding of the process of the construction of ‘crime’ has been presented through its model of the ‘square of crime.’ In this form of analysis it has been argued that the construction of the concept of ‘crime’ involves at least four component parts – the offender, the victim, the state and state agencies, the general public and social norms. The fact that so few criminologists have recognised or adopted this or a similar model and that even fewer incorporate two or more dimensions of the ‘square of crime’ in their analysis is symptomatic of the narrow one-dimensional focus of much academic criminology. Very few criminologists who study crime also study punish ment while there are divisions between those who study offenders and those who study victims. This division and fragmentation in the subject is further compounded by those who see themselves as theorists, methodologists and those who focus on policy developments. While some form of a division of labour and specialism is to be expected, the one-dimensional nature of much criminology reduces its potential impact and significance. The aim of critical realist criminology is to develop a more ‘joined-up’ approach that incorporates a grounded social constructionism that avoids the excesses of relativism and idealism.” [Roger Matthews, “Realist Criminology Revisited.” The SAGE Handbook of Criminological Theory. Eugene McLaughlin and Tim Newburn, editors. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2010. Page 201.]

“In this article the aim is to incorporate some of the insights and approaches developed by critical realists into a re-fashioned realist criminology. In doing so the objective is to advocate the development of a criminology that prioritizes the role of theory. In examining the primary role of theory reference will be made to certain organizing concepts such as class, the State and structure, since they are key categories of analysis but appear to have a diminishing currency in academic criminology. Coupled with these reflections on theory there will be some discussion of the methodological approach that has been developed by critical realists, which stand in contrast to the forms of positivism and empiricism that are prevalent in criminology.” [Roger Matthews, “Beyond ‘so what?’ criminology: Rediscovering Realism.” Theoretical Criminology. Volume 13, number 3, 2009. Pages 341-362.]

“Critical realist criminologists share a particular understanding of the broader processes of social ordering (e.g., criminalization, diffusion of norms, marginalization) and structural arrangements (e.g., stratification, integration) that interact to generate both crimes and responses to them as well as ideas about how these processes can be studied.” [Jon Frauley, “Critical Realist Criminology.” Criminology: Critical Canadian Perspectives. Toronto, Ontario: Pearson. 2011. Page 145.]

“The post-empiricist criminology we have in mind is theoretical, ontological, and empirical. It is an informed realist scientific practice influenced by the kind of analysis offered by Roy Bhaskar …. Bhaskar and his interlocutors in the social sciences have had relatively little impact on criminology …. We believe that critical realism holds important insights for the nature of social reality and could strengthen and enhance critical criminology taking it beyond the mistaken impasse of quantitative-versus-qualitative enquiry.” [George S. Rigakos and Jon Frauley, “The Promise of Critical Realism: Toward a Post-Empiricist Criminology.” Critical Criminology in Canada: New Voices, New Directions. Vancouver, British Columbia: UBCPress. 2011. Page 244.]

“The quintessential contribution of Realist Criminology is to reassert causal explanation as the rationale for criminology as a distinctive and coherent intellectual project. In support of this, the book provides an exposition of familiar criticisms of the positivist search for ‘independent’ variables that reduce the causes of crime to the biology, personalities and/or social contexts of offenders – including the recent renaissance of experimental criminology.” [Adam Edwards, “Realist Criminology.” Review article. Criminal Justice Matters. Volume 99, issue 1, March 2015. Pages 26-27.]

“The purpose of this article is not to criticise [Roger] Matthews’ failed attempt to re-define the dimensions of a realist criminology. The book itself was mostly enjoyable to read, even though I kept whispering under my breath, continuously, in regard to the concept of place, ‘you’re so close, Roger, but you missed it again.’ Instead, it is to take advantage of the shortcomings in Matthews’ … Realist Criminology to bring special consideration to what ought to be the pivotal role of a realist, critical theory of place within criminology and, conversely, of place in critical criminology.” [Joseph F. Donnermeyer, “Without Place, Is It Real?” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Volume 5, number 3, 2016. Pages 27-40.]

“A school of philosophy situated in the empirical, and thus friendly to biosocial criminology, is critical realism. Critical realism maintains that events are created by interacting mechanisms at different levels from the physical to the social ‘all the way down [reductionism] – and all the way up [emergence] as well’ …. This is also a description of how biosocial criminology views ‘events.’ Critical realism actually believes there is a reality out there that points the way to naturalism in social science while retaining a belief in human agency. Roy Bhaskar …, the primary figure in critical realism, maintains that ‘social and natural phenomena are susceptible to explanation in essentially the same way, i.e. scientifically.’” [Anthony Walsh and John Paul Wright, “Biosocial criminology and its discontents: a critical realist philosophical analysis.” Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society. Volume 28, number 1, 2015. Pages 124-140.]

“… critical assessments of biosocial criminology provide us an opportunity to not only discuss and defend biosocial science; it provides us a platform to juxtapose a functional scientific perspective-that is, biosocial criminology-against a perspective that offers little substantive scientific or epistemological value.…

“If we follow any philosophical school at all it is that of critical realism. Critical realism is associated with British philosopher Roy Bhaskar …, and is a philosophy of knowledge that claims the possibility of gaining mind-independent knowledge of the world as it is, not merely as it is subjectively perceived. At the same time, it holds that science is fallible and that our perceptions of reality are functions of the mind, and consequently, that we must always critically reflect on our perceptions. Critical realism maintains that science has the ability to progressively close the gap between our views of the world and reality itself: that is, the chasm between the phenomenal and the noumenal can be bridged incrementally as scientists go about interpreting and reinterpreting their data. This is the ‘realism’ in critical realism; the ‘critical’ element lies in the belief that nothing should go unchallenged; if it isn’t challenged, no reinterpretation is possible and no progress is made.”

[Anthony Walsh and John Paul Wright, “Rage Against Reason: Addressing Critical Critics of Biosocial Research.” Journal of Theoretical & Philosophical Criminology. Volume 7, number 1, January 2015. Pages 61-72.]

“Before it grows out of infancy into an established and important sub-discipline, cultura criminology is in danger of choking on the revived liberal fundamentalism from which today’s radical philosophy is currently trying to break free. Thus, criminology lags behind yet again, losing its chance to play a signifi cant role in the renewed project of deep critique.…

“For us, the first step in a more fruitful direction is to forge stronger connections with critical realist empiricism, focusing on serious and harmful crime throughout advanced capitalism’s social hierarchy, using ethnographic methods to reveal emergent predatory practices rather than focusing on minor illegalities and misdemeanours.”

[Steve Hall and Simon Winlow, “Cultural criminology and primitive accumulation: A formal introduction for two strangers who should really become more intimate.” Crime Media Culture. Volume 32, number 1, 2007. Pages 82-90.]

“The subject’s capacities for practical rationality and valuing are contingent potentials, real emergent possibilities for the developing subject, which depend on conditions in the world for their development. Criminal theory’s insistence that moral autonomy consists of simple, general, formal capacities that exist independently of real conditions and experiences in the world, detached from the subject’s need, suffering, and desire and independently of the opportunities they experience in real life, is unconvincing and should be rejected.… In a distorting and antagonistic social world, moral autonomy must be a much more partial, incomplete, contingent and open-ended affair than the criminal law’s Autonomy Assumption can allow, the idealistic gestures of criminal theory notwithstanding.” [Craig Reeves, “Criminal Law and the Autonomy Assumption.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 4, August 2014. Pages 339-367.]

“Critical realism offers exciting prospects in shifting attention toward the real problems that we face and their underlying causes, and away from a focus on data and methods of analysis. As such, it offers a robust framework for the use of a variety of methods in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and significance of information systems in the contemporary world.

“Although the term critical realism has been used in a number of different traditions, we are primarily concerned with that developed from the foundational work of Roy Bhaskar in the philosophy of science, later extended in the social arena by [other] authors ….”

[John Mingers, Alistair Mutch, and Leslie Willcocks, “Critical Realism in Information Systems Research.” MIS Quarterly. Volume 37, number 3, September 2013. Pages 795-802.]

“That postmodern Marxism and a Deweyan/Bhaskarian perspective share certain assumptions has been noted by advocates of the former …. Both approaches reject the notion of society as a ‘closed’ system governed by an underlying essence or structure; consequently, they view as fundamentally flawed the orthodox Marxist assumption that the laws of motion of the economy determine all social phenomena. In addition to critiquing reductionism, determinism, and historical teleologies, both approaches recognize that knowledge qua social product cannot be evaluated with respect to an extrahuman, absolute standard.…

“Although both approaches posit an ‘open’ social ontology, the postmodern Marxist emphasis on the ceaseless play of changes of social entities goes hand in hand with the notion that social and economic processes are marked by a ‘radical contingency and uncertainty’ …. A Deweyan/Bhaskarian approach does not draw the same conclusions from the critique of determinism and reductionism. Social theories and research have the task of revealing the underlying structures and generative mechanisms of social events; such structures and mechanisms, however complexly they interact with each other, have determinate effects that also can be identified. In the process of understanding structures and their multiple determinations, a provisional ‘hierarchy of causes’ can then be developed.”

[Michael Slott, “An Alternative to Critical Postmodernist Antifoundationalism.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society. Volume 16, number 2, April 2005. Pages 301-318.]

“we can see a range of synchronic and diachronic mechanisms in play which between them initiated and then maintained a situation in which it was and is very difficult for business schools to engage effectively either with their supposed target market – business and organisations – or indeed with wider society which should be the beneficiary, but which is often the victim, of their activities. We should be clear, however, that although the problem is often framed as rigour versus relevance, we do not see it as such …. Rather, the problem is that an inappropriate definition of rigour means that much research must end up being irrelevant.” [John Mingers, “Helping Business Schools Engage with Real Problems: The Contribution of Critical Realism and Systems Thinking.” Working paper number 301, August, 2014. Kent Business School, University of Kent. Kent, England. Pages 1-36.]

“CRITIQUE OF THE USE OF PRA [participatory rural appraisal] METHODS IN INDIA

“The Participatory Methods (popularly known as the PRA method), which came to India a decade ago, claims to have a better answer as opposed to other highly prescriptive model-based development approaches of the past. However, PRA’s claim and the way it is used in development work in India, particularly in the field of health, nutrition, and women’s empowerment, shows that this approach, which claims to be local sensitive, using bottom-up planning, and having a motto of ‘putting the last first’ …, seems to have fallen into the same trap as that of the other positivist approaches.”

[Venkatraman Subramaniyam, “Critical Realism and Development Programmes in Rural South India.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 1, 2001. Pages 17-23.]

“A critical realist perspective on context bridges these paradigmatic traditions [qualitative and quantitative research] and provides the theoretical underpinnings for this paper. Such an approach invites an interrogation of the underlying logic and assumptions without giving primacy to either ‘objective’ facts or lived experiences but rather ‘seeks to situate both in relation to a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms that link them together’ ….” [Nancy Edwards and Erica Di Ruggiero, “Exploring which context matters in the study of health inequities and their mitigation.” Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. Volume 39, supplement 9, 2011. Pages 43-49.]

“The term dialectical materialism is often used derisively within contemporary Western Marxism and has come to symbolize Stalinist dogma. Our intention here is to rehabilitate the term by using it to refer exclusively to those inquiries that can be seen as genuine attempts to employ both dialectical and materialist methodologies in both the natural and the social realms. Materialism without dialectics tends toward mechanism and reductionism. Dialectics without materialism tends toward idealism and vitalism. Genuine dialectical materialism seeks to transcend these antinomies. It thus stands for a critical realism sorely lacking in conventional thought ….” [Brett Clark and Richard York, “Dialectical Materialism and Nature: An Alternative to Economism and Deep Ecology.” Organization & Environment. Volume 18, number 3, September 2005. Pages 318-337.]

“What we hope to demonstrate is the importance of both ontological realism and historical constructionism, synthesized within a critical-realist perspective. We argue that within both natural science and social science (and especially within ecology, which increasingly embraces both), it is essential to retain a realist/materialist view that also embraces an understanding of the human-historical construction of the world within limits. Ultimately, there is no contradiction between the Galileo [Galilei] principle (‘It still moves’) and the [Giambattista] Vico principle (‘We can understand it because we made it’) if each of these is properly understood and delimited. In a slight revision of [Karl] Marx’s principle of historical materialism, we can say human beings make their own history, not entirely under conditions of their choosing but rather on the basis of natural-environmental and social conditions inherited from the past. This is the essence of what has been called ‘the philosophy of praxis.’” [John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2010. Page 291.]

“Our overall analysis here is influenced by Roy Bhaskar’s and Andrew Sayer’s critical realism.” [John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2010. Page 294.]

“The term ‘dialectical materialism’ is often used derisively within contemporary Western Marxism and has come to symbolize Stalinist dogma. Our intention here is to rehabilitate the term by using it to refer exclusively to those inquiries that can be seen as genuine attempts to employ dialectical and materialist methodologies in both the natural and social realms. Materialism without dialectics tends toward mechanism and reductionism. Dialectics without materialism tends toward idealism and vitalism. Genuine dialectical materialism seeks to transcend these antinomies. It thus stands for a critical realism sorely lacking in conventional thought.” [Brett Clark and Richard York, “Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin’s The Dialectical Biologist.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 57, issue 1, May 2005. Pages 13-22.]

“In this paper, I present a Transformational Model of Textual Activity (TMTA) based on an analogy of [Roy] Bhaskar’s TMSA [transformational model of social activity]. I argue that texts (oral or written) are present in daily human action. One way in which individuals can act or interact in the social events is through speaking or writing. The individuals produce texts which are shaped by mechanisms and powers. Can texts produce or transform forms of social life?…

“… According to TMTA, society is understood as a set of the structures, practices and conventions which individuals can reproduce or transform through their texts (oral or written).…

“Following the model, society exists in virtue of the individuals, who can reproduce or transform it. However, this is only possible because of the language.”

[Solange Barros, “Transformational Model of Textual Activity: An Approach Based on Critical Realism and Critical Discourse Analysis.” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies. Volume 1, issue 2, September 2014. Pages 1-16.]

“The task of a critical realist sociology of religion is to conduct theory-informed research in order, first, to sort through which of these hypothesized causal influences is ever operative and, second, to then better understand the more specific causal mechanisms that produce such operative effects of pluralism on religion, the specific kinds of social conditions that trigger different causal mechanisms, variance in the effects of different mechanisms on diverse populations and groups within the same contexts, and the configuration of different outcomes that may result from these causal dynamics.” [Christian Smith, “Future directions in the sociology of religion.” Social Forces. Volume 86, number 4, June 2008. Pages 1561-1589.]

“There is an unreflective but widespread view of religion that takes religion as something that exists independent of the concepts with which it is described. From this perspective, religion has a certain objective character and the scholar’s task is to discover it. Call this view of religion ‘naive realism.’ I believe that in the face of the critique, a naive realism about religion is indefensible. Nevertheless, some of the critics draw the conclusion that ‘there is no such thing as religion’ or ‘there are no religions,’ and I argue that this anti-realist view of religion does not follow from the critique. I seek instead to develop a chastened view of the concept of religion, a critical realism, that takes into account the contribution of the modern western provenance of the concept but nevertheless sees the study of religion as the study of a social reality that is in the crucial respects independent of the scholar.…

“This paper, in describing non-dualist Vedic philosophy and its theory of accountability, draws upon the latest spiritual developments of Roy Bhaskar (2000) in his philosophy of critical realism.” [Samuel David Stewart-Jacks. Sustainable Accountability: A Dualist Vedic Perspective. Thesis, Masters in Commerce and Administration. Victoria University of Wellington. 2008.]

“The purpose of this book is to legitimize the task of ontology within the strictures of critical philosophy and thus to confront the problem of critical ontology.…

“… one might object that this book’s goals have already been met in [Roy] Bhaskar…s work.… I do not think it is immediately clear that the possibility and necessity of critical ontology has been established if Bhaskar’s work is taken as it stands. As modest as it may be, my aim is to remedy this deficiency.…

“… the present work’s task … [is] demonstrating the possibility and necessity of critical ontology ….”

[Dustin McWherter. The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2013. Google Play edition.]

“… it could be said that while [Roy] Bhaskar argues that the empirical realist theory of causal laws is indeed ontological, the transcendental analysis of experimental activity entails that that theory is also false.…

“In this essay I will reconstruct the transcendental analysis of experimental activity from the variety of texts and forms in which it occurs. I think a rigorous reconstruction of Bhaskar’s analysis is very much needed to demonstrate its philosophical force, for wariness towards its arguments is a natural consequence of the often gnomic and enthymematic character of Bhaskar’s articulation of them.”

[Dustin McWherter, “Reconstructing Bhaskar’s Transcendental Analysis of Experimental Activity.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. Volume 8, number 1, January 2012. Pages 199-226.]

“… if … [anti-ontological] epistemologies resist [Roy] Bhaskar’s charge that they produce ‘implicit ontologies,’ they can only explain their supposedly non-ontological standing by either positing being elsewhere to draw a contrast with objects of knowledge, which simply relocates instead of removing ontological commitment, or by assuming ontology to be inextricably grounded in infallibilism, which it will then be incumbent on them to justify.” [Dustin McWherter, “Empirical Realism and the Legitimacy of Ontology: A Dialogue.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 5, October 2015. Pages 449-460.]

“… I criticize non-ontological interpretations of [Immanuel] Kant’s theoretical philosophy. My criticisms of this way of reading Kant are philosophical rather than interpretive in character.” [Dustin McWherter, “Kant, Ontology and Empirical Realism: Response to Assiter.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 5, October 2015. Pages 518-529.]

“… there is a tendency among some non-transcendental philosophers to equate transcendentalism with idealism, anti-naturalism, apriorism, foundationalism, and infallibilism. I concur with [Roy] Bhaskar and others that these equations are false ….” [Dustin McWherter, “Metaphilosophical Naturalism and Naturalized Transcendentalism: Some Objections to Kaidesoja’s Critique of Transcendental Arguments in Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 1, February 2015. Pages 54-79.]

“Like many others, I take critical realism to offer the most viable philosophical assistance to the realization of an eudemonic society. The path I take towards conclusions of this sort in my published work will probably be longer than that taken by others, but it is one I want to tread with care given its superior importance, without forgetting its superior urgency.” [Dustin McWherter, “Roy Bhaskar and post-Kantian philosophy.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 2, April 2015. Pages 119-136.]

“According to [Dustin] McWherter, [Roy] Bhaskar’s work ought to be ‘properly modified’ in order to fulfil its intention of refuting [Immanuel] Kant’s position. As such, the point of The Problem of Critical Ontology is constructive critique of Bhaskar on [Immanuel] Kant in order to further substantiate or support the original purpose of Bhaskar’s argument. That is, to establish that an intelligible world is one of natural necessity and causation that are also significant for what is and what can be conceived as real. Characteristics of the real, including but not restricted to appearance and experience, can be established, despite the requirement that appearance and experience are processed by a mind that must do so according to some conditions of cognition.” [Jamie Morgan, “Necessary and Sufficient in Different Domains of Argument: McWherter on Bhaskar on Kant.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 1, February 2016. Pages 92-106.]

“I think that an assessment of [Immanuel] Kant’s rejection of ontology is particularly relevant to the question of how transcendental idealism should be interpreted.” [Dustin McWherter, “Transcendental Idealism and Ontological Agnosticism.” Kantian Review. Volume 17, number 1, 2012. Pages 47-73.]

“… I … [refer to Roy] Bhaskar’s ‘naturalized transcendentalism’ ….

“… [Tuukka] Kaidesoja contends that naturalized transcendentalism is an unsustainable position since (1) the apriority of its inferences would be challenged by scientific developments, and (2) the denial of this apriority would render naturalized transcendental arguments indistinguishable from scientific explanations, so that there would be nothing distinctively ‘transcendental’ about such inferences. Against this, I will first argue that Kaidesoja does not adequately clarify the difference between the explanatory necessity he advocates and the transcendental necessity he repudiates.”

[Dustin McWherter, “Metaphilosophical Naturalism and Naturalized Transcendentalism: Some Objections to Kaidesoja’s Critique of Transcendental Arguments in Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 1, February 2015. Pages 54-79.]

“… [This article] outlines an emergentist theory of action.…

“… it is perfectly compatible with an emergentist ontology to argue that structures (‘the object’) are made up of agents, thereby inherently including in the structure the knowledge that agents have of the structure by virtue of including the agents as its parts. This knowledge has a central role to play in the interplay of structure and agency, which perpetuates that structure. It is therefore perfectly compatible with the emergentist position to see this knowledge as constitutive of structure.”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “Reconciling Archer and Bourdieu in an Emergentist Theory of Action.” Sociological Theory. Volume 25, number 4, December 2007. Pages 325-346.]

“My aims here are twofold. Firstly, I will advocate the ‘theory of action’ as an example of a theory and empirical practice consistent with the conceptualisation of a depth-investigation. Secondly, I will use this description of the theory and an example of empirical work to resolve the doubts about, and rebut the criticisms of, the emancipatory project of critical naturalism.

“In brief, the theory of action is a normative theory of interpersonal and organisational competence that seeks to identify cognitive mechanisms known as ‘theories-in-use’ that govern action and may, in crucial respects, impede agents’ capacity to accurately identify the causal forces that sustain their social world.”

[Tim Rogers, “The Doing of a Depth-Investigation: Implications for the emancipatory aims of critical naturalism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 2, June 2004. Pages 238-269.]

“… [Roy] Bhaskar’s intent [might be] to emphasise that both power₁ and power₂ are stated in terms of a theory of action; power₁ in terms of general capacity, potential or capability and power₂ in terms of the ways in which those generalised capacities and so on are, in turn, capable of specific social ill. Importantly, neither concept is reducible solely to the agent as such because each entails a structural contextualisation.” [Jamie Morgan, “The Merits of Enumeration.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 6, issue 1, February 2007. pages 117-125.]

“Critical realism is important for IS [information science] because: (i) CR [critical realism] enables us to take a basically realist stance whilst accepting the major critiques of naïve realism; (ii) it addresses both natural and social science and thus encompasses the main domains of IS; and (iii) does potentially fit well with the reality of IS as an applied discipline. In terms of its relation to existing paradigms, it is conventional to split IS into positivist, interpretive and critical although as mentioned in Introduction, it is possible to pick out others as well. In these terms, I would argue that critical realism subsumes all three of them. It points out the limitations of positivism and interpretivism individually whilst recognizing the contribution that research methods from these paradigms can make. It also subsumes critical theory, at least in its traditional Habermasian form, through the idea of the essentially emancipatory and transformative capacity of social science ….” [John Mingers, “Real-izing information systems: critical realism as an underpinning philosophy for information systems.” Information and Organization. Volume 14, issue 2, April 2004. Pages 87-103.]

“In my paper … [‘Real-izing information systems: critical realism as an underpinning philosophy for information systems’], I put forward the case that the philosophical position known as ‘critical realism’ could potentially provide a sound underpinning for information systems. It could do this because it successfully addresses some of the problems that dog information systems philosophy such as: an impoverished view of causalityand explanation within empiricism/positivism; the major critiques of observer- and theory-independence from an interpretive stance; the dislocation between natural and social science; and the radical anti-realist positions adopted by constructivists and post-modernists.” [John Mingers, “Critical realism and information systems: brief responses to Monod and Klein.” Information and Organization. Volume 14, issue 2, April 2004. Pages 145-153.]

“This paper constitutes an extended response to Athanasia Chalari’s paper Causal Impact of Resistance, which suggests that one may derive from internal conversations a causal explanation of resistance. In the context of our engagements with critical realism and digital research into social movements, we review Chalari’s main argument, before applying it to a concrete case: the student protests in London, 2010. Whilst our account is sympathetic to Chalari’s focus on inferiority, we critique the individualism that is implicit in her argument, arguing that it emerges because of an underlying neglect of the relational aspects of resistance. Instead, we offer a relational realist analysis that treats resistance as process within an ontologically stratified account of reality that is mindful of the contingency of political acts.…

“… However our broader aim has been, through a critique of the paper by Chalari, which we found extremely thought-provoking but ultimately flawed, to think through what a relational realist approach to social movements would look like.”

[Thomas Brock and Mark Carrigan, “Realism and Contingency: A Relational Realist Analysis of the UK Student Protests.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 45, issue 3, 2014. Pages 377-396.]

“… this project is a critical realist investigation into the creation of sexual moral law. It is an inquiry which draws on a number of existing traditions of thought, most significantly the philosophical conceptualisations of emergent realism and causality. These traditions with respect to critical realism can provide a model for social reality if they are properly imbued with an empirical history. It is from this juxtaposition that a sociologist can elucidate the conditions for a science of social reality ….

“… Dave Elder-Vass … has developed [Roy] Bhaskar’s notion of ‘real causal powers’ to forward an ‘emergentist’ solution to the problem of structure and agency. This solution is significant for a social science of sexual morality, one which renders explicit the sui generis powers of human agency; that is to say, it can show how human agents can be causally effective. This is necessary for a project which is concerned with those practices or structural forces which give rise to hegemonic experiences …. For it offers a plausible means to answer some important sociological questions, like ‘who is doing what to whom and when and why’ …. It is also essential for a project which is interested in resistance and forms of social change. For it offers a means to conceptualise the causal powers of human agents – like social movement activists – who want to challenge oppressive systems of thought and practice. In viewing the social world as comprising of not only human agents, but also of normative relations or structures, then, this emergent philosophy can show how sexual morality is ‘entwined in a multiply determined dialectic of the diachronic and synchronic, of hegemony and resistance … resistance and hegemony’ ….” [Thomas George James Brock. Against Morality: A Critical Realist Examination of a History of Western Sexual Normativity. An Appeal for Emancipation and Explanation through Emergentist Social Science. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University. Durham, England. 2012. Pages 8-9.]

“The theory of emergent realism … is animated by the production of knowledge from activist experience ….” [Thomas George James Brock. Against Morality: A Critical Realist Examination of a History of Western Sexual Normativity. An Appeal for Emancipation and Explanation through Emergentist Social Science. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University. Durham, England. 2012. Page 275.]

“This thesis has furthered the relationship between the philosophy of emergent realism and a history of norm circles. It has shown that ‘history is thus entwined in a multiply determined dialectic and the synchronic, of hegemony and resistance, resistance and hegemony’ …. It has argued that the engaged intellectual can provide answers to some very practical sociological questions through the combination of critical realism and social constructionism.” [Thomas George James Brock. Against Morality: A Critical Realist Examination of a History of Western Sexual Normativity. An Appeal for Emancipation and Explanation through Emergentist Social Science. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University. Durham, England. 2012. Page 311.]

“The rise of political parties described as ‘populist’ has been widespread throughout Europe in recent years. In many countries such parties now represent a more significant force, in terms of electoral success, than at any time since the end of World War II. Over the past twenty years populism has become a structural feature of most European party political systems, arguably constituting a new party type across the political spectrum ….” [Gary Pollock, Tom Brock, and Mark Ellison, “Populism, ideology and contradiction: mapping young people’s political views.” The Sociological Review. Volume 63, number S2, 2015. Pages 141-166.]

“In the context of our engagements with critical realism and digital research into social movements, we review [Athanasia] Chalari’s main argument, before applying it to a concrete case: the student protests in London, 2010. Whilst our account is sympathetic to Chalari’s focus on interiority, we critique the individualism that is implicit in her argument, arguing that it emerges because of an underlying neglect of the relational aspects of resistance. Instead, we offer a relational realist analysis that treats resistance as process within an ontologically stratified account of reality that is mindful of the contingency of political acts. Taking this route, we establish resistance as an emergent relation, generative of distinctive ‘relational goods’ in the context of collective action, which we locate at different levels of reality, as we move from an analysis of individual to collective reflexivity.” [Tom Brock and Mark Carrigan, “A Relational Realist Analysis of the UK Student Protests.” Abstract. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 45, number 3, 2014. Pages 377-396.]

“… our broader aim has been, through a critique of the paper by [Athanasia] Chalari, which we found extremely thought-provoking but ultimately flawed, to think through what a relational realist approach to social movements would look like. In doing so, our tentative suggestions are orientated towards the thorny issues within social movement research ….” [Tom Brock and Mark Carrigan, “A Relational Realist Analysis of the UK Student Protests.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 45, number 3, 2014. Pages 377-396.]

“This article considers the causal impact of resistance in terms of expressed (recognised or unrecognised) action. It aims to understand, in other words, why different individuals may express dissimilar forms of active opposition when facing common stimuli. Why do individuals produce different discussions about resistance when referring to common acts of resistance? Even more importantly, perhaps: why do individuals perceive resistance in different ways? To answer these questions current social theory will be employed, and in particular the relevant discussion of the relationship between structure and agency or, in other words, how society (or the external world) is connected to the individual (or the inner world).” [Athanasia Chalari, “The Causal Impact of Resistance: Mediating between Resistance and Internal Conversation about Resistance.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 43, number 1, 2012. Pages 66-86.]

“Critical realism was the theoretical underpinning to the study. This theoretical framework, previously used in nursing and maternal–child health research, acknowledges that observable phenomena have multiple casual mechanisms that include biology, societal expectations, and the interface of people and structures. Consistent with this framework, we wanted to study the relationship of the women and the clinic structures and processes, with an emphasis on the woman’s perception of her interface with the clinic and providers.” [Julia C. Phillippi, Sharon L. Holley, Kate Payne, Mavis N. Schorn, Sharon M. Karp, “Facilitators of prenatal care in an exemplar urban clinic.” Women and Birth. Volume 29, issue 2, April 2016. Pages 160–167.]

“The purpose of this research was to provide an explicit examination of inspiration in sport. In Study 1, we explored (a) what inspires athletes in sport, and (b) the consequences of being inspired. The aims of Study 2 were to explore (a) the contexts in which leaders inspired athletes, (b) leader behaviours and actions that inspire athletes, and (c) the consequences of being inspired by leaders.…

“… the design and analysis of the research were consistent with the perspective of critical realism that underpinned these studies. Critical realism proposes that through research it is possible to identify patterns that underpin social phenomena, that these patterns are relatively stable but that the phenomenon in question cannot be fully understood only approximated.”

[Sean G. Figgins, Matthew J. Smith, Christopher N. Sellars, Iain A. Greenlees, and Camilla J. Knight, “‘You really could be something quite special’: A qualitative exploration of athletes’ experiences of being inspired in sport.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise. Volume 24, May 2016. Pages 82–91.]

“Readers with an ontological commitment to critical realism may well be feeling worried at this point. There seems to be a slide towards a linguistic reductionist, or idealist, conception of the world and away from the central concerns of critical realism. However, what is being argued here is that a necessary stress on the importance of language is not incommensurable with critical realism.…

“… I am not suggesting that an analyst can ‘objectively’ get outside of language, but rather that we need to be more reflexive about its use and its material effects, particularly when our writing gets linked up with policy. Perhaps it is at this reflexive moment that … Discourses of discourses of locality ought to be added to the taxonomy.”

[A. C. Pratt, “Discourses of locality.” Environment and Planning A. Volume 23, 1991. Pages 257-266.]

“In this paper, I compare and contrast CR [critical realism] with grounded theory, extended case method, and pragmatism. In doing so, I demonstrate that CR can contribute to causal explanation in ethnographic research in three ways: 1) by linking structure to agency and avoiding the common conflation of the two; 2) by accounting for the contingent, conjunctural and tendential nature of causality; and 3) by using surprising empirical findings to generate new theory, as opposed to reconstructing extant theory. To do so, I develop the AART [abduction, abstraction, retroduction, and testing] explanatory schema, which entails abduction, abstraction, retroduction and testing. This model could be helpful in a wide range of ethnographic settings and allows for the generation of complex multicausal explanations.” [Claire Laurier Decoteau, “The AART of Ethnography: A Critical Realist Explanatory Research Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 47, issue 1, 2017. Pages 58-82.]

“In this article, I suggest that a renovated version of [Pierre] Bourdieu’s habitus provides a more appropriate account of agency than that offered by [Margaret S.] Archer. Without resorting to simplistic dichotomies such as reflexivity versus habit, I draw insights from core tenets of critical realism (CR) (such as emergence, the stratification of social reality and the conjunctural nature of causality) to refurbish the groundwork laid by Bourdieu and offer a new theory of reflexive habitus.…

“For critical realists, socially produced ontological structures exist in these three realms: the empirical (the level of experience), the actual (events caused by a conjuncture of mechanisms of which we only experience a few), and the real (the deepest layer where the generative mechanisms producing the events are found) …. Certain structures, then, have ‘unexercised powers, as well as powers that are exercised but unrealized and powers that are realized but unperceived’ …. On the level of the real, Bourdieu discusses the deep structures of the habitus, which are forged through originary experiences, and which are difficult to challenge.”

[Claire Laurier Decoteau, “The reflexive habitus: Critical realist and Bourdieusian social action.” European Journal of Social Theory. June, 2015. Pages 1-19.]

“Reporting on a study of activists living with HIV/AIDS who give testimonials of their experiences with the disease in various educational settings, this article employs the notion of ‘haunting’ as a means of analyzing the effect of social justice activism in the ‘aftermath’ of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.…

“… This article insists … that an epistemology of haunting refocuses our analytic attention toward invisible causal mech anisms and structural lacks.… This project draws considerable inspiration from the contribution critical realism has made to the critique of positivist social science …. Attention to the invisible, to the absent, to the disappeared, to the Other is particularly important in research and scholarship on HIV/AIDS.”

[Claire Laurier Decoteau, “The Specter of AIDS: Testimonial Activism in the Aftermath of the Epidemic.” Sociological Theory. Volume 26, number 3, September 2008. Pages 230-257.]

“The position taken in this article is that both the continuity and the discontinuity hypotheses are at the same time to a certain extent right and wrong and that we need a dialectical methodology to understand the development of society. Such a methodology stresses that development works through preserving changes at a fundamental level by transformations in the upper levels of the organization of society and that fundamental changes of society can be grounded in aspects and contradictions taking place on the upper levels of the organization of society.

“If one applies a dialectical methodology, the rise of transnational informational capitalism is neither only a subjective, nor only an objective transformation, but is based on a subject–object dialectic.”

[Christian Fuchs, “Capitalism or information society?: The fundamental question of the present structure of society.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 16, number 4, 2012. Pages 413-434.]

“In contrast to reductionistic and relativistic social theories, dialectical social theories (such as the theoretical frameworks provided by Pierre Bourdieu, Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, or Anthony Giddens that are based on a dialectic of structures and agency/human actors) have proved successful in conceiving society as being composed of relative autonomous subsystems that all have their own specificity, but nonetheless depend on each other and influence each other. The subsystems are conceived as distinct and at the same time mutually interdependent, which is the fundamental logical figure of dialectical thinking.” [Christian Fuchs, “Introduction to the special issue on ‘ICTs and Society: PhD Students’ Transdisciplinary Research Projects.’” tripleC: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation. Volume 6, number 2, 2008. Creative Commons. Pages i-vii.]

“The increasing importance of computer networks and global network organizations is an instrumental result of capitalist development. Computer technology and the Internet were invented and introduced not in an economic, but in a military, context. The societal diffusion of these technologies occurred due to their original role in the economic restructuration of capitalism. Computer networks are the technological foundation that has allowed the emergence of global network capitalism: that is, regimes of accumulation, regulation, and discipline that are helping to base the accumulation of economic, political, and cultural capital increasingly on transnational network organizations that make use of cyberspace and other new technologies for global coordination and communication ….” [Christian Fuchs, “A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Transnational Informational Capitalism.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society. Volume 21, number 3, 2009. Pages 387–402.]

“Theories of a new imperialism, empire, and global capitalism have brought about discussions of the economic and political strategies of capitalism and their limits. They therefore have an important public and political function. But in many cases the notions of imperialism employed in these discussions remain rather imprecise … or unexplained …. This might be related to a lack of grounding in classical theories. The discussion of [Vladimir] Lenin’s notion of imperialism remains rather superficial. It is therefore important to review this concept, in order to see if it can be applied today.” [Christian Fuchs, “Critical Globalization Studies: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis of the New Imperialism.” Science & Society. Volume 74, number 2, April 2010. Pages 215-247.]

“A Marxist theory of communication should ‘demonstrate how communication and culture are material practices, how labour and language are mutually constituted, and how communication and information are dialectical instances of the same social activity, the social construction of meaning. Situating these tasks within a larger framework of understanding power and resistance would place communication directly into the flow of a Marxian tradition that remains alive and relevant today’ …. A Marxist theory of communication sees communication in relation to capitalism, ‘placing in the foreground the analysis of capitalism, including the development of the forces and relations of production, commodification and the production of surplus value, social class divisions and struggles, contradictions and oppositional movements’ ….” [Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, “Introduction: Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today.” Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism. Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2016. Pages 1-21.]

“A Marxist theory and analysis of information, media, and communication is interested in these phenomena’s contradictory roles in capitalism. Reading Marx’s Capital can help us to understand these roles and to make sense of informational contradictions today. Marx wrote in German. For the non-German speaker, which is the majority of the world population, the question arises about which translation one should choose. Capital is without a doubt a difficult book. When you read this book as accompanying guide to an exploration of media and communication in Marx’s Capital Volume 1, I recommend that you use Marx’s original work in English, but also have a translation of it in your mother tongue at hand, which can help.” [Christian Fuchs. Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Page 7.]

“Freedom can in line with the critical-realist thinking of Roy Bhaskar … be conceived as the absenting of domination, i.e. the asymmetrical distribution of power, so that humans are included and involved in defining, setting, and controlling the conditions of their lives. It is the absenting of constraints on the maximum development and realization of human faculties.…

“… A critical theory of information questions conditions, in which structural resources such as property, decision-making capacities, value definition-capacities are asymmetrically distributed, certain actors are excluded from participation, and the one derive benefits at the expense of others.”

[Christian Fuchs, “Towards a critical theory of information.” tripleC: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation. Volume 7, number 2, 2009. Pages 243-292.]

“Important topics in the Marxist analysis of digital media and the Internet include …: (1) the dialectics of the Internet; (2) digital capitalism; (3) commodification and digital media’s commodity forms; (4) labour, surplus value, exploitation, alienation and class in the digital age; (5) globalisation and the Internet; (6) ideologies of and on the Internet; (7) digital class struggles; (8) the digital commons; (9) the digital public sphere; (10) digital media and communism; and (11) digital media aesthetics.” [Christian Fuchs, “Marx’s Capital in the information age.” Capital & Class. Volume 41, number 1, February 2017. Pages 51-67.]

“This essay argues for a paradigm shift in the study of the Internet and digital/social media. Big data analytics is the dominant paradigm. It receives large amounts of funding, is administrative and a form of digital positivism. Critical social media research is an alternative approach that combines critical social media theory, critical digital methods and critical-realist social media research ethics. Strengthening the second approach is a material question of power in academia.…

“We cannot assume that social media data analysis can never cause harm and that therefore anything goes. At the same time, privacy fundamentalism risks to paralyse critical social media analysis. A realistic approach is needed. We need critical-realist social media research guidelines that go beyond research ethics fundamentalism and beyond big data positivism.”

[Christian Fuchs, “From digital positivism and administrative big data analytics towards critical digital and social media research!” European Journal of Communication. OnlineFirst edition. January, 2017. Pages 1-13.]

“If we assume that information, media, communication, culture, and technology play an important role in contemporary capitalism, then the critique of these phenomena in contemporary society becomes one of the tasks of a critical theory of society. A critical theory of information, communication, and media therefore is a sub-domain of a contemporary critical theory of society.

“Based on the general notion of critical theory that has already been outlined, we can from a praxeo-onto-epistemological perspective on science … define critical studies of information, communication, and media as studies that focus ontologically on the analysis of information, media, communication, culture, technology in the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations, exploitation, oppression, and control by employing at the epistemological level all theoretical and/or empirical means that are necessary for doing so in order to contribute at the praxeological level to the establishment of a participatory, co-operative society. Given such a definition, critical communication and media studies are inherently normative and political….

“Critical studies of information, media, and communication should be embedded into a broader social science perspective in order to show which position they occupy in the overall field of the social sciences. They should therefore be connected to social theory and social theory typologies.”

[Christian Fuchs. Critical Theory of Information, Communication, Media, Technology. León, Spain: Glossarium-BITri. Creative Commons. 2009. No pagination.]

“The purpose of this chapter is to provide a basic framework for the analysis of social media, politics and the state. This topic—which the authors in this collected volume study—can be situated in the broader field of Internet and social media studies …. Internet and social media research can be conducted in different ways. More administrative approaches analyse how digital media are used by whom, for what purpose, addressed to which audience, bearing which content, and having which effects. In contrast, critical Internet studies go beyond the digital version of the Lasswell formula. They do not exclude studying empirically the cornerstones of digital media use, but always situate such analyses in theorising and analysing larger contexts, such as power structures, the state, capitalism, gender relations, social struggles, and ideologies, which shape and are shaped by the digital media landscape in dialectical processes ….” [Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs, “Theorising Social Media, Politics and the State: An Introduction.” Social Media, Politics and the State. Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Pages 3-38.]

“The aim of this section of the paper is to outline a conceptual framework that shows how the notion of critique can be defined. The result will be a typology that consists of three different potential definitions. We point out that we favour one of these three definitions.… First, we will focus on a Marxian understanding and on Critical Theory …, then positivistic … and postmodern … approaches.…

“Marxian critique shows the historical and ideological character of capitalism.… Postmodernism has in recent years been challenged by various approaches that show a new focus on transcendental notions of Marxist critique: transfactuality by Roy Bhaskar …, transcritique by Kojin Karatani …, or the transempirical as totality of the world that is given reason for by dialectical philosophy in the works of Hans Heinz Holz ….

“… A Typology of Defining Critique …

“Social science courses should not be designed in ways that present Marxian thinking as outdated, but should present it as topical and connected to the everyday experiences of students as precarious workers and the emergence of an intellectual proletariat. Marxian ideas need to be connected to students. actual experiences.…

“As radical thinking tends to be more complex than positivistic thinking, it should not range as one of many equally represented topics in social science courses, but should form the main element of academic curricula, syllabi, and reading lists.”

[Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval, “Positivism, Postmodernism, or Critical Theory?: A Case Study of Communications Students’ Understandings of Criticism.” Journal For Critical Education Policy Studies. Volume 6, number 2, December 2008. Pages 112-141.]

“In this contribution, we warn against being too optimistic about the actual democratic effects of notions like ‘civil media,’ ‘community media,’ ‘alternative media,’ ‘grassroots media,’ ‘participatory media,’ or ‘participatory culture.’ We argue that in contemporary society, which is characterized by structural inequalities, an understanding of alternative media as participatory media is insufficient. As an alternative concept, we suggest the notion of alternative media as critical media. This concept is grounded in critical social theory. A typology of approaches for defining alternative media is constructed. We argue that alternative media need to be situated in the context of visions of an alternative society.…

“… We argue that by providing critical content alternative media can help advancing societal transformations and contribute to the realization of a truly participatory society, because critical content expresses progressive political interests and tries to give attention to the realization of suppressed possibilities of societal development.… Critique of society as a whole is needed for establishing participatory democracy.”

[Marisol Sandoval and Christian Fuchs, “Towards a critical theory of alternative media.” Telematics and Informatics. Abstract. Volume 27, issue 2, May 2010. Pages 141-150.]

“The contention that I make here is that Anarchist notions of alternative media are insufficient because they tend to idealize small-scale production and tend to neglect orientation towards the political public. My alternative draft is that a realistic Marxist theory of alternative media is needed. The contention is that alternative media should not only be understood as alternative media practices, but also as critical media that question dominative society.…

“… The first quality of critical media is negation of negation at the content level.…

“The second quality of critical media is negation of negation at the form level.…

“The third quality of critical media is dialectical realism at the content level.…

“The fourth quality of critical media is dialectical realism at the form level.…

“The fifth quality of critical media is the materialistic expression of the interests of the dominated at the content level.”

[Christian Fuchs, “Alternative Media as Critical Media.” European Journal of Social Theory. Volume 13, number 2, 2010. Pages 173-192.]

“My argument in this chapter has been that the concept of rent is mistaken for understanding the political economy of Facebook and that Facebook users are productive transport workers who communicate advertising ideologies that make use-value promises. Their activities are productive labour …. Politics for the digital age need to consider users as political subjects. Unions, organizations of the Left and struggles are nothing that should be left to wageworkers, but need to be extended to digital media users. Pirate Parties have understood this circumstance better than the orthodox wage-labour fetishistic parts of the Left, but they have not well understood that the exploitation of digital labour is connected to the commodification of the commons that include the communication commons and that as a consequence internet politics need to be connected to the critique of the political economy of capitalism as a whole. So whereas the orthodox part of the Left tends to dismiss users as politically unimportant and to neglect internet politics, Pirate Parties see users as the only political subjects.” [Christian Fuchs, “The Digital Labour Theory of Value and Karl Marx in the Age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo.” Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St Martin’s Press LLC. 2015. Pages 26-41.]

“This article reviews the role of the international division of labor in classical Marxist concepts of imperialism, and extends these ideas to the international division of labor in the production of information and information technology today. I will argue that digital labor, as the newest frontier of capitalist innovation and exploitation, is central to the structures of contemporary imperialism. Drawing on these classical concepts, my analysis shows that in the new imperialism, the information industries form one of the most concentrated economic sectors; that hyper-industrialization, finance and informationalism belong together; that multinational informational corporations are grounded in nationstates, but operate globally; and that information technology has become a means of war.” [Christian Fuchs, “Digital Labor and Imperialism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 67, issue 8, January 2016. Pages 14-24.]

“In his Transformative Model of Social Activity, Roy Bhaskar introduces the notion of the ‘dialectics of structure and agency’: ‘social structure is a necessary condition for, and medium of, intentional agency, which is in turn a necessary condition for the reproduction or transformation of social forms’ …. Margaret Archer distinguishes between ‘people’s emergent properties’ (PEPs), ‘structural emergent properties’ (SEPs), and ‘cultural emergent properties’ (CEPs). Her approach of social realism is based on the ‘dialectical relationship between personal and social identities’ …, ‘a synthesis such that both personal and social identities are emergent and distinct, although they contributed to one another’s emergence and distinctiveness’ …. Bhaskar and Archer understand society as the permanent emergence of structures based on human identity and activity.

“In the individual’s interaction with its physical and informational, i.e. material, environment, humans reproduce and transform cognitive and bodily, i.e. human structures. If a person reads a book, s/he transforms its cognitive structures. If s/he walks to the bus station, s/he transforms its bodily structures. Body and mind are in this process structurally connected: humans think while and for moving their bodies; bodily movement is enabled by cognition and transports a human physically through space-time so that s/he can make new experiences that enable the emergence of new cognitive patterns—specific relationships between neurons and neural networks in the human brain. Communication is the way for humans to engage in, create, and maintain social relations. Social relations become crystallised and objectified in social structures that are organised continuously in space-time, in modern society for example in the form of commodities, money, markets, laws, or dominant ideologies. Establishing, reproducing, and changing crystallised and objectified social structures takes place in and through communication. Communication thereby becomes co-operation, a process in which humans communicate in productive and transformative ways that bring about structural changes of social systems and society. New structures are introduced or existing ones are reproduced. Communication is a necessary and always-present feature of structuration that operates at the level of interacting human actors.”

[Christian Fuchs. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 78.]

“An international division of digital labour (IDDL) organises the production of digital media technologies and content in global space in such a way that various forms of exploitation are interconnected …” [Christian Fuchs. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 302.]

“What I term the international division of digital labour (IDDL) is a global manifold system of exploitation that underpins our use of digital media in everyday life …. A critical theory of digital media therefore has to be a critique of relations of exploitation taking place in this international division, a critique of forms of domination that are articulated with the IDDL, a critique of ideologies trying to justify such exploitation and domination, an analysis of associated contradictions, and an analysis of potential struggles and alternatives.

“Labour minus alienation does indeed not equal creativity. A society, in which humans control their conditions and products of work and life, is a democratic commons-based society. The appropriate political demand is therefore “democratic commons for all”. On the one hand, “communism” is one of the terms that gained problematic connotations, because of the Stalinst realities of the 20ᵗʰ century. It is therefore important to prefix democracy so that we can stress that another, different communism is possible today. On the other hand, communism is one of the few terms that is not easily subsumable under capitalist ideology and can signify the need for true alternatives. Labour minus alienation means society minus capitalism and class plus the commons. It means commonism.”

[Christian Fuchs, “Critical Theory of Communication as Critical Sociology of Critique in the Age of Digital Capitalism: A Response to Jan Løhmann Stephensen’s Review Essay on Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media.” Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation. Volume 3, number 1, 2016. Pages 1-14.]

“The task of this book is to provide new readings about how some specific works of authors related to the Frankfurt School matter for critically understanding communication today. It presents five essays that review aspects of the works of Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas and applies these ideas for grounding foundations of a critical theory of communication in the age of the Internet and social media. Each chapter is dedicated to revisiting specific ideas of one of these thinkers. The book is intended as a reader on aspects of cultural Marxism in the digital age. The chapters can also be read independently.

“The approach this book takes is that it a) discusses elements of specific critical theories and b) relates them to the topics of communication and the Internet. It thereby wants to contribute to a renewal and sublation of the critical theory of communication as a critical theory of society.”

[Christian Fuchs. Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet. London: University of Westminster Press. 2016. Page 1.]

“Roy Bhaskar … has distinguished between “real negation ≥ transformative negation ≥ radical negation” in order to stress the non-deterministic and complex character of sublation. Not all negations of negations are at the fundamental level; there are also partial sublations that are transformative but not radical. The emergence of transnational informational capitalism is a transformational sublation, but not a radical one.

“Transnational informational capitalism is a tendency and relative degree in the development of contemporary capitalism, which does not mean that it is the only or the dominant tendency. Capitalism is many things at the same time: it is to a certain degree informational, but at the same time to a certain degree finance capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, hyper-industrial capitalism and so on. We have many capitalisms today existing within one overall capitalist mode of organizing society. Capitalism is at the same time a general mode of production and exploitation and a specific realization, a coexistence and interaction of different types and forms of capitalist production and exploitation. Why do I speak of transnational informational capitalism? …

“Statistical data suggest that the globalization of media/information corporations is not a myth. There surely is not a purely global media system—as transnational corporations are grounded in their respective national economies. But global production in the form of outsourcing, subcontracting and spatially diffused production seems to be an emergent quality of capitalism and therefore also of information corporations. Indicators such as the TNI [transnationality index], the foreign assets share, the foreign sales share, the foreign employment share and the foreign affiliates share allow one to measure the degree of transnationality of information companies.”

[Christian Fuchs. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Pages 142-143.]

“Critical theory has a normative dimension: For [Karl] Marx, critical theory is a normative realism. It argues that it is possible to logically provide reasonably grounded arguments about what a good society is, that the good society relates to conditions that all humans require to survive (the essence of humans and society), and that one can judge existing societies according to the extent that they provide humane conditions or not. [Karl] Marx found it important not just to analyze capitalism academically, but also to communicate this analysis politically. This explains his own practice as journalist and political actor.

“Critical theory is connected to struggles for a just and fair society, it is an intellectual dimension of struggles …. Critical theory rejects the argument that academia and science should and can be value-free. It rather argues that all thought and theories are shaped by political worldviews.”

[Christian Fuchs, “Critical Theory.” The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication. Volume three. Gianpietro Mazzoleni, editor. Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell imprint of John Wiley & Sons. 2015. Pages 240-252.]

“For [Margaret S.] Archer reflexivity enables agents to become critical about themselves and their social environment and to do so they employ internal conversation; subjectivity and objectivity are interrelated and interdependent, but they do not coincide. For Archer, reflexivity constitutes the link between structure and agency and, as she … maintains, reflexivity may be the means to explore the reasons behind the emergence of social change.…

“… It would … be … appropriate to refer to this study as an exploratory investigation … which revealed possible tendencies concerning the causal powers of social change. The participants were adults and were fully informed about the process; the questions did not raise any sensitive issues and therefore no ethical authorization had to be considered.”

[Athanasia Chalari, “The Causal Powers of Social Change: the case of modern Greek society.” GreeSE Paper number 64. Hellenic Observatory Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe. London School of Economics. London, England. November, 2012. Pages 1-44.]

“Why do individuals produce different discussions about resistance when referring to common acts of resistance? Even more importantly, perhaps: why do individuals perceive resistance in different ways? To answer these questions current social theory will be employed, and in particular the relevant discussion of the relationship between structure and agency or, in other words, how society (or the external world) is connected to the individual (or the inner world). This discussion may reveal possible causal powers of resistance since it explains how terms such as ‘external conversation’ (associated with expressed forms of interaction and verbal communication) are connected with ‘internal conversation’ and the subjective inner properties of agency.” [Athanasia Chalari, “The Causal Impact of Resistance: Mediating between Resistance and Internal Conversation about Resistance.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 43, issue 1, 2012. Pages 66-86.]

“… [There has been] a shift from focus on representational to ontological narrativity.…

“… The understanding of life stories as spatio-temporal constructs infuses the phenomenon with fluidity …. Emphasis is put upon being as a process in the making.… [N]arrative is understood as an ontological condition of social life. ‘Reality’ is presented as the effect of discursive conventions, fluid and fluctuating.”

[Ann Kristin Eide, “Life Stories: Beyond Construction.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 2, 2012. Pages 139-162.]

“Utilising critical realist philosophy of social science, this article contends that discourse may be studied as a causal mechanism in the generation of events – and one relationally connected to mechanisms of differing kinds. To do this, it is argued that we should adopt critical discourse analysis rather than the guidance of poststructuralist discourse theory.…

“In CR [critical realist] terms, the role a discourse plays in an order of discourse – how it draws on and re-orders genres, styles and other discourses – is its dispositional power as a possible causal mechanism. To analyse this ordering between discourses, CDA [critical discourse analysis] draws on the insights of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) …. This is because SFL views ‘language as a strategic, meaning-making resource’ …, and offers tools to understand how different levels of meaning are created in a text and may work to correspond upwards into the social level.”

[Benjamin Banta, “Analysing discourse as a causal mechanism.” European Journal of International Relations. Volume 19, number 2, 2012. Pages 379-402.]

“… we have argued that the study of semiosis would benefit from articulation with critical realism. This has already occurred in critical discourse analysis, of course, with its even-handed concern with context as well as text. But we suggest that it should be extended to other forms of semiotic analysis. This does not mean that we reject the hermeneutic approach; rather, we argue that hermeneutics by itself cannot provide an adequate explanation of social phenomena even at the level of face-to-face communication and interaction.” [Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop, and Andrew Sayer, “Critical Realism and Semiosis.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 5, issue 1, May 2002. Pages 2-10.]

“This book is about language and power, or more precisely about connections between language use and unequal relations of power, particularly in modern Britain. I have written it for two main purposes. The first is more theoretical: to help correct a widespread underestimation of the significance of language in the production, maintenance, and change of social relations of power. The second is more practical: to help increase consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others, because consciousness is the first step towards emancipation.” [Norman Fairclough. Language and Power. Essex, England: Addison Wesley Longman Limited. 1989. Page 1.]

“This book presents a new approach to the analysis of political discourse. Its novelty resides in the integration of critical discourse—analytical concepts with the analytical framework of argumentation theory, on the basis of viewing political discourse as primarily argumentative discourse. It is based on a view of politics in which the concepts of deliberation and decision-making in contexts of uncertainty, risk and persistent disagreement are central. This is a view of politics in which the question of action, of what to do, is the fundamental question. In accordance with the critical conception of reasonableness that underlies our approach, we will define a reasonable decision as one which has emerged from a reasonable (dialectical) procedure, i.e. from the systematic critical testing of reasons, claims and arguments for action.” [Isabela Fairclough and Norman Fairclough. Political Discourse Analysis: A method for advanced students. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Google Play edition.]

“If we are to develop understandings of the role of discourse consistent with a critical realist view, we need to move from the lofty heights of meta-theoretical debates and to look more closely at discourses in particular contexts. There are a number of ways this could be approached, but we need to make clear that any approach that focuses purely or mainly on the internal relations and dynamics within texts fails to meet the criteria of examining the interactions between the discursive and extra-discursive.” [Paul Thompson and Bill Harley, “Beneath the Radar? A Critical Realist Analysis of ‘The Knowledge Economy’ and ‘Shareholder Value’ as Competing Discourses.” Organization Studies. Volume 33, number 10, 2012. Pages 1363-1381.]

“The approach I have adopted to analysing discourse in the book is known as ‘critical discourse analysis.’ Critical discourse analysis sees language as one element of a social practice along the lines of what I said at the beginning of this chapter. The aim is to see how language is articulated together with other elements. This approach is particularly concerned with social change as it affects discourse, and with how it connects with social relations of power and domination. It looks at change in terms of how the combination of discourses, genres, and styles, which make up the language elements of a social practice, changes over time.” [Norman Fairclough. New Labour, New Language? London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Pages 158-159.]

“First, we argue that critical realism cannot afford to ignore semiosis, provisionally defined as the intersubjective production of meaning, in its more general approach to social relations, their reproduction and transformation …. Second, and equally important for our purposes, we inquire into the social preconditions and broader social context of semiosis. This set of problems is well suited to the application of critical discourse analysis because the latter can provide explanatory contextualisations of the production, communication, and reception of semiosis and therefore provide a means of thinking about the articulation of the semiotic and extra-semiotic in social transformation ….” [Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop, and Andrew Sayer, “Critical realism and semiosis.” Realism Discourse and Deconstruction. Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Google Play edition.]

“From a critical discourse analysis (CDA) point of view, it is important that [Pierre] Bourdieu’s constructivist structuralism is combined with a theory of discourse as a social resource with its own specific generative capacity available in all practices and always articulable with other moments of the social …. A discourse-informed constructivist structuralism would therefore not treat objectivism and subjectivism as two distinct dimensions of the social, but as two analytical dimensions of the articulatory process between discourse and material conditions of existence (what we may also call other ‘moments’ of the social).” [Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, “Language and Power in Bourdieu: On Hasan’s ‘The Disempowerment Game,’” Linguistics and Education. Volume 10, number 4, 2000. Pages 399-409.]

“CDA views language as discourse, understood as an element of the social process which is dialectically related to others. Relations between language and other elements are dialectical in the sense of being different but not ‘discrete,’ i.e. not fully separate. We might say that each element ‘internalizes’ the others without being reducible to them … – for example, social relations, power, institutions, beliefs, and cultural values are in part discursive, in the sense that they ‘internalize’ discourse without being reducible to it.” [Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, “Critical Discourse Analysis in Organizational Studies: Towards an Integrationist Methodology.” Journal of Management Studies. Volume 47, number 6, September 2010. Pages 1213-1218.]

“I approach the question of learning indirectly in terms of the more general and in a sense more fundamental question of the performativity of texts or, in critical realist terms …, their causal effects on nonsemiotic elements of the material, social, and mental worlds and the conditions of possibility for the performativity of texts. I use the term semiosis rather than discourse to refer in a general way to language and other semiotic modes such as visual image, and the term text for semiotic elements of social events, be they written, spoken, or combine different semiotic modes as in the case of TV texts.” [Norman Fairclough, “Semiotic Aspects of Social Transformation and Learning.” An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Rebecca Rogers, editor. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 2004. Pages 225-226.]

“… we analyse the national standards documents from Australia and the UK using critical discourse analysis (CDA), and argue that these blueprints for teachers’ work exclude reflexivity as an essential and overarching discourse of teacher professionalism.…

“Margaret Archer’s … morphogenetic approach to realist social theory provides a useful framework to understand the ways in which teachers manage competing influences and deliberate about pedagogic action in the classroom. She argues that social structures or contextual forms are always transformable but always constrained as they take shape from, and are formed by, agents. In proposing an analytical dualism whereby structure and agency are seen as separate rather than conflated, she argues for their complementarity rather than their counteraction.”

[Mary Ryan and Terri Bourke, “The teacher as reflexive professional: making visible the excluded discourse in teacher standards.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Volume 34, number 3, 2013. Pages 411-423.]

“Although a critical realist ontology underpins the research, the thesis does not offer a critical realist analysis. Rather, the research is coloured by the recent developments in CDA [critical discourse analysis] … in which critical realism is brought into dialogue with CDA as part of the project to strengthen it theoretically …. [Norman] Fairclough emphasises that CDA engages in ‘relational’ analysis: ‘relations between semiotic and non-semiotic,’ ‘relations between levels,’ and ‘relations within orders of discourse and within texts.’ These relations are viewed as ‘dialectical,’ meaning that there are relations between elements ‘which are different but not discrete’ ….” [Pia Lamberti. A critical exploration of argumentation in the texts that third-year Development Studies students interpret and construct. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg. Johannesburg, South Africa. April, 2013. Page 89.]

“Norman Fairclough took on these problems in the development of critical discourse analysis (CDA). Rather than simply compare the ‘distortion’ of ideology to an otherwise unproblematic reality he sought to make visible the connections between linguistic and other social practices, and to theorise and analyse the ‘dialectical’ relationships of discursive activity with situations, institutions and structures. He allied this project to a putatively emancipatory critical realism and, where critical linguistics had tended to look at very specific linguistic actions and to assume their connection with social power, Fairclough started from the position that there is a semiotic aspect to all social practices, the aim of analysis being to show this at work in particular instances of domination.” [Alan Finlayson, “Critique and Political Argumentation.” Political Studies Review. Volume 11, 2013. Pages 313-320.]

“CDA [critical discourse analysis] is distinctive in that it is a form of ‘explanatory critique’ [à la Roy] Bhaskar … i.e. CDA takes the form of ‘showing (a) a problem, which may either be cognitive, for example, a misrepresentation, or an unmet need … (b) what obstacles there are to it being tackled … (c) what function (including ideological function) of the misrepresentation or unmet need is in sustaining existing social arrangements; and (d) possible ways of removing the obstacles. The two types of problem point to two aspects of CDA: one a form of transitive critique of discursive dimensions of practices in terms of whether they meet or fail to meet the communicative aspects of the needs of people engaged in the practices.’” [Jessica J. Clapham, “An analysis of Trainee Teachers’ use of Code-switching in the Bilingual Secondary Classroom: a case from Wales.” Educationalfutures. Volume 3, number 1, February 2011. Pages 20-38.]

“[Norman] Fairclough’s approach to discourse analysis proceeds from the view that semiosis, i.e. all forms of meaning making, including visual images, body language, as well as language, is an irreducible part of social processes. According to Fairclough, all practices are practices of production. That is, they are the arenas within which all aspects of social life—economic, political, cultural or everyday life—are produced. Fairclough sees social life as consisting of interconnected networks of social practices. Every social practice includes a number of elements, which are dialectically related: productive activity, means of production, social relations, social identities, cultural values, consciousness, and semiosis.” [Lynn Roseberry, “Towards a Discourse Analysis of the Corporate Social Responsibility/Accountability Debate.” Working paper number 02-2007. CBS Center for Corporate Social Responsibility. Copenhagen Business School. Frederiksberg, Denmark. 2007. Pages 1-13.]

“Critical realism maintains that there is a real world ‘out there’ that is independent but open to investigation.… Furthermore, critical realism and CDS [critical discourse analysis], unlike some poststructuralist and constructivist approaches, go beyond the ‘how’ to look at ‘why’ things happen and suggests that the ‘why’ involves strategies that cannot be reduced to what is immanent in the texts or practices, but resides in the relation between discursive practices and underlying social relations …. Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting now that I believe that it is possible to draw on a governmentality approach to explain counter-terrorism strategy without accepting the poststructuralist assumptions that usually accompany it.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Reading Documents in Their Wider Context: Foucaultian and realist approach to terrorism discourse.” Critical Methods in Terrorism Studies. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 19-32.]

“Discourse studies as a method, relies on the theoretical background of social constructionism. Even though discourse studies include several different orientations, a common point of view is in the emphasis placed on the constructed character of social entities, relations and phenomena.… In this article I will define discourse as a particular way of representing reality. These representations which are expressed in monument debates, construct the monuments, events, concepts, memories, identities and aspects related to them in a complex way. These representations also indicate the power positions and hierarchies which are intertwined in language use and meaning-making processes.” [Tuuli Lähdesmäki, “From personality cult figure to camp image – the case of President Urho Kekkonen.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. Volume 6, issue 1, May 2009. Pages 52-76.]

“… the case has been presented that [Michel] Foucault is best understood as having exercised an immanent style of thought, in contrast to the transcendentalism of critical realist approaches. Such a line of argumentation was exercised through a focus on the work of Norman Fairclough, his critical realist-informed CDA [critical discourse analysis] framework and its application to a question concerning the ‘marketization’ of the contemporary university. This empirical focus allowed the article to contrast two distinctive styles of problem-posing in organization studies: making a case for the superior value of Foucault’s immanent thought as the basis for situated, transformative organizational engagements; and by contrast to the distanced conservatism of Fairclough’s critical realist-informed approach.” [Rowland Curtis, “Foucault beyond Fairclough: From Transcendental to Imminent Critique in Organization Studies.” Organization Studies. Volume 35, number 12, 2014. Pages 1753-1772.]

“Let me sum up my argument in this paper. First, studies of organization need to include analysis of discourse. Second, however, its commitment to postmodernism and extreme versions of social constructivism limits the value of one prominent tendency within current research on organizational discourse for organizational studies. Third, a version of CDA [critical discourse analysis] based on a critical realist social ontology is potentially of particular value to organization studies. I refer especially to its value in researching organizational change.” [Norman Fairclough, “Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism.” Organization Studies. Volume 26, number 6, 2005. Pages 915-939.]

“… our critical discourse analysis of two texts separated by nearly three decades of policy and practice suggests that such documents are a key site for extending our understanding of how the relationships between local and transnational literacies are organized. Our analysis, summarized here, offers detailed evidence for how this is accomplished.” [Mary Hamilton and Kathy Pitt, “Challenging Representations: Constructing the Adult Literacy Learner Over 30 Years of Policy and Practice in the United Kingdom.” Reading Research Quarterly. Volume 46, number 4, (October/November/December 2011. Pages 350-373.]

“Critical discourse analysts such as Norman Fairclough …, Ruth Wodak …, Teun A van Dijk … and Mary Talbot … have drawn from investigations of ideology and power relations by critical theorists such as [Karl] Marx …, [Antonio] Gramsci …, [Louis] Althusser …, Foucault … and Judith Butler …. In this way they have revealed that apparently self-evident or common sense discourses, facilitated by language and similar to the ‘view from nowhere’ ….” [Edward Burlton Davies. Reconstruction of Gender Law via a Critical Discourse Analysis of Trans and 3ʳᵈ Wave Feminist Narratives of Sexual Subjectivity. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Manchester Metropolitan University. Manchester, England. 2013. Pages 170-171.]

“My orientation here is toward critical discourse analysis, a subset of what has come to be known as critical language studies …. I want to explore the potential and value of discourse analysis explicitly tied to a sociological analysis of how educational knowledge, competence, and curriculum contribute to the differential production of power and subjectivity. These have been and remain central issues in the sociology of education and in curriculum studies …. An approach to critical discourse analysis can tell us a great deal about how schools and classrooms build ‘success’ and ‘failure’ and about how teachers’ and students’ spoken and written texts shape and construct policies and rules, knowledge, and, indeed, ‘versions’ of successful and failing students.” [Allan Luke, “Text and Discourse in Education: An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis.” Review of Research in Education. Volume 21, 1995–1996. Pages 3-48.]

“Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has emerged over the last decade as an appealing and successful school in discourse analysis.… CDA states that discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned. Furthermore, discourse is seen as an opaque power object which CDA aims to make more transparent. CDA also advocates interventionism in the social practices it investigates; explicitness in political interests and in the political use of social scientific research are welcomed. CDA thus openly professes strong commitments to change, anti-power biases and practice-orientedness.” [Jan Blommaert, “Context is/as Critique.” Critique of Anthropology. Volume 21, number 1, March 2001. Pages 13-32.]

“The focus is a pair of texts, related through internal hyperlinks, about the controversy concerning the installation of a social center in a middle-class neighborhood in central Sao Paulo [Brazil]. The texts are analyzed on the theoretical basis of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and considering the following analytical categories: metaphor, representation of social actors and intertextuality.…

“The focus on ontological perspectives arising from recent developments in the social sciences (e.g. in Critical Realism …) renders CDA a social approach of texts that has a direct implication on the type of text analyses formulated by researchers in CDA. This is because there is no separation between social and linguistic perspectives in analyses; rather, a CDA will be more effective the greater the integration between assumptions articulated in interdisciplinary relations ….”

[Viviane de Melo Resende, “Discursive representation and violation of homeless people’s rights: Symbolic violence in Brazilian online journalism.” Discourse & Communication. Volume 10, number 6, December 2016. Pages 596-613.]

“… three different approaches to social constructionist discourse analysis will be introduced – Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory [i.e. post-Marxism], [Norman Fairclough’s] critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology. In the three following chapters, we will present the approaches individually. All three approaches share the starting point that our ways of talking do not neutrally reflect our world, identities and social relations but, rather, play an active role in creating and changing them. We have selected these approaches from the range of different perspectives within discourse analysis on the grounds that we think that they represent particularly fruitful theories and methods for research in communication, culture and society. They can be applied in analysis of many different social domains, including organisations and institutions, and in exploration of the role of language use in broad societal and cultural developments such as globalisation and the spread of mass mediated communication.” [Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2002. Page 2.]

“[Lilie] Chouliaraki and [Norman] Fairclough define the aim of critical discourse analysis as explanatory critique, importing Roy Bhaskar’s concept ….” [Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2002. Page 77.]

“Taking a discourse analytic approach, this article explores how a biomedical understanding is drawn on and mobilized in women’s accounts of their depressive experiences.…

“Participants drew on two key resources in their construction of depression as a biomedical condition: framing depression as a diagnosis, and comparing depression to various medical conditions. Both of these resources were used with the effect of validating speakers’ experiences and legitimizing their identities.…

“Consistent with a synthetic approach to discourse analysis, this research is conducted from a critical realist epistemological position ….”

[Michelle N. Lafrance, “A Bitter Pill: A Discursive Analysis of Women’s Medicalized Accounts of Depression.” Journal of Health Psychology. Volume 12, number 1, January 2007. Pages 127-140.]

“In this article, we investigate how people diagnosed as chronically ill are presented in Danish chronic care policies. We used a critical discourse analysis (CDA) informed by Norman Fairclough, professor of linguistics, in which we combined a textual analysis with an analysis of social practice.…

“We adopted Fairclough’s … critical realist position, which is moderate socially constructivist about the nature of social life.…

“Our analyses identified an overall governing discourse comprised of five interrelated discursive practices [the rational chronically ill patient, individualizing responsibility for one’s own health, constructing vulnerable patients, the patient as an object of risk-rationality, and the reversal of roles]. We argue that these discourses serve to naturalize the individualization of health and present chronic care management as being beneficial for and accessible to everyone, despite apparent adverse effects for some groups in society.”

[Iben M. Ravn, Kirsten Frederiksen, and Kirsten Beedholm, “The Chronic Responsibility: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Danish Chronic Care Policies.” Qualitative Health Research. Volume 26, number 4, 2016. Pages 545-554.]

“For New Labour, its political discourse has therefore been an important tool in overcoming the tensions arising from this ‘neoliberal consensus,’ in particular by reworking social justice into a discourse of social inclusion, thereby allowing it to redefine justice as the provision of opportunities to participate in the labour market. In essence, New Labour political discourse offers a ‘have your cake and eat it’ solution to neoliberalism. This is achieved partly through a recurrent textual pattern of ‘not only but also,’ used to blend together in apparent harmony neoliberal elements alongside reworked social democratic values …. Rather than offering a way of removing the inequalities and insecurities arising from a neoliberal commitment to free market economics, the Third Way offers a way around them ….” [Jane Mulderrig, “The hegemony of inclusion: A corpus-based Critical discourse analysis of deixis in education policy.” Discourse & Society. Volume 23, number 6, November 2012. Pages 701-728.]

“Communitarians should not get unduly worried …. Universalizability functions as both a test for consistency/sincerity and a criterion for truth. The mediations involved in the case of both addresser and addressee will give the communitarians most of what they want.” [Roy Bhaskar. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page 166.]

“This paper should be read as a call for making the Nordic model a basis for emancipatory, regional and global political action. The argument is only superficially connected with recent attempts by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton – with the assistance of Anthony Giddens … – to resuscitate the Third Way.…

“Obviously, there is a closer connection with [Anthony] Giddens’s … attempt at ‘the renewal of Social Democracy’ than with [Bill] Clinton’s or [Tony] Blair’s Third Way. While the former takes up issues – even if vaguely – such as ‘democratizing democracy’ and ‘cosmopolitan democracy,’ the latter appears to be little more than an attempt to revitalize elements of the traditional Anglo-Saxon liberal welfare state … in the context of continuing neoliberalist transformations and deepening commodification of all areas of social life.”

[Heikki Patomäki, “Beyond Nordic Nostalgia: Envisaging a Social/Democratic System of Global Governance.” Cooperation and Conflict. Volume 35, number 2, 2000. Pages 115-154.]

“Consistent with their heuristic purpose, Hodkinson, Biesta and James build their study on intrinsically phenomenological grounds and produce a theory of learning cultures that is subjective and weak in terms of generalizability. This is an epistemological fault that, despite the valuable insights and the rich reflections of the authors, is incompatible with the general aim of this paper to bridge the theory of learning cultures and critical discourse analysis and provide a basis for extending the use of textual analytical methods in educational research.”

[Luca Magni, “Research Proposal for the Application of Critical Discourse Analysis to the Study of Learning Cultures.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 4, October 2011. Pages 527-542.]

“… it [a learning culture] is a particular way to understand a learning site as a practice constituted by the actions, dispositions and interpretations of the participants. This is not a one-way process. Cultures are produced, changed and reproduced by individuals, just as much as individuals are produced, changed and reproduced by cultures. Individuals are differently positioned with regard to shaping and changing a culture—in other words, differences in power are always at issue too. Cultures, then, are both structured and structuring, and individuals’ actions are neither totally determined by the confines of a learning culture, nor are they totally free.” [Phil Hodkinson, Gert Biesta, and David James, “Understanding learning cultures.” Educational Review. Volume 59, number 4, November 2007. Pages 415-427.]

“… a learning culture does not have precise boundaries, and the field of force operates at all scales of investigation, from the individual learner, to macro issues of social structure and globalization. Furthermore, all places where people live and interact has a learning culture, which is the practices through which people learn in that place. These social practices include but are not limited to micro-politics … as well as macropolitics, at a national and European Union level.” [Phil Hodkinson, Graham Anderson, Helen Colley, Jenny Davies, Kim Diment, Tony Scaife, Mike Tedder, Madeleine Wahlberg, and Eunice Wheeler, “Learning Cultures in Further Education.” Educational Review. Volume 59, number 4, November 2007. Pages 399-413.]

“The cultural approach not only allows for … [an] authentic, … encompassing and in a sense … holistic approach for the study of learning. It also provides … [an] avenue towards the improvement of learning, one that focuses on the transformation of learning cultures as a whole, rather than only on the change of one or more of its ‘elements’ (such as, for example, teaching, curriculum or student approaches to studying). Because the cultural approach sees the dispositions, actions, histories and trajectories of individual students as constitutive parts of a learning culture, student learning is not simply seen as an ‘outcome’ or ‘product’ of a particular learning culture but at the very same time as something that shapes and forms the culture.” [Gert Biesta, “From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures: Values and Judgements in Educational Research and Educational Improvement.” International Journal of Early Childhood. Volume 43, number 3, November 2011. Pages 199-210.]

“The transmission of power between generations always represents a critical moment in the history of domestic units, among other reasons because the relation of reciprocal appropriation between the material, cultural, social and symbolic patrimony and the biological individuals fashioned by and for the appropriation finds itself provisionally in peril. The tendency of patrimony (and thus of the whole social structure) to continue in its state cannot be realized unless the inheritance inherits the heir, unless, by the mediation notably of those who are provisionally responsible for it and who must assure their succession, ‘the dead (that is, property) seizes the quick (that is, a proprietor disposed and able to inherit).’” [Pierre Bourdieu. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Susan Emanuel, translator. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1995. Page 11.]

“Diachronic fairness seems particularly applicable to ecological justice. We can consider the balancing of accounts with Nature as a matter of desert. In an argument which extends intrinsic value to non-human nature, we could say that the planetary ecosystem does not deserve to be prematurely destroyed. This is not a matter of preserving the planet for future generations of humans but rather of compensating Nature for the destruction caused by past generations. A principle of balance, as [Roy] Bhaskar … indicates, would place a limit on the emergent totality. If humanity continues to exploit the natural world without giving back what is necessary to maintain the global ecological balance, then humanity deserves the consequence of a degraded environment which may end in human destruction. If this is true, however, we would also have to ensure that the burden of suffering is distributed to people over time in proportion to their contribution to ecological imbalance. Of particular significance here is the environment deserved by future generations. There is a strong basis in desert for stopping activities which load the consequences of overexploitation of the environment on to particular groups and places or on to future generations.” [Nicholas Low and Brendan Gleeson. Justice, Society and Nature: An exploration of political ecology. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 53-54.]

“A … precise way to articulate … [a] post-positivist ontology and epistemology is to redeploy … perspectival realism … as a postcolonial-perspectival realism. As I am appropriating it here, perspectival realism recognizes the reality of the social world but denies that it is wholly knowable within the terms of any single theory or conceptual apparatus. To a degree, this approach converges with the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar …, which has been subsequently adopted in sociology—viz., there are multiple layers of social reality, and social events are produced by multiple causal processes that are not explicable by any single theoretical system. Perspectival realism similarly posits the complexity of the social world, recognizing its infinite vastness, but it goes a step further. The complexity of the social world is so vast that it is not only impossible for any single theory to explain an event (which is critical realism’s interest) but for any single concept, category, or theory to fully apprehend any social object, form, process, or relation.” [Julian Go. Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Page 196.]

“The question of standpoint is one left unaddressed in critical realism. Yes, there might be different theories necessary for explaining an event, but what is the standpoint or perspective of any one of those theories that made them possible and intelligible in the first place?” [Julian Go. Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Page 224.]

“One explanation for sociology’s lateness and difficulty with postcolonial critique is that sociological thinking is what critics in other discourses have in mind as standing at the heart of the intellectual Eurocentrism that in turn constitutes the main obstacle to full-scale postcolonialization. Just because non-sociological postcolonialists feel less bound up with sociology as a part of their own identity, and because it is correspondingly easier for them to deploy potent caricatures of the sociological tradition and its (allegedly) unitary ‘project,’ they can proceed without ado to pinpoint or insinuate sociology as the thought-style that is most in need of anti-Eurocentric dismantling.…

“… Marxist philosophy, then critical realism, had already exposed the basic flaws [of positivism], though no special prompting was required from those quarters either, since from the mid-1960s onwards liberal philosophers of science themselves were making unorthodox suggestions: that science is a web of culture and a way of seeing, that claims to objectivity are routinely revised and overturned within the process of science itself, that facts are overdetermined by theories and theories underdetermined by evidence, that theories are visions which are never definitively ‘refuted,’ that the boundaries between science and other imaginings cannot be militantly policed, and so on.”

[Gregor McLennan, “Postcolonial Critique and the Idea of Sociology.” Working paper number 02-12. School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies of the University of Bristol. Bristol, England. February, 2012. Pages 1-62.]

“Drawing upon the critical realist perspective …, this study analyzed 65 Chinese university students’ discursive and meta-discursive acts in a simulated business writing task, including pre-writing group discussions, individual request writing, and post-writing reflective essays. By examining the (in) consistencies in these discursive and meta-discursive acts, the study revealed the multiple layers of cultural identities that the students constructed, co-constructed, and negotiated in the process. While the students seemed able to exercise agency in an attempt to claim ownership of Anglophone discourse inwriting requests, theywereunable to resist or undo the cultural stereotypes that make them feel culturally inferior. Implications for research and teaching in ESP [English for specific purposes] and intercultural communication/rhetoric are discussed.…

“With the above review of the traditional cultural preferences for politeness strategies and conflict styles as the backdrop, we believe it would be interesting to investigate whether and how the EIL [English as International Language] students in this study draw upon these ‘cultural resources’ … and position themselves in relation to their native culture (C1) and language (L1) and English culture (C2) and language (L2). Hence, we examined how 65 university students in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, constructed, co-constructed, and negotiated their cultural identities in a simulated business writing task, through individual request writing (discursive acts), pre-writing group discussions, and post-writing reflective essays (meta-discursive acts).”

[Haiying Feng and Bertha Du-Babcock, “‘Business is Business’: Constructing cultural identities in a persuasive writing task.” English for Specific Purposes. Volume 44, October 2016. Pages 30-42.]

“This article presents a Critical Realist view on how ideas and theories can be treated as parts of the causal analysis of social practices. With explicitly causal language, identifying possible forms for emancipatory action is easier than with constitutive analyses.…

“The basic idea of intertextuality is that all texts relate to preceding or simultaneously occurring texts …. Texts can be, for example, responses to previous texts, use previous texts to support their arguments or make ironic remarks about them. Once produced, texts become material for other texts and can be used for various purposes. Previous texts can be indicated with more or less explicit and direct references or can be taken as a presupposition for a new text.”

[Matti Jutila, “Taming Eastern Nationalism: Tracing the Ideational Background of Double Standards of Post-Cold War Minority Protection.” European Journal of International Relations. Volume 15, number 4, 2009. Pages 627-651.]

“My first aim is to work towards such a project of a critical realist critical discourse analysis (CRCDA) …. This will be achieved above all by a critical assessment of the most progressive form of CDA [critical discourse analysis], the leading proponent of which is Norman Fairclough who, in recent years, explicitly aligned his work with CR [critical realist] concepts. While Fairclough’s work is remarkable both analytically and theoretically, it lacks metatheoretical clarity and remains (implicitly) at odds with CR [critical realism] regarding certain important ontological questions.… The scope of my argument thus goes beyond issues of discourse or semiosis, broaching questions of (materialist) social theory such as the concept of ideology.” [Elmar Flatschart, “Critical Realist Critical Discourse Analysis: A Necessary Alternative to Post-marxist Discourse Theory.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 1, March 2016. Pages 21-52.]

“In many ways, the 20ᵗʰ century was the age of applied science. The gradual shift towards a ‘knowledge society’ is not only noticeable in the realm of application, it is also pivotal in philosophy, namely the ‘linguistic turn’ and the triumph of a logically sedimented empiricist analytical philosophy of science. I would interpret this success of a particularly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ view on science as precise, ordered, logical as a broader movement, which is intrinsically connected to societal developments on a large scale and largely associated with questions of productive forces and their role in shaping the historical ways of thinking. Without being able to go deeper into this matter, I would argue, that it is just logical, that this success gradually affected not only the ‘precise’ and natural sciences (where its origins lay), but also the social sciences. In this light, another important strand, the all too ‘continental’ dialectical approach, became more and more subordinated as a theoretical fundament for social science and with the decline of ‘leftist philosophy,’ mainly that of the Frankfurt School, it started to lose any recognition in scientific practice. In this article, I want to argue that this is a mistake, as it omits major problems in the analytical tradition just as it neglects certain virtues of critical dialectics, which considerably enhance critical social science as such. My basis for this argument will not be the analytical tradition itself, but an already broadened philosophy for the social sciences, Critical Realism. I will shortly present Critical Realism as an advanced, open-minded and in many ways succinct version of a scientifically oriented approach to philosophy, which perceives philosophy – just like the analytic tradition – as an ‘underlabourer and occasional midwife’ of science.” [Elmar Flatschart, “Critical Dialectics for the Social Sciences. Towards a mediation of Critical Realism and Critical Theory.” Social Transformations in Theory and Practice. M. Bucholc, editor. Volume 31. IWM Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences. Vienna, Austria: Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen Institute for Human Sciences. 2012. No pagination.]

“I maintain that the move away from metatheory and towards negative dialectics can greatly contribute to a mutual understanding of CR [critical realism] and feminism.…

“In this article, I was only abstractly able to indicate the negative dialectics of difference as expression of historicity and gendered materiality. I pointed towards the critical theory tradition and its understanding of dialectics that is in many ways on par with DCR [dialectical critical realism] but also exhibits diverging characteristics like the assumption that a non-identical, othered aspect of dialectics cannot be expressed in metatheoretical terms. The German feminist materialist debate in the tradition of the Frankfurt School has contributed important insights on this topic.”

[Elmar Flatschart, “Feminist Standpoints and Critical Realism. The Contested Materiality of Difference in Intersectionality and New Materialism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 3, 2017. Pages 284-302.]

“CPE [cultural political economy] has until now predominantly used critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a method to study the evolution of economic imaginaries. This method can be productively employed if the research interest is primarily located on the semiotic level. However, ‘the “imaginary” refers not only to semiosis but also to its material supports, and this requires a broader toolkit’ ….

“… we aim to fill this broader toolkit by introducing CGT [critical grounded theory] as a method for CPE to reach its full analytical potential. CGT goes beyond CDA, broadens and deepens it by grounding it in rich, ethnographically derived accounts of the everyday. We will demonstrate how the application of CDA creates tensions in CPE’s efforts to account for both the non-discursive and the discursive dimensions of social actions and processes if not combined with ethnographic tools such as interviews, observations or focus groups. People act within social structures and they give sense and meaning to their actions, constituting two aspects of human praxis that should not be isolated but studied in their complex interrelations. CGT is capable of accounting for both meaning-production and actions and processes in their ‘real’ interrelations.”

[Claes Axel Belfrage and Felix Hauf, “Operationalizing cultural political economy: towards critical grounded theory.” Journal of Organizational Ethnography. Volume 4, number 3, September 2015. Pages 324-340.]

“While there are several ways to navigate the realist-constructionist divide, critical realism provides a useful ‘third way’ between the naïve realism of positivist research and the radical constructionism of much postmodernism ….

“CPE [cultural political economy] defines semiosis as the social production of meaning ….

“Critical grounded theory is designed to operationalize theories underpinned by critical realism such as CPE. It critically reworks grounded theory, a popular but often uncritically adopted methodology in the study of organizations …, to render it compatible with the ontology and epistemology of critical realism. CGT draws on the analytical tools of grounded theory without bracketing the critical-theoretical and discourse-analytical insights of CPE. Rather than mainly relying on discursive artefacts, CGT invites the theoretically equipped researcher to ‘go places’ and ‘talk to people’ in order to investigate what people actually do with discourses in particular settings and processes before working this grounded data up into critical grounded theory.”

[Claes Belfrage and Felix Hauf, “The Gentle Art of Retroduction: Critical Realism, Cultural Political Economy and Critical Grounded Theory.” Organization Studies. Early–view edition. August, 2016. Pages 1-21.]

“Cultural political economy is an emerging post-disciplinary approach that highlights the contribution of the cultural turn (a concern with semiosis or meaning-making) to the analysis of the articulation between the economic and the political and their embedding in broader sets of social relations. Explicit arguments in favour of ‘cultural political economy’ as such emerged in several contexts in the 1990s as part of and/or in reaction to the then prevailing cultural turn. It was also prefigured in classical political economy, the German Historical School, and some versions of critical political economy and/or ‘old institutionalisms’; and there are similar currents in other fields of social scientific inquiry. Given the range of cultural turns and the starting points from which they have been made as well as the widely different definitions of political economy (and its critique), there is no consensus among scholars on the nature of cultural political economy.” [Bob Jessop, “Cultural Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies.” Critical Policy Studies. Volume 3, issue 3–4, 2010. Pages 336-356.]

“Applying cultural political economy to issues of technoscience, and in an age of overlapping crises, yields new perspectives on research questions specifically concerning the parallel development of technoscience, capital accumulation and changing natures, including: how new metrologies are both allowing the direct capitalistic valorisation of new phenomena (e.g. carbon markets) and/or facilitating indirect regularization of new commodities (e.g. international food standards) and markets (e.g. of science-based labour); how innovation constructs new frontiers of capital accumulation (e.g. biotech or ICTs [information and communications technologies]); how technoscience both identifies ‘problems’ and suggests ‘fixes’ to regularize continued accumulation, including governance of new technoscientific ‘risks’ (e.g. geo-engineering) and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ of practices that may not even be obviously related to technoscience (e.g. of care for the elderly); and how new technological capacities and new technoscientific ontologies afford governmental intervention to assist continued accumulation (e.g. personal genomic medicine).” [David Tyfield, “A Cultural Political Economy of Research and Innovation in an Age of Crisis.” Minerva. Volume 50, number 2, June 2012. Pages 149-167.]

“We call our approach realist-discourse-theoretic; ‘realist’ signifies that it is premised upon realism; ‘discourse-theoretic’ refers to the role of knowable, realist-grounded extradiscursive factors.

“Thus, in our view, all discursive contention involves both epistemic factors and realist-grounded non-epistemic factors. In some situations, the epistemic factors predominate, in which case, the discourse that achieves hegemony has greater epistemic value than its rivals. In some other situations, the non-epistemic factors predominate, in which case, the discourse that achieves hegemony might well be of inferior epistemic value to its rivals.”

[Raymond W. K. Lau, “Re-theorizing news’ construction of reality: A realist-discourse-theoretic approach.” Journalism. Volume 13, issue 7, October 2012. Pages 886-902.]

“In recent years, critical realism has risen to prominence. It has been fruitfully applied to various social sciences …. This represents a welcome development, challenging the postmodernist de-totalizing and depoliticized climate of the past two decades, which as Curran … notes, has also affected mass communication research, ‘for better or worse.’ This article endeavours to show that critical realism provides a fresh viewpoint on several well-researched aspects of the fundamental issue of news production.” [Raymond W. K. Lau, “Critical realism and news production.” Media, Culture & Society. Volume 26, number 5. Pages 693-711.]

“Non-epistemic factors are more usually referred to as extra-discursive factors in contemporary usage. The two terms are synonymous and used interchangeably hereinafter. On the other hand, because of the above, the ontology of social reality, instead of being objective, is discursive, in the sense that, because the discourse that achieves hegemony out of discursive contention exerts real effects on people and how they act, it thereby constitutes reality.…

“It should be stressed that our position is inclined towards the general realist position …, and not the specific critical realist position (with its special concepts such as emergence and explanatory critique), though we do generally agree with [Roy] Bhaskar’s early (pre-dialectical) works.”

[Raymond W. K. Lau and Jamie Morgan, “Integrating Discourse, Construction and Objectivity: A Contemporary Realist Approach.” Sociology. Volume 48, number 3, June 2014. Pages 573-589.]

“To label my position essentialist is to misunderstand the contemporary realist position that I adopt. I am a realist insofar as I find anti-objectivist epistemic relativism untenable, but I also see constructionism as possessing valuable insights complementary to realism. Hence, my reconceptualization of authenticity explicitly incorporates constructionist insights into it ….” [Raymond W. K. Lau, “Semiotics, objectivism & tourism: An anti-critique.” Annals of Tourism Research. Volume 44, January 2014. Pages 283-287.]

“Abandoning [Immanuel] Kant’s philosophical idealism, and securing his own premises from ‘bad circularity’ by adaptation of [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s method of immanent critique, [Roy] Bhaskar has taken full advantage of the ‘third way between [better, beyond] traditional metaphysics and positivism’ illumined by Kant.” [Mervyn Hartwig and Rachel Sharp, “The Realist Third Way.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 2, issue 1, July 1999. Pages 17-23.]

“In this paper, I critique those brands of contemporary neuroscientific research into human health that rest on a set of interrelated, reductionist assumptions. These assumptions result in the claim that grieving or loving are caused mechanically by physiological, chemical, and electrical processes in the brain. I employ a critical realist understanding of scientific practice to detail methodological impossibilities entailed in reductionist neuroscience that are nevertheless used to justify claims to scientific knowledge and authority. I use an exemplar of such research to delineate specific errors and to show how knowledge claims based on them are therefore ideological, not scientific.…

“In the present case, the critical realist understanding of the human person is that it is impossible for the brain to cause grief. Brains can only afford persons the capability of using language through which they construct the meaning ‘grief’ according to socio-cultural concepts and values as they interact with each other dynamically. Thus, the reductive assumption that human brains cause behaviour presents us with a situation similar to that encountered by physicists in the nineteenth century when some theorists proposed the existence and operation of the entity called ‘aether’ to account for the movement of light waves. It was thought that light waves required a substance in order to move, a substance that would carry them, in the same way that sound waves required air. Aether was the proposed substance.”

[Frank Tortorello, “What is Real About Reductive Neuroscience?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 3, 2017. Pages 235-254.]

“This paper presents some interdisciplinary reflections about Critical Realism and Critical Discourse Analysis which can contribute to the educator of languages in process of emancipation and social transformation.…

“… As educators, researchers and discourse analysts we can understand that to reach an emancipatory science and social transformation, we cannot be indifferent to these issues.”

[Solange Ma. de Barros Ibarra Papa, “Critical Realism (CR) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): reflections for the educator of languages in the process of emancipation and social transformation.” Privatedly published paper. Undated. Pages 1-10. Retrieved on November 7th, 2015.]

“Evaluation is … applied research. And although we have called throughout for injections of ‘theory’ into every aspect of evaluation design and analysis, the goal has never been to construct theory per se; rather it has been to develop the theories of practitioners, participants and policy makers. The proof of this realist pudding thus lies, not so much with the question of what realism can do for evaluation, but with the issue of what realist evaluation can do for programming and policy making. The upshot is that we have avoided being terminological terrorists and have tried instead to be conceptual captivators in smuggling the realist paradigm ever so gently into the existing language of evaluation.” [Ray Pawson and Nick Tilley. Realistic Evaluation. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1997. Kindle edition.]

“The realist approach can now be said to be part of the repertoire of evaluation methods. There has been a corresponding shift in methodological focus. Polemical thrust and counter-thrust about the realist contribution as compared to that of other evaluative approaches such as randomised trials and meta-analysis have given way to closer examination of its practice ‘on the ground.’” [Ray Pawson. The Science of Evaluation: A Realist Manifesto. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“Realist evaluation has its own slogan – ‘what works for whom in what circumstances.’ Since it was coined in the first text, this phrase has gradually been embellished to capture the multiple, contingent outcomes of all interventions. A more meticulous, if less snappy, version thus goes: ‘what is it about a programme that works for whom, in what circumstances, in what respects, over which duration.’ The most significant rendition, however, adds a vital realist signature – ‘what works for whom in what circumstances … and why.’” [Ray Pawson and Ana Manzano-Santaella, “A realist diagnostic workshop.” Evaluation. Volume 18, number 2, 2012. Pages 176-191.]

“Searching in a metanarrative review is guided by the objectives and focus of the review, and revised iteratively in the light of emerging data. Searching is directed at finding sufficient data to develop and make more sense of the relevant research traditions that have been identified from the scoping search phase. The data may lie in a broad range of sources that cross traditional disciplinary, programme and sector boundaries. This stage is likely to involve searching for different kinds of data in different ways.” [Trisha Greenhalgh and Geoff Wong. Training materials for meta-narrative reviews. Oxford, England: Realist And Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES). July, 2013. Page 16.]

“Because a meta-narrative review may generate a large number of avenues that might be explored and explained, and because resources and timescale are invariably finite, it may be necessary to ‘contain’ a review by progressively focusing both its breadth (how wide an area?) and depth (how much detail?). This important process needs to be considered from the start and may involve iterative rounds of discussion and negotiation with (for example) content experts, funders and/or users. It is typical and legitimate for the review’s objectives, question and/or the breadth and depth of the review to evolve as the review progresses.” [Geoff Wong, Trish Greenhalgh, Gill Westhrop, and Ray Pawson. Quality standards for realist syntheses and meta-narrative reviews. Version 4. Oxford, England: Realist And Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES). Undated. Page 12.]

“It is perhaps worth clearing up a little terminological confusion from the outset.… Here, we settle on ‘realist evaluation’ [over ‘realistic evaluation’] because it has become the preferred nomenclature of other authors ….” [Ray Pawson and Nick Tilley, “Realist Evaluation.” 2004. The preparation of this paper was funded by the British Cabinet Office. Privately published. Pages 1-36. Retrieved on November 22nd, 2015.]

“At the end of the research sequence, there is … [a] set of impediments that make it difficult to translate evaluation results into subsequent policy action. Significant social and individual change often takes a while to accomplish and, when noteworthy intervention outcomes are discovered, they are usually accompanied by doubts about their staying power. Programme practitioners and subjects may procrastinate and change their minds at the very time that evaluators have to begin churning out the findings.” [Ray Pawson. Evidence-Based Policy: A Realist Perspective. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2006. Page 10.]

“We have argued that good evaluation is good social science. For us, this embraces the gallant aims of precision in articulation of theory, rigor in empirical testing, confederation in lines of inquiry, and cumulation in the body of findings. The ‘realist movement,’ of which we are a part, is often considered the brash upstart of the evaluation schools. In fact, it depends on these rather venerable ideas. The future, for us, thus lies in keeping faith with some of the grand old principles of social science and in not forgetting the hard-won lessons of the old studies.” [Ray Pawson and Nick Tilley, “Realistic Evaluation Bloodlines.” American Journal of Evaluation. Volume 22, number 3, 2001. Pages 317-324.]

“My earliest work associated itself happily enough with ‘critical realism’ and the then emerging writings of Roy Bhaskar.…

“Bhaskar’s moment of brilliance lies in showing that the laws of science are not discovered though the routine assemblage of laboratory apparatus and the mechanical application of measuring instruments.”

[Ray Pawson, “From the library of ….” Evaluation. Volume 17, number 2, April 2011. Pages 193-196.]

“This report gives an account of the Transitional Aid Research Project (TARP), an evaluation of a programme attempting to ‘reduce recidivism rates on the part of ex-felons.’ The basic idea under scrutiny was that by providing some minimum level of income support during the period immediately following release from prison, the balance of incentives would be changed in favour of employment and against crime. The background to the initiative was the knowledge that securing employment was one of the best safeguards against recidivism and the fact that at the time, in the states involved (Georgia and Texas), ex-convicts were ineligible for unemployment payments. In order to get by, they had to rely on family and friends who themselves often lived on the fringes of society.” [Ray Pawson, “Middle-range realism.” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie. Volume 41, number 2, 2000. Pages 283-325.]

“The realist understands causality in terms of underlying causal mechanisms generating regularities. The underlying causal mechanism will often be hidden. In the case of things falling to the ground, we can’t see the gravity making it happen. In the case of inherited sight defects we cannot see the genetic mechanisms at work. In the case of metal bars attracting one another we cannot see the mechanism drawing them together. Natural science is replete with the investigation of mechanisms explaining observed patterns. Realists understand experiments in the natural sciences as the creation of conditions in which mechanisms will be activated.” [Nick Tilley, “Realistic Evaluation: An Overview.” Presented at the Founding Conference of the Danish Evaluation Society. September, 2000. Pages 1-13. Retrieved on November 22nd, 2015.]

“Critical realism was developed as an alternative to traditional positivistic models of social science as well as an alternative to post-modern approaches and theories of constructivism.” [Paul Linsley. A Realistic Evaluation of Two Aggression Management Training Programmes. Doctor of health science thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The University of Nottingham. Nottingham, England. August, 2013. Page 82.]

“In the critical realist world view, aggression management programme outcomes cannot be explained in isolation; rather, they can only be explained in the sense of a mechanism that is introduced to effect change in a constellation of other mechanisms and structures, embedded in the context of pre-existing historical, economic, cultural, social and other conditions.

“As part of this process critical realism places an importance on the social world in which people move, and that to understand the behaviour, values and which they operate. The objective then is to display the social organisation of activities, as they are revealed through involvement in the natural setting of the activity. The researcher’s attention is directed towards participants’ subjective perceptions of their own experiences with the aim of presenting these perceptions clearly and understanding their basic structure and meaning through a process of interpretation …. The critical realist tries to make sense of what people are doing by asking ‘What’s going on here? How does this work? How do people do this?’ And hopes to be told by people about ‘the way We do things around here’ ….”

[Paul Linsley. A Realistic Evaluation of Two Aggression Management Training Programmes. Doctor of health science thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). The University of Nottingham. Nottingham, England. August, 2013. Pages 91-92.]

“As someone who has been engaged in realist-driven work, including realist evaluation, since 2000, I truly know the heady excitement of not only thinking of interventions differently, but also of asking different and new questions on a fundamentally different ontological basis ….” [Alex Clark, “Critical realism and realist evaluation: Fashion, fad and better futures.” IIQM – The Qualitative Research Blog. July 2nd, 2014. Retrieved on August 25th, 2015.]

“Realistic evaluation recognises the significance of context to the understanding of why interventions work (e.g. action learning), for whom, how and in what circumstances. The explicatory proposition for realistic evaluation is that programmes work (have successful outcomes – O) only insofar as they initiate suitable ideas and opportunities (mechanisms – M) to groups in the appropriate social, cultural and discursive conditions ….” [Randal Parlour and Brendan McCormack, “Blending critical realist and emancipatory practice development methodologies: making critical realism work in nursing research.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, number 4, 2012. Pages 308-321.]

“Realist evaluation has been used to study implementation of complex interventions in various contexts, including protocol-based care …, understanding the impact of a nutritional intervention during smoking cessation … and recruitment and retention of overseas nurses in the United Kingdom (UK) National Health System (NHS) ….

“… [The aim of the study is to] compare existing and new processes and outcomes by applying theory-based realist evaluation methods in a novel policy implementation context.”

[Jane Noyes, Mary Lewis, Virginia Bennett, David Widdas, and Karen Brombley, “Realistic nurse-led policy implementation, optimization and evaluation: novel methodological exemplar.” Journal of Advanced Nursing. Volume 70, number 1, 2014. Pages 220-237.]

“In this paper, we seek to examine from a critical realist perspective the rapidly developing contribution of realistic evaluation to evidence-based practice (EBP). To do so, we address two major criticisms of EBP – that it is ill-equipped to deal with complexity and that it is exclusive and authoritarian – and consider the degree to which realistic evaluation ameliorates or replicates these problems. Our central thesis is that, insofar as realistic evaluation adheres to the ontology of critical realism, it provides a sound contribution to EBP’s capacity to understand complex healthcare interventions, but insofar as it rejects the critical turn of Bhaskarian realism, it replicates the technocratic tendencies inherent in EBP.” [Sam Porter and Peter O’Halloran, “The use and limitation of realistic evaluation as a tool for evidence-based practice: a critical realist perspective.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, number 1, 2012. Pages 18-28.]

“… influenced by trends within social programme evaluation in higher-income countries …, there is an emerging interest in critical realist approaches to evaluation …. Such approaches consider the question: What works for whom in what circumstances? All approaches to impact evaluation, thus, aim to explain health policy and systems changes and interventions.” [Kara Hanson, “Advances in impact evaluation.” Health Policy and Systems Research: A Methodology Reader. Lucy Gilson, editor. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO Press imprint of the World Health Organization. 2012. Page 253.]

“Realist social theory, both [Roy] Bhaskar’s TMSA [transformational model of social activity] and [Margaret S.] Archer’s morphogenetic approach, provide a framework which can be applied in realist evaluation.” [Denise E. de Souza, “Elaborating the Context-Mechanism-Outcome configuration (CMOc) in realist evaluation: A critical realist perspective.” Evaluation. Volume 19, number 2, 2013. Pages 141-154.]

“In critical realism, the concept of emergence is important because it helps to explain the consequences, both intended and unintended, of human actions in the real domain. Emergence is defined as the relationship between two features or aspects such that one arises from the other. The notion of emergence derives from the sense that the social emerges from, but is also conceptually distinct from and more than, a person’s cells, biology or psychology ….” [Timothy Wand, Kathryn White, and Joanna Patching, “Applying a realist(ic) framework to the evaluation of a new model of emergency department based mental health nursing practice.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 17, number 3, 2010. Pages 231-239.]

“The notion of the black box of the innovation processes can be traced back to the realist theory of evaluation. Theoretically, this view is associated with the critical realist social theory and its philosophical background, realist interpretation of causality ….” [Tomi Tura, Vesa Harmaakorpi, and Sanna Pekkola, “Breaking inside the black box: towards a dynamic evaluation framework for regional innovative capability.” Science and Public Policy. Volume 35, number 10, December 2008. Pages 733-744.]

“Through our scoping review, we have tried to do the same exercise from the practices of the realist evaluation in the field of public health. Our work has three main objectives to propose a clearer and more precise definition of the concept of mechanism: (1) trace how the concept of mechanism is defined in the writings of [Ray] Pawson and his colleagues, (2) describe how this concept is defined and operationalized in the contribution of the users of the realist approach in the public health field, and (3) explain what are the differences between mechanism, intervention, and context.” [Anthony Lacouture, Eric Breton, Anne Guichard, and Valéry Ridde, “The concept of mechanism from a realist approach: a scoping review to facilitate its operationalization in public health program evaluation.” Implementation Science. Volume 10, number 153, 2015. Pages 1-10.]

“Values inquiry, involvement of stakeholders and methods of personal contact, fieldwork, reflection and reflexivity are central to realistic evaluation. Consideration of realistic evaluation as a paradigm which cannot be value-free may bring new developments in evaluation inquiry. Such developments are likely to produce a more credible and meaningful portrait of social reality and define more explicitly the role of realistic evaluation in it.” [Areti Stavropoulou and Theodora Stroubouki, “Using the principles of realistic evaluation approach in nurse education.” Health Science Journal. Volume 8, issue 4, 2014. Pages 411-422.]

“At the level of epistemology, scientific realism appears to provide a holistic approach to the evaluation of practice. Its ontology is critical realist as in the above three perspectives, but it goes further in recognising reality as a constellation of mechanisms, structures and contexts. Practice takes place in an open system, and can be evaluated through analyses of the real entities, thereby attempting to capture the full complexities of practice. The content of practice intervention is seen as a model, and the extent to which it is effective depends on the extent to which the model is analogous to reality. In a realist effectiveness cycle, the evaluation begins with the model based on existing knowledge about contexts, mechanisms and outcomes, and through data collection the model is continuously refined and developed.” [Mansoor A. F. Kazi and Lucy J. Spurling, “Realist Evaluation for Evidence-Based Practice.” Presented at the European Evaluation Society’s fourth conference. Lausanne, Switzerland. October, 2000. Pages 1-21. Retrieved on March 3rd, 2016.]

“The main thrust of this article has been to question [Ray] Pawson’s characterization of [Roy] Bhaskar’s critical realism as entailing a totalizing conception of science. I have argued that many of the putative differences between the two realisms that he posits are illusional. Moreover, I have argued that where differences do exist, there is good reason for evaluators to adopt the positions of critical realism, rather than those put forward in realist evaluation. Specifically, I have contended that evaluation of interventions needs to focus on both the social mechanisms they entail, and the responses to these by the actors affected by them.” [Sam Porter, “The uncritical realism of realist evaluation.” Evaluation. Volume 21, number 1, 2015. Pages 65-82.]

“The distinction between this paper and the previous one [‘The uncritical realism of realist evaluation’] lies in the fact that the focus here is on the deconstruction and reconstruction of realist evaluation, rather than a defence of [Roy] Bhaskar’s … position. Thus, I engage in an immanent critique of the model, arguing that the problems faced by researchers in operationalizing the basic concepts of realist evaluation reflect ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions contained within its theoretical framework.” [Sam Porter, “Realist evaluation: an immanent critique.” Nursing Philosophy. Volume 16, number 4, October 2015. Pages 239-251.]

“As a point of reference, the article starts by reviewing how interview techniques have been applied in published realist evaluations. Then, the article suggests two guiding principles to interviewing when the researcher’s programme theory is the matter of the interview …. The first one relates to the design of realist studies (sampling strategy and choosing interviewees) and the second one explains how to ask questions like a realist, including the construction of topic guides and identification of three different phases in realist interviews: theory gleaning, theory refining and theory consolidation.” [Ana Manzano, “The craft of interviewing in realist evaluation.” Evaluation. April, 2016. Pages 1-19.]

“Realist evaluation is underpinned by critical realism, and promotes a theory-driven approach to programme evaluation, which implies that to explain what is happening, it is important to understand the contingent theory behind it. We defined programme as ‘any novel intervention or project aimed at improving the states of affairs’ ….” [Lynne Williams, Jo Rycroft-Malone, and Christopher R. Burton, “Implementing best practice in infection prevention and control. A realist evaluation of the role of intermediaries.” International Journal of Nursing Studies. Volume 60, August 2016. Pages 156-167.]

“Realist Evaluation can be represented at all four levels. On the level of philosophy, Realist Evaluation is grounded in realism and in systems theory (for human services programs, a particular kind of systems theory, called complexity theory, is often useful.) Realist evaluation itself is a particular evaluation theory. Realist Evaluation develops a particular kind of programme theory, structured as Context-Mechanism-Outcome Configuration (CMOCs). Lastly, substantive theory feeds realist evaluation with clues on the mechanisms (e.g. the combination of reasoning and resources that enable a programme to ‘work’) through which programs work and the contexts in which they will work.” [Gill Westhorp, Ester Prins, Cecile Kusters, Mirte Hultink, Irene Guijt, and Jan Brouwers, “Realist Evaluation: an overview.” Seminar report. Centre for Development Innovation. Wageningen, the Netherlands. May, 2011. Pages 1-13.]

“The structure of this article is first to draw out a key tension within realist evaluation that has always been problematic and marked it apart from critical realism: the emphasis on outcomes or demi-regularities. Second, it will turn to the concept of the counterfactual and its most commonly invoked incarnation in impact evaluation, the RCT [randomised controlled trial]. It will outline why RCTs can be useful for scientific evaluation in simple or complicated systems, but not complex adaptive ones. In so doing, and together with the realist approach to understanding the value of interventions by reference to mechanisms and context, it will consider and reject the possibility of a realist RCT. Finally, it will discuss the use of theory- or realist-informed RCTs as a means of increasing the precision of experimental evaluation and realist propensity score matching as means of testing realist theory.” [Andrew J. Hawkins, “Realist evaluation and randomised controlled trials for testing program theory in complex social systems.” Evaluation. June, 2016. Pages 1-16.]

“Realistic evaluation springs from critical realism and suggests that the main purpose of evaluation research is to obtain knowledge about the underlying causal mechanisms by which change is brought about in order to identify which processes may improve the successful implementation of the intervention ….” [Karina Nielsen, “Putting context into organizational intervention design: Using tailored questionnaires to measure initiatives for worker well-being.” Human Relations. Volume 67, number 12, December 2014. Pages 1537-1560.]

“Realistic evaluation draws on [Roy] Bhaskar’s critical realism … as taken up and developed by [Ray] Pawson and [Nick] Tilley … and is the theory most often linked to the complexity sciences, particularly CAS [complex adaptive systems theory].” [Chris Mowles, “Complex, but not quite complex enough: The turn to the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship.” Evaluation. Volume 20, number 2, 2014. Pages 160-175.]

“… the intellectual lineage of the realist approach to evaluation can be traced back directly to the (European) critical realist movement in the philosophy of science (see above). In this sense [Ray] Pawson is a sympathetic British relative rather than a direct sibling of the American tradition of theory-driven evaluation, which is generally silent about ontological and epistemological assumptions.” [Brad Astbury, “Some reflections on Pawson’s Science of Evaluation: A Realist Manifesto.” Evaluation. Volume 19, number 4, October 2013. Pages 383-401.]

“In what follows, we first review the current debate on the evaluation of development aid from the viewpoint of the challenges NGOs currently face. Second, we put forward realistic evaluation as a potential approach for NGOs, especially in order to meet their learning objectives. Third, we propose that in order to identify the mechanisms in NGO interventions, additional attention should be paid to the value dimension that affects the designed programme mechanisms and plays an important role in the successes and failures of interventions. We propose that at the conceptual level, a pragmatist account of values should be incorporated with the realistic evaluation efforts taking place within NGOs. In conclusion, we state that a realistic evaluation approach in which inquiring into values is incorporated will allow NGOs to develop their evaluation processes in ways that will provide a better understanding of what works, for whom, and in what context.” [Katariina Holma and Tiina Kontinen, “Realistic evaluation as an avenue to learning for development NGOs.” Evaluation. Volume 17, number 2, April 2011. Pages 181-192.]

“Emergent realist evaluation, or ERE, is an approach to evaluation based both on a philosophy called neo-realism and on an integration of lessons drawn by many evaluators from practice, theory, and research. Like other forms of realism, emergent realism assumes that reality exists apart from our understanding of it.… Emergent realism also assumes, as do most forms of realism, that there are regular patterns in the world that we can detect, including underlying generating mechanisms.… Unobservable underlying mechanisms give rise to observable events.…

“Reality, then, is hierarchical or stratified …

“… [Roy] Bhaskar …, a key figure in critical realism, claimed that there are two functions that the experimental scientist must perform: ‘First, [slhe must trigger the mechanism under study to ensure that it is active; and, secondly, [s]he must prevent any interference with the operation of the mechanism. These activities could be designated as “experimental production” and “experimental control.”‘”

[Melvin M. Mark, Gary T. Henry, and George Julnes, “A Realist Theory of Evaluation Practice.” New Directions for Evaluation. Number 78, summer 1998. Pages 3-32.]

“In this volume, we present logic models representing three theories of evaluation practice: Practical Participatory Evaluation, Values-Engaged Evaluation, and Emergent Realist Evaluation.” [Marvin C. Alkin, Anne T. Vo, and Mark Hansen, “Using logic models to facilitate comparisons of evaluation theory.” Evaluation and Program Planning. Volume 38, June 2013. Page 33.]

“… we recognize that reading everything by a given evaluation theorist would add to the workload and reduce the likelihood such studies are done. Reading the entire corpus of an author’s work intensifies another problem, that is, the theorist’s positions may change over time, making it harder to capture a coherent position. In our case, at least, the UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] team’s decision to define the theory as ‘emergent realist evaluation’ makes the choice of coded papers more defensible ….” [Melvin M. Mark and Gary T. Henry, “Logic models and content analyses for the explication of evaluation theories: The case of emergent realist evaluation.” Evaluation and Program Planning. Volume 38, June 2013. Pages 74-76.]

“… from the methods ‘branch,’ [we consider] [Melvin M.] Mark, [Gary T.] Henry, and [George] Julnes’ emergent realist evaluation ….” [Mark Hansen, Marvin C. Alkin, and Tanner LeBaron Wallace, “Depicting the logic of three evaluation theories.” Evaluation and Program Planning. Volume 38, June 2013. Pages 34-43.]

“Contemporary realists often refer to the existence of a reality that is structured, hierarchical, and embedded (e.g., [Roy] Bhaskar …). In large part, this means that there are unobservable phenomena that underlie the things we perceive and experience.…

“… In the language of some realists (e.g., Bhaskar …), activities at this level are referred to as events or, when observed, experiences.”

[Melvin M. Mark, Gary T. Henry, and George Julnes, “Toward an Integrative Framework for Evaluation Practice.” American Journal of Evaluation. Volume 20, number 2, 1999. Pages 177–198.]

“New definitions of social problems do emerge, but they are also relatively rare and seem to accrete rather than spring dramatically onto the public agenda ….

“Because of the multiple interests and actors involved, no one manages the emergence of new problems on the public agenda and no one has a monopoly on determining the next, new policy alternative to be debated ….”

[Gary T. Henry, “Using Evaluation Findings for Policy: A Realist Perspective.” Presented at the 4th European Evaluation Society Conference. Lausanne, Switzerland. October 12th–14th, 2000. Pages 1-15. Retrieved on May 21st, 2016.]

“Critical realism has a great advantage in process evaluation but also in the other two dimensions when compared with naïve realism and antirealism. This is because the ‘process evaluation’ involves similar aspects which could be studied using outcome measures or identifying themes through reported experiences; however, this requires recontextualization and redescription of data from different theoretical perspective. For example, in patient journey studies the stages of change theory have been used to study the process of change through PHI [persons with hearing impairment] and their CPs [communication partners of persons with hearing impairment] journey through hearing loss.” [Vinaya Manchaiah, Berth Danermark, Jerker Rönnberg, and Thomas Lunner, “Importance of ‘Process Evaluation’ in Audiological Rehabilitation: Examples from Studies on Hearing Impairment.” International Journal of Otolaryngology. Volume 2014, Article ID 168684. Pages 1-7.]

“We are … undertaking an extensive process evaluation and adopting a critical realism approach in which the predominant question is, what works for whom under what conditions? This approach acknowledges that preexisting health care system structures and processes affect, and are affected by, the intervention actors. In this evaluation, we aim to understand the causal processes of change. We will take a realist approach in the evaluation and explore the ‘mechanism’ by which the intervention has its effect ….” [Margaret Thorogood, Jane Goudge, Melanie Bertram, Tobias Chirwa, Sandra Eldridge, Francesc Xavier Gómez-Olivé, Felix Limbani, Eustasius Musenge, Nokuzola Myakayaka, Stephen Tollman, and Rhian Twine, “The Nkateko health service trial to improve hypertension management in rural South Africa: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial.” Trials. Volume 15, number 435, 2014. Pages 1-9.]

“… a clinician cannot reduce the problem of hearing loss to the biological level. In order to achieve a suecessfui treatment, she has to take into account mechanisms working at many levels. If an audiologist only treats a hearing impairment as a biological and technical problem and reduces the problem to the question of a hearing aid, the rehabihtation programme will seldom be successful. It is a well-known fact that many hearing aids are not used because of psychological and social mechanisms. These mechanisms have to be addressed if successful rehabilitation is to be achieved. Hence, rehabilitation must be based on knowledge and methods specific for eaeh level in a complex battery of measures, and not be reduced.” [Berth Danermark, “Different approaches in the assessment of audiological rehabilitation: a meta-theoretical perspective.” International Journal of Audiology. Volume 42, supplement 1, January 2003. Pages 112-117.]

“… realistic evaluation focuses on ‘change mechanisms.’ Change mechanisms arise from a series of embedded processes and are capable of transforming these processes. Whether change happens or not depends on the contexts in which these mechanisms operate. Whether the mechanisms are activated or not depends on the social and cultural conditions that pre-date human action, thereby allowing a program to work. It is therefore crucial to look at different contexts in which a program may be located, that is, to determine ‘how change mechanisms are distributed within and between program contexts’ ….” [Corina Raduescu and Iris Vessey, “Causality in Critical Realist Research: An Analysis of Three Explanatory Frameworks.” Presented at the annual meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism. King’s College. London, England. July 11th–13th, 2008. Pages 1-42. Retrieved on June 27th, 2016.]

“Embedded in the critical realist tradition, this article aims to explore the potentialities of the case study for evaluation purposes when complexity and specificity are moderate.…

“Towards a Middle-Range Theory of Functional Flexibility …

“The translation of the [Context–Mechanism–Outcome] framework proposed by [Ray] Pawson and [Nick] Tilley runs as follows. An occupational road accident brings about the absence of an employee (A). The hidden costs (O) caused by the absence are influenced by the intervening mechanisms (M) and the context (C). As stated by Pawson the vital ingredients of programme ontology are its ‘generative mechanisms’ and its ‘contiguous context’.”

[Gerard Kœnig, “Realistic Evaluation and Case Studies: Stretching the Potential.” Evaluation. Volume 15, number 1, January 2009. Pages 9-30.]

“The study is situated within the emerging field of critical lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) health psychology …. Within this field gay men’s health is investigated in its own right, without research on heterosexual people being taken as its benchmark …. The research is informed by a critical realist position …, which theorizes people’s accounts as constructed, yet at the same time accepts them as descriptions of events and personal experiences that have some basis/meaning in reality.… [T]hese data are (semi) public accounts that report, at least to some degree, men’s understandings of what it means to be gay and what gay identity means to them ….” [Jeffery Adams, Virginia Braun, and Tim McCreanor, “‘Aren’t Labels for Pickle Jars, Not People?’: Negotiating Identity and Community in Talk About ‘Being Gay.’” American Journal of Men’s Health. Volume 8, number 6, 2014. Pages 457-479.]

“The study is situated within the newly demarcated field of critical lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) health psychology … and so does not take heterosexual research as its benchmark; rather, it looks at gay men’s health in its own right …. The research is informed by a critical realist position …, which theorizes people’s accounts as constructed, yet at the same time accepts them as descriptions of events and personal experiences that have some basis/meaning in reality.” [Jeffery Adams, Virginia Braun, and Tim McCreanor, “Gay Men Talking About Health: Are Sexuality and Health Interlinked?” American Journal of Men’s Health. Volume 6, number 3, May 2012. Pages 182-193.]

“The links between process and outcomes in participatory research (PR) can be described by the theory of partnership synergy, which includes consideration of how PR can ensure culturally and logistically appropriate research, enhance recruitment capacity, and generate professional capacity and competence in stakeholder groups.…

“We found by using the critical realist approach and the theory proposed in a recent review of PR that PR can generate positive results through beneficial contextual factors, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and cumulative partnership synergy. Successful partnership of APP [Academic Practice Policy] requires contexts that foster a trustful partnership with respectful recognition of each partner’s competence and interests.”

[Charli C-G Eriksson, Ingela Fredriksson, Karin Fröding, Susanna Geidne, and Camilla Pettersson, “Academic practice–policy partnerships for health promotion research: Experiences from three research programs.” Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. Volume 42, supplement 15, November 2014. Pages 88-95.]

“An improvement-orientated approach to quality assurance located within a critical realist frame would entail changing the rules of engagement and the rules of evidence of the game. This would mean shifting from the top-down application of universal prespecified criteria across the system to developing a more context-specific backward-mapping approach that is designed to begin with self-evaluation that focuses on the reasoning of practitioners in situ. This focus on the understanding of practitioners (in this case those who teach in higher education) is crucial if the goal is double- as opposed to single-loop learning. In other words, the evaluation should motivate evaluees not only to do what they already do better, but to provide them with reasons for re-thinking and re-conceptualising what they do, in order to do it differently.” [Kathy Luckett, “Methodology matters: Possible methods to improve quality.” Perspectives in Education. Volume 25, number 3, September 2007. Pages 1-11.]

“Since the emergent properties of social structures depend on their being peopled, and the causal powers of people either depend on, or are modified by, their position in social structures, all working mechanisms will involve both. [Margaret S.] Archer’s development of [Roy] Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity (TMSA) in terms of morphogenetic cycles is an invaluable theoretical outline.” [Caroline New, “Realising the Potential: the ESRC Seminar Series on Social Realism and Empirical Research.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 1, July 2001. Pages 43-47.]

“I propose to replace the politics of scale with the concept of ‘scalar politics,’ arguing that it is often not scale per se that is the prime object of contestation between social actors, but rather specific processes and institutionalized practices that are themselves differentially scaled. This is advocated as a significant new direction for research on scale, attempting to integrate work on scalar practices and discourses with a continuing concern for the material production of scale …. This work of synthesis is supported by a critical realist philosophical position, combining an ontological sense of scale as a set of material relations with an interest in the epistemological construction of scale through particular social representations and discourses ….” [Danny MacKinnon, “Reconstructing scale: Towards a new scalar politics.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 35, number 1, February 2011. Pages 21-36.]

“The positioning of reality as an open system is required to argue for the trans-factual operation of universal laws, to overcome the weakness of the Humean concept of laws being tied to closed systems through the constant conjunctures of events. Once we discern open systems we allow for the possibility of generative mechanisms and structures existing independently of any particular pattern or sequence of events …, required to justify the concept of a stratified ontology and the rejection of positivistic notions of prediction and direct unmediated knowledge. As a result of this commitment we can argue that causal laws endure and continue to operate where no conjuncture of events is forthcoming …, allowing us to consider the conditions under which such laws operate.” [Jason Ferdinand, “Something’s Missing In Gherardi’s Kitchen: Practice-Based Theorizing With A Dialectical Critical Realist Flavour.” Presented at Critique and Inclusivity: Opening the Agenda. Critical Management Studies. July 7th–9th, 2003. Pages 1-15. Retrieved on May 20th, 2016.]

“[Margaret S.] Archer’s model of practice … is rooted in a fully conceptualized notion of the real, as philosophically articulated by Roy Bhaskar …, second because it is rooted in human psychophysical development …, and third because her notion of practice informs her own model of social dynamics, called morphogenesis. Like both ‘structure’ and ‘function,’ the term ‘morphogenesis’ is borrowed from biology and applied to sociocultural transformation. Archer has developed this model in four works linking the philosophically real with the socioculturally human via the mutual coefficient of agency and structure ….” [Derek P. Brereton, “House society and practice theories illuminate American campsteads.” Anthropological Theory. Volume 5, number 2, 2005. Pages 135-153.]

“… the purpose of this paper is to outline the case for critical realism as the basis for a framework to guide appropriate action in emancipatory practice development (ePD) and using realistic evaluation for understanding the consequences of those actions. This paper begins by examining reasons why realism and more essentially critical realism offers an appropriate philosophical structure for the study presented.” [Valerie Wilson and Brendan McCormack, “Critical realism as emancipatory action: the case for realistic evaluation in practice development.” Nursing Philosophy. Volume 7, 2006. Pages 45-57.]

“Critical realism, or Habermasian-informed realism, is the philosophical cornerstone of today’s EPD [emancipatory practice development] movement in nursing and midwifery.” [Greg Fairbrother, Andrew Cashin, Tone Elin Mekki, Iain Graham, and Brendan McCormack, “Is it possible to bring the emancipatory practice development and evidence-based practice agendas together in nursing and midwifery?” International Practice Development Journal. Volume 5, issue 1, article 4.]

“… this paper explores the development of critical social theory as an underpinning philosophical paradigm and critical realism as an interconnected evaluative methodology. It also outlines the influences exerted by the critical realist paradigm in guiding emancipatory practice development activities. In addition, the links between critical realism and realistic evaluation are explored and, in particular, how the latter may be employed within an emancipatory practice development study to elucidate and increase understanding pertinent to causation and outcomes.” [Randal Parlour and Brendan McCormack, “Blending critical realist and emancipatory practice development methodologies: making critical realism work in nursing research.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, 2012. Pages 308-321.]

“The generative theory usually associated with CR [critical realism] ‘sees causation as acting internally as well as externally.’ … CR’s approach to smoking and tobacco control will be based on recommendations for research, context, and mechanism. In considering underlying mechanisms associated with smoking in Nigeria for example, using CR terms, accurate information was obtained from the grassroots (those affected directly by the policy) in order to obtain a clearer understanding of local problems of health and smoking.

“During the study, it was discovered that some participants attributed their addiction to smoking to diabolism and blamed themselves or someone else for their addictive behavior – the blame was never on the tobacco companies. In this situation, a policy that would help combat smoking in Nigeria will have to harness some of these cultural beliefs in order for the policy to be effective for that particular population.”

[Dunsi Oladele, Alexander M. Clark, Solina Richter, and Lory Laing, “Critical realism: a practical ontology to explain the complexities of smoking and tobacco control in different resource settings.” Global Health Action: Global Health Beyond 2015. Volume 6, April (3rd) 2013. Open access. Pages 1-14.]

“I argue and conclude, first, that [Sigmund] Freud’s conception of causal unconscious processes is of importance to critical realist thinking in relation to both rationality and social change. I claim that the question of what is regarded as causally efficacious ultimately affects the conception of causality. Second, that the notions of causality in Freudian reasoning and critical realism have real points of connection according to a set of vital criteria – from open systems to the reason vs. causes debate.” [Anne Pernille Kran, “Comparing Causality in Freudian Reasoning and Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 1, April 2010. Pages 5-32.]

“Economic ‘progress’ has become ever more dependent on our preparedness to spend the money we earn by working too hard and too long on the goods which help to provide the satisfaction we have increasingly sacrificed through over-work and over-production. The post 9/11 calls for ‘patriotic’ shopping; the more recent car scrappage schemes; the appeals to spend our way out of the credit crunch, and so forth, these moves all testify to this dependency. The message today is: whatever happens, don’t stop shopping! And it is a message aided by the billions spent on advertising, and the more or less total veto on other representations of desire and pleasure: a veto daily sustained in all our mainstream media outlets, dependent as they are on advertising revenue, and reinforced by the discourse on prosperity of all the mainstream political parties.” [Kate Soper, “The dialectics of progress: Irish ‘belatedness’ and the politics of prosperity.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization. Volume 13, number 2, 2013. Pages 249-267.]

“… there are also … very serious ethical and political objections to conceptualising nature as an autonomous locus of intrinsic value which we should always seek to preserve from human defilement and instrumental appropriation.… It is precisely because a regard for the ‘immediate interests’ of nature … may be consistent with the most patriarchal and least democratic political institutions, and the implementation of totalitarian methods of controlling human consumption, population and migration that a green politics which professes a concern for global equity, gender parity and the collective well-being of future generations, must eschew a simplistic theory of natural value.…

“… These arguments have been influenced by the Critical Realism developed in Roy Bhaskar’s work.”

[Kate Soper, “Realism, Humanism and the Politics of Nature.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. Number 98, December 2001. Pages 55-71.]

“… I argue for an understanding of humanity-nature relations which is both realist and humanist: realist in the sense that it recognizes the contrast between the independent ‘nature’ that is presupposed as the permanent ground of all human activity and environmental change (that which I term the ‘realist’ concept of nature), and the ‘nature’ through which we refer to the historically changing and culturally transformed environment (that I term the ‘lay’ or ‘surface’ concept ‘nature,’ the nature of immediate human experience and aesthetic response); and humanist, in the sense that it is opposed to that form of naturalism which wants to emphasize how similarly (rather than differentially) placed we are to other animals in respect of our ‘essential’ needs and ecological dependencies and seeks to ground ecological policy in this recognition.” [Kate Soper, “The Politics of Nature: Reflections on Hedonism, Progress and Ecology.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Volume 10, number 2, June 1999. Pages 47-70.]

“In short, feminism should be both ‘humanist’ and ‘feminist’ – for the paradox of post-structuralising collapse of the ‘feminine’ and the move to ‘in-difference’ is that it reintroduces – though in the disguised form of an aspiration to no-gender – something not entirely dissimilar from the old humanistic goal of sexual parity and reconciliation. And, while one can welcome the reintroduction of the goal, it may still require some of the scepticism which inspired its original deconstruction.” [Kate Soper, “Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 55, summer 1990. Pages 11-17.]

“… if the symptoms of a return of the ‘repressed’ of value are now disturbing the psychic composure of certain postmodernist modes of reflection, then this is not to do with the repression of a vocabulary but rather with the repression or evasion of the realist commitments that may be essential to sustaining any consistent defence of broadly left-wing political values.…

“At one level—that at which we are called upon to decide our general affective response to the ‘postmodern’ condition—we can think of this equivocation in terms of the emotional tug between two contrary invitations. One, that which asks us to keep a grip on the horror and ugliness of our world, never to forget the extent to which it is beset by war, famine, torture, loss of nature, grotesque inequalities and intolerable oppressions; and which therefore calls upon us to analyse all practice and historical process in terms of the degree to which it promotes or detracts from the realization of greater peace, equality, democracy, ecological well-being and the future flourishing of our species and its planet.”

[Kate Soper, “Postmodernism, Subjectivity and the Question of Value.” New Left Review. Series I, number 186, March–April 1991. Pages 120-128.]

“‘Alternative hedonism’ responds to the current situation not only as a crisis, and by no means only as presaging future gloom and doom, but as an opportunity to advance beyond a mode of life that is not just unsustainable but also in many respects unpleasurable and self-denying. Alternative hedonists can speak more compellingly, and persuasively, than the prophets of environmental catastrophe. Whereas predictions of environmental disaster encourage a carpe diem fatalism, alternative hedonism is premised on the idea that even if consumerism were indefinitely sustainable it would not enhance human happiness and well-being (not, at any rate, beyond a point that we in the rich world have already passed). And it points to new forms of desire, rather than fears of ecological disaster, as the most likely motivating force in any shift towards a more sustainable economic order.” [Kate Soper, “Environmental Alienation.” Changing our Environment, Changing Ourselves: Nature, Labour, Knowledge and Alienation. James S. Ormrod, editor. London: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature. 2016. Pages 81-99.]

“My work is centred around certain core commitments, which have been preoccupations from the start. These relate to certain tensions, or conflicting perspectives, which I’ve continued to worry at and attempted to theorize, although they’ve been revised and recontextualized in response to changes in the political and intellectual situation. I have focused on issues of hedonism and consumption, the question of human needs and pleasures. For instance, in the early work on [Karl] Marx, I felt that what was missing from Marxism was a coherent thematic about needs. Or perhaps it’s better to say that what interested me in the Marxist position was its juxtaposition of two conflicting perspectives on needs. One of these is relativist: all needs are culturally relative and historically developed. The other offers a perspective on post-capitalist society which seems to require some kind of commitment to and knowledge of the true conditions of human flourishing. That tension has continued to engage me into my most recent work. I’m still thinking about an alternative hedonism from within an ecological perspective. So that’s one ongoing thematic.” [Kate Soper, “An alternative hedonism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 92, November/December 1998. Pages 28-38.]

“The separation between ‘is’ (Sein) and ‘ought’ (Sollen) is one of the stakes in any discussion of transdisciplinary social science. Explaining a significant social phenomenon almost inevitably entails passing judgment on that phenomenon and carries implicit or explicit recommendations about whether it should be preserved or absented. The inevitably normative dimension of even the most empirical social science has been occluded, however, by the doctrine of ‘value-freedom’ or value neutrality ….

“… Some critical realists prefer the term ‘structure’ to mechanism, but this carries the theoretical baggage of ‘structuralism.’ The word ‘system’ brings with it the connotations of systems theory. The word ‘process’ is problematic because processes are located at the ontological level of ‘events.’ Events are the things sociologists are trying to explain, not their explaining elements. The words ‘determinant’ and ‘cause’ are too general and all-encompassing. The word ‘mechanism’ has thus gained favor as an alternative to atheoretical empiricism, even if it is constantly in danger of slipping into a sort of positivism.”

[George Steinmetz, “Transdisciplinarity as a Nonimperial Encounter: for an Open Sociology.” Thesis Eleven. Number 91, November 2007. Pages 48-65.]

“The historicist historical sociologist … understands the social world as an open, overdetermined system …, while the Humean understands the social world as a system of empirical regularities. These alternative philosophies have important implications for policy science. Policy interventions based on the premise of social regularities are unlikely to succeed, except in the narrowest contexts, because of the openness of the social.” [George Steinmetz, “Should Comparative Historical Sociology Save the World?” Trajectories: Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section. American Sociological Association. Volume 28, number 2, winter 2016. Pages 1-10.]

“Historical sociology at a minimum is defined by a refusal of general theory – of the idea that a single causal mechanism can explain any and all historical events – and a willingness to explore overdetermination, conjunctures, accidents, and the unprecedented and unique event ….” [George Steinmetz, “Bourdieu, Historicity, and Historical Sociology.” Cultural Sociology. Volume 5, number 1, March 2011. Pages 45-66.]

“By claiming to represent and even to reinvent history singlehandedly, historical sociologists unwittingly collude with the discipline’s ‘Homeland Security Agents,’ whose goal is to seal the frontier against historical interlopers. A preferable option would be to open the border to history, inviting processes of transdisciplinarity and transculturation. Without this, sociology will continue to expel and repel historically-minded thinkers and to prevent trained historians from being hired in sociology departments. Sociologists will be deprived of the benefit of interacting with a discipline that has been dealing for centuries with the same theoretical, epistemological, and methodological questions that concern sociology.” [George Steinmetz, “The Relations between Sociology and History in the United States: The Current State of Affairs.” Journal of Historical Sociology. Volume 20, number 1/2, March/June 2007. Pages 1-12.]

“… [The] complex and contingent social reality is produced and mediated through our conceptions of that reality. As such, critical realism places great emphasis on the constitutive role of meaning and language, and so advocates that the production of any knowledge is a social activity that uses existing knowledge, information and ‘frames of meaning’ …. Realists agree therefore with governmentality theorists that the naming of phenomena is of central importance, but differ in their commitment to a belief in the material reality underlying discursive accounts of social phenomena. In so doing, critical realism posits a more complex relation between language and the world ….” [Sadie Parr, “Confronting the reality of anti-social behaviour.” Theoretical Criminology. Volume 13, number 3, 2009. Pages 363-381.]

“Within the current literature in the philosophy of science, there are arguments made for a realist conception of mechanism. Mario Bunge’s realist school and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist school exemplify this. Each claims a sensible middle ground between empiricism and relativism. In a parallel fashion, research in the social sciences following the mechanism paradigm purports to occupy a fruitful position between the extremes of positivism and of epistemological skepticism. But is the mechanism-realist paradigm as it is applied in social-scientific research a continuation of the mechanism-realist paradigm as it is designed by the philosophy of science? …

“Despite any differences on the definition of mechanism and its relation to affiliated ontologies, Bunge and Bhaskar are on the same page when describing the complexity in which mechanisms operate.…

[Chares Demetriou, “The Realist Approach to Explanatory Mechanisms in Social Science: More than a Heuristic?” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 39, number 3, 2009. Pages 440-462.]

“Using a critical realist epistemology, it can be argued that case research is ideal for identifying the deep processes and structures that cause particular outcomes to occur and the contexts that allow or facilitate their occurrence ….

Diagram E

[Debbie Harrison and Geoff Easton, “Patterns of actor response to environmental change.” Journal of Business Research. Volume 55, 2002. Pages 545- 552.]

“This article explores the merits of using realistic evaluation design in the evaluation of a new model of patient care and its contribution to evidence-based pain management for patients with cancer who are receiving palliative care. To provide relevant clinical and theoretical context, we first outline the new model and examine the challenge of implementing interdisciplinary evidence-based practice. Study methods are described in detail and findings are selectively reported to illuminate methodological strengths and challenges associated with realistic evaluation.” [Debbie Tolson, Jean McIntosh, Linda Loftus, and Paul Cormie, “Developing a managed clinical network in palliative care: a realistic evaluation.” International Journal of Nursing Studies. Volume 44, 2007. Pages 183-195.]

“… Critical Realists directly assert the veracity of ontological realism and its importance to the foundation of science. But the essence of this ultimate reality is at direct odds with the reality of the New Atheists. Roy Bhaskar, the father of Critical Realism, horrified some of his followers and pleased others, by telling us exactly what reality entails.…

“Bhaskar’s technique of ‘God-realisation’ and his call to ‘re-enchant reality’ provide us with some sense of why an assertion of ontological realism is important to him–it is necessary in establishing that the existence of God is compatible with contemporary science.”

[Paul Froese, “fact, value, God, and reality: How Wittgenstein’s Ethics Clarifies the Fact-value Distinction and, in the Process, Perhaps Subverts a Scientific Holy War.” The Association of Religion Data Archives. ARDA Guiding Papers Series. Pennsylvania State University. State College, Pennsylvania. 2011. Pages 1-13.]

“… [According to] a transcendental account of the concept of causal power … (1) the existence of the causal powers of things belong to the necessary conditions of the possibility of successful scientific practices and, (2) the causal powers of things exist in a special ontological realm beyond the realm of the actual events and processes that constitute the possible objects of our experiences ….” [Tuukka Kaidesoja, “Exploring the Concept of Causal Power in a Critical Realist Tradition.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 37, number 1, 2007. Pages 63-87.]

“Now I think that it may be said from the perspective just sketched that the starting point of [Roy] Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments for his transcendental (or critical) realist ontology is promising, because the arguments begin with analysis of successful natural scientific practices. But, as I argued in ‘The trouble with transcendental arguments,’ his arguments have to be naturalised in order for them to be coherent and plausible.” [Tuukka Kaidesoja, “How Useful are Transcendental Arguments for Critical Realist Ontology?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 5, issue 2, August 2006. Pages 344-353.]

“… the naturalist perspective to social ontology requires that our ontological theories should be compatible with the ontological assumptions and presuppositions of the well-confirmed scientific theories as well as epistemically successful scientific practices, including those in cognitive science. It follows from this that a priori conceptual analysis of the meanings of folk psychological concepts cannot provide a sufficient basis for developing a naturalist ontology of social action though it may offer some useful ideas to begin with.” [Tuukka Kaidesoja. Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Page 172.]

“In addition to transcendental arguments, the concepts of causal power and ontological emergence are among the key components of critical realism. Though I share some of their basic views pertaining to these concepts, I argue that both of these concepts are used ambiguously by [Roy] Bhaskar and many other critical realists. For example, I demonstrate that there are sections in Bhaskar’s … books where he tends to detach causal powers from concrete entities by interpreting the former as transcendentally real features of reality.

“…I readily admit that I was only able to sketch a naturalized critical realism in broad outline. Although I regard the sketch as highly promising, I admit that it needs more work.”

[Tuukka Kaidesoja, “Précis of Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology.” Journal of Social Ontology. Creative Commons. Volume 1, number 2, 2015. Pages 321-326.]

“… one of the core points in my critique is that one cannot plausibly argue for ontological views by means of Kantian transcendental arguments unless one commits him- or herself to a Kantian doctrine of transcendental idealism (or some historically and culturally relativized version of it) according which the objects of cognitive experience and scientific knowledge are partly constituted by the forms of our sensibility and the categories of our understanding (or by our scientific theories and practices). Since [Roy] Bhaskar … advocates realism with respect to ontological categories and objects of scientific inquiry, transcendental idealism of this kind is explicitly rejected by him. In my view, the unresolved tension between transcendental arguments and ontological realism in Bhaskar’s work is one of the reasons why his transcendental arguments for the transcendental realist ontology are problematic and hard to reconcile with a naturalist philosophy of science.

“Though I reject [Roy] Bhaskar’s a priori reasoning to establish ‘the (conditional) transcendental necessity’ of the ontological conclusions of his transcendental arguments and believe his meta-philosophical position to be incoherent, I nevertheless admit that there is something interesting in the ontological arguments presented in RTS [Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science]. I agree with Dave Elder-Vass’ and Daniel Little’s views that my naturalization of Bhaskar’s ontological arguments in RTS can be seen as an attempt to save the reasonable core of these arguments by means of removing the anti-naturalist (or aprioristic) elements from them.”

[Tuukka Kaidesoja, “Elaborating Naturalized Critical Realism: Response to Ruth Groff, Dave Elder-Vass, Daniel Little and Petri Ylikoski.” Journal of Social Ontology. Creative Commons. Volume 1, number 2, 2015. Pages 359-375.]

“I wish to emphasize here, that this study does not consist solely of negative criticism of the doctrines and concepts put forth within the tradition of critical realism. The following articles seek to explore and develop alternatives to the critical realist arguments and the doctrines criticized by them. The first and second articles argue, for example, that the naturalistic method of argumentation in ontology avoids the problems associated with the Kantian method of transcendental argumentation employed in the works of Bhaskar and some of his adherents.” [Tuukka Kaidesoja, “Studies on Ontological and Methodological Foundations of Critical Realism in the Social Sciences.” Ph.D. dissertation. Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research. Number 376. University of Jyväskylä. Jyväskylä, Finland. December 2009. Pages 1-65.]

“… the whole idea to naturalize transcendental arguments can also be questioned both from the point of view of Kantian transcendental philosophy and from the perspective of meta-philosophical naturalism. The term ‘transcendental argument’ in its Kantian meaning refers to arguments that produce knowledge about our way of cognizing (or knowing) reality. Knowledge about our way of cognizing reality is, according to [Immanuel] Kant’s transcendental idealism, also knowledge about the objects of our cognitive experience, because our way of cognizing reality partly constitutes the objects of our cognitive experience.” [Tuukka Kaidesoja, “The Trouble with Transcendental Arguments: Towards a Naturalization of Roy Bhaskar’s Early Realist Ontology.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 1, April 2005. Pages 28-61.]

“… [My stated] ontological views should not be regarded as descriptions of ‘transcendental conditions’ of anything because I do not think that the notion of ‘transcendental condition’ makes sense in the context of naturalist philosophy of science …. Despite this, I explicitly present them as naturalist alternatives to the anti-naturalist elements in the original critical realist ontology, as identified and criticized in my book. Due to the significant overlap between the above ontological views and Bhaskar’s original ontological views (e.g. commitment to a realist theory of causation in terms of causal powers and mechanisms and to a version of emergent materialist social ontology), I think that these naturalist ontological views together provide a revised and elaborated version of the original critical realist social ontology. For this reason, I use the term ‘naturalized critical realist social ontology.’” [Tuukka Kaidesoja, “Reclaiming Naturalized Critical Realism: Response to McWherter.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 2, February 2017. Pages 200-222.]

“It seems to me … that … [Tuukka] Kaidesoja fails to see through the rhetorical form to the point of [Roy] Bhaskar’s argument. What Bhaskar is arguing, as I understand him, is that there are true facts about the world, the referents of which are not actual things or events, and that we need some space in our ontology for these referents.… To restate the point a little differently, there are types of things of which it is true, irrespective of whether tokens of the type actually do exist, that tokens of the type would have certain causal powers if they did exist.” [Dave Elder-Vass, “Of Babies and Bathwater. A Review of Tuukka Kaidesoja Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology.” Journal of Social Ontology. Creative Commons. Volume 1, number 2, 2015. Pages 327-331.]

“… if what I have said is correct, then the bottom line is that there is no appreciable difference between naturalized critical realism and regular critical realism. [Tuukka] Kaidesoja’s version of the latter is a straw man (or woman, in my case), signaling only, if anything, an underlying ambivalence about [Roy] Bhaskar’s unabashed repudiation of empiricism. Since the metaphysics upon which all more or less agree is hardly orthodox, either in social science or, even now, in philosophy, this agreement seems both a good thing and the most important thing.” [Ruth Groff, “Tuukka Kaidesoja on Critical Realist Transcendental Realism.” Journal of Social Ontology. Creative Commons. Volume 1, number 2, 2015. Pages 341-348.]

“[Tuukka] Kaidesoja characterizes his position as a science-oriented version of the emergent materialist ontology. He contrasts this position to eliminative materialism that does not seem to provide promising bases for a philosophy of social sciences. I think he greatly clarifies critical realist discussions about emergence. He argues that there are at least three notions of emergence found in the critical realists literature, and two of these – transcendentally realist and global-level concepts of emergent powers – should be discarded as inherently problematic. This leaves only the compositional concept of emergent power, for which Kaidesoja suggests a Bungean analysis according to which a property is emergent if the constituents of the object having it do not possess it. In other words, emergent properties are ontologically novel properties.” [Petri Ylikoski, “Comment on Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology.” Journal of Social Ontology. Creative Commons. Volume 1, number 2, 2015. Pages 333-340.]

“I would further note that if we take the position that [Tuukka] Kaidesoja broadly accepts aspects of critical realist argument regarding scientific practice (necessary for it to be translated into naturalism) and that those aspects are derived precisely from the form of inquiry he thinks is basically flawed, how is it that it resulted in insights with which he accords, since the question form (as rephrased above) regarding science roots the focus on realist ontology that made the findings of RTS [Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science] within its immanent critique what they are?” [Jamie Morgan, “The Relevance of a Transcendental Mode of Inquiry.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 5, issue 2, August 2006. Pages 354-361.]

“They [Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert] claim that, ‘the critique of the new individualism we present in this book is one that finds a wealth of contemporary identity strategies. Some are conforming, some privatize, others are individualizing and genuinely autonomous. These later individualisms emerge from unique personal histories, as identities reinvented with imagination and ethical courage’ …. Yet not only does their account suffer from profound empirical inadequacies (thus calling into question the extent to which it ‘finds’ such strategies) but their reliance on formal concepts occludes the space between the ‘global’ and the ‘psychic’. Throughout the book they implicitly endorse a sparse ontology that only recognizes the psychic life of the subject ‘in here’ and the rampaging global forces ‘out there.’” [Mark Carrigan, “Realism, Reflexivity, Conflation, and Individualism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 3, October 2010. Pages 384-396.]

“Much contemporary psychoanalysis has been preoccupied with theorizing the structure of multiple identifications in the constitution of personal identity and a sense of individualism, but at the same time the larger question of social forces and institutional transformations has been sidelined from critical scrutiny. Our argument is that social theory must try to develop an account of the new individualism increasingly prevalent throughout the West today which, while attending to the specificity of psychic processes of multiple identifications and of the centrality of the passions, brings out the broader social and global significance of this phenomenon. Individualism can never be free of the emotional constructs and multiple identifications of the individual involved in producing and performing identities; what aspects of cultural life and of globalization individuals choose to emphasize and concentrate upon, and equally what they choose to ignore or set aside, is fundamental to any sober assessment of subjective reactions to processes of individualization.” [Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 75-76.]

“As Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert argue, persons are now called upon to exercise inner resources of creativity and flexibility in order to engage in everyday life ….” [Paul James and Andy Scerri, “Globalizing Consumption and the Deferral of a Politics of Consequence.” Globalizations. Volume 9, number 2, April 2012. Pages 225-240.]

“A realist process theory of causation constitutes a rejection of the basic premises of the positivist understanding of causation as well as being incompatible with other aspects of positivism …. The linking of ontological realism and epistemological constructivism that I advocate here is also explicitly antifoundationalist in rejecting any fundamental beliefs or assumptions about reality other than that it exists.” [Joseph A. Maxwell, “The Importance of Qualitative Research for Causal Explanation in Education.” Qualitative Inquiry. Volume 18, number 8, 2012. Pages 655-661.]

“This realist view of causation is compatible with, and supports, all the essential characteristics of qualitative research, including those emphasized by constructivists. First, its assertion that some causal processes can be directly observed, rather than only inferred from measured covariation of the presumed causes and effects, reinforces the importance placed by many qualitative researchers on directly observing and interpreting social and psychological processes.… Second, … it supports the insistence of qualitative researchers on the explanatory importance of context and does so in a way that does not simply reduce this context to a set of ‘extraneous variables.’ Third, the realist argument that mental events and processes are real phenomena that can be causes of behavior supports the fundamental role that qualitative researchers assign to meaning and intention in explaining social phenomena and the essentially interpretive nature of our understanding of these …. Fourth, in claiming that causal explanation does not inherently depend on preestablished comparisons, it legitimizes qualitative researchers’ use of flexible and inductive designs and methods.” [Joseph A. Maxwell, “Using Qualitative Methods for Causal Explanation.” Field Methods. Volume 16, number 3, August 2004. Pages 243-264.]

“… I would reframe the argument for experimental methods in terms of a realist understanding of causation.… I would argue that strictly experimental designs, with no qualitative components, are a comparatively powerful method for understanding causality only when three conditions obtain.” [Joseph A. Maxwell, “Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education.” Educational Researcher. Volume 33, number 2, March 2004. Pages 3-11.]

“… [There is an] approach to causation from that prevalent in quantitative research, one that sees causality as intrinsically referring to the mechanisms or processes that produce a particular outcome in a given context, rather than being limited to general laws or regularities, and that accepts causal explanations derived from the study of specific events and phenomena.” [Joseph A. Maxwell, “Expanding the History and Range of Mixed Methods Research.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Volume 10, number 1, 2016. Pages 12-27.]

“At the outset, I want to acknowledge that I share a kind of postmodern perspective … that asserts that diversity is fundamental and irreducible, and one that displays an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ that assert a unified, totalizing understanding of some phenomena.” [Joseph A. Maxwell, “Reemergent Scientism, Postmodernism, and Dialogue Across Differences.” Qualitative Inquiry. Volume 10, number 1, 2004. Pages 35-41.]

“The comparison of conditions or groups in which a presumed causal factor takes different values, while other factors are held constant or statistically controlled, is central to this approach to understanding and explanation and tends to be associated with research that employs experimental or correlational designs, quantitative measurement, and statistical analysis.” [Joseph A. Maxwell, “Using Numbers in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry. Volume 16, number 6, 2010. Pages 475-482.]

“In the social sciences, the most prominent manifestation of realism is the ‘critical realist’ tradition usually associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar …. However, Bhaskar’s work, particularly his more recent development of critical realism as an emancipatory perspective, which he called ‘dialectical critical realism,’ departed in significant ways from the position I take here, and has been criticized by others in the ‘critical realist’ tradition …. I have … not adopted Bhaskar’s views in general, although I find his basic positions (particularly on the importance of distinguishing ontology from epistemology) compatible with the stance that I present here.…

“A wide range of terms have been used for such versions of reallism, including ‘critical’ realism ([Margaret S.] Archer, … [Roy] Bhaskar, … [and Donald T.] Campbell …), ‘experiential’ realism ([George] Lakoff …), ‘constructive’ (and, later, ‘perspectival’) realism ([Ronald N.] Giere …), ‘emergent’ realism ([Gary T.] Henry …), ‘natural’ realism ([Hilary] Putnam …), and ‘agential’ realism ([Karen] Barad …). [William C.] Wimsatt … did’t give his approach to realism a formal name, but used the phrase ‘multi-perspectival realism’ … to describe this. I will use the term ‘critical realism’ in a broad sense to include all of these versions of realism.”

[Joseph A. Maxwell. A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2012. Pages 4-5.]

“[Joseph A.] Maxwell actually prefers the term critical realism, though he notes two quite different origins of the ‘critical’ epithet. The first is rooted in the emancipatory, transcendental approach of the UK philosopher Roy Bhaskar in which critical powers reside in the analyst’s privileged understanding of the deep, oppressive roots of society. The second comes from the evolutionary epistemology of US philosopher/social scientist Donald Campbell in which scientists apply a perpetual, critical eye to each other’s work and thereby gradually and collectively construct improved explanations.” [Ray Pawson, “A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research.” Review article. Qualitative Social Work. Volume 13, number 4, 2014. Pages 585-586.]

“[Joseph A.] Maxwell positions himself within the realist tradition initiated by [Roy] Bhaskar … by first defining realism as an ontological perspective. More specifically, he holds that the relationship between ontology (what reality is) and epistemology (how we perceive that reality) is complex.” [Jérémie Bouchard, “A Realist Approach for Qualitative Research.” Review article. OnCUE Journal. Volume 6, number 2, fall 2012. Pages 102-108.]

“… the limitation of an individual theory, method and/or tool is that it cannot encompass all of the different ICT [information and communication technologies] causal mechanisms and contexts that are needed in order to achieve outcomes from actions. Thus, critical realism is not in competition with existing theories, methods and tools. Rather, it is a philosophy that provides a unifying direction for the combination of individual theories, methods and tools.… In addition to the internal mechanism of the software, three contexts were researched: technological, social and business.” [Stephen Fox, “Applying critical realism to information and communication technologies: a case study.” Construction Management and Economics. Volume 27, May 2009. Pages 465-472.]

“This largely theoretical paper argues the case for the usefulness of applying a critical realist, complex network theory (CRCNT) to an understanding of Action Learning (AL) and the challenge of it’s evaluation.…

“Even if a solution is found to a problem in a particular situation there is no guarantee that it will travel, or generalise, or transfer either sideways to a different situation or forward over time. According to a CR, complex network theory (CNR and CRCNT) view it may do or it may not, depending on two things: firstly whether the context is sufficiently similar for whatever the mechanism underlying the potential P to operate in a similar way, and secondly whether the emergent properties of the system work to help or hinder this.”

[John Burgoyne, “Evaluating action learning: a critical realist complex network theory approach.” Action Learning: Research and Practice. Volume 7, issue 3, November 2010. Pages 239-251.]

“Our revised theory of ‘ethnic activation’ is based on a stratified social ontology: that is to say, that it recognises as analytically distinct, and hence as mutually influential, different domains of the social world. The notion of distinct social domains … [is] fundamental to the work of … writers associated with what we might broadly term ‘sociological realism’: [Margaret S.] Archer … and others.…

“It should be clear that our alternative paradigm entails a strong rejection of the categories of race and ethnicity as categories of sociological analysis.…

“Taking seriously the political formation of groups also means taking people seriously or, more formally, restoring a robust notion of agency in which people’s engagement with the world is treated credibly yet critically.”

[Bob Carter and Steve Fenton, “Not Thinking Ethnicity: A Critique of the Ethnicity Paradigm in an Over-Ethnicised Sociology.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 40, issue 1, 2009. Pages 1-18.]

“The new audience product is defined and maintained by the operation of semantic closure, pattern-finding and framing mechanisms that operate on the raw CDR data. The three mechanisms are nested so that an output from one feeds the other …. This allows information about the audience to cascade through metrics, reporting applications and practices, becoming richer and more relevant for audiencemaking practices at every step.…

“… if we understand the data as the digital matter from which information is extracted, the three mechanisms constitute a set of information actualization mechanisms.”

[Aleksi Aaltonen and Niccoló Tempini, “Everything counts in large amounts: a critical realist case study on data-based production.” Journal of Information Technology. Volume 29, issue 1, March 2014. Pages 97-110.]

“This paper will identify some of the key conceptual tools of a critical realist approach to knowledge.… What is required is a shift towards a theory that emphasises the contextual nature of the ways that knowledge is produced and disseminated. In other words, there is no single hierarchy of knowledge, but there are multiple hierarchies of knowledge.… [Stuart Nairn, “A critical realist approach to knowledge: implications for evidence-based practice in and beyond nursing.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, number 1, 2012. Pages 6-17.]

“Our theory of a transformative enterprise was … created through our lived experiences, our thoughts and ideas, and a common purpose—shared vision in having liaisons with the parents. We valued, respected, and acknowledged the parents’ ways of knowing, and we privileged their knowledge system by providing space for their voice and fostering a partnership in decision making about school activities, functions, and fund-raising projects. In our schema, we were all co-creators of our future and had a common purpose that made us one holistic body that located a deep commonality among us …. Our aim was to concretize the local knowledge system from the rich cultural wisdom, practices, rituals, and experience of the parent community, utilizing their genuine input into the educational process of our students, which came from a very disadvantaged and historically poor context ….

“… As a critical realist, my ontological position is committed to a reform agenda in which the purpose of both basic and applied research is to explain and change the current teaching and learning practices, particularly in schools.”

[Kholeka Constance Moloi, “An African Narrative: The Journey of an Indigenous Social Researcher in South Africa.” Indigenous Pathways into Social Research. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. 2013. Pages 101-121.]

“… this book is informed by a clear commitment to a Critical Realist notion of the truth, in that I seek to uncover the reason for things not propositions …. Moreover, the intent of my book is also inspired by Critical Realism, in that it will, I hope, contribute in a small way to the emancipation of my people.” [Gracelyn Smallwood. Indigenist Critical Realism: Human Rights and First Australians’ well-being. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 20.]

“… [My] critique is anchored by a number of key philosophical concepts developed by the Critical Realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar. The thesis advances and analyses a number of case studies - some well known, even notorious such as the Hindmarsh Island Affair and the Northern Territory Intervention; others like that of my late nephew Lyji Vaggs and Aboriginal Elder May Dunne much less so. There are six case studies in all. I could of course have chosen many more from our history. Truly it is littered with the wreckage of Indigenous lives and hopes. It was simply impossible to record the suffering of all my people. Nonetheless I want it to be known that the suffering of our people is not forgotten by me and my fellow activists and family members. I dedicate this thesis then to the memory of all those Indigenous people who have endured the long horrors of colonialism.” [Gracelyn Smallwood. Human Rights and First Australians’ Well-being. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Townsville, Queensland, Australia. October, 2011. Page xvi.]

“Gracelyn Smallwood’s attempt to engage at a critical and intellectual level in human rights debates is one of the first by an Australian Indigenous activist. It is also the first empiricallybased application of the critical realist theory of explanatory critique to be published by any scholar. To fully appreciate her book, however, it needs to be read in association with her PhD thesis (Smallwood 2011), on which it is based. The academic inclusion of a necessarily highly passionate representation of truth regarding issues, perceptions and viewpoints requires a certain level of objectivity. Failure to achieve this objectivity potentially undermines the logical analysis needed to establish the significance or validity of issues in question. Subjectivity alone tends towards an innuendo-laden rhetoric.” [Neil Hockey, “Indigenist Critical Realism: Human Rights and First Australians’ well-being.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 1, 2017. Pages 95-100.]

“… the philosopher Roy Bhaskar has provided us with a critique that I would argue should form the basis of our understanding of the relationship of indigenous education to the movements of modernism and postmodernism …. Bhaskar begins by giving three meanings for modernism: philosophical enlightenment and rationality; the High Modernism of the aesthetic avant-garde; and the process of technological modernisation. There are important differences between these three traditions, although they are often confused in common usage.” [Grace Sarra, “Indigenous studies in all schools.” International Journal of Inclusive Education. Volume 15, number 6, July 2011. Pages 611-625.]

“… in the Tawhidi methodological worldview as the primal and foundational Islamic epistemology of ‘everything,’ three key perspectives stand out as irrevocable. First, the episteme represents the organic unity of knowledge of the ‘paired’ universe. Second, the singular precept of unity of knowledge constructs the world of unity of being and becoming. Third, such things belong to life-fulfilment needs. The universe of such three attributes of things exists perpetually and evolves continuously in the dimensions of knowledge, space, and time.… [Masudul Alam Choudhury. Islamic Financial Economy and Islamic Banking. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Page 13.]

“The failure of mainstream economics, its dialectical and evolutionary outgrowth premised in rationalism and the Islamic imitation of these postulates point to yet another deeply rooted problem of studying critical realism of the socio-scientific methodological worldview.” [Masudul Alam Choudhury. Islamic Financial Economy and Islamic Banking. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Page 420.]

“The question regarding an institutional lender of last resort in the Muslim World can be answered upon a bold and assertive acceptance of the challenges that the normative model combined with the positive model of unity of knowledge as the Islamic worldview brings about. This is a complex methodology dealing with an extensively complementary and relational worldview of unity of knowledge (tawhidi episteme).… Its connotation, texture, meaning and implications for living world-systems and human and scientific cognition are contrary to the rationalistic foundation of morals and ethics of the occidental genre.” [Masudul Alam Choudhury, “Financial Globalization and Islamic Financing Institutions: The Topic Revisited.” Islamic Economic Studies. Volume 9, number 1, September 2001. Pages 19-38.]

“What, then, is the nature of ethico-economics? Economics as that great endeavor of man is seen as the interaction, integration, and inter-causal evolutionary learning therefrom—of the endogenous treatment of ethics and economic reasoning and applications. Heterodox Islamic economics is essentially ethico-economics. It is methodologically relevant in terms of the interactive, integrative, and evolutionary interrelations created by inter-causality between primal ontology, epistemology, phe nomenology, and sustainability overpaths of evolutionary learning. The totality of such epistemic ethico-economic behavior arises from the epistemic moral foundation of the monotheistic unity of knowledge that provides the functional nature of the unified economy within the widest expanse of the world-system and its congeries of sub-systems.

“… the exogenous meaning of ethics is shown to be the permanent nature of the behavioral economics and mainstream Islamic economics owing to their methodology premised on the heteronomous treatment of ethics and economics.”

[Masudul Alam Choudhury and Ishaq Bhatti. Heterodox Islamic Economics: The emergence of an ethico-economic theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2017. Page 29.]

“Heterodox economics, by and large, is a critique of economic thought and the emergence of economic reasoning based on fresh epistemology and critical realism ….” [Masudul Alam Choudhury and Ishaq Bhatti. Heterodox Islamic Economics: The emergence of an ethico-economic theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2017. Pages 57-58.]

“… methodological independence is particularly questionable when morality and ethics are capable of discovering their roots in the divine law. The meaning of morality and ethics in the latter case takes up an epistemological nature, being derived in formal ways from the monotheistic (Tawhidi) methodology. This is subsequently endowed by its methodical formal model as invoked by the Qur’an and the sunnah, the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad.” [Masudul Alam Choudhury and Ishaq Bhatti. Heterodox Islamic Economics: The emergence of an ethico-economic theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2017. Page 114.]

“This article makes the case for a contemporary philosophy of Islam to help Muslims surmount the challenges of postmodernity and to transcend the hiatuses and obstacles that Muslims face in their interaction and relationships with non-Muslims. It argues that the philosophy of critical realism so fittingly underlabours [i.e., eliminates the weeds, junk, trash, or rubbish] for the contemporary interpretation, clarification and conceptual deepening of Islamic doctrine and practice as to suggest and necessitate the development of a distinctive Islamic critical realist philosophy, social and educational theory and world-view, specifically suited for this purpose. This approach is called Islamic critical realism.” [Matthew L. N. Wilkinson, “Introducing Islamic Critical Realism: A Philosophy for Underlabouring Contemporary Islam.” Abstract. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 4, January 2013. Pages 419-442.]

“… while original and dialectical (Islamic) critical realism thematise difference, non-identity, real change and duality as being real and necessary features of the natural and social worlds, the philosophy of metaReality (PMR) thematises unity as the necessarily prior substratum to duality. This is because while unity can exist without duality, duality cannot exist without unity. ‘Thus concepts of identity, unity, etc. are ontologically, epistemologically and logically prior to concepts of non-identity, etc.’ …. Translating this into the terms of ICR [Islamic critical realism], we might claim, for example, that the unity of God can exist without the multiplicity of the world but the multiplicity of the world cannot exist without the unity of God.” [Matthew L. N. Wilkinson. A Fresh Look at Islam in a Multi-Faith World: A philosophy for success through education. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 89.]

“In terms of ICR [Islamic critical realism], we might call the ground-state the divine spirit (ruḥ), that is, the essential life-force of every human being that is ‘borrowed’ from God as the ultimate honour bestowed on humankind. The ground-state is the divine substratum that sustains at the level of the metaReal the human self (nafs) at the level of the actual and the empirical.” [Matthew L. N. Wilkinson, “The Metaphysics of a Contemporary Islamic Shari’a: A MetaRealist Perspective.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 4, August 2005. Pages 350-365.]

“The conceptualization of curriculum as a duality of presence and absence and its three particular component parts is undertaken using concepts derived from the philosophy of critical realism.…

“… the absent curriculum in a NCH [English National Curriculum for History] merely comes to be perceived by pupils from groups whose histories have been unnecessarily absented from the formal, selected and enacted curriculum as an official statement of their relative ontological and civic insignificance.”

[Matthew L. N. Wilkinson, “The concept of the absent curriculum: the case of the Muslim contribution and the English National Curriculum for history.” Journal of Curriculum Studies. Volume 46, issue 4, 2014. Pages 419-440.]

“… my own teaching experience and the aspirations of the NCH [English National Curriculum for History] both suggested a significant role for school history in the development of British male Muslim identity.…

“… history has the potential to be an important subject for Muslim boys on all four planes of social being described by the philosophy of critical realism. History at school can help Muslim boys succeed in a way that does some justice to the totality of their personhood on a holistic, multi-dimensional model of a human being inspired, in this case, by the philosophy of critical realism.”

[Matthew L. N. Wilkinson, “Helping Muslim boys succeed: the case for history education.” The Curriculum Journal. Volume 25, number 3, 2014. Pages 396-431.]

“… explanation of the Islamic epistemological considerations (IEC), and its link with resolution of actual economic problems does have both scientific and policymaking value. Implicitly, we are going to compare IEC with the epistemological considerations of ONP [orthodox neoclassic paradigm in economics] as well.…

“… we must assume that the world exists in such a way that it makes our theory of economics possible, and this is the place of ontology in economics. If your economic theory, epistemologically, is responsive but its ontology is not figured out, then it does not have solid foundation. This is the one dimension of epistemological considerations that we already emphasized. As Roy Bhaskar stresses, the statements about being can be transposed into statements about our knowledge of being.”

[Yadollah Dadgar, “The interrelationship between Islamic epistemological considerations, ‘IEC,’ and resolution of actual economic problems.” Humanomics. Volume 27, number 2, 2011. Pages 81-96.]

“This paper is a fundamental paper that addresses some aspects from critical realism and transcendental idealism into the making of Islamic economics. Not only that the discussion on the concept of scarcity in Islamic economics is limited and seems to be lacking; in addition, this paper offers a critical discussion on the validity of the concept of scarcity in economics from a critical perspective.…

“… The current school of mainstream economics subscribes to positivism that restricts knowledge enquiry only to a quantifiable observation. From the first instance, such epistemological stand seems to be problematic to be the philosophical foundation for Islamic economics or for any economics that is based on religion. Therefore, it is crucial to explore the concept of scarcity from several dimensions to determine its position in Islamic economics. In doing so, this paper presents perspectives of five Islamic economists and scholars who teach the subjects of Islamic economics and development.”

[Amir Wahbalbari, Zakaria Bahari, and Norzarina Mohd-Zaharim, “The concept of scarcity and its influence on the definitions of Islamic economics: A critical perspective.” Humanomics. Volume 31, number 2, 2015. Pages 134-159.]

“This research is based on the realism perspective which states that reality exists independent of the filters and beliefs of the human mind, and is critical to our ability to know reality with certainty ([Roy] Bhaskar …).…

“Two basic principles are provided by Shariah in Islamic finance: risk sharing and promoting the welfare of the society …. The sharing of profit and losses arising out of any legal Shariah compliant business, Islamic transaction must be asset-backed, as money itself has no intrinsic value, and investment should be in those businesses which are not prohibited by Shariah ….”

[Adeel Javed and Bashir A. Fida, “Islamic Project Financing in Pakistan: Current Challenges and Opportunities Ahead.” Iranian Journal of Management Studies. Volume 8, number 1, January 2015. Pages 47-71.]

“This section proposes a knowledge-seeking model that can preserve Islamic foundations while borrowing IR [international relations] theoretical tools to develop Islamic perspectives on international relations including a theory of Islamic agency. To put it differently, the aim is to allow the Muslim IR researcher to extend Islamic knowledge about the social world, human nature, and universal laws to the realm of international relations where western IR theoretical toolkit can serve as an aid instead of a barrier to such theoretical effort.

“Fortunately, Critical Realist philosophy can be applied to give coherence and intellectual stability to this model. Specifically, [Roy] Bhaskar’s work on the intelligibility of scientific activity and the resultant classification of objects of knowledge into transitive and intransitive can be shown to fit the task. For Bhaskar, in order for scientific activity to be intelligible, one must assume that knowledge is of two types, transitive and intransitive. The necessary existence of an intransitive dimension of knowledge is in particular what makes scientific activity an intelligible one, or even possible. Intransitive objects of knowledge are unknown to us and we wish to have knowledge of them. They are the real things, structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are independent of us.”

[Meshari Hamad Alruwaih. Islamic Agents, Structure, and International Relations: Ontology as Faith. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Durham University. Durham, England. 2014. Page 77.]

“The choice of a mixed-method approach was informed by the critical realist ontology and epistemology ….

“Interview accounts from parents and young people suggest that Islam was adopted in the process of intergenerational transmission to legitimise values and beliefs. It emerges that having an ‘Islamic upbringing’ meant that parents transmitted a sense of right and wrong based on their interpretation of the Islamic doctrine ….”

[Michela Franceschelli and Margaret O’Brien,  ‘Islamic Capital’ and Family Life: The Role of Islam in Parenting.” Sociology. Volume 48, number 6, 2014. Pages 1190-1206.]

“This thesis will be concerned with articulating and defending a form of realist social theory I have entitled ‘emergentist Marxism.’ As such, its principal objective is less to investigate the voluminous literature on ‘social realism’ and more to show the ways in which Marxist theory can be legitimately ‘constructed’ as a specific ‘materialistic’ application of ontological and methodological realism in the human sciences.…

“The significance of this research is that it functions simultaneously as a contribution to the social science component of Roy Bhaskar’s philosophical realism, and as a Marxist commentary upon and perhaps intervention against it. The latter is less certain, however, because Bhaskar’s depth realism appears to be consistent with the version of anti-reductive materialism defended here.

“‘Realism’ or ‘emergentism’ refers to an ontological position denoting a stratified social world of irreducible levels, of which persons, practices and structures are the most fundamental, all of which are efficacious by virtue of the properties and powers which pertain to each of them. ‘Materialism’ denotes the ontological position where the material structures of social systems vertically explain social and cultural structures without ‘explaining them away.’ Thus ‘emergentist Marxism’ is an anti-reductive socio-historical materialism and attendant dialectical realist method. Translated into practical social research, it is applied concretely here to the task of theorising the interface between the properties and powers which pertain to human agents, and those which pertain to social structures, in shaping the constitution and dynamics of social systems.

[Sean Creaven. Marxism and Realism: A materialistic application of realism in the social sciences. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. page ix.]

“Overall, the purpose of the book [Marxism and Realism] is to clarify the relationship between critical realism and Marxian dialectical materialism, in order to develop a coherent theory of the relationship between human agency, social interaction and structural properties in social systems. To these ends, I have tried to show how critical realism can enrich Marxism and vice versa, thus establishing a new synthesis, ‘emergentist materialism.’ My argument is that emergentist materialism, as social theory, makes defensible the central claims of Marxism in anthropology and sociology ….” [Sean Creaven, “On Marxism and Realism.” Historical Materialism. Review article. Volume 13, number 2, 2005. Pages 223-240.]

“The main philosophical task of Emergentist Marxism is to … [clarify] the relationship between [Roy] Bhaskar’s realist dialectics and the materialist dialectics of the Marxist tradition. My argument is that dialectical critical realism enriches but does not found Marxian dialectics (as Bhaskar would claim); rather, the latter both overreaches and preservatively sublates the key concepts of the former.” [Sean Creaven. Emergentist Marxism: Dialectical Philosophy and Social Theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Kindle edition.]

“… I wish to defend here ontological materialism (grasped as a dialectical emergentist ontology of being) against [Mervyn] Hartwig’s realist agnosticism. This will be done by means of critical examination of the conceptual and logical flaws and contradictions of idealist ontology, and the ways in which a thoroughgoing materialism overcomes these. I take it that undermining the ontological pretensions of idealism undermines those of agnosticism as well.” [Sean Creaven, “Materialism, Agnosticism and God.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 31, number 4, 2001. Pages 419-448.]

“The structures of politics and ideology … are rooted in and emergent from those of the economy or mode of production. They are not mere mirrors of the underlying structure.” [Sean Creaven, “The ‘Two Marxisms’ Revisited: Humanism, Structuralism and Realism in Marxist Social Theory.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14 number 1, February 2015. Pages 7-53.]

“According to socio-historical materialism, history is societal evolution, a directional process, which has a tendential impulse leading from less developed to more developed social systems.… For emergentist Marxism, history as evolutionary development (and as involving structural transformations of social relations), is rooted foursquare in the same mechanisms—namely the interface between forces and relations of production and base and superstructure (as emergent structures), on the one hand, and constitutive social labour and the processes of class struggle (as emergent forms of agency), on the other.” [Sean Creaven, “Marx and Bhaskar on the Dialectics of Freedom.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 2, issue 1, July 2003. Pages 63-93.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s social ontology elaborated in The Possibility of Naturalism, the Transformative Model of Social Action (TMSA), is clearly influenced by and consistent with [Karl] Marx’s social ontology, though it is derived independently of Marx through transcendental enquiry into the presuppositions and conditions of possibility of intentional human agency. Thus there is a discernible Marxist hue to Bhaskar’s own earlier work, which, however, has tended to fade in the later developments of Bhaskar’s thought.…

“Sean Creaven’s book-length treatment of the over-lapping fields of Marxism and critical realism is … an intervention into a much debated set of questions over which there is little agreement. This, in itself, makes his work an important contribution, to be welcomed and engaged with by non-Marxist critical realists, Marxist critical realists, and non-critical-realist Marxists alike.”

[Branwen Griffydd Jones, “Marxism and Realism: A materialistic application of realism in the social sciences.” Historical Materialism. Review article. Volume 12, issue 3, 2004. Pages 345-355.]

“Marxism and Realism is a detailed and often laborious attempt to strengthen the ties between realism and Marxism through the concept of emergence. It is an important piece of work in a much needed and burgeoning area of research and is a timely contribution to a developing area of concern for those who still assume that Marxism is the most appropriate bed-fellow for critical realism. Such an assumption today seems less certain as critical realism has evolved at least as much for non-Marxist purposes as for Marxist ones.” [Neil Curry, “Marxism and Realism: A materialistic application of realism in the social sciences.” Review article. Capital & Class. Volume 26, issue 2, autumn 2002. Pages 177-179.]

“… in Emergentist Marxism we find [Sean] Creaven arguing that ‘pre-capitalist societies generally did not have “dominant ideologies” that sought to legitimate class domination in the eyes of the downtrodden or which functioned to bind the subordinate classes to their oppressors and exploiters.’ He references in support of his claim the work of a number of other British Marxists, confirmation, if confirmation is required, of the dire poverty of British Marxism over matters relating to the theory and history of ideological production.” [Malcolm K. Read, “On the Radical Historicity of Literature: Althusser versus Bhaskar” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 2, March 2016. Pages 142-169.]

“Of central importance to [Sean] Creaven’s argument [in Marxism and Realism: A materialistic application of realism in the social sciences] is the notion of ‘species being’ or human nature in [Karl] Marx’s work. This is a key element to the book since much of the rest of the argument, including the argument about the central importance of class struggle in social change, hinges on it. Marx himself, it must be said, was not wholly consistent about this matter.” [Peter Dickens, “Marxism, Realism and the ‘Species Being’ Question.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 2, July 2001. Pages 38-42.]

“My Naturalistic Humanism, based on Dialectical Ontological Materialism, Constitutes a Denial of the Possibility that Human beings on Planet earth can build a Social order (eudaimonia or communism) based on Universalized love and Solidarity. Equally, my denial of the possibility of Generalized Unconditional love across the species stands, Logically, in Contradiction to my own view that Socialism or Communism is Feasible ….

“… [I had] intended to outline and defend a Marxian naturalistic humanism, which was capable of ontologically founding or grounding a secular emancipatory politics and ethics. This, I argued, was necessary, because a liberatory politics and ethics based either on theism or Bhaskar’s transcendental humanism was simply not up to the task, for a number of reasons which are extensively discussed. This aspect of my work, in my view, was the most innovative and important aspect of my analysis.”

[Sean Creaven, “Resisting the Theistic Turn.” Critical Realism and Spirituality. Mervyn Hartwig and Jamie Morgan, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 263-289.]

“… I put the case for a causal-realist approach … inspired largely by the work of such thinkers as Wesley Salmon and Roy Bhaskar. This approach takes due account of depth-ontological advances in our knowledge of the physical world …. That is to say, it posits a range of explanatory factors – causal attributes, dispositional properties, microphysical (molecular or subatomic) structures etc – rather than offering a vastly generalized (hence altogether vacuous) diagnosis of ‘technology’ or ‘Western metaphysics’ as the deep-laid source of all our latterday discontents. At the same time it avoids the converse and equally disabling positivist assumption that such advances belong to a realm quite apart from the sphere of ethical value inquiry or informed social criticism.” [Christopher Norris. Reclaming Truth: Contributions to a critique of cultural relativism. London: Lawrence & Wishart Limited. 1996. Page xv.]

“… [There] is the causal-realist theory according to which scientific explanations have to do chiefly with the properties of things themselves – with their structures, effects, ‘transfactually efficacious’ powers ([Roy] Bhaskar), etc – rather than with various propositions or logics of enquiry that purport to account for them.” [Christopher Norris. Reclaming Truth: Contributions to a critique of cultural relativism. London: Lawrence & Wishart Limited. 1996. Page 165.]

“… constructive empiricism requires ‘a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.’ Causal realism might look good by comparison with empiricism or instrumentalism in so far as one endorses this deluded idea that there is something over and above the warrant of straightforward empirical evidence that decides the truth-value of our statements, predictions or explanatory hypotheses quite apart from that evidence itself. Yet it one takes a sceptical view of such claims then it will look much more like a faith position with little to commend it bar a vague and wholly unjustified sense of taking additional risks for greater rewards.” [Christopher Norris, “Meaning, truth, and causal explanation: The ‘Humean condition’ revisited.” Revitalizing Causality: Realism about causality in philosophy and social science. Ruth Groff, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page 95-128.]

“Roy Bhaskar has pursued some of the consequences of … [postmodernist] thinking in his book, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom, most of which is taken up with a critique of [Richard] Rorty’s neo-pragmatist position. His argument – in brief – is that Rortian talk of creative ‘redescription’ is misleading when applied to epistemology or philosophy of science in so far as those disciplines cannot be construed as creating or inventing the various objects which constitute their proper ontological domain. To adopt this extreme anti-realist line is to invite all manner of antimonies, paradoxes or aporias when it comes to explaining how science could possibly afford us knowledge of the world, or again, how we could ever have reason – cultural-linguistic preference aside – for counting certain theories more adequate (better borne out by argument or evidence) than others of notionally similar scope. Indeed, there is something decidedly myopic about Rorty’s idea of freedom, construed as it is in such wholesale world-transformative terms as to leave no room for any irksome constraints upon the human will to redescribe ‘reality’ in response to an ever-shifting range of interests, values or desires.” [Christopher Norris. Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. 1997. Page 158.]

“I have been arguing that [Richard] Rorty remains committed to empirical realism, and the epistemic fallacy it enshrines, and that he de facto inherits a positivist ontology in virtue of his subscription to a Humean-Hempelian account of science (albeit as modified by Davidson); that is to say, he tacitly misdescribes science. But it is equally important to see that Rorty damagingly underdescribes science, generally reducing it to a mere instance of discourse, of the ‘linguistified.’ This not only abstracts from the material aspects of science (such as experimental activity) but from the specificity of scientific as distinct from other kinds of discourse, and the internal differentiations (e.g. pure/ applied, natural/ human) within science itself. This results in a hypernaturalistic linguistified monism or pantextualism, relieved at best by distinctions between normal and abnormal discourse and/ or scientific and literary cultures.” [Roy Bhaskar. Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Kindle edition.]

“Insofar as there is a real issue between ‘realists’ and ‘pragmatists’ in contemporary philosophy of language it seems to me a metaphilosophical one—the issue about whether philosophy can retain its Kantian self-image once the notion of language as the source of a priori knowledge is dropped. On this point, to be sure, I shall be siding with the ‘pragmatists.’ But I hope that my discussion may help to frame this metaphilosophical issue in less Aesopian language than that in which it is usually stated.” [Richard Rorty. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1979. Page 266.]

“As I see the history of pragmatism, there are two great differences between the classical pragmatists and the neopragmatists. The first … is the difference between talking about ‘experience’ … and talking about ‘language’ …. The second is the difference between assuming that there is something called ‘the scientific method,’ whose employment increases the likelihood of one’s beliefs being true, and tacitly abandoning this assumption.… [A]s American philosophy moved into its postpositivistic stage, less and less was heard about the scientific method, and about the distinction between science and nonscience.” [Richard Rorty. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books imprint of the Penguin Group. 1999. Page 35.]

“[John] Dewey is saying: suppose you’re a pragmatist about truth – i.e., you think that truth is what works. The obvious question, then, is: whom does it work for? This is the question that [Michel] Foucault raises. You then ask political questions about whom you want it to work for, whom you want to run things, whom you want to do good to; which come prior to philosophical questions. Then let democratic politics be what sets the goals of philosophy, rather than philosophy setting the goals of politics.” [Richard Rorty, “Richard Rorty: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Culture.” Michael O’Shea, interviewer. The Harvard Review of Philosophy. Spring, 1995. Pages 58-66.]

“Here is where pragmatist philosophy might be useful to feminist politics. For pragmatism redescribes both intellectual and moral progress by substituting metaphors of evolutionary development for metaphors of progressively less distorted perception. By dropping a representationalist account of knowledge, we pragmatists drop the appearance-reality distinction in favor of a distinction between beliefs which serve some purposes and beliefs which serve other purposes — for example, the purposes of one group and those of another group. We drop the notion of beliefs being made true by reality, as well as the distinction between intrinsic and accidental features of things.” [Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 50, autumn 1991. Pages 3-14. Originally delivered through The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, December 7th, 1990. Pages 1-35.]

“As Roy Bhaskar has noted, [Richard] Rorty does not maintain that the —ideal—of total self-creation, full self-overcoming’ is a possibility. Rorty writes: ‘no project of redescribing the world and the past, no project of self-creation through imposition of own’s own idiosyncratic metaphoric, can avoid being marginal and parasitic’ …. Indeed, when closely examined, the limitations Rorty posits are such that the freedom through self-creation he propounds appear very restrictive indeed.” [Adam Thomas Colenso Carter. Irony and Ideology in Schlegel, de Man, and Rorty. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). McMaster University. Hamilton, Ontario. 1998. Page 251.]

“He [Richard Rorty] has been described … as ‘one of the major US philosophers of the post-modern movement.’ As such, Rorty can be treated as a representative of wider cultural, ideological trends. Roy Bhaskar takes this line in his recent Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom. ‘Why Rorty?,’ he asks, having devoted the bulk of his book to criticizing the American philosopher. Bhaskar answers his own question by claiming that Rorty’s philosophy, with its anti-realism and celebration of irony, provides an ideology for intellectual yuppies. There is nothing new in seeing the tones of conformity in Rorty’s professed postmodern liberalism.” [Michael Billig, “Nationalism and Richard Rorty: The Text as a Flag for Pax Americana.” New Left Review. Series I, number 202, November–December 1993. Pages 70-83.]

“He [Richard Rorty] asserts that the idea that the world has an intrinsic nature ‘is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation.’ I will examine his main reason for this colourful suggestion in the next section. But one consideration is that ‘the cash value of that phrase is just that some vocabularies are better representations of the world than others, as opposed to being better tools for dealing with the world for one or another purpose.’That is a strongly pragmatist assertion. Rorty seems to think that only confusion results from adding to the claim that some theories are better tools than others for some purpose, the further claim that they represent the world better, that they are closer to getting things right. That clearly conflicts with realism.” [Robert Kirk. Relativism and Reality: A contemporary introduction. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1999. Page 136.]

“… philosophers can and should turn their attention to any topic that (1) engages their (preferably intense or passionate) interest, (2) poses one or more significant philosophical issue(s), and (3) may additionally have the potential to change people’s sense of what counts as a topic that satisfies descriptions (1) and (2). At times such an approach might seem to push things just a bit too far beyond the personal toward the downright idiosyncratic. Still I would want to hold my ground on this and say again that condition (1) is non-negotiable for anyone who wishes to philosophise in a more than merely academic way, while the standards laid down by (2) should properly be open to revision in light of some new and, at first appearance, unsuitable candidate for treatment. Should philosophy lose sight of this possibility, or close ranks against the discussion of non-approved themes or ideas, then it will surely become ever more subject to that law of sharply diminishing returns that goes along with over-specialisation in topics dictated very largely by its own professionally driven agenda. It will also run the risk – unfortunately all too present in an academic culture so much given over to ‘research’ interests driven by the next assessment exercise – of turning into what George Orwell described as a ‘smelly little orthodoxy,’” Christopher Norris. Philosophy Outside-In: A Critique of Academic Reason. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. 2013. Pages 28-30.]

“This recent book by Christopher Norris challenges some of the conventions that shape the current practice of academic philosophy, especially the ‘analytic’ variety.… The main worry motivating this book is that the academic conventionalization of narrow specialization in philosophy tends to reward an intellectual disposition that is fundamentally conservative, conformist, and too blinkered to handle the more general problems for which philosophy is distinctively suited and which are inevitably presupposed in the treatment of more specific problems.” [Dustin McWherter, “Philosophy Outside-In: A Critique of Academic Reason.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 301-305.]

“… any critique of prevalent (‘logocentric’) ideas must always take account of its own embeddedness in a certain cultural-linguistic milieu or tradition to the logicist claim that such critique has to start with a strenuous rejection of the turn towards language as – supposedly – the ultimate limit or horizon of intelligibility. This is basically the same issue that divides continental thinkers of a strongly hermeneutic or language-centred orientation such as [Martin] Heidegger and [Hans-Georg] Gadamer from those, like [Theodor] Adorno or [Jürgen] Habermas, who whatever their otherwise sharp differences agree on the need for a critical approach that holds out against received ideas and their customary modes of expression. From the latter viewpoint, it is a sine qua non of enlightened or progressive thought that it should always maintain the utmost vigilance with regard to those ingrained habits of belief that may always turn out to have been kept in place by the inertial force of communal usage or linguistically encoded prejudice.” [Christopher Norris. Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. 2012. Pages 34-35.]

“One of the … salutary features of [Christopher] Norris’s book is, as we have seen, the way it outlines the real possibility that such an overcoming could also amount to a substantial overcoming of the anti-realist, social-constructivist, and relativist positions that are so broadly characteristic of contemporary widespread belief and practice, and of the contemporary deadlock of critical thought and transformative practice. It remains to be seen, of course, whether this joint overcoming of the analytic/continental divide and of the deeply held axiomatics of contemporary ideology at the level of philosophical thought and action will, in fact, take place; but it is heartening that philosophers such as Norris have begun to envision it as a possible outcome of the most significant critical and formal imperatives discernible in philosophical thought today.” [Paul M. Livingston, “Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative.” Review article. Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism. Volume VI, December 2015. Pages 283-303.]

“Making multitheoretic-linguality an actuality, based on the possibility of mutual understanding through a common object language, seems in several cases to require more than understanding the other theory cognitively or linguistically. It is the task of the social researcher to make the possibility of multitheoretic-linguality an actuality, thereby becoming capable of applying a rational criterion for theory choice.…

“… My argument here is not primarily that [Roy] Bhaskar is right and critical realists should therefore accept the greater explanatory power criterion and multitheoretic-linguality, though I do accept this. My main argument is that critical realists who accept the possibility of judgemental rationality do not consider or seek to realize the conditions that Bhaskar argues are necessary to make the possibility an actuality.”

[K. Robert Isaksen, “Reclaiming Rational Theory Choice as Central: A Critique of Methodological Applications of Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 245-262.]

“Understanding science as a diachronic process of transformation allows a gradual transition (mediated by the straining, stretching, severing and sundering of meanings) to the semantic inc. of fully-developed scientific theories.… But such logical or semantic inc.—which patently holds between contemporary and classical physics, or between, say, Marxian political economy and neoclassical economic theory—does not preclude psychological bi (or multi-) theoretic-linguality any more than the perspectival inc. of two aspects of a Gestalt switch figure inhibits our ability to move from one to the other.” [Roy Bhaskar. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Page 82.]

“… it seems logical that researchers in educational administration, an applied discipline, should recognize the fluid and emergent nature of contemporary social systems of which schools are an integral part….

“Applied to educational administration, critical realism challenges researchers to ask uncomfortable questions about taken-for-granted assumptions about educational policies, administrative practices, power and knowledge within the context of an emergent social order with the ultimate goal of increasing the life chances of those whom the inquiry is about. Attention to life chances which relate to the opportunities that are available in society and are a function of two elements – options and ligatures …, is of paramount importance in the context of a social world that is in a constant state of flux.”

[Benedicta Egbo, “Emergent Paradigm: Critical Realism and Transformative Research in Educational Administration.” McGill Journal of Education. Volume 40, number 2, spring 2005. Pages 267-284.]

“The three … themes … [are] a realist ontology, a Marxist theory of structural contradiction and a freestanding normative conception of egalitarian justice ….” [Alex Callinicos. The Resources of Critique. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2006. Page 243.]

“The main thing that critical realism brings to this discussion [of social structures] is emergence …. The thought is that social structures must be conceived as emergent properties of social interactions, arising from but irreducible to the actions and mental states of individual human beings.” [Alex Callinicos. The Resources of Critique. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2006. Page 184.]

“In substance [Roy] Bhaskar’s account [of real dialectical contradictions] broadly corresponds to a definition of structural contradiction that I first put forward in 1987 [the first edition of Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory]. A structural contradiction exists if and only if

“(1) a relationship exists between two or more social entities;

“(2) the social entities are constituted by virtues of their beings terms of the relationship;

“(3) the entities are mutually interdependent by virtue of the relationship;

“(4) the entities are potentially in conflict by virtue of the relationship.…

“(5) where this conflict develops, the relationship is liable either to collapse or to be transformed.”

[Alex Callinicos. The Resources of Critique. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2006. Page 197.]

“The balance between the role played by structural contradictions and conscious human agency in resolving organic crises has shifted from the former to the latter in the course of the past 1,500 years. The transition from feudalism to capitalism occupies an intermediate position in this respect between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Russian Revolution. Marxist historians have in recent years challenged the idea that bourgeois revolutions are necessarily (or even usually) the work of the bourgeoisie itself.…

“… the development of capitalism involved the emergence of production relations in which exploiter and exploited are, for the first time, legal equals, even if the underlying economic relationships continue to involve structural inequalities. Formal political equality and class exploitation became, in principle at least, mutually compatible, although the protracted emergence of bourgeois democracy, with three centuries separating the English Revolution from the general acceptance of universal adult suffrage, shows that they can actually coexist only in specific historical conditions.”

[Alex Callinicos. Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory. Second revised edition. Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2004. Pages 267-268.]

“The broad thrust of this chapter and its predecessor has been, first, to vindicate a critical realist ontology that is naturalistic in the sense of conceiving the world (including the social and the mental) as strata of interacting generative mechanisms, and to outline a Marxist theory of social contradiction.” [Alex Callinicos. The Resources of Critique. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2006. Page 209.]

“… [My] scepticism about the ‘new dialectic’ does not represent a rejection of the very idea of dialectical social theory: the tenability of this idea depends on whether it is scientifically acceptable to ascribe structural contradictions to social reality (as I believe it is) ….” [Alex Callinicos, “Against the New Dialectic.” Historical Materialism. Volume 13, number 2, 2005. Pages 41-59.]

“The roots of social oppression and alienation lie in alienation from the self: this more fundamental alienation is overcome when the self breaks loose from the attachments that bind it to particular desires and fears and imprison it in the cycle of reincarnation, and recognises its identity with God. The second part narrates fifteen of the lives passed by one such self, culminating, it seems, in [Roy] Bhaskar himself, whose task is ‘to reconcile and resynthesize the opposites: East and West, male and female, yin and yang, reason and experience, fact and value, mind and body, heaven and earth.’ …

“Bhaskar’s discovery of Eastern religion cannot be deduced from the logic of his earlier philosophy but must have arisen from contingencies of his life into which it would be inappropriate to inquire. The most that one can say is that it has long been true that the critical realism movement around Bhaskar displayed certain unhealthy cult-like qualities: perhaps, in this respect, being helped to change consciousness.”

[Alex Callinicos, “Critical Realism and Beyond: Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectic.” Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, editors. Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2008. Pages 584-585.]

“It is perfectly coherent to reject methodological individualism and to hold that social explanations typically ascribe causal powers to both social structures and individual agents. Another way to put it would be to say that the kinds of mechanisms legitimately invoked in social explanations are not required to be reducible to micro-mechanisms. Not simply is this a coherent position, but it is widely held. It is, for example, common to Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration and to Roy Bhaskar’s application of Critical Realism to the social sciences: the – in different ways – rather depressing evolution of these thinkers in recent years does not provide grounds for dismissing their important and influential earlier writings ….” [Alex Callinicos, “G. A. Cohen and the Critique of Political Economy.” Science & Society. Volume 70, number 2, April 2006. Pages 252-274.]

“I honestly don’t see that there’d be much point discussing whether or not one can make a transcendental argument for the existence of angels or the transmigration of souls, so what I want to do in part is to consider what kind of flaws, weaknesses, and tensions in the earlier development of critical realism—particularly in its dialectical phase—could have helped to make possible this kind of development.…

“The upshot of this book is, to begin with, that the Third Way that is now on offer does not constitute an attractive option for the left. Far from breaking with the neo-liberal policies of the New Right, it has continued and, in certain ways, radicalized them. The [Tony] Blair government has carried privatization further than its Tory predecessors dated. It does not follow that no more beneficent measures have been passed, but the balance is greatly overweighted by those that further entrench market relations in every corner of social life. In both the United States and Britain the cruelty of Third Way social policy has been masked by the effects of the economic boom of the 1990s – without the very rapid fall in American unemployment during the second half of the last decade, the impact of welfare ‘reform’ in particular would have been truly appalling.…

“A second major theme of this book has been to stress the continuities in both the world economy and global politics.”

[Alex Callinicos. Against the Third Way. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 2001. Pages 121-122.]

“The theory of emergence … allows for us to distinguish genuine wholes – for example social relations – which cannot be reduced to something else, at the same time as they are composed by parts which themselves are indivisible wholes – for example human beings. And the latter can in their turn be parts of greater wholes, such as society. Each level in this hierarchy of composition has its own specific mechanisms and emergent powers. This in turn means that it is possible to understand dysfunctions in these wholes, which yet are functional to their nature.” [Berth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Liselotte Jakobsen, and Jan Ch. Karlsson. Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. Page 65.]

“… I will outline two specific and compatible approaches that have influenced my research: critical realism and material-discursive approach.…

“… In essence, critical realism includes both dimensions of human existence, the ‘real or non-discursive (i.e. material structures that exist independently of our understanding of them)’ and the ‘discursive (i.e. discursive resources and practices that are available to make sense of human experience)’ ….

“A material-discursive approach, informed by feminist thinking, places a specific emphasis on gender at both a material and a discursive level. The material-discursive position raises the issue that if we see emotional distress as wholly constructed and only discursive, we greatly limit our ability to acknowledge and be responsive to the undeniable presence of suffering in the lives of those who experience emotional distress.”

[Shimu Khamlichi. Medicalising Menstruation: The Case of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder and DSM 5. Doctoral Degree in Clinical Psychology thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of East London. London, England. May, 2013. Pages 26-27. Retrieved on December 5th, 2015.]

“Our epistemological standpoint was critical realism, which recognizes the materiality of somatic, psychological, and social experience, but conceptualizes such materiality as being mediated by culture, language, and politics …. In this light, to both acknowledge the biological materiality of menarche and menstruation, and recognize women’s constructs and subjective experience of these events, we adopted a material-discursive theoretical framework …. Our analysis also drew on intersectionality, a concept which examines how mutually constitutive categories of difference, such as gender, culture, and religion, shape individual lives, social practices, and cultural ideologies …. Intersectionality moves away from an additive approach of single variables, to consider experience in the light of multiple influential factors that are continuously interacting ….” [Alexandra J. Hawkey, Jane M. Ussher, Janette Perz, and Christine Metusela, “Experiences and Constructions of Menarche and Menstruation Among Migrant and Refugee Women.” Qualitative Health Research. Early–view edition. October, 2016. Pages 1-18.]

“Our main argument is that critical realism fails to articulate the synthetic side to abstraction. For this reason, the critical realist method is unable to capture the ‘inner connection’ of social phenomena. We offer a radical addition to critical realism, which we term ‘systematic abstraction,’ that overcomes this problem.…

“Systematic dialectics begins by recognising that there are many historical categories (denoting aspects of the real social totality), universal through, but specific to the current mode of social production, that is, capitalism. For example, there are specific forms of state, ideology, gender and religion, which have been subjected to much scrutiny across the social sciences. On this, critical realism and systematic dialectics can concur. The difference between systematic abstraction and critical realism is first revealed in the purpose of the method of enquiry within systematic dialectics. This purpose is to search for the most abstract and simple category from which to comprehend the structured totality.”

[Andrew Brown, Gary Slater, and David A. Spencer, “Driven to abstraction?: Critical realism and the search for the ‘inner connection’ of social phenomena.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 26, 2002. Pages 773-788.]

“… critical realism can be employed in a variety of ways. The key problem, no matter how it is employed, is that critical realism remains inherently blind to the conceptual development from abstract to concrete. In consequence, the Marxian emphasis on value theory appears through critical realist lenses as a claim for the importance of one particular structure termed ‘value’ over all others – a debateable claim of limited relevance to case study research. Through the lenses of systematic abstraction the Marxian claim is very different. The claim is that value is an abstract and simple expression of the capitalist system, an expression that is retained and developed in the journey from abstract to concrete.” [Andrew Brown, “Critical realism in social research: approach with caution.” Work, employment and society. Volume 28, number 1, 2014. Pages 112-123.]

“It is hoped that a development from critical realism to systematic abstraction will ultimately be welcomed by those people, currently calling themselves ‘critical realists,’ but who wish to divorce themselves from three controversial aspects of critical realism: (i) [Roy] Bhaskar’s … development of ‘dialectical critical realism,’ which is in fact a fully blown pseudo-dialectics built upon the critical realist corruption of systematic abstraction uncovered in this paper …; (ii) Bhaskar’s … subsequent development of ‘transcendental critical realism,’ where he turns to new age philosophy, embracing such themes as reincarnation; (iii) engagements in debates regarding the existence of a transcendent God; belief in such a God being argued to be consonant with critical realism ….” [Andrew Brown, “Methodological issues in theorising the financial, economic and social system: realistic and systematic abstraction.” Working paper number 03. Financialisation, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development (FESSUD). Leeds University Business School. Leeds, England. November 1st, 2013. Funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme. Pages 1-32. Retrieved on December 20th, 2015.]

“… the diverse determination(s) embedded within the concept ‘population’ can only be fully derived after it has been placed within the more determinate concepts comprising a systematic totality. Thus abstraction moves ‘forwards,’ as progression (‘population’ is placed within a systematic closed totality), and ‘backwards,’ as a retrogression (‘population’ is complexified and concretised as a moment, or social form, of the diverse forms of that totality). What we create, therefore, is a circular movement in method ….” [Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood, and John Michael Roberts, “The marriage of critical realism and Marxism: Happy, unhappy or on the rocks?” Critical Realism and Marxism. Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood, and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 14-15.]

“This paper will critique the critical realist social ontology and advocate the alternative provided by ‘systematic dialectics’ …. Critical realism is correct that, from the perspective of particular individuals, current social and monetary relations can be thought of as separate ‘social structures’ that constrain and facilitate individual activities. However, the switch made by systematic dialectics from the perspective of particular individuals to the perspective of the economic system as a whole reveals a very different social ontology.” [Andrew Brown, “Reorienting critical realism: a system-wide perspective on the capitalist economy.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 14, number 4, December 2007. Pages 499-519.]

“Dialectics is uniquely suited to the task of theorising transformation. Yet dialectical critical realism, despite its apparent promise to overcome deficiencies of critical realism regarding the theorisation of transformation, is based upon the conceptual essence of critical realism and so fares no better at theorising structural transformation. The branch of new dialectics termed ‘systematic dialectics’ offers a superior interpretation of [Karl] Marx’s method. Marx’s starting point is the whole object realm, not a single ‘appearance form’ as in critical realism.… Marx’s method of presentation involves a dialectological development from the abstract and simple ‘cell-form’ to ever more concrete and complex categories; in contrast to critical realism this does not entail a juxtaposition of individual ‘essences.’” [Andrew Nicholas Brown. Critical Realism, Value and Capital. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Middlesex University. London, England. July, 2002. Page 180.]

“Andrew Brown is to be thanked, not only for his thoughtful and critical insights into systematic dialectics and critical realism, but also for his scholarly attitude towards debate and discussion.…

“… it is not clear how the levels of abstraction should be established and the shifts managed, again, other than (something like) the way they appear in the model. In short, even if systematic dialectics is helpful in constructing a model of the capitalist system as a whole, it offers little help in constructing a model of labour markets or, for that matter, investigating other work- and employment-related systems.”

[Steve Fleetwood, “Critical realism and systematic dialectics: a reply to Andrew Brown.” Work, employment and society. Volume 28, number 1, 2014. Pages 124-138.]

“… a new tendency that has emerged in recent years … is variously labelled ‘the New Dialectic,’ ‘New Hegelian Marxism’ or ‘Systematic Dialectic.’ … The term ‘the New Dialectic’ in the title was originally coined by me in a review, and it has since been widely used in the sense I intended, namely to refer to literature sharing certain common themes, but which does not take the form of a definite ‘school.’ Rather it is a convenient way of grouping together thinkers of independent spirit, clearly doing something rather distinctive in the present intellectual conjuncture.” [Christopher J. Arthur. The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2004. Page 1.]

“The particular variant of the New Dialectic to which I adhere is known by its exponents as systematic dialectic (beside my own work, see that of Geert Reuten, Michael Williams, and Tony Smith). So let me now expand on a systematic – as opposed to a historical – dialectic. There are two different type of dialectical theory in [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel. First is a dialectic of history. Hegel believed there is a logic of development underlying world history. But there is a second sort of dialectical theory found in writings such as the Science of Logic and Philosophy of Right. This may be termed ‘systematic dialectic’ and it is concerned with the articulation of categories designed to conceptualise an existent concrete whole.… There is very little in the secondary literature on how to do systematic dialectic even though Hegel’s and [Karl] Marx’s major works are not historical but systematic. Moreover Marx himself never wrote” his threatened brochure on dialectical method; although he did leave its outcome in the shape of Capital.

“At the philosophical level it is a way of working with concepts that keeps them open and fluid, and above all systematically interconnected. At the methodological level it puts the emphasis on the need for a clear order of presentation, which, however, is not a linear one, for the starting point is not empirically or axiomatically given but in need of interrogation. Epistemologically it insists on the reflexivity of the subject-object relation. Ontologically it addresses itself to totalities and thus to their comprehension through systematically interconnected categories, which are more or less sharply distinguished from historically sequenced orderings. Textually it prefers to look at Hegel and Marx afresh, setting aside sclerotic received traditions of interpretation. Substantively it reexamines or reconstructs Marxian theory in the light of the above protocols.”

[Christopher J. Arthur. The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2004. Page 4.]

“The account that follows is strongly influenced by systematic dialectics, a method that tries to understand social forms as interconnected moments of a totality. We therefore move from the most abstract categories to the most concrete, tracing the unfolding of gender as a ‘real abstraction.’ We are only concerned with the form of gender specific to capitalism, and we assume from the outset that one can talk about gender without any reference to biology or prehistory. We begin by defining gender as a separation between spheres. Then, having done so, we specify the individuals assigned to those spheres. Importantly, we do not define spheres in spatial terms, but rather in the same way [Karl] Marx spoke of the two separated spheres of production and circulation, as concepts that take on a materiality.” [Endnotes. The Logic Of Gender: On the separation of spheres and the process of abjection. Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 2013. Page 3.]

“This book presents a combination of ‘systematic dialectic’ and ‘value-form theory’, and Arthur succeeds in showing how the two complement each other. This entails significant ‘reconstruction’ of [Karl] Marx and [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, as [Christopher J.] Arthur acknowledges, although he may underestimate the extent of the reconstruction. The book is positioned within a tendency that Arthur calls ‘the New Dialectic’, which is interested in a return to Hegel’s logic as the basis for Marx’s method.” [Franklin Bell, “The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital.” Review article. Capital & Class. Volume 29, number 1, spring 2005. Pages 149-151.]

“As [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel argued, science in treating a totality must take the shape of system, ‘since what is concretely true is so only as … totality’ …. The system comprises a set of categories expressing the forms and relations embedded within the totality, its ‘moments.’ The task of systematic dialectic is to organize such a system of categories in a definite sequence, deriving one from another logically.” [Christopher J. Arthur, “Systematic Dialectic.” Science & Society. Volume 62, number 3, fall 1998. Pages 447-459.]

“One of the biggest advantages of systematic dialectics is that it provides a methodology able to accommodate one-sided and apparently inconsistent perspectives, each of which possesses an element of the whole story.” [Tony Smith, “Systematic and Historical Dialectics: Towards a Marxian Theory of Globalization.” New Dialectics and Political Economy. Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2003. Page 30.]

“Systematic dialectics aims to show the essential working of the object: the whole in essences. The whole in essence is the interconnection of all the moments necessary for the reproduction of the object.… [W]e are out to distinguish aspects and expressions that could come and go without affecting the reproduction of the system, from all the necessary moments the lack or distortion of which would make the system, the object, fall apart.” [Geert Reuten, “The Interconnection of Systematic Dialectics and Historical Materialism.” Historical Materialism. Volume 7, issue 1, 2000. Pages 137-165.]

“Regardless of textual exegesis, the systematic dialectic, if it is anything, is indeed a method for (hermeneutically and logically) coherent conceptual development. This may in practice involve a pluralism of ways of ‘moving forward’ in the presentation, even if the emergence and transcendence of contradiction are in some sense the most fundamental, to which we should aspire.” [Michael Williams, “Marx’s Method in Capital: a reexamination.” Review article. Review of Political Economy. Volume 9, number 4, October 1997. Pages 485-493.]

“While [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel appears to deal with the movement from contradiction, to contrariety to transcendence, without reference to shifts between levels of abstraction, systematic dialectics is concerned explicitly with movement from the most abstract to the concrete. The notion of a self reproducing system of interconnected conscious social beings allows us to legitimately conflate immanence and teleology: the adequacy of categories is to be judged in terms of the imperatives of systemic self reproduction.” [Michael Williams, “No Escape from the ‘Post-Hegelian’ Dialectic.” Science & Society. Volume 64, number 3, Fall 2000. Pages 357-365.]

“… metaReality can be seen as a transformation from theory to the unity of theory and practice in practice. [Roy] Bhaskar characterizes the philosophy of metaReality as ‘not really even a system of thought, but an intervention in the discursive process which is designed to enable agents to reflexively situate their own non-dual being in the context of their growth and development in the dual realm’ …. This is the constellational identity of subject and object in humans and other beings. Thus, anti-anthropism and anti-reductionism, precisely as the constellational identification of anthropism and non-anthropism in metaReality, complete the drive to non-dualism in the realization of alethic truth about ourselves as being, and not as the true thought or proposition about being.” [Trond Gansmo Jakobsen, “Environmental Ethics: Anthropocentrism and Nonanthropocentrism Revised in the Light of Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 2, February 2017. Pages 184-199.]

“Nordic ecophilosophy is seen as the opposite to reductionism. In its very roots it is criticizing physicalism and materialism as developed in the Cartesian worldview. In this regard Nordic ecophilosophy is anti-reductionist and holist and represents non-anthropocentric as opposed to anthropocentric approaches. However, my main aim in this chapter is to show that even if Nordic ecophilosophy cannot be regarded as reductionist in the classical physicalist sense, it nevertheless represents a tendency to reductionism in a different sense. As classical (empirical) realism mostly reduces to physics Nordic ecophilosophy has a tendency to reduce things to ecology. What we are talking about is a form of ecologism, not physicalism. My focus in this chapter is to develop what I mean by Nordic ecophilosophy being reductionist in this sense and to say something about its implications. By then showing how critical realism can widen our perspective to an integrative pluralism involving a stratified and layered reality with powers, dispositions, emergence and change in open systems and on different organizational levels, from physics, to biology and ecology, humans and society, I want to open up space for a non-reductionist and non-ecologistic richer and deeper ontology as well as our understanding of our own place in it. This reflection involves dialectical critical realism as well as basic critical realism. By providing a brief introduction to metaReality one of the intentions of this chapter is to show to what extent critical realism might improve on Nordic ecophilosophical projects.” [Trond Gansmo Jakobsen, “Nordic Ecophilosophy and Critical Realism..” Ecophilosophy in a World of Crisis: Critical realism and the Nordic Contributions. Roy Bhaskar, Karl Georg Høyer, and Petter Næss, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Page 180.]

“This paper has attempted to advance documentary theory by employing the dialectic. The dialectic we have adapted is the Bhaskarian one, with its four levels encompassing non-identity, negativity, totality and agency. We have attempted to illustrate how this might be applied to a range of problems with documentary theory especially the moments of self-esteem, the aesthetics of failure, epistemic hesitation and delirium. Much work of course remains to be done, however it is our hope that this paper will have made at least in part the case for a Dialectical Critical Realist approach within Documentary Theory.” [Gary MacLennan and John Hookham, “Documentary Theory and the Dialectic: A Dialectical Critical Realist Approach.” Presented at the Debating Realisms, a conference of the International Association for Critical Realism. Roskilde University. Roskilde, Denmark. August 17th–19th, 2001. Pages 1-15. Retrieved on December 5th, 2016.]

“… we can elaborate three related criteria that a practice of embodied collective reflexivity would have to meet:

[Tobin Nellhaus, “Embodied Collective Reflexivity: Peircean Performatives.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 1, 2017. Pages 43-69.]

“… ontological assumptions are not well developed by authors interested in metatheatricality. A better ontology would provide better historical and theoretical explanations. In this article I will outline a social ontology consisting of social structures, agents, and discourses.…

“… the critical realist understanding which I am pursuing considers perceptions as the tip of an iceberg, the contingent products of real (and often unperceivable) forces and structures, many of them social. Identifying such mechanisms and structures is what interests me here, for these are the contents of ontology.”

[Tobin Nellhaus, “Social Ontology and (Meta)theatricality: Reflexions on Performance and Communication in History.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Volume XIV, number 2, Spring 2000. Pages 3-39.]

“Two aspects of critical realism’s theory of knowledge lead the way to the concept of performance strategies. First, the development of knowledge involves a dialectical interchange between theory and practice. [Roy] Bhaskar describes this as a theory-practice helix, in which practice predisposes and sometimes motivates theoretical judgments, and theory logically entails practical judgments and may directly cause practical actions.…

“Second, the process of forming new knowledge by means of older knowledge does not just refer to the use of current techniques to accumulate data that one can use to confirm or challenge a theory: it also concerns the use of something already understood as an analogy for something not as well understood. For critical realism, models—iconic images—are an essential part of an explanatory theory.”

[Tobin Nellhaus, “Critical Realism and Performance Strategies.” Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz, editors. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. 2009. Pages 57-84.]

“Examples of realist or predominantly realist theatre historiography include works by Bruce McConachie, Tracy Davis, and Michael Hays.…

“Economics, politics, gender, technology, reception, aesthetics, and many other areas can be the subjects of realist theatre histories. However, realism charges historians to recognize the causal links tying to particularities to underlying social structures and dynamics.… Most of all, in studying an aspect of theatre, realist theatre historians strive to explain its emergence, form, timing, and mode of existence.”

[Tobin Nellhaus, “Science, History, Theatre: Theorizing in Two Alternatives to Positivism.” Theatre Journal. Volume 45, number 4, December 1993. Pages 505-527.]

“We have now reached the point at which we can assemble and introduce the integrative semiotic framework … that draws on all the material developed above.… [S]emiotics … [can be] shown at the center of a triangle formed by [Jürgen] Habermas’s … three worlds: the personal, the social and the material worlds. But this framework goes beyond Habermas to consider both the relationships between the three worlds and the mediating role of semiotics within these relationships.…

“… Between the personal and social worlds there is a relationship of what we might call sociation. This is essentially the relationship between structure and action that has been so heavily discussed and debated. From a critical realist position, … morphogenesis addresses this area.”

[John Mingers and Leslie Willcocks, “An integrative semiotic framework for information systems: The social, personal and material worlds.” Information and Organization. Volume 24, issue 1, January 2014. Pages 48-70.]

“… we advocate that semiotics should be used as part of a carefully designed mixed-methods study together with other qualitative and quantitative tools … as necessary to the research problem at hand. We would frame this as sympathetic to the general philosophical approach of critical realism, which informs the integrative semiotics framework ….” [John Mingers, “Guidelines for Conducting Semiotic Research in Information Systems.” Kent Business School, University of Kent. Kent, England. Working Paper number 303, October 2014. Pages 1-37.]

“At the heart of semiotics are questions about the cultural meanings of symbols and objects …. Humans are rather like King Midas in that everything they touch turns into signs that represent something other than themselves. So semiotics is the study or deciphering of both the intended and the unintended meanings that are the stuff of communication. In this regard it is similar to hermeneutics … which was originally the understanding of ancient texts but is now much more widely, in IS [information systems], the basis of interpretive research – understanding people and cultures. It is also akin to specific qualitative techniques such as content analysis …, conversation analysis … and discourse analysis … but has a much greater theoretical scope.” [John Mingers and Leslie Willcocks, “Guidelines for Conducting Semiotic Research in Information Systems.” Proceedings of the 14th annual meeting of the European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management Studies. June 11th–12th, 2015. Pages 290-298. Retrieved on February 3rd, 2016.]

“In this article I will take up [Roy] Bhaskar’s few comments on the sign, and develop them farther by appropriating ideas of C. S. [Charles Sanders] Peirce. Obviously a complete analysis of signs is unfeasible within a single article, but it is possible to lay fuller foundations for a critical realist semiotics. Those foundations, however, force a revision of Bhaskar’s ontological strata. I will then pursue that revision to explore the significance of signs for the ontology of society (an issue that has several analytical and methodological implications), and for a general picture of the dimensions of practice.” [Tobin Nellhaus, “Signs, Social Ontology, and Critical Realism.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 28, number 1, 1998. Pages 1-24.]

“A critical realist approach can provide a highly comprehensive understanding of the body both on stage and in the audience. Critical realism is not limited to semiotic analysis: it apprehends the body not only as a bearer and producer of signs, but also (among other things) as a physiological being and as a social entity. Moreover, critical realism can grasp the interrelationships among these aspects of embodiment, and it can do so in concrete, ‘operational’ terms. It enables discussions about (say) how semiosis, social power relations, and the brain’s mirror cells might interact in a stratified analysis of audience response (the stratification being a crucial part of that analysis).” [Tobin Nellhaus. Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2010. Page 12.]

“The objective of Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism is to employ the premises of critical realism to defend a theory of theatre that is founded on ontological rather than aesthetic-generic categories and to contextualize dramatic performance by situating it in its socio-cultural environment …. [Tobin] Nellhaus argues that critical realism is valuable not only as an interpretative framework for the purposes of theoretically situating theatre but is especially effective for developing a comprehensive and plausible account of theatrical performance that has the supplementary capacity to clarify the structure of social reality itself.” [Kieran Cashell, “Imitation of Life.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 3, 2012. Pages 324-360.]

“One of the key elements in a critical realist methodology is a particular and specific notion of causality and believing in this generative theory of causation also includes a belief that reasons for actions can be construed as causes. Critical realists draw a distinction between successionist and generative theories of causation …. If we concentrate on experimental methods and approaches to social research, this will bring out some of the arguments in favour of generative rather than successionist theories of causation. The use of the experimental method necessitates a belief in a successionist theory of causation. Successionist theorists, following David Hume’s notion of causality as spatio-temporal contiguity, succession and constant conjunction …, argue that causal relations cannot be observed. Researchers can observe successive occurrences, but they can never understand and record the causal mechanism that connects them.” [David Scott, “Ontology, Epistemology, Strategy and Method in Educational Research. A Critical Realist Approach.” magis, Revista Internacional de Investigación en Educación. Volume 7, number 14, 2014. Pages 29-38.]

“A study that professes to be critical realist can be critiqued for the degree to which it corresponds to the foundational assumptions of critical realism. It cannot be critiqued for failing to reflect a positivist ontology. Of course, the same is true vice versa. The only way in which positivists and critical realists can critique each other is by arguing that their own foundational assumptions are superior to those under scrutiny.…

“Critical realism presents a paradigmatic alternative to positivism. Instead of cherry-picking this philosophy’s ideas and transposing them into a context in which they do not make sense, qualitative methodologists ought to question their ontological foundations and their views on causation. Once this is done, they will be in a position to decide whether they want to hold on to causal mechanisms or to the positivist measuring rod. Both is not possible.”

[Nivien Saleh, “Philosophical Pitfalls: The Methods Debate in American Political Science.” Journal of Integrated Social Sciences. Volume 1, number 1, 2009. Pages 141-176.]

“This research is situated in a critical realist paradigm which, as sociologist Margaret Archer argues, views strategic social practice as ‘inseparable from its human components because the very existence of society depends in some way upon our activities.’ This view is largely consistent with [Pierre] Bourdieu’s ontology.

“Central to critical realism is that the explanation of strategic practice is achieved through revealing the causal mechanisms that produce them. According to critical realism, the objective strategy is reflection of power relations between positions occupied within the distributions of the resources which are or may become active, effective, like aces in a game of cards, in the competition for the appropriation of scarce goods of which this social universe is the site.

“Central to critical realism is that the explanation of strategic practice is achieved through revealing the causal mechanisms that produce them. According to critical realism, the objective strategy is reflection of power relations between positions occupied within the distributions of the resources which are or may become active, effective, like aces in a game of cards, in the competition for the appropriation of scarce goods of which this social universe is the site.”

[Huifen Wang, Guoliang Luo, and Huanping Hong, “Beyond Socio-Materiality and Sense-Making: Planting Symbolic Power and Critical Realism into Strategy-As-Practice Logic.” Open Journal of Business and Management. Volume 4, 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 177-187.]

“This Article is dedicated to retiring the now-dominant ‘rational actor’ model of human agency, together with its numerous ‘dispositionist’ cohorts, and replacing them with a new conception of human agency that the authors call the ‘situational character.’ …

“… we provide a more realistic depiction of the human animal, and a more promising starting place for theorizing about humans and their institutions, including laws and legal theory. We call that depiction the situational character.…

“… The purpose of this Article is to substantiate and elaborate a central premise of critical realism, that although we think we are dispositional actors, we are better understood as situational characters.…

“The situational character is no island. Our motive for coherence guides not just our own self-conceptions, but also our conception of ourselves as beings situated among others in groupings, which in turn provide a powerful guide to our understanding of ourselves and our world.”

[Jon Hanson and David Yosifon, “The Situational Character: A Critical Realist Perspective on the Human Animal.” Georgetown Law Journal. Volume 93, number 1, November 2004. Pages 1-178.]

“Insofar as economics, and law and economics, have been challenged by critics, most debate has taken place over the extent to which people are rational. Economists tend to assume that the ‘rational actor model’ is reasonably accurate, or that its inaccuracies do not, for one reason or another, threaten their conclusions substantially. The critics tend to either roll their eyes at the obvious absurdity of the rational actor model or, more carefully, provide evidence to support a conclusion that the rational actor model is flawed and should be adjusted to take into account the irrational features of the typical human actor. In our view, both perspectives miss the far more significant assumption behind the rational actor model: that people are dispositional actors. As the [Stanley] Milgram experiments so powerfully demonstrate, it is our situations—far more than we realize, and often far more than our dispositions—that move us. We are, in essence, not rational actors, but ‘situational characters.’” [Jon Hanson and David Yosifon, “The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Volume 152, number 1, November 2003. Pages 129-346.]

“The present Article is … precisely dedicated to analyzing, from a critical realist perspective, the wisdom and constitutional viability of one possible policy response to the obesity crisis: a ban on junk-food advertising to children.

“… my purpose is to show, in the context of a difficult First Amendment question, that the critical realist approach to legal theory is capable of yielding substantial analytic insights, jurisprudential innovations, and public policy contributions.”

[David Yosifon, “Resisting Deep Capture: The Commercial Speech Doctrine and Junk-Food Advertising to Children.” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. Volume 39, 2006. Pages 509-601.]

“Situationism is premised on the social scientific insight that the naïve psychology—that is, the highly simplified, affirming, and widely held model for understanding human thinking and behavior—on which our laws and institutions are based is largely wrong. Situationists (including critical realists, behavioral realists, and related neo-realists) seek first to establish a view of the human animal that is as realistic as possible before turning to legal theory or policy. To do so, situationists rely on the insights of scientific disciplines devoted to understanding how humans make sense of their world—including social psychology, social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, and related disciplines—and the practices of institutions devoted to understanding, predicting, and influencing people’s conduct—particularly market practices. Jon Hanson & David Yosifon, The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture, 152 U. Pa. L. Rev. 129, 149–77 (2003).” [The Project on Law and Mind Sciences, “About Situationism.” The Situationist. January 28th, 2007. Retrieved on February 18th, 2016.]

“There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else. Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception. Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong. ‘The situation’ refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are relevant in explaining human behavior. ‘Situationism’ is an approach that is deliberately attentive to the situation. It is informed by social science—particularly social psychology, social cognition, cognitive neuroscience and related fields—and the discoveries of market actors devoted to influencing consumer behavior—marketers, public relations experts, and the like. The Situationist is a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions. The Situationist is associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.” [The Project on Law and Mind Sciences, “About The Situationist.” The Situationist. April 23rd, 2008. Retrieved on February 18th, 2016.]

“The treatment of causal analysis in IR [international relations], as we have seen, is characterised by a set of problems on all sides of the theoretical divides. The dominance of Humean discourse of causation has, arguably, played an overwhelming role in giving rise to these various problems.…

“The aim here is to build a consistent philosophical account of causation through, first, clarifying the philosophically or critically realist framing of causation ….

“… [It] is necessary … to clarify the often misunderstood contributions of philosophical and critical realism in IR.”

[Milja Kurki. Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pages 195-196.]

“I will proceed by … analysing some of the key tenets of the critical realist approach to causation and its contributions to our understanding of causation in IR [international relations]. A critical realist account of causation suggests that the positivist model of causal analysis is not the only way to engage with the complexity of causal relations in world politics. On the other hand, the critical realist model provides a framework for ‘constitutive’ IR theorists to re-engage with causal analysis. For it is argued that, despite their misgivings on causation, ‘constitutive theorists’ associated with various ‘post-positivist’ approaches in IR already implicitly do causation in ways that provide IR with rich knowledge of causes and consequences in world politics.” [Milja Kurki, “Critical Realism and Causal Analysis in International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 35, number 2, 2007. Pages 361-378.]

“… for many, ‘meta-theoretical’ or ‘philosophy of science’ research remains a rather abstract theoretical sub-field narrowly engaged in detailed debates on epistemology, causation or prediction. Philosophically informed IR [international relations] research can, however, be much more than this.” [Milja Kurki, “The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical IR Scholarship Today.” ” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 40, number 1, 2011. Pages 129-146.]

“It is suggested here that we need not conceptualise causation according to Humean assumptions: we can, in fact, think of causation as a ‘common-sensical’ intuitive notion with a multiplicity of different meanings, none of which entail laws or determinism. We can also understand social scientific causal analysis as epistemically reflective, methodologically pluralist and complexity-sensitive.” [Milja Kurki, “Causes of a Divided Discipline: Rethinking the Concept of Cause in International Relations Theory.” Review of International Studies. Volume 32, number 2, April 2006. Pages 189-216.]

“… important [work] is [seen in] Milja Kurki’s restatement of the importance of Aristotelian notions of causation in the face of the dominant Humean understanding of a cause as a constant conjuncture (Kurki 2008). This work is yet to stimulate a great deal of ‘applied’ IR theory but it has played an important role in shaking the dominant post-positivist approach to the field.” [Chris Brown, “The Development of International Relations Theory in the United Kingdom: Traditions, Contemporary Perspectives and Trajectories.” International Studies. Volume 46, numbers 1-2, January/April 2009. Pages 221-237.]

“… the challenge for a critical theory of security … is to seek to uncover the sources of power in particular contexts, and what work it is doing, for without this, emancipatory realism will not advance in the realm of politics.” [Ken Booth. Theory of World Security. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Page 242.]

“The assumptions and ideas of ‘critical realism’ are sympathetic with much of this discussion, including the view that there is something ‘out there’ independent of our perceptions (philosophical but not political realism), that reasons are causes, that the ideas and actions of actors are part of the constitution of reality, that agents and structures are mutually implicated, that theoretical accounts are part of reality until they are falsified (but that they do not exhaust what is real), and that epistemological relativism and rational judgement are compatible. There is an ‘out there’ which can only be engaged through the theories ‘in here,’ but what is in our minds is only part of reality, never its whole.” [Ken Booth. Theory of World Security. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Page 246.]

“The challenge therefore facing emancipatory realism is that of embedding non-dualistic politics (that is, attempting to change the world by means that are equivalent to the changes we wish to bring about). Emancipation, after all, is a process not an end-point; it is being through becoming. Conceiving means/ends in a non-dualistic manner is not ‘rocket science,’ as they say, but politically speaking it might as well be for those politicians and their supporters who seem unable to understand how the pursuit of an aim by its opposite prejudices the very objective being sought.” [Ken Booth. Theory of World Security. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Pages 428-429.]

“The relationship between power and ideas is important, and more complex than either realists or post-structuralists usually suggest. Some ideas are backed with more effective power than others; as we said at the start, no choice is entirely free. Our choices are shaped by structures of power. But we also stressed the centrality of choice.” [Ken Booth, Tim Dunne, and Michael Cox, “How Might We Live? Global Ethics in a New Century: Introduction.” Review of International Studies. Volume 26, December 2000. Pages 1-28.]

“… is there only one logic to anarchy? It was questioning the logic of anarchy, which grew out of my study of ethnocentrism in the mind 1970s, that led me to an approach which I call ‘utopian realism.’ Like similar labels, this raises at least as many questions as it settles ….

“Utopian realism as I am using it here is more an attitude of mind than a ‘theory’ with powers of explanation and prediction. But it is based upon both normative (‘utopian’) and empirical (‘realistic’) theories. The normative element is made up of a universal appeal, based on reason, to various world order principles thought to represent the appropriate standpoint for academics.”

[Ken Booth, “Security in anarchy: utopian realism in theory and pratice.” International Affairs. Volume 67, number 3, July 1991. Pages 527-545.]

“… [Roy Bhaskar’s] conception of emancipation demonstrates the transformative potential of theory and accordingly fits well with the Welsh School’s theory of emancipatory realism. [Ken] Booth describes emancipation as ‘the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do’ …. Initially these ideas about emancipation developed as ‘an attitude of mind’ which he referred as ‘utopian realism’ that sought to synthesize the dialectical opposition of ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ …. Subsequently this progressed into the realisation that merely an attitude of mind is insufficient; theory, he realised, with its ‘powers of explanation and prediction’ also plays a crucial role …. This led to the formulation of ‘emancipatory realism’ as ‘a systematic set of ideas about being, knowing, and doing’ that brings together ‘“theories of the good life,” and “theories of survival” into a comprehensive approach to security in world politics”’ ….” [Tim Siegenbeek van Heukelom. Food as Security: The controversy of foreign agricultural investment in the Yala Swamp, Kenya. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Sydney, Australia: Centre for International Security Studies, University of Sydney. August, 2013. Page 8.]

“In order for emancipatory theory to be of any practical use it must at some point stop being theory about emancipation and actually become emancipation itself. This motivated the question: what does emancipation itself look like in a research project about the experience of art students as they grapple with being at art school?” [Melanie McDonald, “Critical Realism, Meta-Reality and Making Art: Traversing a Theory-Practice Gap.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 7, issue 1, May 2008. Pages 29-56.]

“… whether or not capitalism exists is not a matter of academic squabbling. The concept of what is present determines what needs to be absented (to use the terminology of the radical philosopher Roy Bhaskar). To say that a social formation is decidedly capitalist has a different political implication than the contrary view that it is not capitalist (enough), or that it is capitalist here and there but not everywhere. If a country is dominantly semi-feudal or not capitalist enough, then the radical strategy is seen by many as one which is to be directed against semi-feudal exploiters or at the promotion of advanced capitalism. This strategy licenses an indefinite wait for the fight for socialism (abolition of class relations) to start. But if what is present is already capitalism, albeit one that is not very progressive and that is unlikely to be very progressive for a very long time, the nature of class politics must be seen in a radically different manner.” [Raju J. Das, “Reconceptualizing Capitalism: Forms of Subsumption of Labor, Class Struggle, and Uneven Development.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 44, number 2, June 2012. Pages 178-200.]

“Learning environments are tiered or layered or laminar systems, where learning is an emergent property with multiple and tiered determinants.…

“The implication of the stratified or laminar character of the learning is that one needs to account for the mechanisms that operate at the physical, biological, psychological, sociocultural and curricular levels.…

“… It [the learning environment is … laminar or layered, having at least physical, biological, psychological, social and curricular dimensions.”

[Gordon Brown, “The Ontological Turn in Education: The Place of the Learning Environment.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 8, issue 1, May 2009. Pages 5-34.]

“A critical realist [approach?] to emancipatory learning emphasizes the importance of focusing on economic, political, and social structures as a means of people understanding themselves and the way they think, believe, and behave. It is, after all, these structures which influence, if not determine, people’s consciousness. This is not to deny that the question whether critical realism can lead to freedom, or simply to the reemergence of new structures, is central to theoretical attempts to move beyond postmodernism.” [Tom Inglis, “A critical realist approach to emancipation: A response to Mezirow.” Adult Education Quarterly. Volume 49, issue 1, Fall 1998. Pages 72-76.]

“… for freedom or emancipation to be possible we must have, as Bhaskar points out, ‘informed desire.’ It is the knowledge of the power relations that oppress them that will enable Australian Aborigines to be free ….

“… one is not playing an intellectual game. Issues around Indigenous education are serious, often deadly so….

“To begin with, the struggles around Indigenous knowledge cannot simply be compared to a struggle around ‘freedom of knowledge.’ Moreover, whenever and wherever we meet oppression I would argue strongly that, yes, we should be implacable in our opposition. I would also emphasize that the struggle for Indigenous emancipation is not simply a struggle over aesthetics, whether they be liberationist or not. The cognitive and the ethical will also be involved. As for contradictions and ambivalences, we should seek to exploit those contradictions which can be turned to help Aboriginal children. Where we meet ambivalences we must seek to turn these to total commitment to justice for those same children.”

[Chris Sarra. Strong and Smart – Towards a Pedagogy for Emancipation: Education for First Peoples. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. Kindle edition.]

“Strong and Smart recounts the story of how the author overcame low expectations for his future to become an educator who has sought to change the tide of low expectations for other Aboriginal Australian students. It draws upon critical realism to demonstrate how Indigenous people have agency and can take control of their own emancipation.” [Nick Wilson, “Strong and Smart – Towards a Pedagogy for Emancipation: Education for First Peoples.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 2, issue 3, January 2013. Pages 400-404.]

“… the emancipatory mission of CR is most helpful in reaffirming what education should ‘be about’ ….

“…a critical realist conception of the endeavour of education can be articulated as: facilitating the emergent rationality of each student towards emancipation. At its most general level, this book simply makes a claim for the explanatory power of critical realism for the field of education.

“In a more specific way, it hopes to advance a perspective on education which facilitates the emancipation of students and those who work with them.

“Critical realism allows students of all levels and abilities to be involved in responding to the axiology of emancipation, as long as teachers and those who support them bear in mind that a myriad of real and stratified social structures and mechanisms are enabling and constraining the student, while enabling and constraining each other. In other words, educational systems are mind-independent realities, which possess deep structures and complex causal relations.”

[Brad Shipway. A Critical Realist Perspective of Education. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Google Play edition.]

“[Brad] Shipway’s work has led me to conceive of education more as an emancipatory movement (or perhaps ‘moment’). I had the sense that this is where Shipway was pushing. In describing education in this way, I feel emphasis is given to the dynamic context-dependent potential of education as a force for human freedom while at the same time signalling an emancipatory axiology that is both a necessary condition and a real possibility in the making.” [Fabio Gironi, “A Critical Realist Perspective of Education.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 2, April 2014. Pages 204-221.]

“When combined with the axiology of emancipation, the view that all agents are involved in emancipation to a greater or lesser extent supports a claim for the equal universal moral worth of each agent’s process of emancipation. Despite the limitations an agent may face, or whether they are involved in the process of emancipation to a greater or lesser extent (or even at all), the process itself is of equal worth to any other agent’s emancipatory process.…

“… [Roy] Bhaskar makes it quite clear that the axiology of emancipation can be discerned as early as in an infant’s ‘primal scream.’ …

“… because the axiology of emancipation is a tendency which is operating even before cognitive emancipation is realised, teachers (and other educational workers) have important work as custodians of the emancipation of pre-rational students until such time as each agent is ready to become more autonomous.…

“Viewing the education of young students through dialectical critical realist glasses, I think it is most reasonable to argue that the axiology of emancipation indicates teachers should be conditioning their students by providing them with an emancipatory environment in which to learn.”

[Brad Shipway, “The Educational Limits of Critical Realism? Emancipation and Rational Agency in the Compulsory Years of Schooling.” Presented at the 8th annual meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism. Cambridge, England. August 17th–19th, 2004. Pages 1-18. Retrieved on February 18th, 2016.]

“As a critical realist, [Roy] Bhaskar is concerned with ‘emancipatory social practice’ and this gives him common ground with many contemporary social theorists on the libertarian-left. In promoting emancipatory social practice his position inverts the famous dictum of Marx, who gave prominence in his program to changing the world: for Bhaskar the world cannot be changed rationally unless it is interpreted adequately and this interpretation has as its prerequisite the philosophical idea othe independent existence of the natural and the social world ….

“… Bhaskar has essentially socialist political aims in mind. He cuts through the Gordian Knot of his own scepticism: he talks of ‘reclaiming reality,’ by eliminating the prejudices, errors, unsupported claims and philosophical false trails which have covered or disguised reality for us; and he talks of using this reclaimed reality as the only basis for emancipatory social practice”

[David Corson, “Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and Educational Knowledge.” British Journal of Sociology of Education. Volume 12, number 2, 1991. Pages 223-241.]

“On [Roy] Bhaskar’s account …, structures of power have no existence separate from the activities that they govern and from agents’ reports [in language] of those activities. It is true that the discourse of individuals is heavily influenced by institutional practices: human agents are tightly constrained by discursive structures and the effects of these constraints often show up in stereotyped and unjust oppositions that severely disadvantage females. But it is also true that structures in their turn are reconstructed and reinforced by acts of discourse. Indeed the very possibility of emancipation from oppressive ideologies and structures depends on this being so.” [David J. Corson, “Language, Gender and Education: a critical review linking social justice and power.” Gender and Education. Volume 4, issue 3, 1992. Pages 229-254]

“The prominent British philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar, calls his emancipatory conception of discovery ‘critical realism’ …

“Critical realism is an ontology …. Bhaskar shows that the most basic evidence we can have about the social world is the reasons and accounts that given people offer to describe the things in their world that they value, or the things that oppress them.”

[David Corson. Language Diversity and Education. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers. 2009. Page 30.]

“… [The] idea of human motive, delivered in a discursive account, anticipates discussion below of [Roy] Bhaskar’s emancipatory conception of social action and the place of language in it.…

“As a critical realist, Bhaskar is interested in ‘emancipatory social practice’ which gives him common ground with many contemporary social theorists on the libertarian-left. In promoting this practice his position inverts the famous dictum of Marx, who gave prominence in his programme to changing the world: in Bhaskar’s philosophy the world cannot be rationally changed unless it is adequately interpreted and this interpretation has as its prerequisite the philosophical idea of the independent existence of the natural and the social world.”

[David Corson, “Language, power and minority schooling.” Language and Education. Volume 5, issue 4, 1991. Pages 231-253.]

“… interdisciplinary integration could be considered an important part of the so-called institutional dimension of sustainability, along with the necessary power base for the implementation of such a policy.…

“Lack of interdisciplinary integration may … be legitimised by certain postmodernist ideas, in particular the claim that the ‘great narratives’ are dead.…

“But the barriers to interdisciplinary integration may also result from metatheoretical positions explicitly excluding certain types of knowledge and methods ….

[Karl Georg Høyer, “Interdisciplinarity, Ecology and Scientific Theory: The Case of Sustainable Urban Development.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 7, issue 2, October 2008. Pages 179-207.]

“I present an abstract heuristic model … in order to clarify the concepts of ‘finitude of scope’ and ‘finitude of faculties’ …. These two concepts are then employed in a critical reading of Roy Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism,’ where I argue that, in an important sense, critical realism would be more consistent and truer to its founding principles if it were understood as a skeptical realism.…

“… In fact, the bedrock principles of Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’ substantially amount to a skeptical realism ….

“… epistemological skepticism will … serve as a revealing lens through which to read Bhaskar’s critical realism.”

[Matthew G. Hannah, “Skeptical realism: from either/or to both-and.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space. Volume 17, number 1, February 1999. Pages 17-34.]

“… this study focuses its attention on those who are involved in the events that happen within the [Nigerian] university. By ‘events’ we mean the processes that are associated with intake, transformation and output, which are the main activities of a university; however, this paper, concentrates its attention specifically on the transformation process. According to the principles of critical realism, by analysing the empirical evidence gathered from the university officers it should be possible to penetrate to the underlying hidden structure beneath and understand it.” [Niyi Adetunji, “Government Policies in Relation to Quality Management Implementation: A Review of Nigerian Universities Principal Officers.” Journal of Organisational Studies and Innovation. Volume 1, number 1, summer 2014. Pages 22-34.]

“Against the critiques which have been levelled at postmodernism I will argue that critical realism is theoretically best placed to mediate the various postmodern positions and concerns by developing a reading of critical realism which places critical realism firmly within the context of postmodernism as an alternate postmodernism.” [Timothy Rutzou. In Pursuit of the Real: Postmodernism and Critical Realism. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University College London Institute of Education. London, England. 2015. Page 3.]

“In arguing for an alternative postmodernism the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar becomes an important point of contact between realism and postmodernism. While often presented as a means of escaping postmodernism Bhaskar’s philosophy shares a number of more than superficial similarities with the problematics of postmodernism. In fact it requires little imagination to view Bhaskar’s transcendental realism as a vast deconstructive endeavour operating upon the edifice of Western philosophy.” [Timothy Rutzou. In Pursuit of the Real: Postmodernism and Critical Realism. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University College London Institute of Education. London, England. 2015. Page 17.]

“Unsurprisingly, I want to make the claim that social science needs to become critically realist. The question then becomes: what does it mean to be critically realist today? Here I want to make four suggestions for a reimagined, reconstructed social science informed by a critical realism: social science must become (1) more methodologically reflexive, (2) more epistemically reflexive, (3) more ontologically reflexive, and (4) more practically and ethically reflexive.” [Timothy Rutzou, “Re-Imagining Social Science.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 4, 2016. Pages 327-341.]

“Comparativists within the camp of critical realists seem to accept the prevailing comparative methods as relevant and appropriate, although they acknowledge that these methods must be critically chosen and applied in a critical realist perspective. In my view, this is indefensible because a certain philosophy of science is advocated on the one hand, while critical realists, on the other hand, accept research methods which are based on other philosophies of science. The excuse is that we can adopt a critical methodological pluralism, but in practice, this is not easily done. What is more important is, however, that we abstain from developing new methodologies, inspired by and fulfilling the criteria of critical realism.

“… One of the first tasks is to elaborate the explanatory methodology of these research strategies, because a recurring criticism of existing methodologies is their lack of a proper understanding of the concept of generative causality and the design of research strategies which comprehend this explanatory framework. The objective should be to construe what we have called a substantive, contextual methodology for comparative social science research.”

[Peter Wad, “Critical realism and Comparative Sociology.” Paper presented at the fifth annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism. Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. August 17th–19th, 2001. Pages 1-14. Retrieved on June 27th, 2016.]

“In the generative network approach of the relationship between theory and research, these pure theories will have their place, in their own right, as well as in relation with empirical research. The mutual and simultaneous interchanges between abstract theorizing and empirical research, now often tacit or ignored, are important resources for improvement in theoretical and empirical knowledge.” [Caroline Gijselinckx, “Towards a generative network approach of the epistemological, ontological and empirical in sociological research.” Paper presented at the fifth annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism. Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. August 17th–19th, 2001. Retrieved on November 13th, 2015.]

“A Gramscian Ontology of International Relations

“When it comes to the question of ontology within the study of International Relations, this study will seek to advance a critical realist approach. Critical realist ontology … stems from the fundamental distinction of the dimensions of knowledge between the ‘intransitive’ and the ‘transitive’ dimension …. The ‘intransitive’ dimension can be said to be formed by the objects of science, the things ‘out there’ that we put under scientific scrutiny. The ‘transitive’ dimension on the other hand is what we as human beings make out of these objects. These are the theories and discourses that structure our understanding of the universe. Since these ‘objects’ serve as constituents of the social world they can also be objects of study, and within social science, they are exclusively so.”

[Dennis Halvordsson. Securitizing the Virtuality of the Real: A Gramscian Analysis of the Securitization of U.S. Cyberspace Governance. Bachelor Thesis in International Relations. School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Gothenburg, Sweden. Autumn, 2012. Page 8.]

“The discussion to follow will be centered on the problem of unifying accounts of individual consciousness and societal relationships, rejecting a common failing of cognitivism - the tendency to consider psychological phenomena is isolation from systems of social relations, thereby marooning them in the form of states and processes within individuals ….

“… it [this discussion] assumes a rejection of the doctrine of methodological individualism, which ‘... asserts that facts about society are to be explained solely in terms of facts about individuals’ ([Roy] Bhaskar …). Any analysis of the relations between the individual and society requires a position on this issue. The rejection of methodological individualism does not, however, imply its inverse—methodological collectivism—which would explain individuals solely in terms of the social system. Instead, what Bhaskar … terms the ‘transformational model’ best describes the view taken here ….

“… Our aim is to suggest a tentative formulation using the strengths in the social constructionist account of individual consciousness taken from [B. F.] Skinner, together with a Marxist account of cultural production that owes much to [Antonio] Gramsci and [Raymond] Williams.”

[Mark Burton and Carolyn Kagan, “The Verbal Community and the Societal Construction of Consciousness.” Behavior and Social Issues. Volume 4, number 1 and 2, 1994. Pages 87-96.]

“… the entire development of [Roy] Bhaskar’s work can be understood in relation to his identification of the basic categorial structures of anthroporealism and his subsequent exploration of their implications. The categorial structures of anthroporealism are embodied in any illicit projection of ideas about what is specifically human into the wider world. Within critical realism the most familiar examples of anthroporealist ideas are the epistemic and ontic fallacies: the reduction of knowing to being and (its dialectical opposite) the reduction of being to knowing. These fallacies are anthroporealist inasmuch as they both fix a certain distinction between the human and nonhuman and at the same time establish a fundamental split between them.” [Nick Hostettler, “On the Implications of Critical Realist Underlabouring: Response to Heikki Patomäki’s ‘After Critical Realism?’” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 1, April 2010. Pages 89-103.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar states that there are in principle no limits to the ‘new and ever deeper, and explanatory more basic, strata’ … that await discovery in either the human or physical sciences …. CR [critical realism] makes possible a science of the social that recognises the ontological reality of mechanisms (powers) specific to both structure and agency (i.e. it sanctions non-epiphenomenal and non-elisionary or non-conflationary theory). Structure thus describes the pre-formed social and cultural forces that agents confront and are embedded in and this distinction, between structure and agency, permits explanations to be advanced that give weight to the emergent powers of man and society without denying their separate status or complementary interaction.” [Martin Lipscomb. The Theory and Application of Critical Realist Philosophy and Morphogenetic Methodology: Emergent Structural and Agential Relations at a Hospice. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of the West of England. Bristol, England. March, 2009. Page 17.]

“It is in that creative process of regeneration that Eurocentrism, like modernism, will bury itself; and all of humankind will rediscover once again the bliss of particularistic difference, not standardize commonality, with living (not becoming, achieving, or doing) as the only anthropically comprehensible ‘meaning of life’ given us. Of course, if we do endeavor and succeed in this return to normalcy, let it be a salutary reminder to the modernist tribe (including critical realists) that we would then have only caught up to where the bushmen began their evolution, eons ago. So much (obviously can be said) for – the grand delusions of – ‘progress.’” [Rajani Kanth, “Eurocentrism, realism, and the anthropic cartography of emancipation.” Realism Discourse and Deconstruction. Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Google Play edition.]

“As a vital new paradigm in the human sciences, Bhaskarian Realism seeks to resolve the classical antinomies that have divided social science by offering a vantage point from which both individualism and collectivism can be corrected, such that neo-classical theory can be convincingly refuted, while orthodox Marxism and Stalinism can equally be rejected in favour of the original insights in the classical [Karl] Marx, insights into the real ontology of societies, on whose irreducible basis alone we can hope to construct efficacious categories to explain, and understand the dynamics of social existence.…

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s suggestions for a restructuration of Marxian discourse are of critical interest. He argues that there is something very misconceived in the traditional Marxian manner of lumping together all ideas, indiscriminately, to form a bloc termed a superstructure, as distinguished from a ‘material’ base, for, quite simply, even purely economic activity necessarily has an inalienable ideational component (all activity, economic or otherwise, necessarily carries with it the presumption of some conception carried by the agent as to what and why he/she is doing).”

[Rajani J. Kanth, “Economic Theory & Realism: Outlines of a Reconstruction.” Methodus. Volume 3, number 2, 1991. Pages 37-35.]

“The market has given us the teeming ghetto, the abandoned housing project, the downtown no-man’s land, the far boondocks, where you intrude only at peril; the Streets where none may walk, the parks that none may use, the Commons that none may share; the market has razed our landscape, poisoned our waters, polluted the air, and ravished the good earth; the market has come between us and those we love, be they people, principles, ideas, dreams, or aesthetics.” [Rajani Kanth. The Post-Human Society: Elemental Contours of the Aesthetic Economy of the United States. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Open imprint of Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. Creative Commons. Page 29.]

“Psychologically, and philosophically, a regime of greed, of necessity, offends every sacred value of my aesthetic endowment, sins against every single statute of my discarnate being, revolts against every finer feeling of my sovereign self.

“This book is my highly personal ode (and yet, it is still a verifiable cultural anthropology) – in a human society all is ad hominem: it couldn’t be otherwise – to that elongated nightmare of struggle against the premises of the great creed, viewed sometimes from afar, and sometimes from within; but always from the perspective of one who has struggled bitterly for the waning canons of a forgotten civility – and lost.”

[Rajani Kanth. The Post-Human Society: Elemental Contours of the Aesthetic Economy of the United States. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Open imprint of Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. Creative Commons. Pages 99-100.]

“It is the routine violence and mayhem that mars everyday life in the US that renders Rajani Kanth’s The Post-Human Society so noteworthy, timely and necessary. It offers a searing moral critique of US society, taking aim at the cultural pillars upon which such a society was historically founded, constructed and sustained. Although fully drafted in 1992, the book’s contents are by no means dated but seem to have stood the test of time well. Indeed, it is plausible to suggest that the apparent escalation of uncertainty, insecurity and violence in the US and throughout the world since the early nineties has rendered the book even more relevant today.” [Tung-Yi Kho, “The Post-Human Society: Elemental Contours of the Aesthetic Economy of the United States.” Journal of Critical Realism. Review article. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 310-314.]

“As a vital new paradigm in the human sciences, Bhaskarian realism seeks to resolve the classical antinomies that have divided social science by offering a vantage point from which both individualism and collectivism can be corrected, such that neoclassical theory can be convincingly refuted, while orthodox Marxism and Stalinism can equally be rejected in favor of the original insights in the classical Marx, insights into the real ontology of societies, on whose irreducible basis alone we can hope to construct efficacious categories to explain and understand the dynamics of social existence. In what follows, in stages, the realist vision is described, encapsulating the varied intellectual moments of the oeuvre of Bhaskar.” [Rajani Kanth. Capitalism and Social Theory: The Science of Black Holes. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Google Play edition.]

“Transcendental realism asserts the non-identity of thought and being, of the objects of the transitive and intransitive dimensions. In so asserting this, the Bhaskarian realist denies empiricism for limiting the concept of the natural order to what is given in human experience; it also denies idealism for seeing it as a human construct. For realism, the cognitive possibility is determined by the nature of the (independent) object (for it is humanity that is the contingent phenomenon in nature, and knowledge a cosmic accident). The forlornness of the universe, as [Martin] Heidegger saw it, acquires in [Roy] Bhaskar, thereby, an important scientific legitimacy.” [Rajani K. Kanth, “Economic Theory & Realism: Outlines of a Reconstruction.” Methodus. Volume 3, number 2, 1991. Pages 37-35.]

“The problem is the perennial one of existential transitivity—or epistemic interference—in the wilful production of human knowledge about humans. Since there is no ideal, ontic resolution of this difficulty (the ontic circle may not be epistemically squared), despite the conceits of traditional positivism, and the nouvelle ambitions of critical realism (as inspired by the work(s) of Roy Bhaskar), this discourse will simply note that as a disclaimer before proceeding to discern, decipher, and allocate, albeit in speculative fashion, a distinctive logos (if not a telos) to the advent of modernism in its founding (and confounding) European guise.” [Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. Against Eurocentrism: A Transcendent Critique of Modernist Science, Society, and Morals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2005. Page 3.]

“Culture is a heirarchically ordered system of values; and although similarities abound, no two cultures are exactly alike.… Given the plurality of cultures, and their incommensurability, does it not then follow that the critique of modernism offered here is gratuitous?” [Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. Against Eurocentrism: A Transcendent Critique of Modernist Science, Society, and Morals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2005. Page 134.]

“… the critique of modernism cannot be absolutist—it can, but only by forsaking relevance.…

“… In effect, even the votaries of modernism are unlikely to survive the modernist destruction of human and nonhuman habitats; only in that important sense, this critique of modernism is both concrete and real as much as it is, as a contextual matter, absolutist and universal, despite its unique, and ontically specific, vantage point.”

[Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. Against Eurocentrism: A Transcendent Critique of Modernist Science, Society, and Morals. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2005. Pages 147-148.]

“The most important contribution Against Eurocentrism makes to contemporary critical theory is to draw modernity, capitalism and civil society together under the single term: Eurocentrism. It also provides a normative framework for responding to the ills of the present, offers an explanation for these ills, and even sheds light on a way of ending them. Here, though, is a strange twist, for the explanatory and prescriptive parts of his thesis are curiously modernist in nature. In the end, Kanth’s own account of alternative, non-modern, culture draws directly on modernist justifications of its own institutions as solutions to problems of human nature. It is as if his moral critique absorbed all his critical energies. His guard down, modernism crept back in.” [Nick Hostettler, “Reclaiming the Past and the Outside.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 5, issue 2, August 2006. Pages 380-396.]

“Rejects Eurocentrism in favor of a vision of the collective wisdom of the human race. Contends that modernism is the scourge of our millennium; that the virtues or benignities of modernism are purchased at too high a cost. Discusses the modernist revolutions and the ascent of Europe; the utopian impulse in the era of the Enlightenment; the omissions of materialism; and discontent and thoughts on human emancipation.” [Editor, “Against Eurocentrism: A Transcendent Critique of Modernist Science, Society, and Morals.” Review article. Journal of Economic Literature. Volume 43, number 4, December 2005. Page 1173.]

“The debate that arose concerning [Roy] Bhaskar’s … realist accounts of both natural and social science … was, in part, focussed on the role regularities play in constructing causal accounts. From the perspective of early Bhaskarian realism, regularities were neither sufficient nor necessary for the establishment of knowledge concerning causal/generative mechanisms. They are not sufficient, if only because correlations are not always causal. They are not necessary, if only because complex interacting mechanisms in open systems can lead to the blocking of causal tendencies. These are sound arguments. However, it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Regularities can appear in open systems, though they may be less than perfect and may be complex in nature.” [Barry Cooper and Judith Glaesser, “Contrasting variable-analytic and case-based approaches to the analysis of survey datasets: exploring how achievement varies by ability across configurations of social class and sex.” Methodological Innovations Online. Volume 5, number 1, 2010. Pages 4-23.]

“I must name a few (in no particular order), comprising both intimates and distal compeers, who either marched alongside, or provided necessary philosophical nourishment quite unknowingly, ingly, one time or another, in this long and arduous trek: Roy Bhaskar, Noam Chomsky, Roger Owen, Robert Heilbroner, Bill Brugger, Paul Sweezy, Paul Feyerabend, Sai Baba, Harry Magdoff, Paul Auerbach, Mark Blaug, Boudhayan Chattopadhyaya, Peter Bell, Tony Brewer, Wolfram Elsner, Ali Shamsavari, Sudipta Kaviraj, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, Vandana Shiva, Chandra Mohanty, Warren Samuels, Barbara Thayer, Janeen Costa, Kamal Chenoy, Shaun Lovejoy, David Gordon, Paul Hanson, Tim Wonderly, Janaka Bmanwila, and Janet Darley.…

“Today, this expansionist paradigm of growth and domination is at its all-time time zenith, even as abject despair and impuissant misery are the lot of the majority who live under its insensible yoke. Fortunately, in keeping with a hoary lineage of revolt, a few have now risen in protest (largely self-organized women, disgruntled tribals, and sensitive people generally, the world over) against the very metaphysical foundations of this inveterate culture of death, and its grotesque philosophy of materialism. In all naive ‘voluntarism,’ they have shown that there is only one ‘science’ of social change—struggle and resistance—that is valid in all epochs, past and present. Nothing that cannot be changed, that is fought for; nothing that may not be evaded through intelligence, guile, and exile. This book confirms that simple intuition of the untutored mind: that human volition can overcome the very institutions that are its own artifacts. In one phrase: apathy confirms and conserves, while activism emancipates and liberates. Indeed, this is true at every ontological level, in all epochs: at the level of the individual, the family, the group, the class, and so on.”

[Rajani Kannepalli Kanth. Breaking With the Enlightenment: The Twilight of History and the Rediscovery of Utopia. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc. 1997. Kindle edition.]

“Breaking with the Enlightenment is a wide-ranging, thought-provoking book that will appeal to those who are interested in human emancipation but troubled by the ‘darker’ side of the Enlightenment project. Rajani Kanth argues that the European Enlightenment set in motion a modernist impulse underpinning all subsequent intellectual and political thought and action with damaging consequences for almost all inhabitants of the planet – and the planet itself.” [Steve Fleetwood, “Regressive/Progressive….” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 1, issue 1, July 1998. pages 22-23.]

“… [This is a] deep, internal form, or structure, of discourse and is a prime instance of the transfactuality a societal mechanism, i.e. the production of different knowledge effects by the form common to distinct intellectual inquiries. It is a typically critical realist concept, providing a structured and differentiated account of discursive practices. It thematises the differential temporalities of reproduction and transformation of the relatively enduring problematic and the more transient effects which emerge at the level of surface contents. The concept of the problematic also encompasses the insights of realist dialectics by identifying different levels and regions at which real absences exist and can be absented (…, and these are best described by [Roy] Bhaskar’s account of the logical contradictions of irrealism. The irrealist problematic is preserved within discourse by core irrealist categories, of which universals are just the prime example. Universals function in ways similar to [Imre] Lakatos’ ‘hard core’ of research programmes, as relatively stable pivots around which modern social transformation takes place. These processes can be theorised as irrealist discourse–discipline dialectics ….” [Nick Hostettler, “The dialectics of realist theory and the Eurocentric problematic of modern discourse.” Realism Discourse and Deconstruction. Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Google Play edition.]

“The critique of identity thinking brings together the deconstructive and dialectical approaches, while being, as [Jacques] Derrida makes clear, central to the critique of law. My aim is to develop a dialectical critique of identity thinking as it relates to the concept of the legal subject. So doing, I consider and develop the innovative treatment of modern classical dialectics by [Roy] Bhaskar and locate Derrida’s deconstruction within it.” [Alan Norrie, “Dialectics, deconstruction and the legal subject.” Realism Discourse and Deconstruction. Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Google Play edition.]

“To a large extent, we accept positivist critiques of nonmaterialist strains of Marxism and concur with the priority positivists’ give to empirical evidence and realist ontology. However, in the spirit of C. Wright Mills and contemporary critical realists like Roy Bhaskar …, we also recognize the need for sophisticated social theory to direct our inquiries. Here, an important qualification is needed: Throughout the rest of this article, we are considering only the relationship of materialist, critical-realist Marxism to the sociological positivist tradition—viewing the latter in its less epistemologically naïve, more sophisticated form.” [Richard York and Brett Clark, “Marxism, Positivism, and Scientific Sociology: Social Gravity and Historicity.” The Sociological Quarterly. Volume 47, number 3, summer 2006. Pages 425-450.]

“Whilst I use ontology to evaluate the nature of work, not any ontology will suffice. The ontological position adopted here is sponsored by critical realist philosophy, the basic propositions of which have been dealt with elsewhere ….

“Work can be considered as a set of activities, or as a set of relations.…

“… My suggestion is to … [start] with an ontological makes it possible to specify certain social relations and activities within these as work.”

[Jan Ch. Karlsson, “The Ontology of Work: Social Relations and Doing in the Sphere of Necessity.” Critical Realist Applications in Organisation and Management Studies. Steve Fleetwood and Stephen Ackroyd, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Pages 90-91.]

“… I argue that social science now needs to reassess its ontological and epistemological commitments to the social if it is to explicate empirical recalcitrance in a way that can convince sceptical policymakers that there is a strong relationship between housing and illness. To this end, I draw upon the ontological doctrine of critical realism, which is committed to a stratified and relational dialectic (as opposed to ‘at’ or foundational) ontology….

“In housing studies the concept of ontological security has been imported into the literature onto the meaning of home …. This, then, provides an important starting point in the critical realism of home and health.”

[Chris Allen, “On the ‘Physiological Dope’ Problematic in Housing and Illness Research: towards a critical realism of home and health.” Housing, Theory and Society. Volume 17, 2000. Pages 49-67.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s idea of dialectic provides a framework—or perhaps a lens—through which inquiry and praxis in librarianship can be examined. His books offer a progressively well-developed idea of the need to envision the social sciences generally as encompassing the two forms of reality. Unlike some theorists, Bhaskar does not advocate subsuming social science under the method or epistemology of the natural sciences; his stance is that there are varying ontological existences that must be accounted for, that human relations cannot be reified as though they were intransitive objects of knowledge. Moreover, the very concept of information can be revisited in light of the dialectic that Bhaskar details. To situate his framework in bold terms, Bhaskar provides a corrective for an abundance of information seeking and information retrieval work that has been done to date, which has been heavily influenced by information-processing cognitive inquiry. Once one comprehends that the informational objects are in fact transitive objects, then one can engage them discursively, epistemologically, and in their own ontological context.” [John M. Budd, “Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism.” Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC. 2010. Pages 29-39.]

“This article argues for a realist conception of human needs.…

“… The inhumanity of tyranny, we contend, is better fought from the terrain of objective and universal human needs. As a corollary we claim that conditions of basic need satisfaction are generally more conducive to resistance to tyranny, independence of action and political freedom.”

“In this paper I join the ‘ontological project’ by discussing critical realism (CR), a philosophy of science, and a realist social theory and explanatory framework that has developed from it. A distinctive feature of a realist philosophy is that ontology (the theory of being, which has strong implications for the conceptions of reality) is seen as distinct from epistemology (the theory of knowledge), which means that scientific theorising is based on the assumption that there exists a mind-independent reality. In this respect realism differs from empiricism (the view that knowledge derives from experience of the world), and also from idealism (positing thought and language over matter). In social studies this distinction conditions our analysis: how real is social reality, and how can we best study, for example, the complex social events associated with information seeking and use?” [Marianne Wikgren, “Critical realism as a philosophy and social theory in information science?” Journal of Documentation. Volume 61, number 1, 2005. Pages 11-22.]

“A theory of objective, universal human needs is seen by many to constitute a form of essentialism which reduces human beings to static, ahistorical biological nature, denying historical specificity, difference and agency. Distinguishing universal needs from the diversity of wants that people have is seen to presuppose some metaphysical commitment to abstract universal human nature.…

“… Need can be specified in terms of the objects necessary to realise the potential powers of human beings as natural beings. The realist social ontology of causal powers, stratification and emergence addresses the simultaneously biological, social and individual basis of human need.”

[Branwen Gruffydd Jones. Explaining Global Poverty: A critical realist approach. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Google Play edition.]

“Human beings have emergent powers rooted in the social strata, and meet their needs through production in society. Unlike the instinctual activities of animals, human beings self-consciously create the objects which satisfy their needs. This difference is at the root of human history and notions of development and progress, and the historicity of human needs. Human production is a self-conscious, intentional process involving planning, reflection and learning.… The ways in which it is possible for humans to meet their needs are therefore not static and unchanging, as they are for animals: the satisfaction of needs changes and develops for humans.” [Branwen Gruffydd Jones, “Explaining Global Poverty: A Realist Critique of the Orthodox Approach.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 1, July 2001. Pages 2-10.]

“[Karl] Marx’s major contributions to political economy include both the substantive content of his theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism, and the distinct method of historical materialism. To a significant extent, the developments in method enabled Marx to produce his profound theoretical analyses of the workings of capitalism. The method of historical materialism as developed and practised by Marx and [Friedrich] Engels has been subject to rival interpretations. Engels, and later [Vladimir] Lenin, characterized Marx’s approach as having been informed by German idealist philosophy, French socialism and English political economy.… The method of historical materialism can also be considered in relation to the vexed question of science and explanation, drawing upon the work of Derek Sayer, Bertell Ollman and Roy Bhaskar, who underline the non-positivist features which define Marx’s method.” [Branwen Gruffydd Jones, “Method of political economy.” The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Ben Fine, Alfredo Saad-Filho, and Marco Boffo, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2012. Pages 220-226.]

“I take Roy Bhaskar-inspired ‘critical realism’ as equivalent to scientific realism, at least for the discussion here.…

“… scientific realism submits to ontological absolutism (whereas antirealism does not). Scientific realism readily admits that our mental activity is a form of social reality and that our behavior and nonbehavior shape social reality. Scientific realism, however, also insists that even these social realities exist independently from observers’ thinking, observation, and behavior: my mental activity is real whether you believe it is real or not.”

[Shiping Tang, “Foundational Paradigms of Social Sciences.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 41, number 2, 2011. Pages 211-249.]

“Critical realism is a radical critique of the Western philosophy, especially positivism that is closely associated with rational choice theory and Western modernity.…

“An important hidden problem for development and social science research is positivism’s dominance. According to [Roy] Bhaskar …, positivism is a dominant ideology that serves the interests of capitalist Western modernity through a reductionist approach even to complex social phenomena. This ensures that anything not in line with orthodoxy does not get a hearing, and is even demonized. It dominates academia and policy formulation despite the many and cogent critiques and recognizable development policy failures, especially visible in economics ….”

[James M. Njihia, “Critical realism and its prospects for African development research and policy (PAK).” Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya. Volume 3, number 1, June 2011. Pages 61-85.]

“[E. F.] Schumacher’s … critique of orthodox economics which is positivist in the best selling Small Is Beautiful … anticipated themes in critical realism. For example, Schumacher sought a metaphysics that gives inner clarity to people’s basic convictions despite limited knowledge of facts and theories. In the process he anticipated many critical realist notions such as depth ontology and epistemological relativism. He rejects the assumptions of system closure and reductionism as concerned only with convergent problems, while divergent problems are the ‘real stuff of life’ …. He deplores the preclusion of ethical issues in economic analysis by a denial that society and humans have different levels of being, similar to critical realist notions of stratified reality and emergence.” [James M. Njihia, “Critical realism and its prospects for African development research and policy.” Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (PAK). Volume 3, number 1, June 2011. Pages 61-85.]

“Economists …, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from ‘metaphysics’ or ‘values’ as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.…

“The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal: it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”

[E. F. Schumacher. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 2010. Ebook edition.]

“From Buddhism, [E. F.] Schumacher was inspired by the idea of the Middle. In a period where bigness was praised – bigger countries! bigger companies! bigger oil tankers! – Schumacher praised a more moderate and appropriate size, rather than just smallness (as expected from the title of the book). Opposed to the complexity of contemporary technological systems, Schumacher argued for intermediate technology – simpler and less expensive technology in the size of man.” [Thomas Taro Lennerfors, “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.” Scandinavian Journal of Management. Volume 29, 2013. Pages 402-408.]

“The remainder of this article builds on a line of philosophical inquiry that we have been developing over a number of years to advance MOS [management and organization studies] as a critical realist science of design …. Originating largely out of the UK in the 1970s and 1980s …, critical realism exists in the space between objectivism and (radical) social constructionism. In the wake of its spreading intellectual influence across the social sciences, MOS scholars are increasingly positing critical realism as a foundation for moving beyond the paradigm wars between positivism and post-positivist relativism ….” [Mark P. Healey and Gerard P. Hodgkinson, “Rethinking the philosophical and theoretical foundations of organizational neuroscience: A critical realist alternative.” Human Relations. Volume 67, number 7, 2014. Pages 765-792.]

“… OCN [organizational cognitive neuroscience] shares … [a] holistic perspective with [Mark P.] Healey and [Gerlad P.] Hodgkinson’s … critical realist view ….” [Michael J. R. Butler, Nick Lee, and Carl Senior, “Critical Essay: Organizational cognitive neuroscience drives theoretical progress, or: The curious case of the straw man murder.” Human Relations. Early–view edition. February, 2017. Pages 1-20.]

“Terrorism and its study. This is the distinction between ontology and epistemology. The purpose of this short piece is to raise this necessary distinction in relation to the new discourse of critical terrorism studies (CTS). What I want to raise here is the question of exactly what it is that CTS is claiming to be critical about. The claim I make is that CTS … takes an approach that is overly epistemological, to the point where ontology often becomes a secondary issue. My argument is that the ultimate test of critique is in relation to the ability to explain something ‘out there.’ This means that at some point we must break out of the idea of terrorism as a constitutive discourse to say something about what it is that is being constituted.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Critical of What? Terrorism and its Study.” International Relations. Volume 23, number 1, March 2009. Pages 93-98.]

“Critical Terrorism Studies can be strengthened by scholarship that draws on a combination of critical realism (CR) and historical materialism (HM). CR relates epistemological relativism (we can know the social only indirectly through our interpretation of it) to ontological realism (there is a powerfully influential social reality that includes but is much more than our knowledge claims about it) through judgemental rationalism (knowledge claims can be tested against social reality, although always in an indirect, interpreted and fallible way). We illustrate CR-informed HM’s value in relation to analysing capitalism’s constant remaking of the world, terrorism as an instrument of capitalist class rule and the reified thinking involved in the use of terrorism that it is inherently anti-emancipatory.“

“We illustrate CR-informed HM’s [critical-realist-informed historical materialism’s] value in relation to analysing capitalism’s constant remaking of the world, terrorism as an instrument of capitalist class rule and the reified thinking involved in the use of terrorism that it is inherently anti-emancipatory.…

“… capitalism has an inherent dynamic of change – Particular elements of the capitalist ruling class – composed of alliances of owners and managers of capital, state elites and wider social elites seek to resist or work with that dynamic of change while protecting and advancing their own interests. There are numerous situations in which terrorism may be deployed as an instrument of the capitalist ruling class ….”

[Eric Herring and Doug Stokes, “Critical realism and historical materialism as resources for critical terrorism studies.” Critical Studies on Terrorism. Volume 4, number 1, April 2011. Pages 5-21.]

“This paper articulates the commitments, contours and justifications for a pluralist but non-eclectic critical, realist, reflexive social science with emancipatory aims. In it, we stress that social science can and should be used to guide the conceptualization of desirable and viable forms of social organization and their conditions of realization.…

“The contributions of this critical, realist, reflexive social science with emancipatory aims are inherently intertextual and interdiscursive given the respective discursive locations of the contributors.”

[Ronjon Paul Datta and Jon Frauley, “Situation Critical: For a Critical, Reflexive, Realist, Emancipatory Social Science.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 2, June 2010. Pages 227-247.]

“… [Maurice] Godelier and [Roy] Bhaskar will serve as my examples. Both insist that universality and necessity have objective existence, embodied in real ‘structures’ (Godelier) or ‘mechanisms’ (Bhaskar). However, these structures or mechanisms are not directly present to the senses. In contrast to the views of most analytical philosophers, what particularly characterizes such structuralism is its extreme hostility to empiricism and to the idea that experience can be a source of knowledge. The senses, these writers argue, give us knowledge only of the world of appearances, the empirical world; but this must be sharply distinguished from the level of ‘reality’ at which structures and mechanisms operate.

“Bhaskar, for example, talks of structures and mechanisms as ‘transcendent’ and as ‘transfactual’ entities, and repeatedly emphasizes their independence from the empirical world, the world of experience. Godelier, likewise, puts all the stress in his account on the distinction and the separation of the structural level from the world of appearances. The appearances that we apprehend with our senses, he insists, conceal these real structures; and so scientific theory must reject and put aside these sensory appearances in order to grasp reality….

“Despite the constant claim that structuralism is something entire ly new in philosophy, the continuity of such ideas with the themes of classical rationalism from Plato onwards is evident. It is not surprising, therefore, that this work shows the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of this tradition.

“This structuralist realism clearly shares some common ground with the sort of realism that I have been defending. In particular, as I have stressed, it also recognizes the existence of natural necessities and natural kinds. Moreover, as this philosophy insists, these aspects of reality are not immediately and directly manifest in appearances. Reality differs from immediate appearance. In this sense, we may indeed say that appearances ‘conceal’ reality, and that knowledge involves the active overcoming of appearances, and a movement beyond them. These are important aspects of knowledge; and it is the contribution of the rationalist approach to stress them….

“Bhaskar … talks of structures and mechanisms as ‘transcendent’ and as ‘transfactual’ entities, and repeatedly emphasizes their independence from the empirical world, the world of experience. Godelier, likewise, puts all the stress in his account on the distinction and the separation of the structural level from the world of appearances. The appearances that we apprehend with our senses, he insists, conceal these real structures; and so scientific theory must reject and put aside these sensory appearances in order to grasp reality.

[Sean Sayers. Reality and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge. New York: Basil Blackwell Inc. 1985. Creative Commons. Pages 29-31.]

“Expectably, [Claude] Lévi-Strauss is primarily interested in Crow-Omaha systems from the standpoint of alliance theory …. He states that in Crow-Omaha systems one type of cross-cousin is equated with the father and the other with the son;2 thus with people into whose line Ego may not marry. In this respect he sharply distinguishes them from ‘asymmetrics’ systems, i.e., kinship systems with preferential or prescribed unilateral cross-cousin marriage.” [A. J. F. Köbben, J. Verrips and L. N. J. Brunt, “Lévi-Strauss and Empirical Inquiry.” Ethnology. Volume 13, number 3, July 1974. Pages 215-223.]

“Although many authors allude to the relationships between complexity and QCA [qualitative comparative analysis], these links are rarely made explicit. We propose that one way of doing so is by using critical realism as a meta-framework.…

“We have argued that critical realism provides a meta-framework for understanding the relationship between the complexity of the real world and qualitative comparative analysis as a complexity-informed method.… Using critical realism as a meta-framework for understanding social complexity enables us to position the research in this field within the debates in the philosophy of science.”

[Lasse Gerrits and Stefan Verweij, “Critical Realism as a Meta-Framework for Understanding the Relationships between Complexity and Qualitative Comparative Analysis.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 2, January 2013. Pages 166-182.]

“Critical realism affords a practical approach in relation to investigate the phenomenon at large, which exists and ties into complex societal relations in disruptive ways. In The possibility of Naturalism … Roy Bhaskar introduced critical realism as an alternative to contemporary approaches as it positions itself critical to both social constructivism and positivism …, thus describes an interface between the natural and social worlds of science. As a result of this, critical realism has both a realistic view, expressed in its ontology, and a constructivism view, expressed in its epistemology. Accordingly, realism exists in the social world dependent on available knowledge, which is the ontological perspective.” [Thomas Borchmann. Bitcoin – A new medium. Master’s thesis. Aalborg University. Aalborg, Denmark. October, 2015. Page 18.]

“… this article … suggest[s] that agency should be considered as the locus of social transformation. In this view, agency proceeds from and postdates the various structural antecedent influences that condition it, but these antecedent influences do not prescribe emergent outcomes. This is because agents make independent choices about how to respond to their situations. In this regard, agency transmutes antecedent structural conditions into new forms as actors use their projective capacities within the structured locations that they find themselves. Projective capacities combine within pre-existing and collective structural forms (families, teams, divisions and so on) to create potentially transformational behavioural-process outcomes. This transmutation approach to the relationship between structure and agency offers a temporally and ontologically grounded analytical method that could be used to analyse various longitudinal qualitative data.” [Steve Vincent, “A transmutation theory of inter-organizational exchange relations and networks: Applying critical realism to analysis of collective agency.” Human Relations. Volume 61, number 6, 2008. Pages 875-899.]

“… [According to the] methodological principle—eliminative realism—… it is the purpose of studies that attempt to discuss value as such to attempt to eliminate sources of relativism….

“… explanation entails elimination….

“… Granted that simple intuition of essences is out of the question, a viable realism must proceed by removing all the relational obstacles to the premature closure of the possibility of realism. I will call this methodological imperative eliminative realism. … [I]t tells us a general direction for our efforts to take. We are aiming for realism but we can only eliminate relativism along the way, never knowing if we will get there. In this way, it combines an ontological doctrine (reductionism, realism) with an epistemological directive (eliminativism)….

“‘Eliminative realism’ states that we cannot adduce a single standard of aesthetic excellence but that retrospectively we can analyze valuing situations to remove cases of relativism.”

[Ian F. Verstegen, “A Critical Realist Perspective on Aesthetic Value.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 5, issue 2, 2006. Pages 323-343.]

“What … these different critical realist perspectives share is a belief that a correct acount of social processes has to engage with ontological as well as epistemological issues and that the relationship between the two has to reflect the principles established in both….

“… my argument … will … justify the emphasis critical realists place on the agency-structure relationship … [and] develop a relational model of structure ….

“Self-reports of events and processes cannot provide complete knowledge of relations between different events and states of being, i .e. poverty, homework, school achievement.

[David Scott, “Critical Realism and Statistical Methods: A Response to Nash.” British Educational Research Journal. Volume 33, number 2 April 2007. Pages 141-154.]

“The work of the participants in this study has been a testament to the power of human agency when it comes to acting in line with deeply held pedagogic values.… [I]nsights into emergent pedagogy in higher education in England are outlined, and implications stemming from this research are drawn out. The methodological issues outlined … [here] have been effective in opening up the data to reveal aspects of emergent pedagogy and changing structures. Morphogenesis has proved to be a helpful lens through which to start to unravel the extremely complex interplay of various physical, social and discursive structures, both within human beings and in the contexts in which they live and work. These insights have come about through the use of critical realism to develop the analysis of structures, agency, morphogenesis, human knowledge and learning that were elaborated in the earlier chapters of this book.” [Bushra Sharar. Emergent Pedagogy in England: A Critical Realist Study of Structure-Agency Interactions in Higher Education. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Page 197.]

“A case study approach, underpinned by critical realism is used to analyse participants’ pedagogic endeavours….

“Features of agency, of human knowledge and pedagogy and of the changing nature of higher education are analysed by identifying structures as having interacting social, cultural and material aspects within a stratified reality. An Archerian [Margaret S. Archer] morphogenetic approach reveals structure and agency interactions over time in participants’ accounts.”

[Bushra Connors. A study of structure and agency interactions in the changing context of English higher education: What is happening to Pedagogy and what are we doing about it? Abstract. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Institute of Education, University of London. 2015. Page 3. Retrieved on September 24th, 2015.]

“This thesis is a testament to the power of human agency when it comes to acting in line with deeply held pedagogic values. In this chapter, insights into emergent pedagogy in higher education in England are outlined, and implications stemming from this research are drawn out. The methodological issues outlined … [earlier] have been effective in opening up the data to reveal aspects of emergent pedagogy and changing structures. Morphogenesis [Margaret S. Archer] has proved to be a lens through which to start to unravel the extremely complex interplay of various physical, social and discursive structures, both within human beings and in the contexts in which they live and work.” [Bushra Connors. A study of structure and agency interactions in the changing context of English higher education: What is happening to Pedagogy and what are we doing about it? Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Institute of Education, University of London. 2015. Page 245. Retrieved on September 24th, 2015.]

“Since critical realists seek to develop analyses that explore some of the underlying factors or ‘entities’ behind empirical analysis, we call our approach a ‘critical realist discourse analysis,’ theorizing that our analysis of the contexts from which our participants speak can help us better understand their talk.” [Wendy Sims-Schouten and Sarah Riley, “Employing a Form of Critical Realist Discourse Analysis for Identity Research: An Example from Women’s Talk of Motherhood, Childcare, and Employment.” Studying Organizations Using Critical Realism: A Practical Guide. Paul K. Edwards, Joe O’Mahoney, and Steve Vincent, editors. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Page 64.]

“We argue that an effective critical realist discourse analysis is produced through a multi-level analysis that draws upon discursive practice …, Foucauldian discourse analysis … and an examination of embodied, material and institutional practices that may be considered to have extra-discursive ontology.” [Wendy Sims-Schouten, Sarah C.E. Riley, Carla Willig, “Critical Realism in Discourse Analysis: A Presentation of a Systematic Method of Analysis Using Women’s Talk of Motherhood, Childcare and Female Employment as an Example.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 17, number 1, 2007. Pages 101-124.]

“Using a critical realist approach to critical discourse analysis, I will explain how … social processes … demonstrate an oppressive power and structure in the school. That explanation will then be used to consider how to change the oppressive environment.…

“… [A] problem to be considered in critical realist discourse analysis is hegemony, which is referred to as ‘the processes of particular emergent discourses (and not others) and associated narratives becoming hegemonic in particular organizations’ …. This means that some emergent discourses will get accepted into the controlling organizational discourse and others, as noted above, will be oppressed to preserve a status quo. Discourse analysis of the above scenario couldn’t more accurately demonstrate this. It was a teacher not an administrator who brought the emergent discourse of profanity in the school to the attention of the superintendent.”

[Heather Hickman, “Structure, Power, and Discourse: An Analysis of Discipline in an Urban High School.” PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education. Volume 5, issue 2, spring 2008. Online, open access journal. Pages 1-8.]

“In their paper ‘Critical Realism in Discourse Analysis,’ [Wendy] Sims-Schouten, [Sarah] Riley and [Carla] Willig … note that, to date, ‘critical realist work has tended to be theoretical’ …. They seek to address this shortcoming by demonstrating what a ‘systematic empirical critical realist discourse analysis’ … might look like, in a semi-structured interview study of motherhood, childcare and female employment. This represents a timely and welcome endeavour. However, in this short piece I will argue that their analyses (i) recruit and depend on arguments and techniques from the very perspectives they criticize, and (ii) those techniques are deployed in a somewhat ad hoc fashion. Consequently, the authors fail to provide a distinctive or systematic operationalization of a critical realist discourse analysis.” [Susan A. Speer, “On Recruiting Conversation Analysis for Critical Realist Purposes.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 17, number 1, 2007. Pages 125-135.]

“An analysis drawing on CRDA [critical realist discourse analysis] involves looking for any orientation to the extra-discursive factors that may be salient in this example. There are two factors that may be considered here. First, the participant does not have other children, nor does her family home have a garden. From this material position, then, it makes sense to argue that childcare is advantageous in terms of providing a social environment that has other children and additional amenities.” [Sarah C.E. Riley, Wendy Sims-Schouten, and Carla Willig, “The Case for Critical Realist Discourse Analysis as a Viable Method in Discursive Work.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 17, number 1, 2007. Pages 137-145.]

“For the purposes of the article we draw upon various insights that emanate from different traditions within discourse analysis. Because our aim is to explore how accounts of quitting help to sustain behaviour change and how they may facilitate change for others, we most closely identify with a critical realist perspective, which both encapsulates a realist view of social structure and captures the prospects for change that emanate from it ….” [O. Parry, F. G. R. Fowkes, and C. Thomson, “Accounts of Quitting among Older Ex-smokers with Smoking-related Disease.” Journal of Health Psychology. Volume 6, number 5, 2001. Pages 481-493.]

“The methodology combines ethnography and critical discourse analysis, in order to ‘look at interpretations of texts as well as texts themselves, and more generally at how texts practically figure in particular areas of social life’ …. This critical realist approach seeks to triangulate data from different sources (interviews, observations, documentary analysis), while anticipating that texts and participants may employ different representations of LIFT [Local Improvement Finance Trust in the UK], according to their locations within networks and organizations.” [Rachel Alfred, “Closed policy networks, broken chains of communication and the stories behind an ‘entrepreneurial policy’: The case of NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust (NHS LIFT).” Critical Social Policy. Volume 27, number 1, 2007. Pages 139-151.]

“The approach to the analysis in this study was critical realist in orientation …, using a form of discourse analysis informed by post-structuralism … and by [Margaret] Wetherell’s … description of critical discursive psychology, where she argued for the blending of fine-grained analysis of texts with the more global analysis of the text’s context.” [Alison J. Towns and Gareth Terry, “‘You’re in that realm of unpredictability’: Mateship, loyalty and men challenging men who use domestic violence against women.” Violence Against Women. Volume 20, number 8, 2014. Pages 1012-1036.]

“… [The] progressive socialization of the forces of production (technology, skills, organizing techniques) coexists in a relation of ‘real contradiction’ with the valorization imperatives imposed on firms by the persistence of capitalist relations of production. These relations of production, based on private ownership and control over the means of production, are expressed in exploitation within firms and competition between them.…

“… Yes, I plead guilty to a critical-realist understanding of society (like nature) as a layered causal structure; and yes, I see the forces and relations of production as representing a deeper layer of causality than the superstructure of politics and culture ….”

[Paul S. Adler, “Marx, Socialization and Labour Process Theory: A Rejoinder.” Organization Studies. Volume 28, number 9, September 2007. Pages 1387-1394.]

“[Trish] Reay and [C. R. (Bob)] Hinings … suggest consideration of institutional logics as a means of tracking the dynamic processes of de- and re-institutionalization within organizational fields. Field destabilization challenges the dominant logic to achieve a new equilibrium, which is accompanied by a new dominant logic. The concept of an institutional logic is consistent with our critical realist perspective as (1) the epistemological relativism of critical realism can accommodate the institutional theorists’ contention that actors and their interests are institutionally constructed, and (2) the development of the new institutional logic represents the manifestation of a generative mechanism: shifts in the underlying power relationships within and surrounding public higher education.” [M. Ann Welsh and Gordon E. Dehler, “Whither the MBA? Or the Withering of MBAs?” Management Learning. Volume 38, number 4, September 2007. Pages 405-423.]

“… we argue that since organizational fields are composed of actors who make up communities, and are characterized by the interactions between these actors …, structure, logics and political factors are all important to field level change. Actors within communities hold different institutional logics, and all fields can be characterized by competing institutional logics to some degree. At the field level, when a dominant institutional logic exists, it is because other logics are subordinate. Thus the process of moving from one dominant logic to another involves actors using their power to accomplish such shifts.” [Trish Reay and C. R. (Bob) Hinings, “The Recomposition of an Organizational Field: Health Care in Alberta.” Organization Studies. Volume 26, number 3, March 2005. Pages 351-384.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s focus on the importance of underlying ontological structures and our understandings of these through socially mediated scientific processes has similarities with the critical realist discourse analytic notion of the importance of extra-discursive features in a social constructionist analysis.…

“This is a social psychological thesis about empowerment and people with learning disabilities. Therefore, although a discourse analytic approach is adopted, the literature on autonomy and empowering people with learning disabilities should not be hastily dismissed. For this reason, a critical realist discourse analytic position (see chapter 1 which introduces this position to the reader) is adopted in this thesis, which makes a case for situating discourse within its material, historical and cultural context and, therefore, presenting a more ‘grounded social constructionism’ ….

“… By adopting a critical realist discourse analytic position, consideration was also given to the disempowering effects of invoking certain interpretative repertoires.”

[Treena Jingree. “Bugger you lot I know I can do it!”: Discourses about Empowering People with Learning Disabilities. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Surrey. Guildford, Surrey, England. 2009. Pages 3, 8, and 61.]

“… we take seriously the critical realist charge that ‘discourse is necessarily dependent on a pre-constituted set of separable, yet interdependent, material conditions and social structures’ …; and therefore ‘organizational discourse analysis [is] an exercise in historical reconstruction’ … to determine how social actors are ‘faced with a set of institutionalized economic, political, and cultural constraints that will limit the range of strategic and tactical discursive options available to them’” [Ryan S. Bisel and J. Kevin Barge, “Discursive positioning and planned change in organizations.” Human Relations. Volume 64, number 2, 2011. Pages 257-283.]

“Many of the themes in [Andrew] Sayer’s exploration of critical realism, for example, are fundamentally psychodynamic: we are embodied beings; people’s identities are internally related …; and in the relationship there is ‘a fusing of the horizons’ of listener and speaker, researcher and researched, in which the latter’s actions and texts never speak for themselves, and yet are not reducible to the researcher’s interpretations of them either’ …. This constructive psychosocial discourse that emphasizes intersubjectivity, I suggest, has great potential for a psychosocial criminology.” [Alison P. Brown, “Interpretation and the case study: The challenge of a relational approach,” Theoretical Criminology. Volume 11, number 4, November 2007. Pages 485-500.]

“… texts produced as parts of social events have a privileged place in investigations that, like ours, are aligned with a dialectic-relational approach (i) between structures’ mechanisms and the ways they are instantiated in specific social practices and (ii) between language and other elements of social life, within each event …. The analysis of specific texts as part of specific events operates towards an analytical connection between the concrete social event and the more abstract social practices.… More than that, as seen before, texts not only suffer the effects of social structures and practices, but they also cause effects on social life.” [Elaine Mateus and Viviane de Melo Resende, “The Practice-Position System as Epistemological Category: Constributions to Critical Discourse Analysis.” Alfa. Volume 59, number 3, 2015. Pages 431-454.]

“In this review, I focus on three interrelated themes or issues. First, I examine the core ontological precepts that inform CCO [communication is constitutive of organization] and the various theoretical perspectives which it animates and mobilizes throughout this book …. Second, I review the substantive theorizations of organization and organizing, which emerge from these foundational philosophical commitments and their implications for analyzing power relationships and control processes. Third, I assess the developmental potential of CCO-based theorizations and studies in light of this exposition and analysis. Each of these discussions is undertaken from a social/critical realist position that is increasingly prominent in organizational studies in recent years ….” [Mike Reed, “Is Communication Constitutive of Organization?” Management Communication Quarterly. Volume 24, number 1, 2010. Pages 151-157.]

“We began analyzing the data for the current article by first extracting the relevant data from the verbatim interview transcripts. We then read and reread this data corpus looking for the themes … within the accounts of participation, and then reorganized the data into the most prevalent themes. Our epistemic position to the thematic analysis was not straightforwardly realist and, in common with much critical/qualitative health psychology research, we employ a critical realist discursive approach ….” [Elizabeth Peel, Odette Parry, Margaret Douglas, and Julia Lawton, “‘It’s No Skin off My Nose’: Why People Take Part in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Health Research. Volume 16, number 10, December 2006. Pages 1335-1349.]

“Critical emancipatory discourse for its part continues the tradition, espoused by labor process theorists and critical realists, of broadening the deterministic account of historical materialism by incorporating the role of agency and discourse in transforming social structures. Liberationist struggles vary at the micro level due to discrepant firm-specific norms evolving from social relations across professional, occupational and peer groups …. They also vary at the macro level due to wider historical, social, political and cultural forces. Further, the liberationist project has expanded its focus beyond class to race and gender and, in particular, to Third-World peasantry. The revolutionary impulse of the working class has been blunted by a consumer society offering a seductive array of images designed to represent the better life. If there is to be a class struggle, its locus has shifted from the west to the south and east, and to disenfranchised populations fueled as much by religious zeal as by political promise.” [Joseph A. Raelin, “Emancipatory Discourse and Liberation.” Management Learning. Volume 39, number 5, 2008. Pages 519-540.]

“No one … has drawn attention to the strong realist view on knowledge behind DPSIR [Driving forces, Pressures, State, Impacts, and Responses], which we find as a central, albeit tacit, fundament of the approach. This implies that the ‘facts’ and understandings of environmental issues provided in applications of the DPSIR framework are presented as scientific truths, while discursive interpretations are not revealed. In this paper, wapply findings from discourse analysis to provide a perspective through which the image of DPSIR as a tool of neutral knowledge can be deconstructed. We have chosen to focus on the particular topic of biodiversity management. This is a controversial topic and with relatively large differences between types of interpretations of problems and solutions. There are, in other words, large differences between various discourse types, and these differences make the topic suitable for our examination in this paper.” [Hanne Svarstad, Lars Kjerulf Petersen, Dale Rothman, Henk Siepel, and Frank Wätzold, “Discursive biases of the environmental research framework DPSIR.” Land Use Policy. Volume 25, 2008. Pages 116-125.]

“When deliberating over a project, agents engage in a process of ‘reflexive determination,’ which refers to the personal process undertaken by individuals in identifying the causal mechanisms linking structure to their agency. What we call reflexive performance, involves agents not only identifying the structures, institutions, mechanisms, rules, resources, etc., deemed to enable or constrain wider organizational performance, but also constructing strategies to use them to pursue their personal goals. No social structure (etc.) is constraining or causal tout court. Whether social structures enable or constrain depends upon the nature of the relationship between it and the individual drawing upon it.” [Anthony Hesketh and Steve Fleetwood, “Beyond Measuring the Human Resources Management–Organizational Performance Link: Applying Critical Realist Meta-Theory.” Organization. Volume 13, number 5, 2006. Pages 677-699.]

“… teaching our students to think dialectically should be one of the central goals of a critical realist rhetoric. But how do we design writing assignments which help students develop their own abilities to think dialectically? To begin, it might prove useful to identify some key features of dialectical thought. First, dialectical thinking seeks to grasp its subject within its historical unfolding, to see its subject not just as a completed thing but as a process of becoming. In other words, dialectical thinking rejects the reification of social structures and knowledge and seeks to understand the dialectic of process and product. This is important because for many students it is difficult to imagine that the social institutions which circumscribe their lives have not been around forever, or that such institutions are not the inevitable outcome of natural forces…. I want my students to understand that, say, the economic social structure of capitalism is neither eternal nor inevitable, but rather the result of specific socio-historical material conditions that came about first in England and then spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world until it has reached its present globalized state. Students need to understand that social structures, although they create an inertia of their own and can be difficult to change or overthrow, are variables in the social problems equation and that some human needs and the laws of nature are the invariable components.” [Donald Judd. Critical Realism and Composition Theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Kindle edition.]

“I must begin this review with a confession: before reading this book [Critical Realism and Composition Theory] I had never heard of ‘composition studies.’ I discovered before even receiving the book that I was not alone in my ignorance.… It is thus encouraging to know that for some it is a specialism. It is further encouraging to know that the practice of teaching composition to undergraduates has been subjected to systematic reflection and a body of knowledge built up about it. It is encouraging to know that that body of knowledge has been theoretically probed and also epistemologically, empirically and politically contested.” [Garry Potter, “Realism and Writing.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 1, August 2004. Pages 186-190.]

“This exploratory, qualitative study is grounded in postpositivist beliefs about research …, leaning towards the critical realist position that knowledge and action reflect interpenetrating yet distinct layers of reality ….

“… We term a manager’s patterned, organized ‘knowledge-in-action’ a ‘caregiving heuristic.’ Caregiving heuristics are a specific form of knowledge-in-action …, not as explicated as formal theory yet more completely explicated than a ‘shoot from the hip’ approach to clinical decisions. The managers’ caregiving heuristics were comprised of four elements: (1) specific guidelines for action that were value-based (presented fully earlier), (2) ‘tacit’ knowledge, (3) compassion, and (4) cognitive heuristics.”

[Katherine Tyson McCrea and Jeffrey J. Bulanda, “Caregiving Heuristics: Valuable Practitioner Knowledge in the Context of Managing Residential Care.” Qualitative Social Work. Volume 9, number 3, 2010. Pages 343-363.]

“Not only do idealist approaches ignore the critical-realist point that structures pre-exist social actors …. They also overlook the point that social actors acquire the resources to participate in transformative praxis because of their given structural location. Ideological production must be explained in relation to the objective mechanisms which determine consciousness: material interests generated by social structures and patterned identities which arise through the practice and lived experience of individuals ….” [Daniel Woodley, “Between myth and modernity: Fascism as anti-praxis.” European Journal of Political Theory. Volume 11, number 4, 2012. Pages 362-379.]

“… [The] move towards a new realism or naturalism is not confined to social constructionism alone, but is a motif at work in current Anglo-American philosophy of mind, the various neurosciences, artificial intelligence and robotics, psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences.… This feisty and voluble crowd includes researchers in scientific realism …, Marxist critical realism …, biological realism …, philosophical naturalism …, socionaturalism …, restricted harmless naturalism …, coherence theory …, moral realism …, pedestrian realism …; even work on the limitations of discourse theory …, supervenience …, situated cognition …, ecological psychology …, and, as recently evidenced in this publication, a positive reappraisal of pragmatism ….” [George G. Hruby, “Sociological, postmodern, and new realism perspectives in social constructionism: Implications for literacy research.” Reading Research Quarterly. Volume 36, number 1 January/February/March 2001. Pages 48-62.]

“… [The] move towards a new realism or naturalism is not confined to social constructionism alone, but is a motif at work in current Anglo-American philosophy of mind, the various neurosciences, artificial intelligence and robotics, psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences. Its proponents, drawing from the methodology and philosophy of the natural sciences, are a varied group who utilize somewhat idiosyncratic terminologies, and while many agree on some things, none agree on all. This feisty and voluble crowd would include the scientific realism of John Greenwood …, the Marxist critical realism of Andrew Collier …, the biological realism of Daniel Dennett … and Ruth Milikan …, the philosophical naturalism of Owen Flanagan … or Fred Dretske …, the socio-naturalism of Chris Sinha …, the restricted harmless naturalism of Robert Almeder …, the coherence theory of Linda Alcoff …, the moral realism of Frank Farrell (1996), the pedestrian realism of Hilary Putnam …, even work on the limitations of discourse theory …, supervenience …, situated cognition …, ecological psychology …, and, as recently evidenced in this publication, a positive reappraisal of pragmatism ….” [George G. Hruby. The Socionaturalist Narrative: An Approach to the Bio-Ecological Dynamics of Reading and Literacy Development. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Georgia. Athens, Georgia. 2002. Page 148.]

“Let us follow Roy Bhaskar in calling being-able ‘power₁’ and domination ‘power₂.’ …

“Now some inequalities in power₁ do not harm the have-not in any way.… Let us call a power₁ such that acquisition of it by A when B lacks it makes B less powerful in absolute terms than before, power₁.₅.…

“Why are some cases of power₁ cases of power₁.₅ and others not? Usually, it is because powers₁.₅ are powers over resources that are needed by, or whose use affects, people at large: power over (i.e. usually ownership of) means of labour, cars, land, media outlets. Where this is not so, it is because the power₁.₅ is in some way institutionally assigned its power to forestall the powers of those who lack it, for instance, membership of a dominant race in a racist society, physical strength in a society that tolerates bullying, an old school tie in England.

“In some societies – notably slave-based and feudal societies – power₂ is very much more salient than power₁.₅. But in capitalist society it is the other way round. The vast majority of power₂ that exists takes the form of the power of boss over worker in the workplace.”

[Andrew Collier, “Power₁.₅ and the Weakness of Liberalism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 6, issue 1, 2007. Pages 111-116.]

“… [Idealists] deny that ideas are ideas of anything; they deny the aboutness of ideas.…

“Realism is openly committed to the aboutness of ideas, but idealism, which denies it, cannot get started without tacitly assuming it.”

[Andrew Collier, “About Aboutness.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 2, issue 1, July 1999. Pages 2-5.]

“My main aim in this chapter is to suggest that the nature of language and practice is such as to support realism not idealism, including discursive and pragmatic idealism.…

“… Of course nothing is ever completely known by us, but the knowledge we have, so far as it goes, is of real properties of things, existing independently of us.… And this ‘aboutness’ is characteristic too of practice and of language.”

[Andrew Collier, “Language, Practice and Realism.” Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism. Ian Parker, editor. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 1998. Pages 47-48.]

“The causal dependence of other forms of oppression on class, for all their irreducibility to it, can be expressed in terms of what Roy Bhaskar calls the four planes of social being which are also, I would suggest (in terms of his earlier concepts) distinct levels of the stratified world, each with its own definition and its own effects, yet forming an ordered series, each rooted in the last. In my own words the four planes are: (1) our relation to the non-human world; (2) the social structure; (3) personal relationships; and (4) individual subjectivity. I would argue that while oppression can take place at (3) and (4) in order for it to count as oppression (for not every wrong done by one person to another is a case of oppression), it must be rooted in (2). And domination at level (2) is rooted in inequalities of power at level (1). That is to say, while power over things is not itself oppressive and unilateral power over people is, the underlying reality of unilateral power over people is inequality in power over things. And it is inequality of power over things that constitutes class.” [Andrew Collier. Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to their Reconciliation. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Page 16.]

“Andrew Collier’s book [Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical Contribution to their Reconciliation] is a contribution to salvation theory and to salvation, in what is arguably the period of the greatest and most urgent need for salvation in human history. The author takes the two dominant soteriological movements in today’s world (though they are not the two dominant worldviews), the Christian and the Marxist, and argues that they need to understand, learn from, and ally with each other in the face of the successfulness of their common opponents, the ‘totalitarian commercialism’ of secularism and the anti-humanism of neo-paganism.” [James Daly, “Salvation According to Luther and Althusser.” Review article. Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 5, issue 1, July 2002. Pages 71-79.]

“My aim in this paper is to defend an objectivist view of truth and hence of Marxism as the science of social formations, and to show the practical importance of this view.…

“The objectivist position is: (a) that a thought is true if it corresponds to or adequately reflects reality, (b) that thought is a product of and dependent upon reality, but reality is independent of thought, and not at all its product (though a given reality may be the product of action which has involved thought); (c) insofar as it is scientific, theory is independent of its subject; one must ask not Whose theory is it? but Is it adequate to its object?”

[Andrew Collier, “Truth and Practice.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 5, summer 1973. Pages 9-16.]

“I do not intend in this paper to prove the truth of the intellectualist conception of freedom. My grounds for believing it to be true are concerned with the fact that it accounts for our experience of freedom in a way that is compatible with a scientific realist ontology.…

“Freedom is the efficacy of knowledge; it is extended not only by extending knowledge, but by increasing the conditions of its efficacy; and this cannot be achieved by pure reason, but by activities which, though rationally justifiable, are not limited to those of reasoning.”

[Andrew Collier, “Freedom as the Efficacy of knowledge” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 18, autumn 1977. Pages 16-21.]

“… the requisite critique of [Louis] Althusser’s epistemology can’t be that which he himself provides; he exorcises one devil – ‘theoreticism‘ – that seven devils may enter. Rather, the critique should be directed at what [Sebastiano] Timpanaro calls his ‘Platonism,’ and should reinstate the notion of putting questions to nature as the characteristic of scientific enquiry. Because this notion involves the idea that the results of scientific validation-procedures must be causally dependent on the nature of the real object, it may appear to fall under Althusser’s fire against genetic accounts of knowledge.” [Andrew Collier, “In Defence of Epistemology.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 20, summer 1978. Pages 8-21.]

“Most of the Marxists I meet are Christians – Doug Porpora, David McLellan. Doug once commented that as soon as you admit you are a Christian Marxist they all crawl out of the woodwork. But it is not surprising that we are a minority. Marxism arose in the context of the nineteenth century continental left, which was universally anti-religious – in fact this was almost the only thing they all agreed on.… [I]t is not surprising that Christian Marxists are thin on the ground. What is surprising is that there are so many of them. There is probably a three-figure number of Christian Marxists in this country [the UK] and there is probably only a four-figure number of Marxists.” [Andrew Collier in Andrew Collier and Gideon Calder, “Philosophy and Politics: An Interview with Andrew Collier, Part 1.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 7, issue 2, 2008. Pages 276-296.]

“Neither the peace movement nor the Green movement can achieve their aims so long as the great powers of modern technology are dispersed, that is so long as capitalism and/or the nation state exist. But this does not mean that these aims can simply be relegated to footnotes to the programme for international socialism, to be seen to one fine day after the mighty have been put down from their seats. For although a lasting solution to these problems must await international socialism, there is a vital role (quite literally, vital) for defensive struggles against the cold war and the spoliation of the environment, here and now. Scientific socialists have always recognised the place for defensive struggles – trade union struggles, for instance. Indeed, socialist parliamentary politics can never be more than a defensive struggle. None of these activities can bring about socialism (or disarmament or care for the earth); but they may slow the advance of barbarism, and more that [sic; than] that may not be possible in the West for some time to come.” [Andrew Collier. Socialist Reasoning: An Inquiry into the Political Philosophy of Scientific Socialism. Savage, Maryland: Barnes & Noble Books. 1990. Pages 92-93.]

“Scientific socialism is produced by the conjunction of the experience of the workers’ movement as it traverses its network of paths through the capitalist jungle, and the ‘dialectic,’ that is, the ontology of structured wholes which develop, reproduce themselves, break down and are transformed. ‘Nature is the test of dialectic’ ([Friedrich] Engels), but that dialectic provides, so to speak, the geological background to the capitalist jungle. It does not give us maps – we can’t predict the date of the next economic crisis, or be sure that any given strategy is not a blind alley (though we can be sure that some are). But it does give us some clues as to whether we are heading for the mountains or the marsh; which beasts might survive in this jungle and which are certainly mythical, and so on. If someone tells us that high wages have made the workers bourgeois or that capitalists no longer seek profits, we shall be justified in treating these tales with the same scepticism as a natural scientist would treat claims to have made a perpetual motion machine or discovered a case of spontaneous generation. Whereas if all we had to go on were ramblers’ tales, who could say what we might not encounter round the next comer?” [Andrew Collier. Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1989. Pages 146-147.]

“… the augmentation of human powers by technology is an increasing threat to life on Earth so long as those powers are not subject to collective human control, but are used in ways determined by the need of commercial concerns to survive in the market. It is like giving hand grenades to children in an unsupervised playground. It is in this way and no other that capitalism is bound to lead to disaster. Market socialism, while it would abolish some forms of exploitation, would not touch this problem. A workers’ co-operative producing for the market is constrained by the market to put profitability before the environment as much as is a capitalist firm. I argue for these positions in my book Socialist Reasoning; I do not do so in my specifically critical realist works, as that would not be the right place.” [Andrew Collier, “Response to Geoffrey Hodgson.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 2, issue 2, July 1999. Pages 10-12.]

“Scientific socialism aims to supply the workers’ movement with a science, not vice versa. ‘Socialism’ is the noun, ‘scientific’ only the adjective. From the point of view of the history of the theory – its origins, function and fate – this fact can hardly be overstressed. Only from the perspective of a class permanently engaged in struggle generated by the contradictions of capitalism, could the deep structure of that system become visible. But that does not mean that the content of the theory is in any way value-laden or perspectival. So from the point of view of philosophical reflection on the theory – reflection which asks questions about the logical and epistemological status and structure of the theory, its explanatory power, its evaluative content if any, and so on – very little change can be got out of information about the political starting point of the theory.” [Andrew Collier, “Scientific Socialism and The Question of Socialist Values.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Volume 11, supplement 1, 1981. Pages 121-154.]

“GC [Gideon Calder]: The book Socialist Reasoning … defends scientific socialism quite vigorously, pretty much along classical Marxist lines. Would you still offer such a defence, and for similar reasons?

“AC [Andrew Collier]: Yes I would. My position vis-à-vis Classical Marxism is that Marx made two closely related mistakes, one of which is his atheism and the other is the absence of a theory of unconditional love in his ethics. They are both obviously aspects of his rejections of Christianity.”

[Andrew Collier and Gideon Calder, “Values and Ontology: An Interview with Andrew Collier, Part 2.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 8, issue 1, 2009. Pages 63-90.]

“If my account of the logical constituents of the debate between (at least some) liberals and (at least some) socialists is correct, it can serve as an example of one type of reasoning about political and moral issues—a type which can be called ‘naturalistic’; the word ‘rationalistic’ would be better if it could be rid of various connotations which I shall try to exclude in what follows. For this argument about liberty and collectivism is a case of practical reasoning in which one position with definite practical consequences—liberalism—is criticised, not in the name of different values, but of an explanatory theory about human life in society. This criticism, without calling into question the motivating value behind the theory criticised—individual liberty—radically transforms the set of practices which it had motivated.” [Andrew Collier in Brenda Cohen and Andrew Collier, “Positive Values.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Volume 57, 1983. Pages 17-35 and 37-54.]

“Scientific socialism is premissed upon the rejection of (at least) the former as a historical possibility: it is no use converting the boss to socialism, the constraints of competition will make him act like any other boss. Of course, in order to change the social structure, it is necessary to convince a lot of people that the change is needed; but these activities of persuasion in which the vast bulk of socialist political activity consists are not an end in themselves, but constituted entirely by the need to change the structure. This applies to here-and-now politics as well as the revolutionary goal: the aim is not to change people but to build an effective hypoparty, strong trade unions and so on; at every turn, scientific socialism directs activity away from individual change towards structural change – pointing out, for instance, that having leftist individuals as trade-union officials solves nothing, while altering the trade union structure so that officials are accountable to and dismissable by the members solves a lot.“ [Andrew Collier, “Scientific Realism and the Human World: the case of psychoanalysis.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 29, autumn 1981. Pages 8-18.]

“Andrew [Collier] was steadfast in his maintenance of the concept of scientific socialism … and his criticism of intellectual fashions – although critical realism had its own moments, of course, both before and after [Roy] Bhaskar’s surprising turn to religion. Andrew was already there and played a full part, with three books between 2001 and 2004 defending the truth-claims of Christianity.” [William Outhwaite, “Realism and moral being: Andrew Collier, 1944–2014.” Obituary. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 187, September/October 2014. Pages 67-68.]

“To accomplish … [the] act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.” [Friedrich Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Edward Aveling, translator. Chicago, Illinois: Charles H. Kerr & Company. 1908. Page 139.]

“… [Andrew] Collier … is certainly no liberal. He is in the business of defending the classical Marxist concept of scientific socialism. You worry when the book’s blurb contrasts such a defence with ‘currently fashionable post-Marxist debates’ … This latter is left speak for ‘trendy treachery,’ and it signals the fact that the book is mainly directed at the left. Thus Collier announces that his book is not so much an argument for socialism as about how to argue for socialism; declares that he has no time to prove that the proletariat has an interest in struggling for socialism (but that proofs could be supplied) …. The tone is frankly combative ….” [David Archard, “Socialist Reasoning. An Inquiry into the Political Philosophy of Scientific Socialism.” Review article. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 57, spring 1991. Pages 31-32.]

“It needs a certain courage to undertake a defence of ‘scientific socialism’ in the current climate. Andrew Collier approaches the task with commendable panache. Couched within the framework of Bhaskarian realism, his book presents a forceful argument for ethical naturalism in our thinking about political ideals. Talking about values is always a way of talking about facts, and the scientific status of the Marxist programme must be seen to reside in its anti-utopianism: its rejection of the form of reasoning which says ‘here are some ideals, let us find a way of realizing them,’ in favour of that which says, ‘here is an evil, let us find a way of eliminating it.’” [Kate Soper, “Socialist Reasoning: An Inquiry into the Political Philosophy of Scientific Socialism.” Political Studies. Review article. Volume 38, issue 4, December 1990. Pages 756-757.]

“… all freedom, as freedom to interact with and hence change the world – which is never just ‘my’ world but everyone’s world – all freedom, I say, is to a greater or lesser degree freedom to transform the common world. It is important to note that this is to a greater or lesser degree. Certainly, I am more causally enmeshed with some parts of the world than with others. My body-actual has a unique part in determining how close a part of me (i.e. of my body-cosmic) any given entity is.… And so it is always pertinent to ask whether a given exercise of freedom – a given transformation of the common world – is with or without common consent.” [Andrew Collier, “The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 57, spring 1991. Pages 3-9.]

“I take it that the critique of moral ideology belongs to two sciences: Historical Materialism and Psychoanalysis.…

“Clearly the judgement that moral ideology has a socially repressive function is derived from Historical Materialism.…

“Historical Materialism must treat morality as an ideology with a function in any society based on class exploitation. Any exploiting class will benefit from the prevalence of an ideology which will reconcile the exploited to the deprivation of possible satisfactions which they will suffer as a result of their exploitation.”

[Andrew Collier, “The production of moral ideology.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 9, winter 1974. Pages 5-15.]

“… the rationality of the practical application of science depends on following the full sequence abstract sciences – concrete science – practice rather than the abridged sequence abstract science – practice …. It is a matter of ‘practical wisdom’ to determine in any given case what the scope of the requisite concrete science should be.

“The application of abstract science is irrational and the application of concrete science is rational. But concrete science can never give you what abstract science appears to give: a method of calculating which course of action is rational.… Deciding on the basis of an abstract science just is leaving some things out of account – that is what abstract means.”

[Andrew Collier, “Unhewn demonstrations.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 81, January/February 1997. Pages 22-26.]

“The inadequacies of chrematistic rationality will already have suggested by contrast the nature of use-value rationality. Different use-values must be recognised as qualitatively different and hence not interchangeable in any fixed proportion. Calculation disappears from moral reasoning, and is put in its place – unable to deliver a final decision –in economic reasoning.…

“I would hope that this rootless notion of originality, being no more than an aesthetic effect of chrematistic rationality, would disappear from a use-value-rational world, to be replaced by a preference for the almost imperceptible transformation of deeply assimilated traditions.”

[Andrew Collier, “Value, Rationality and the Environment.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 66, spring 1994. Pages 3-9.]

“Andrew [Collier] rightly says that it is not individuals, but capitalist corporations, that destroy the earth. It does not follow that the psychological mechanisms which might explain individual spoiling are irrelevant. Psychological mechanisms are involved in our daily acceptance of the destruction we live with, which our own routines prolong. Moral indifference, ignorance, denial and collusive fantasies are produced and drawn on by corporate decision-makers. The more we know about the psychological processes involved, the more chance we have of bringing about social conditions that promote ‘alloplastic realism.’” [Caroline New, “Letter: Critical social science and psychological explanation.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 89, May/June 1998. Pages 55-56.]

“Everything turns on the idea that alloplastic realism is the criterion of mental health.…

“My conclusion is that Caroline New is quite right to insist that what I have called alloplastic realism is central to the notion of mental health, and that only a psychological theory which recognizes this is compatible with any rational politics. But she does not draw the conclusion that psychological theory itself has no political implications, leaving these open to be determined by analysis of social reality.”

[Caroline New and Andrew Collier, “Mind, reality and politics.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 88, March/April 1998. Pages 38-43.]

“[Jane] Howarth writes that, ‘it may be true that one cannot be constructivist about nature, but one can be constructivist about science and hence about nature as science presents it.’ Now if this means, to put it in the vocabulary of Critical Realism, that science is fallible, that there can be rival transcendental arguments to explain natural powers and structures, then this seems quite consistent with my own position, and no criticism of it. But if it means something more like ‘realist nature can be equally well-represented in any and every theoretical construction,’ then it is indeed at odds with my own realism ….

“… [Here], indeed, is my own position, which I would describe as both realist and humanist.

[Kate Soper, “Future culture: Realism, humanism and the politics of nature.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 102, July/August, 2000. Pages 17-26.]

“… [One might consider] what a counter- or post-consumerist order might look like, what alternative seductions to McDonaldization it might evoke, how or why these might begin to win support among the yet unconverted ‘multitude,’ and what their role in any democratically achieved transition would be. The opposition of the peace and anti-globalization movements is eloquently summoned, but only, it seems, in its capacity to expose the awfulness of the actual, rather than as the exponent of a compelling alternative to it.” [Kate Soper, “The awfulness of the actual: Counter-consumerism in a new age of war.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 135, January/February 2006. Pages 2-7.]

“As far as the elitism of the decision to go to war [in Iraq] is concerned, we know that this was taken without UN endorsement, despite a historically unprecedented degree of dissent in both Europe and the USA, and against the wishes of the majority of the electorate even in those countries whose governments supported it and were to become militarily involved (notably the UK).…

“There are, however, … qualifications to this picture of global disempowerment. There is the fact that the Bush administration, despite high levels of opposition, did indeed have (and still enjoys) extensive backing from its electorate for its war efforts.”

[Kate Soper, “War and democracy.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 135, July/August 2003. Pages 2-6.]

“There is no period in the history of feminism in which the core ideas of ‘heterosexual utopianism’ have not found expression in some form or other, but as an explicitly formulated utopian discourse it played a particularly key role in the legitimation of a first phase of feminist agitation in the nineteenth century.… The promise was of heterosexual reunion, or perhaps more accurately, transcendence of all the previous relations of asymmetry and inequality whereby the sexes in their previous existence had perforce had to contrive what reconciliation they could.” [Kate Soper, “Heterosexual Utopianism.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 69, January/February 1995. Pages 5-15.]

“The conception of science and reason that Marxism explicitly offers in distinguishing itself from the Enlightenment is: dialectic. It is this Hegelian inheritance that is contrasted with the ‘metaphysical’ conception of science shaped in ‘the mechanical philosophy.’ Mechanistic science is allowed to have both a necessary historical role and a continuing validity in certain areas of investigation. But dialectic, it is claimed, is essential for the ‘historical’ sciences. Moreover, to focus on the present topic, Marxists have frequently claimed that this conception of science as dialectic is required to solve the problems set by the idea of scientific socialism. The deformations of both ethical socialism and Stalinism involve mechanistic conceptions of science.“

“… an essentially non-dialectical conception of scientific theory … [is] purely descriptive, explanatory and predictive of its object. It is because the relation of theory to object is conceived as purely descriptive, explanatory and predictive that the practical relation of subject to that object is a relation of power, the object of the theory being conceived in that theory’s practical implications as under the control of the subject. One important thing missing from this model of scientific theory – if it is compared with [Karl] Marx’s conception of social science – is the idea of criticism. Marx’s social science is socialist science by being, as science, a critique of its object, capitalist society.”

[Roy Edgley, “Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science: Reason as Dialectic.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 15, autumn 1976. Pages 2-7. Reprinted as: Roy Edgley, “Reason as Dialectic: Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1998. Pages 395-408.]

“Critical political analysis, I argue, should be:

[Colin Hay. Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2002. Page 251.]

“[Colin] Hay’s Political Analysis raises foundational issues for all social scientists, not least in its outline for a via media, or middle way, between positivist and interpretivist social science.…

“A key theme of Political Analysis is the qualitative difference in subject-matter between the natural and the social sciences. Following [Roy] Bhaskar, Hay maintains that social structures, unlike natural structures: (1) do not exist independently of the activities they govern; (2) do not exist independently of an agent’s conception of their activity; and (3) may only be relatively enduring ….”

[Chris Clarke, “Paths between Positivism and Interpretivism: An Appraisal of Hay’s Via Media.” Politics. Volume 29, issue 1, February 2009. Pages 28-36.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments differ from [Immanuel] Kant’s in at least the following ways:

“Such transcendental arguments are surely not guilty of foundationalism.”

[Andrew Collier, “Virtually Real: Letter.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 63, spring 1993. Page 64.]

“Action research (AR)—a term invented by Kurt Lewin in 1944—aims to combine scientific inquiry with active participation in a situation with two views in mind: to effect change in the situation and to advance the stock of knowledge.” [Monder Ram, Paul K. Edwards, Trevor Jones, Alex Kiselinchev, and Lovemore Muchenje, “Pulling the Levers of Agency: Implementing Critical Realist Action Research.” Studying Organizations Using Critical Realism: A Practical Guide. Paul K. Edwards, Joe O’Mahoney, and Steve Vincent, editors. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Page 205.]

“… critical realism … accords with our action research. This approach follows a subjectivist epistemology similar to the hermeneutic tradition but an objectivist ontology. This approach concentrates on epistemic reflexivity, which looks at exposing interests and enabling emancipation through self-reflexivity.” [Teresa Brannick and David Coghlan, “In Defense of Being ‘Native’: The Case for Insider Academic Research.” Organizational Research Methods. Volume 10, number 1, January 2007. Pages 59-74.]

“It should, I believe, be part of the task of an ontological aesthetics to bridge the divides between science, philosophy and art. The first step should be the rejection of the reduction of science to philosophy or the reduction of philosophy to science. Philosophy is then set free to underlabour both for science and for an art theory and an art criticism.…

“Absence both as the ground for an ontological aesthetics and a critical orientation is an extremely fertile notion. To the best of my knowledge, however, no one in Western aesthetics has worked systematically with a concept of the richness and depth of Bhaskarian absence.” [Gary MacLennan, “Towards an Ontological Aesthetics.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 1, issue 1, July 1998. Pages 8-11.]

“The artist, then, is the slave to the master. Most importantly, however, there is another slave to whom the artist is master. This slave in contemporary times is the wage-slave or proletariat. The artist is trapped between the master and this other slave beneath her. She can form an alliance with the slave and attempt to overthrow the ensemble of master-slave relationships, or she can seek mutual forgiveness and reconciliation with the master. The difficulties in forming alliances with the proletariat are all too obvious. It is much easier to orientate towards the master, in other words, to accommodate. By and large this can be read as the trajectory of all too many artists.” [Gary MacLennan, “Aesthetics and the Dialectic of Desire to Freedom: Comment on Beech and Roberts.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 1, issue 2, July 1998. Pages 19-22.]

“The livelihood vulnerability framework incorporates the views of various theories on rural livelihoods and food insecurity. It is aimed at building a methodological framework for food insecurity analysis in peasant communities. The recourse to vulnerability for building the methodological framework is resultant from its complex ecological, sociocultural and political-economic perspectives, which are more suitable than conventional poverty frameworks. A vulnerability framework is the best method of assessing food insecurity, both as a process and as an outcome.” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, “Theorizing food insecurity: building a livelihood vulnerability framework for researching food insecurity.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift—Norwegian Journal of Geography. Volume 58, 2004. Pages 23-37.]

“The recourse to vulnerability for building the methodological framework is resultant from its complex ecological, socio-cultural and economic-political perspectives, which are more suitable than conventional poverty frameworks. A vulnerability analysis provides a basis for tracing social causality in addition to physical processes and shows how they are interlinked …. Vulnerability is understood as the opposite of security.… The framework illustrates these understandings of vulnerability as a triad comprising the threats that face peasants the capabilities of peasants, which is a function of their resilience and sensitivity, and the outcomes of peasant strategies ….” [Jan Hesselberg and Joseph A. Yaro, “An assessment of the extent and causes of food insecurity in northern Ghana using a livelihood vulnerability framework.” GeoJournal. Volume 67, 2006. Pages 41-55.]

“The impacts of climate change on African agriculture is said to be highly negative as physical and social vulnerability on the continent is very high. Vulnerability as a function of exposure to contingencies and ability to withstand these adaptive capacities puts the African farmer as a high risk taker with little cushioning abilities.” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, “The perception of and adaptation to climate variability/change in Ghana by small-scale and commercial farmers.” Regional Environmental Change. Volume 13, 2013. Pages 1259-1272.]

“Land in most of Africa is controlled under the customary system which is governed by well intentioned social and cultural rules meant to grant equal access to families within groups with common interest in land. Making a living requires some form of access to land without which the livelihoods of many would be in jeopardy. Land tenure may be defined as the terms and conditions on which land is held, used and transacted ….” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, “Customary tenure systems under siege: contemporary access to land in Northern Ghana.” GeoJournal. Volume 75, 2010. Pages 199-214.]

“Understanding how institutions work is best appreciated by looking at the structure-agency debate by structurationists and critical realists. Structures and institutions set the frame for manoeuvrability of social objects.… Structure, in a realist sense, suggests a set of internally related elements whose causal powers, when combined, are emergent from those of their constituents …. Whether these powers are exercised is dependent on other conditions, thereby eliminating the idea of a model of regular causation … The task of critical realists then becomes one of uncovering structures and processes operating in societies and to understand how individual agents are constrained and empowered ….” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, “The Dilemma of the Peasant: Macroeconomic Squeeze and Internal Contradictions in Northern Ghana.” Ghana Social Science Journal Volumes 5 and 6, numbers 1 and 2, 2008/2009. Pages 27-61.]

“Contrary to the deagrarianisation thesis, this study found that livelihood adaptation, implying both a diversification to new or secondary livelihood activities and changing the form, nature and content of the farm sector, characterised rural livelihoods in the area. The adaptation process involves not just a move from the farm to the non-farm sector, but also an intensification of efforts in the farm sector with seasonal diversification into other livelihood activities ….” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, ”Is deagrarianisation real? A study of livelihood activities in rural northern Ghana.” The Journal of Modern African Studies. Volume 44, number 1, March 2006. Pages 125-156.]

“… our analysis is framed by two main propositions. The first is that gender differential effects of commercial land transactions arise from two sources: (1) pre-existing differences in the division of productive and reproductive labor, resource control, and decision making; and (2) gender biases in project design and implementation. Secondly, as long as business models in commercialization projects do not tackle these problems, they are likely to mainly reinforce gender inequalities in land tenure and livelihood outcomes.” [Dzodzi Tsikata and Joseph Awetori Yaro, “When a Good Business Model is Not Enough: Land Transactions and Gendered Livelihood Prospects in Rural Ghana.” Feminist Economics. Volume 20, number 1, 2014. Pages 202-226.]

“The economy of the peasant society is no longer dependent on farming but is increasingly shifting towards non-farm activities in a process of diversification of livelihoods. The livelihoods of peasants are characterised by great exibility through the maintenance of options to meet expected fluctuations in resource endowment, entitlements to food, work and income, climatic conditions, and the reliability of government services ….” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, “The poor peasant: one label, different lives. The dynamics of rural livelihood strategies in the Gia-Kajelo community, Northern Ghana.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift—Norwegian Journal of Geography. Volume Vol. 56, 2002. Pages 10-20.]

“Achieving sustainable rural livelihoods is the dream and a goal that is becoming unrealistic in dry marginal communities where social, economic and political forces militate against progress in diverse ways. Multiple livelihoods consequent upon adaptation to environmental and economic threats emerging from political neglect of these marginal areas seems to be eluding [the] majority of the people.” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, “Rural Livelihoods at a Cross-road in Northern Ghana.” Rural Development in Northern Ghana. Joseph Awetori Yaro, editor. New York: Nova Science Publishers. 2013. Page 83.]

“Flooding has … been severe in the sprawling urban cities and towns of coastal Ghana, due mainly to the increasing frequency of storms and poor urban planning. Indigenous fishing communities are affected the most in terms of loss of physical assets and livelihoods.” [Ben-Willie Kwaku Golo and Joseph Awetori Yaro, “Reclaiming Stewardship in Ghana: Religion and Climate Change.” Nature and Culture. Volume 8, number 3, winter 2013. Pages 282-300.]

“Synergistic relations exist between climate change and social, ecological, political and economic factors. In recent times, there is a difficulty of singling out climate as a driver of local livelihood change thereby suggesting that livelihood changes in human–environmental systems may be best understood by looking at co-evolution of different driving forces over time ….” [Joseph Awetori Yaro, Joseph Teye, and Simon Bawakyillenuo, “Local institutions and adaptive capacity to climate change/variability in the northern savannah of Ghana.” Climate and Development. Volume 7, issue 3, 2015. Pages 235-245.]

“Various studies which focus on the liberalisation of various sectors have drawn attention to the impacts of foreign direct investments on the livelihoods of local communities, drawing attention to implications for land tenure systems” [Dzodzi Tsikata and Joseph Yaro, “Land Market Liberalization and Trans-National Commercial Land Deals in Ghana since the 1990s.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing. April 6th–8th, 2011. Retrieved on November 9th, 2015.]

“Climate change increases the vulnerability of the poor in the areas of water supply, exposure to disease, increasing sensitivity of livelihood activities, and undermining of growth opportunities. The effects of climate change in Ghana will vary geographically.” [Joseph A. Yaro, “The Social Dimensions of Adaptation to Climate Change in Ghana.” The World Bank. Discussion paper 15. December, 2010. Page 5.]

“The world has become interconnected and interdependent, not only in the economic, but also in the social, cultural, political and environmental domains of life. Globalisation has intensified worldwide social relations which link distant localities, so that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa …. By addressing how global changes/trends affect local institutions, which are directly relied on by rural people, the paper adds a refreshing insight to understanding the relationship between globalisation and rural livelihoods.” [Joseph A. Yaro, “Neoliberal globalisation and evolving local traditional institutions: implications for access to resources in rural northern Ghana.” Review of African Political Economy. Volume 40, number 137. Pages 410-427.]

“The author [Joseph Awetori Yaro] … proceeds to offer an analytical framework, which he terms the Livelihood Vulnerability Analytical Framework and which is informed by critical realism.… Critical realist ontology is appropriate for the author’s concern with structures and processes in explaining food insecurity and how structures and processes in concrete contexts may empower or constrain peasants in their struggle for food security.” [N. Shanmugaratnam, “Doctoral Theses.” (Joseph Awetori Yaro. Combating Food Insecurity in Northern Ghana. Food Insecurity and Rural Livelihood Strategies in Kajelo, Chiana and Korania. Doctoral dissertation and occasional paper number 44. Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. 2004.) Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift—Norwegian Journal of Geography. Volume 60. Pages 272.]

“A critical realist theory of hegemony should … [argue] that hegemony can only operate under conditions of social and material causality. It is necessary to examine the social whole and its different structures and mechanisms, each of which has its own dynamics. It must study the nature of these various relations and the types of co-determination or conflict that are taking place. It must determine the dominant forces within each society so that, with an analysis of capitalism, an attempt is made to link the question of social hegemony to the dominant dynamic of capital accumulation.” [Jonathan Joseph. Hegemony: A Realist Analysis. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Google Play edition.]

“The basis for a realist theory of hegemony lies in a distinction between a structural aspect of hegemony and an agential aspect. The agential aspect of hegemony is rather easier to outline as it corresponds to the normal understanding of the concept as the struggle for dominance, the application of strategy, the exercise of power, the striving for consent, the articulation of interests, the construction of blocs and the battle of ideas.

“Our argument is that underlying this is a more structural aspect of hegemony that is concerned with its role in the process of social reproduction.”

[Jonathan Joseph, “A Realist Theory of Hegemony.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 30, number 2, 2000. Pages 179-202.]

“… by introducing Bhaskar’s notion of the transformational model of social activity, we provide a framework for understanding hegemony’s relation to structure and agency. The argument moves from emphasising the structural aspect of hegemony to looking at how the structural and agential aspects of hegemony fit together to looking at the possibilities and limitations of hegemonic projects and their agents.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Hegemony and the structure-agency problem in International Relations: a scientific realist contribution.” Review of International Studies. Volume 34, 2008. Pages 109-128.]

“Adopting a critical realist ontology that sees the social world as made up of stratified social relations, I argue that governmentality has a particular place within the social formation. To take the best known passage from [Michel] Foucault ... as our guide, governmentality is an ‘ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power’ ….”

[Jonathan Joseph in Jonathan Joseph and Olaf Corry, “Jonathan Joseph and Olaf Corry Review each Other’s Books on Governmentality and Global Politics and then Respond to each Others Reviews.” European Political Science. Volume 13, 2014. Pages 123-130.]

“My account of hegemony is based on the fact that social structures are not reproduced in isolation, but in combination with other social structures so that the question of social reproduction becomes a question of reproducing the unity of different combinations of structures.… My view … is that because the social world comprises overlapping structural combinations, structural hegemony performs the function of ensuring the reproduction of social structures and structural ensembles. Structural hegemony arises out of the need to secure the unity of the social formation and the reproduction of the complex and contradictory combinations of social structures, practices and generative mechanisms.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Re-Stating Hegemonic Theory.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 2, issue 1, November 2003. Pages 127-137.]

“In looking at what makes hegemony and governmentality possible, as well as examining the basis on which they might combine or overlap, the paper develops a realist ontology, a position at odds with Foucauldian (and possibly neo-Gramscian) arguments.… The ultimate aim is not to develop a perfect understanding of either concept, but to show how they might contribute to an understanding of the social world as structured and stratified in a certain way and how they might reveal the emergent social features of international relations.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Combining Hegemony and Governmentality to Explain Global Governance.” Spectrum Journal of Global Studies. Volume 6, number 1, 2014. Pages 1-15.]

“Hegemony is not restricted to a hermeneutic role, but concerns real material relations and social practices, economic and political interests, social status and privileges. This can immediately be seen if we consider an example such as the articulation of hegemony in Northern Ireland. The maintenance of unionist ascendancy depends on more than simply the articulation of a political or religious discourse or ideology, however important this may be.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Hegemony in the Fourth Dimension.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 31, number 3, 2001. Pages 261-277.]

“The problem with [Michel] Foucault is that in arguing that the production of knowledge is bound up with historical regimes of power he displays a tendency to reduce truth claims to power effects. Cognitive validity is relative to a particular system of practices, discourses and power relations or what he calls a ‘regime of truth.’ If knowledge is relativised to such a degree, then there can be no basis for objective knowledge. All statements and accounts of the world disguise hegemonic power relations and dominant discourses.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Foucault and reality.” Capital & Class. Volume 28, number 1, spring 2004. Pages 143-165.]

“The hegemonic function of the state is not simply limited to uniting the power bloc and securing domination over the masses; hegemony relates to the wider role of securing the unity of the whole social formation and, under capitalism, promoting the accumulation process. It is this latter, more functional role that determines the class character of the state and makes its overthrow, rather than its gradual transformation a necessity.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Metatheory and the State.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 1, July 2001. Pages 51-53.]

“Jonathan Joseph … aims to develop [Antonio] Gramsci’s celebrated analysis of hegemony in a critical realist direction by distinguishing analytically between ‘structural hegemony’ and hegemonic projects and then connecting them dialectically. He develops this approach through a critical engagement not only with Gramsci’s work but also with other positions and debates within classical Marxism, Western Marxism, and post-Marxism.” [Bob Jessop, “Critical Realism and Hegemony: Hic Rhodus, hic saltus.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 2, May 2003. Pages 183-194.]

“[Jonathan] Joseph and I agree that capital accumulation cannot be secured exclusively through market forces and factory despotism and also depends on extra-economic mechanisms. We also agree that one can assess institutions in terms of their relative contribution to securing these conditions and that the state has a crucial role in these respects. We disagree that these conditions are necessarily best secured under the leadership and direction of the state or, at least, about the best way to formulate this claim.” [Bob Jessop, “Putting Hegemony in Its Place.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 2, issue 1, November 2003. Pages 138-148.]

“[Jonathan] Joseph’s … development of hegemony thus supplements the agential aspect with a structural definition by applying a critical realist method. In this it is broadly consistent with LPT [labour process theory] in that it rejects the technological or structural determinist readings of [Karl] Marx, acknowledges the specificities of empirically observed situations and locates these within the deeper structural mechanisms of the capitalist relations of production. This avoids any suggestion that hegemony is a purely agential process (actors may create hegemony through their actions but not in conditions of their own making). It thus takes a broadly Marxist approach but rejects the determinism of classical Marxism, replacing economic determinism with a more complex view of the social totality.” [Rick Delbridge, “Explaining Conflicted Collaboration: A Critical Realist Approach to Hegemony.” Organization Studies. Volume 28, number 09, 2007. Pages 1347-1357.]

“While suggesting that resilience derives its meaning from its surrounding discourse and practices, it does offer modifications to these through its focus on knowledge, the social, and the human. In acknowledging this, the article accepts the view … that resilience encourages human potential, but suggests that this is constrained by its position within a broadly neoliberal logic of governing. The argument is developed through the themes of governance through failure and governance through denial, while the final section develops this in the context of global governance and international interventions.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Governing through Failure and Denial: The New Resilience Agenda.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 44, number 3, 2016. Pages 370-390.]

“… we have sought to appropriate a theory of hegemony – in particular, the critical realist theory of hegemony – that encapsulates the conditions that lead to the rise of a power bloc, as well as the actions and strategies of members of the bloc.…

“… While the vertical operation of hegemony is extremely important, this paper brings to light the horizontal dimension of hegemony, i.e. the relationship between dominant social groups as they form a ‘powerbloc’ and its significance for MAC [management accounting control] changes. It was clearly evident that the nature of the MAC changes was influenced by the political strategies of the two dominant groups vis-à-vis each other as they tried to carve out a wider sphere of influence for themselves within the power bloc. Assertion of their respective ideologies, i.e. ‘national security’ or ‘economic efficiency,’ served the same purpose.”

[Junaid Ashraf and Shahzad Uddin, “Military, ‘managers’ and hegemonies of management accounting controls: A critical realist interpretation.” Management Accounting Research. Volume 29, December 2015. Pages 13-26.]

“Incorporating strategy and regulation into a theory of the capitalist state is in keeping with critical realism’s critique of actualism—the privileging of ‘actual’ moments, events or conjunctures without recourse to the underlying structures and generative mechanisms that produce them.…

“This helps in our construction of a true ‘open Marxism’ that analyses central functions whilst rejecting functionalism or essentialism. Critical realism is not a contingent or relativist methodology.”

[Jonathan Joseph, “In Defence of Critical Realism.” Capital & Class. Number 65, January 1998. Pages 73-106.]

“… a critical realist explanation of CAP [common agricultural policy] reforms is proposed. It draws on explanations of global agricultural policy changes developed in the field of critical social geography, which is a post-Marxist approach focused on how the regulation of production relations affects individuals and social groups based on the kind of means of production they possess …. It also draws on certain elements of classical critical political economy, such as the concentration of privately owned capital leading to pressures on labour and systemic crises …. Based on these more general characteristics, an explanation of more specific elements characterizing CAP reforms contexts and outcomes is developed.” [Marko Lovec. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy Reforms: Towards a Critical Realist Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature. 2016. Page 48.]

“The purpose of this research is twofold: to explain the limitations and contradictions of existing mainstream approaches to explaining and understanding CAP [common agricultural policy] reforms; and to test the proposed alternative, critical realist explanation against the existing approaches. According to the critical realist theory of science, the problem of existing approaches is not simply that they are wrong; the problem is that narrow assumptions with regard to the characteristics of the object of inquiry support the generalization of partial and biased research results, leading to partial and biased explanations and understanding of CAP reforms. Broader assumptions provided by critical realist metatheory enable the endorsement of and refl ection on results of existing research of CAP reforms and allow for more robust, deeper level explanations. More comprehensive assumptions also support the dialogue between different lines of research, which have become increasingly specialized and dependent on particular research techniques, thus reducing critical mass.” [Marko Lovec. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy Reforms: Towards a Critical Realist Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan imprint pf Springer Nature. 2016. Page 64.]

“In contrast to the dominant liberal institutional political economy models that explain preenlargement CAP reforms in terms of the negative trade related policy externalities, the common budget expenses and the specific role played by the common institutional setting, a critical realist explanatory model is proposed.…

“… Reflexive epistemologies point to the interest biased discourses (or in fact any other social institutions). However, ‘multifunctional’ and ‘liberal’ discourses demonstrate the transformation of the criticism of the old protectionist CAP into a new ‘dominant’ CAP discourse, basically leaving its distributional practice unchanged.…

“The first, reflexive point and the second, realist point, are fundamental to critical realism. By observing the transformations and tensions in social institutions, critical realism tries to determine dispositional properties of the objects, approximating a ‘mind-independent world’ ….”

[Marko Lovec and Emil Erjavec, “‘Big bang’ enlargement and Common agricultural policy reform.” Drustvena Istrazivanja. Volume 21, number 1, 2012. Pages 219-238.]

“… [Perry Anderson] famously linked the philosophical attitude of ‘Western’ Marxism to its separation from practice while, writing from a broadly Trotskyist standpoint, he saw the superiority of ‘classical’ Marxism as guaranteed by its unity with the struggles of classical Marxism from critical scrutiny …. The problem that Anderson begins to formulate is this; if we reject the various errors of Western Marxism – such things as [Georg] Lukács’s views on reification and class consciousness, or [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s constitution of the totality through scarcity and praxis, or [Jürgen] Habermas’s Kantian separation of system and lifeworld, or [Louis] Althusser’s scientism – if we reject these views; what have we left to fall back on? Does the ‘classical’ Marxism of the post-war period have the necessary degree of scientificity and explanatory power, or is it also infested with schematic posturing? The problem seems to be that since the beginning of the last century, all the alternatives to Stalinism and reformism have been categorised as either ‘Western’ Marxist or ‘classical’ Marxist. Perhaps the answer to this Andersonian problem is to take up critical realism and, through its underlabouring [getting rid of the trash, rubbish, or weeds], rid ourselves of the unnecessaries so that we can get back to being just plain Marxists.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Five Ways in which Critical Realism Can Help Marxism.” Critical Realism and Marxism. Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood, and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 40-41.]

“The first question that most people interested in this forum will want to ask is; can we develop a specifically scientific realist school of IR [international relations]? To get any disappointment out of the way so that we can move on to alternative questions, the short answer is no. Scientific realism is not a theory. In the main, I will draw on Marxism for my theoretical examples, while employing scientific realism to critically examine Marxist and other theoretical claims. Of course, scientific realism can be put to work on a range of different theories, although I find its relationship to Marxist theory the most convincing.” [Jonathan Joseph, “Philosophy in International Relations: A Scientific Realist Approach.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 35, number 2, 2007. Pages 345-359.]

“I argue that reflexive deliberation shapes the agency of students as they engage in teaching–learning interactions. It may be possible to enhance the agency of students if approaches are used that consider curricular knowledge, the presence of supportive social relations and the dedication of students. The article offers ways to promote the flourishing of students rather than their dehumanization.…

“It is important to emphasize, though, that group interaction in the context of higher education encompasses activity on the part of individual students. The term ‘teaching–learning interaction’ helpfully reminds us that group interaction is predicated on the action of those who are part of the group. The structural conditioning under which students and teachers operate, furthermore, incorporates requirements around assessed tasks, and these typically involve significant activity on the part of students in which there is no expectation of direct engagement with others. The student, furthermore, must face significant uncertainty in how to frame their actions, something that inherently involves reflexive deliberation.”

[Peter E. Kahn, “The flourishing and dehumanization of students in higher education.” Journal of Critical Realism. Latest–articles edition. July, 2017. Pages 1-15.]

“… I provide some brief historical background to the encounter, situating both historical geographical materialism and critical realism and why it was thought, and is still thought by some, that historical materialism was critical realist anyway: in hindsight, a major misjudgment. I then proceed to the major part of the paper identifying exactly why it is a misjudgment and why critical realism does not provide adequate tools for understanding the world. In a final section, I outline their different implications for geographical understanding.…

“Marxist geography or what would be known later as historical geographical materialism made its initial appearance at the beginning of the 1970s. Only towards the end of the decade did human geographers become aware of critical realism and how it could be turned to effective use in human geography. Both it and historical geographical materialism were in significant part critical reactions to the spatial-quantitative revolution of the 1960s, though in hindsight they were clearly quite different responses.”

[Kevin R. Cox, “Notes on a brief encounter: Critical realism, historical materialism and human geography.” Dialogues in Human Geography. Volume 3, number 1, 2013. Pages 3-21.]

“The metaphor of an ‘encounter’ is central to the arguments in the article. An encounter invariably involves coming upon the other(s) in a specific time–place context. At a specific moment in Human Geography Marxist geographers came across, rather accidentally, Critical Realist (CR) geographers and were drawn towards them; however, that moment in retrospect turned out to be a passing encounter.…

“… The geographies of labour and firms did little to challenge the geographies of knowledge production or the political practices for emancipation. Marxist theory developed informed by bourgeois practices of firms, just in time technologies and capital flows delinked from the politics of decolonisation and freedom.…

“[Kevin R.] Cox’s (2013) treatment of Marxism warrants attention as it is commonplace in the academia. If Cox wishes to argue for the superiority of Historical Materialism, the purpose is defeated by the fact it relies on reiterating the intrinsic superiority of Marxism. Questions about science and society raised by CR need to be answered. The decontextualised treatment of Marxism reduces it to an ideology instead of a living methodological tool to understand and change the world.”

[Radha D’Souza, “Who encounters what here?” Dialogues in Human Geography. Volume 3, number, 2013. Pages 34-39.]

“In this commentary, I want to accomplish three things—appreciate [Kevin R.] Cox’s … clear exposition of critical realism and historical geographical materialism as methodology; think about why he has raised these questions now and what bearing his delicate unearthing of a patch of common ground between the two might have on contemporary theoretical debates; and offer a different slice through the questions raised than the ‘elaboration of new structures’ indicated by Cox ….” [Cindi Katz, “ Dialogues in Human Geography. Volume 3, number 1, 2013. Pages 30-33.]

“[Radha] D’Souza says that ‘Contrary to Cox’s … assertions structure–agency, space–time, history–geography and dialectics, including unity and difference, are central themes in CR [critical realism].’ But one can go through my paper with a fine toothcomb without spotting any of these ‘assertions.’” [Kevin R. Cox, “The continuing relevance of old debates.” Dialogues in Human Geography. Volume 3, number 1, 2013. Pages 49-55.]

“… it is worth appreciating that there are many ‘schools’ of realist research with a bewildering array of names. Each has interpreted and applied the works of the ‘father’ of realism, Roy Bhaskar …, slightly differently. The result is they each do things differently for differing reasons. The implication is that a researcher wanting to use a realist approach must first decide on which ‘school’ to follow. Once selected, while there may be some leeway in interpretation and/or application, the followers of the chosen realist school will have certain ontological, epistemological, conceptual, and methodological expectations. Make sure you understand what these expectations are at the start of your journey. Following a certain school will take you down a different path, though these paths may overlap in parts.” [Geoff Wong, “Special Invited Editorial: Getting Started With Realist Research.” Creative Commons article. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Volume 14, number 5, December 2015. Pages 1-2.]

“From a Critical Realist perspective, I propose an approach that enables a coherent scientific and methodological set-up and secures a fit between the knowledge in the field, the fieldwork and the analysis of the empirical findings.…

“… A Critical Realist Approach to Studies of SMEs [small, micro, and medium-sized enterprises] and Environmental Practices …

“… The explorative design is aimed at investigating the field where we need to establish an understanding of the area investigated, the perceptions of the phenomenon under scrutiny and what constitutes ‘issues or problems in the field’ according to involved parties (like government employees, researchers, industry associations, firms, consultants and NGOs [non-governmental organizations]).”

[Søren Jeppesen, “Critical Realism as an Approach to Unfolding Empirical Findings: Thoughts on Fieldwork in South Africa on SMEs and Environment.” The Journal of Transdisciplinary Environmental Studies. Volume 4, number 1, 2005. Pages 1-9.]

“Drawing upon Margaret Archer’s discussions of primary and corporate agency, a threefold approach to thinking about structure and agency is developed, which allows us to think about agency beyond the human. Finally, an explanation is given as to why a complex approach to thinking about international relations ultimately implies a posthuman perspective.…

“… Is it possible for some non-human species to be reflexive? It would not surprise us if it was but we do not know. We would suggest that critical realists like Archer, Carter and Charles do not ‘know’ that this is impossible, either.…

“… the introduction of scientific/critical realist contributions from [Roy] Bhaskar and [Margaret S.] Archer has contributed to a much more comprehensive account of the relationship between structures and agents.…

“We prefer to talk about … placement in a situation of unequally distributed power and resources as reproductive agency.… Transformative agency is a term we would use to describe the cultural struggle over resources and social organisation to effect differences in that distribution.… What of the effects of natural systems – these have causal powers and emergent properties, but might they also have agency? In order to discuss these questions, we need to look at some of the perspectives on agency more commonly associated with ‘posthumanist’ approaches, and here we develop a third concept of agency, affective agency.…

“… Posthumanism can be broadly understood to be the decentring of human beings and human interests, and raises fundamental questions for our human-exclusive conceptions of the political, including political actors and the constitution of agency.”

[Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, “Of Parts and Wholes: International Relations beyond the Human.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 31, number 3, June 2013. Pages 430-450.]

“Four elements emerged as central to an equity-focused settings approach: a focus on social determinants of health, addressing the needs of marginalized groups, effecting change in a setting’s structure, and involving stakeholders. Each came with related challenges. To offer potential solutions to these challenges we developed a conceptual framework that integrates theoretical and methodological approaches, along with six core guiding principles, into a ‘settings praxis.’ …

“Drawing on the work of [Roy] Bhaskar, critical realism is a … logic of inquiry useful in harnessing the social context of equity-focused settings-related work. Under a critical realist perspective, context is an intrinsic component of an intervention and a relevant object of inquiry, rather than something to control for. Central to critical realism is also the recognition that individuals and structures interact, which helps acknowledge their joint contribution to social inequities in health. Through this focus on both individuals and structures, critical realism moves attention to the lived experiences of people and to the embedding of phenomena within the social context of settings.”

[Martine Shareck, Katherine L. Frohlich, and Blake Poland, “Reducing social inequities in health through settings-related interventions — a conceptual framework.” Global Health Promotion. Volume 20, number 2, 2013. Pages 39–52.]

“… we think there are significant benefits from adopting a more inclusive research philosophy osophy that is open to and integrates some of the differences of alternative philosophies of science. Engaged scholarship represents an example of such integration. Ontologically, engaged scholarship adopts Bhaskarian critical realism with its middle-ground position between positivism and relativism and its layered/stratified/multi-dimensional mind-independent reality. However, it also adopts [Nicholas] Rescher’s realistic pragmatism to provide a pragmatic justification for its realist stance. With critical realist ontology, engaged scholarship adopts a Campbellian relativist evolutionary epistemology to understand the macro-level accumulation of scientific knowledge and its weak anti-foundationalist methodological stance where there are better warranted ranted methods depending on the phenomenon. It also adopts triangulation across convergent, inconsistent, and contradictory data to understand the micro-level development of more robust scientific knowledge.” [Andrew H. Van de Ven. Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pages 63-64.]

“… the critical realist social ontology … underpins engaged scholarship …. Critical realism enables the researcher to get into the ‘black box’ of an intervention to identify how and why it works in a particular set of circumstances ….” [Monder Ram, Trevor Jones, Alexander Kiselinchev, Lovemore Muchenje, and and Kassa Woldesenbet, “Engaging with super-diversity: New migrant businesses and the research–policy nexus.” International Small Business Journal. Volume 31, number 4, June 2013. Pages 337-356.]

“Methods, on the one hand, are techniques that must be skillfully deployed to collect and analyze data. A methodology, on the other hand, includes specific claims about what exists (ontology) and the criteria for making causal explanations (epistemology). Engaged scholarship shifts the debate away from method toward methodology, recognizing the potential incommensurability of ontological and epistemological claims among theories.” [Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch, and Janet Hoy. Qualitative Methods for Practice Research. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Page 23.]

“… a critical realist methodology accounts for the open system component of all social work practice. Contexts, by definition, have many layers of causal mechanisms; therefore to study practice, researchers need critical realism to account for complex causal explanations that unfold in open and continuously dynamic practice settings. Quantitative methods can be used when engaged scholarship researchers decide that some practice components can be defined (i.e., relatively fixed) and their regularity confidently established.… In particular, meanings in social work settings are constantly developing and changing thus, qualitative methods are ideally suited for collecting data for engaged scholarship projects that focus on the moment-to-moment experience in the real worlds of practice.…

“… Our learn-by-doing strategy in this chapter will prepare the student and practitioner to initiate engaged scholarship research that is informed by critical realist assumptions.”

[Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch, and Janet Hoy. Qualitative Methods for Practice Research. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Page 30-31.]

“Nested analysis provides a solution to many of the tensions that exist in the current state of methodological advice about case selection strategies: scholars often justify intensive case study work because of a sense that they lack sufficient data and analysis of such cases, and yet most case selection strategies require that we justify that selection at the outset based on what we think we know about a particular case or set of cases, often in relation to a broader universe of cases. Nested analysis provides some assistance for squaring this circle, by detailing some guidelines for the daunting task of case selection with respect to the findings of the preliminary LNA [large-N analysis].” [Evan S. Lieberman, “Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research.” The American Political Science Review. Volume 99, number 3, August 2005. Pages 435-452.]

“… nested analysis and the epistemological problem of causal inference … corresponded to and relied on the ontological model of critical realism.” [Gitte Sommer Harrits, “More Than Method?: A Discussion of Paradigm Differences Within Mixed Methods Research.” Journal of Mixed Methods Research. Volume 5, number 2, 2011. Pages 150-166.]

“… [The] nested analysis approach, as a critical realist paradigm, fitted my research questions and approach, focusing on the causal relations between various predicting factors of media technology innovation acceptance. The quantitative … and qualitative … phases were mutually translatable as I was observing the same reality and phenomenon in the different phases. This research design also allowed for the presence of different voices: from the mass television audience to the professionals, and included both qualitative and quantitative data, which facilitated sensitivity to different participants’ voices and the issues each wanted to raise.” [Nóra Nyirő, “Nested analysis-based mixed method research of television and video recording audiences.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. Volume 9, issue 2, November 2012. Pages 780-797.]

“My standpoint is that technological devices are important in order to understand real markets, but that there is also a ‘judgmental process’ alongside the technical calculative process.…

“I will demonstrate the existence of the ‘judgmental process’ by using field material collected during research visits at a chartering firm that deals with tanker chartering in Denmark.…

“… Besides collecting accounts, I observed what the charterers actually did in their work. This way of doing an ethnographic study is compatible with critical realist methodology … in which a reality is assumed to exist independent of humans, even if humans interpret this reality in different ways and those interpretations influence actions. Critical realism is thus more than just talk about talk since it includes a reality of social structures which pre-exist humans, but can be changed.”

[Per Forsberg, “Testing prices in markets: How to charter a tanker.” Ethnography. Volume 10, number 3, 2009. Pages 265-290.]

“… [Roy] Bhaskar argues that we cannot dismiss the notion that the range of social facts we encounter are themselves the product of the intentional activity of humans. He argues that ‘The individualist truth that people are the only moving forces in history – in the sense that nothing happens behind their backs, that is, everything that happens, happens in and through their actions – must be retained.’ Our own agency creates these social facts which, for Bhaskar, are in principle at least enabling as well as coercive. When adopting Bhaskar’s critical realism as a critique of deconstructive influences upon postcolonialism, it is significant to note that Bhaskar holds society as something that we inevitably reproduce and transform ….

“Bhaskar clarifies his view on the possibilities of social transformation when he notes that ‘for critical realism the social world, being itself a social product, is seen as essentially subject to the possibility of transformation.’ Bhaskar’s insistence upon the transformative power or theory in the practical and tangible realities of the social world suggest something of the existentialist framework that I am suggesting offers a better theoretical foundation for postcolonialism than does poststructuralism.”

[Ben Russell Masters-Stevens. Identity in the Anglo-Indian Novel: ‘The Passing Figure’ and Performance. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Hertfordshire. Hatfield, England. October, 2014. Pages 18-19.]

“… [One] approach [to social mechanisms] is the so-called critical, or new, realism in social science, stemming from the work of Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar, but the latter, in particular …. Bhaskar rejects both the macro-reductionist collectivism of [Émile] Durkheim and the microreductionist individualism of Weber. He also rejects the dialectical view of [Peter] Berger and [Thomas] Luckmann …. His own suggestion is that both individuals and society exist, but in a symbiotic, rather than a dialectical, relation. ‘Society is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency’ ….

“As is often pointed out, Bhaskar’s model has much in common with Anthony Gidden’s theory of structuration …. I agree that there is a similarity, in that both maintain that society is constantly created, but there is also an important difference. While for Giddens the creative aspects is in focus, Bhaskar conceives of structuration as reproduction and transformation of existing structures, with causal powers. In the end, therefore, Gidden’s theory of structuration is a theory of action, where structure appears only as an epiphenomenon, whereas Bhaskar’s theory is a form of structuralism.”

[Lars Udehn. Methodological Individualism: Background, history and meaning. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 186-187.]

“The phenomena of interest were patterns of interaction and interpersonal perceptions in real settings, and so we adopted a critical realist approach for which grounded theory seemed most suited …. We were concerned with observable processes rather than an linguistic or discursive interpretation of the way our participants construed their relationships. Our approach to coding followed grounded theory guidelines and worked upwards from open (preliminary, descriptive) codes, to axial (conceptually connecting) codes and finally to selective codes (core categories that relate to a broader conceptual framework).…

“… In our model [conceptual model of the relationship consequences of aural impairments], we have emphasized the role of social processes that establish the ground rules and motivation for individuals to maintain their commitment to each other and strive to make adjustments to an imposed difficulty.”

[Richard Hallam, Paul Ashton, Katerina Sherbourne, and Lorraine Gailey, “Persons with acquired profound hearing loss (APHL): how do they and their families adapt to the challenge?” health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. Volume 12, number 3, 2008. Pages 369-388.]

“The dichotomy between naturalism and non-naturalism is sometimes considered no longer adequate to represent the diversity of philosophical positions in the social sciences today …. One complication confronting the bifurcation has been the emerging strength in the last 25 years of the philosophical position in the social sciences of transcendental and critical realism …. This position construes itself as a ‘new critical naturalism’ that has resolved the dispute between conventional naturalism and non-naturalism ….” [Clive Beed and Cara Beed, “Polarities between Naturalism and Non-Naturalism in Contemporary Economics: An Overview.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volime 30, number 4, December 1996. Pages 1077-1104.]

“Critical realists insist that people need not assume that contemporary processes represent ideal end states which need not be changed.…

“My own interpretation of the realist method of specific concrete abstraction and its related theory of dialectics of domination is that the approach is of sufficient merit to deserve application particularly in a research concerned with the survival mechanisms of a rural development project.…

“… [Certain] actions need to be taken to usher the goals-problems dialectics into a third phase.…

“A central theme of this paper is that development comprises of a number of processes of which conflicts between opposing forces are important.”

[S. Yirenkyi-Boateng, “Coping mechanisms and their unintended consequences: a realist approach to a rural technology transformation programme.” GeoJournal. Volume 43, number 2, October 1997. Pages 153-162.]

“We appear to be in the presence of two quite different conceptions of what anthropology is ultimately about. Are we unsettling our categories so as (1) to better understand the ‘radical alterity’ of a specific group of people (whoever ‘we’ are here taken to be); or (2) to show that in certain ways, at least, such alterity was not quite as radical as we thought, and we can put those apparently exotic concepts to work to reexamine our own everyday assumptions and to say something new about human beings in general? Obviously I am an exponent of the second position.…

“Critical Realists argue—compellingly, in my view—that most contemporary philosophical positions are simply variations on the epistemic fallacy. To take one particularly salient example: both Positivists and Poststructuralists tend to agree that if there were a real world independent of the subject, it should be possible (at least in principle) for the subject to have absolute and comprehensive knowledge of it. Positivists argue that such knowledge is possible; Poststructuralists, in most cases at least, argue that since such knowledge is impossible, one must conclude there is no independent reality at all.”

[David Graeber, “Radical alterity is just another way of saying ‘reality’: a reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 5, number 2, 2015. Creative Commons. Pages 1-41.]

“The approach, which most clearly can be considered as a critical theory, is [Roy] Bhaskar’s Dialectical Critical Realism. For Bhaskar, there is a normative feature in dialectical thinking that he terms Moral Realism. Its central feature would be absenting absence.… Dialectic would be the axiology and pulse of freedom …. Bhaskar stresses a quality of critical thinking that is inherent in Marxian thinking: the critique of all domination because it sets limits on human potentials.…

“Critical theory is materialistic in the sense that it addresses phenomena and problems not in terms of absolute ideas and predetermined societal development, but in terms of resource distribution and social struggles. Reality is seen in terms that address ownership, private property, resource distribution, social struggles, power, resource control, exploitation, and domination.…

“Our critical social systems modeling approach is a non-constructivist one because we find it difficult to conceive society as just a construct of the human mind …. Society is not independent of individuals, but also not as radical constructivism seems to claim only subjectively cognitively constructed.

“… our notion of self-producing social systems is realistic, it assumes that social reality exists objectively and is recognized and transformed by humans who are parts of social reality and form this reality in interaction with others.”

[Christian Fuchs and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, “Autopoiesis and Critical Social Systems Theory.” Autopoiesis in Organization Theory and Practice. Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. 2009. Pages 111-129.]

“Critical realism … looks at the ways that systems are isolated or connected to other or larger systems. Closed systems, where they exist (mostly in experimental situations or laboratories) are defined by the degree of their isolation (i.e., closure). In open systems, interaction with other systems are continuous and inevitable. And while it is possible to model a closed system (i.e., using particular methods or statistical techniques) of the body/brain/mind, in the real world these systems are in a constant state of interaction with the outside world (i.e., the relational world of family, school, neighborhood, caregivers). Moreover, not only are all parts of the foster care system interconnected to a greater or lesser degree; they are also embedded in and connected with every aspect of social life. It is quite clear that a child in foster care is rooted in what we are calling open systems of caregiving.” [Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch, and Nate Okpych, “Foster youth and psychotropic treatment: Where next?” Children and Youth Services Review. Volume 33, issue 2, 2011. Pages 395-404.]

“The critical realist, Roy Bhaskar, examines the nature of experimental activity within the natural sciences by drawing our attention to the problems associated with creating closure in necessarily open systems.…

“For critical realists, human subjects represent a particular problem for claims to closure. In this case, the two conditions of closure – a stable, unchanging object of inquiry (the intrinsic condition of Amish homogeneity, for example) and the constancy of outside forces (the extrinsic condition – unaffected by mainstream influences) – are, in fact, untenable ….”

“Realists have argued that the critique of reductionism focuses on only one of its forms: atomistic reduction – the simplification or reduction of complex wholes into component parts. However, they argue that holism is equally problematic and reductive. It simply makes the opposite claim: the part is comprehensible in terms of the whole. Holism and atomism both make knowledge claims about the respective levels at which they work.”

[Jerry Floersch, Jeffrey Longhofer, and Kristine Latta, “Writing Amish Culture into Genes: Biological Reductionism in a Study of Manic Depression.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. Volume 21, number 2, June 1997. Pages 137-159.]

“I will now focus specifically on the proposed alternative food/agricultural system that is based on the aspiration for food sovereignty, introduced by the international network of movements of smallholder, family and cooperative farmers, La Vía Campesina [MP3 audio file], which I take to be an instance of [Roy Bhaskar’s concept of] concrete utopianism. The aspiration for food sovereignty is articulated within actual social movements, and it shapes their practices, policies and struggles to gain space to develop.” [Hugh Lacey, “Food and Agricultural Systems for the Future: Science, Emancipation and Human Flourishing.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 3, June 2015. Pages 272-286.]

“The ‘theoretical model of composing’ (i.e. the system of communicative functions) … makes no claim to be a comprehensive theory of written composition, and in fact its ‘leanness’ is an advantage, as the practical model (and software) based on it could in fact be used within any one of the current approaches to written composition. This is because it starts from a consideration of the activities of the real composing of real students observed by educationists and researchers not bound by a common ideology for prescribing how writing ‘ought to be,’ and any theories developed about writing were grounded in actual practice …. It is important to bear in mind that the model of ‘good’ writing is not prescriptive in the sense of saying what ‘should’ happen, but in terms of describing prerequisites for effective composing. If students are not perceived to write in the ways described in the more detailed analytical version of the empirical model of composing (as established by think-aloud or video protocols), it is not necessarily because the prerequisites for effective composing are not described accurately in the model, but possibly because the prerequisites are not actually being fulfilled in those cases (this can be established by means of empirical data).” [Deirdre Pratt. A realist approach to writing: developing a theoretical model of written composition to inform a computer mediated learning application. Doctor’s degree in technology thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Language and Translation, Durban Institute of Technology. Durban, South Africa. August, 2007. Page 63. Retrieved on December 17th, 2015.]

“Critical realism depicts reality as complex, dynamic and layered. Anything – text, utterance, code, discourse, non-discursive event, belief, person or natural/social phenomenon – can act as a causal factor effecting (or affecting) communication.” [Deirdre Pratt. A realist approach to writing: developing a theoretical model of written composition to inform a computer mediated learning application. Doctor’s degree in technology thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Language and Translation, Durban Institute of Technology. Durban, South Africa. August, 2007. Page 166. Retrieved on December 17th, 2015.]

“While a model of composing (i.e. Stages of the writing process) had already been developed in a previous study … and had proved effective in teaching composition at both secondary and tertiary level, this ‘pedagogical model’ (the user’s model) did not satisfactorily explain why composing should occur in stages (or in these particular stages) nor how features of the specific context in which writing occurred might have shaped composing. Following the orientation chosen, critical realism, this study viewed writing as a complex social mechanism which needed to be modelled for its functioning to be understood.… This mechanism would not only describe what learners were doing as they engaged in writing, but, when explained to them, would constitute a conceptual mechanism informing their everyday practice.” [Deirdre Pratt. Modelling Written Communication: A New Systems Approach to Modelling in the Social Sciences. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. 2011. Page 195.]

“We first propose a four-step approach to theory testing, and then advocate research programs that combine both extensive and intensive designs.…

“Step 1. The initial step involves identifying the causal mechanisms believed to account for the hypothesized relations in a study.…

“Step 2. The next step in testing this theory is to consider whether the proposed mechanisms are indeed present in the empirical setting.…

“Step 3. If the available evidence affirms the presence of the theorized mechanisms, we move to testing their causal effects.…

“Step 4. If empirical data corroborate a theory’s mechanisms and their effects, then the next step to take in evaluating the theory is to examine the implications of its mechanisms jointly.”

[Kent D. Miller and Eric W. K. Tsang, “Testing management theories: critical realist philosophy and research methods.” Strategic Management Journal. Volume 32, issue 2, February 2011. Pages 139-158.]

“From a critical realist perspective, I discuss the role played by behavioral assumptions in organization theories, and use transaction cost economics as an illustrative example. Core behavioral assumptions often constitute the foundation of the mechanismic explanations of a theory, and thus should play a pivotal role in theory development. I distinguish between assumption-based and assumption-omitted theory testing, and show that empirical research in transaction cost economics has been dominated by as sumption-omitted testing. To establish a solid foundation for a new theory, management researchers should pay more attention to assumption-based testing.…

“Since the core behavioral assumptions of a theory often form the foundation of its mechanismic explanations, it is crucial that these assumptions are tested during the early stage of empirical research. I call this way of theory testing assumption-based. By testing a behavioral assumption, I mean investigating whether events observed in the real world are consistent with the assumption.”

[Eric W. K. Tsang, “Behavioral Assumptions and Theory Development: The Case of Transaction Cost Economics.” Strategic Management Journal. Volume 27, number 11, November 2006. Pages 999-1011.]

“THE TENETS OF GENERATIVE REALISM

[John O. Greene, “What sort of terms ought theories of human action incorporate?” Communication Studies. Volume 45, number 2, summer 1994. Pages 187-211.]

“The metatheoretical foundation of the action-assembly approach to the various problems of human action is that of generative realism …. This philosophical stance incorporates a realist conception of scientific explanation (see [Roy] Bhaskar …), in that human action is seen to be the result of the complex interplay of numerous causal mechanisms; explanation is held to be given by specifying the nature of the causal structures and processes that give rise to the phenomena of interest.

“The scientific realists’ agent-structure solution, as described by Roy Bhaskar, starts from a simple premise—namely, that ‘all [social] activity presupposes the prior existence of social forms.’ ….

“The starting point of the scientific realist approach to international structural theory is therefore the recognition that state action is possible and conceivable only if there exist the instruments through which that action can in fact be carried out. Two sorts of instruments or media of action are necessary. First, nations must have resources, the physical attributes that comprise ‘capability.’ A military strategy requires military forces; monetary policy, financial instruments; trade policy, the goods and physical infrastructure of trade; and so on. Second, nations must have available rules, the media through which they communicate with one another and coordinate their actions.”

[David Dessler, “What’s at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?” International Organization. Volume 43, number 3, summer 1989. Pages 441-473.]

“Efforts to construct causal theory might draw on the broad literature on agency and structure in international relations. Again, such metatheoretical discussion cannot lead directly to causal theory, but it can provide useful guidelines for and constraints on the theory-building process. As Alexander Wendt shows …, different solutions to the agent-structure problem lead to different conceptions of explanatory theory.” [David Dessler, “Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War.” International Studies Quarterly. Volume 35, number 3, September 1991. Pages 337-355.]

“Our broadest claim concerns the relation between agency and structure in rationalist and constructivist accounts of international relations. Roughly, we argue that constructivists view world politics in agent-driven terms while rationalists theorize in terms of the effects of structures.” [David Dessler and John Owen, “Constructivism and the Problem of Explanation: A Review Article.” Perspectives on Politics. Volume 3, number 3, September 2005. Pages 597-610.]

“Constructivism is the approach that results when both materialism and rationalism are rejected.” [David Dessler, “Constructivism within a Positivist Social Science.” Review of International Studies. Volume 25, number 1, January 1999. Pages 123-137.]

“Critique of the MRC [Medical Research Council] framework …

“What we have here is a continued adherence to the Humean … perspective on cause and effect, which regards such a relationship being demonstrated by ‘constant conjunction.’ In other words, if one event is invariably followed closely by another event, then it can be concluded that the former is the cause of the latter.…

“… It is our contention that the philosophy of critical realism provides the promise of providing a sounder basis for developing an internally consistent framework that is capable of accommodating these requirements.”

[Bronagh Blackwood, Peter O’Halloran, and Sam Porter, “On the problems of mixing RCTs with qualitative research: the case of the MRC framework for the evaluation of complex healthcare interventions.” Journal of Research in Nursing. Volume 15, number 6, November 2010. Pages 511-521.]

“The purpose of this paper is to identify a philosophy for ethnography which could overcome some of the epistemological criticisms to which it has recently been subjected, notably by Martin Hammersley …. It is argued that Roy Bhaskar’s … theory of critical realism is capable of solving many of the problems raised in relation to representational claims, theoretical focus and explanatory status. A substantive example of how critical realist ethnography can be used is given in a participant observation study of how racism affects occupational relationships between nurses and doctors, and how its effects are mediated by professional ideology. It is argued that the universalist-achievement ethos of professionalism tends to counter the ascriptive nature of racism. Thus, as long as a functional-specific pretext is unavailable, the effects of structural racism will remain latent in social situations where professionalism has a powerful influence.” [Sam Porter, “Critical realist ethnography: the case of racism and professionalism in a medical setting.” Sociology. Volume 27, number 4, 1993. Pages 591-609.]

“We argue that it is possihle for nursmg research to give due attention to social structures without losing its focus on individuals. One methodology that could facilitate this hroadening of nursing’s epistemological boimdaries is critical realist ethnography, which works imder the assumption that the relationship hetween social structures and individual actors involves a two-way process, in that while the enablements and constraints imposed by structures influence individual actions, those actions in turn either maintain or transform social structures. To demonstrate how such a methodology could he applied in nursing research, we work through a case study conceming the theory-practice gap, arguing that the gap is neither the result of clinicians’ ignorance of nor antipathy to theory, hut is largely generated by the lack of resources enjoyed hy nurses, which in turn is a reflection of the social structure of capitalism within which nurses operate.” [Sam Porter, “Breaking the boundaries between nursing and sociology: a critical realist ethnography of the theory-practice gap.” Journal of Advanced Nursing. Volume 24, number 2, August 1996. Pages 413-420.]

“As with all other human beings, the actions of nurses are enabled and constrained by the social structures that pertain ([see Roy] Bhaskar …). Nurses operate within a health care system which, although socialised, is to a considerable extent in the thrall of the medico-industrial complex. Indeed, with the pervasive encroachment of ‘market principles’ into the NHS [National Health Service in the UK], the power of this sector of capital, with its demands for profit, is being increasingly felt, constraining the possibilities of health care actions. Paradoxically, nurses are also under pressure to minimise the fiscal burden on the state, and thus, indirectly, on the rate of profit for capital in general. Notwithstanding this contradiction, the social structure of capitalism sets boundaries, beyond which New Nursing aspirations cannot proceed. The breaking of those boundaries would require the transformation of economic structures ([see] Bhaskar …).” [Sam Porter, “Contra-Foucault: Soldiers, Nurses and Power.” Sociology. Volume 30, number 1, February 1996. Pages 59-78.]

“A critical realist approach towards ethnography acknowledges the dichotomy of social reality being real and predetermined besides socially constructed through human agency. A critical realist approach towards ethnography acknowledges the importance of reflexivity on the part of the researcher, as in feminist, post-modern and post post-modern ethnography …. This study exploring dance groups for community-dwelling older people was conducted from post post-modernist and critical realist perspectives, acknowledging the multiplicity of perspectives, the reflexive voice of the researcher and the potential of human agency in the light of social and biological determinism.” [Susan Paulson, “The Use of Ethnography and Narrative Interviews in a Study of ‘Cultures of Dance.’” Journal of Health Psychology. Volume 16, number 1, January 2011. Pages 148-157.]

“It is argued that the ontological arguments contained within critical realism can augment understanding of opportunity development and provide a framework for considering discovery processes as vital to theory building. Critical realism has an account of causality that facilitates explanation of how causal properties can exist independently of our knowledge; it offers a framework for understanding the nature of potential (such as an opportunity) and, therefore, offers a route for understanding the emergence of new things from such potentials. In drawing on these concepts, the central contribution of the work is developed: identifying three categories of discovery that enable new means of empirically investigating opportunities. In addition, these discovery types are argued to be consistent with the wider creative process theories of opportunity development.” [Lee Martin and Nick Wilson, “Opportunity, discovery and creativity: A critical realist perspective.” International Small Business Journal. October, 2014. Pages 1-15.]

“The strategic-relational approach [SRA] …. examines structure in relation to action, action in relation to structure, rather than bracketing one of them. Structures are thereby treated analytically as strategically-selective in their form, content, and operation; and actions are likewise treated as structurally-constrained, more or less context-sensitive, and structuring. To treat structures as strategically-selective involves examining how a given structure may privilege some actors, some identities, some strategies, some spatial and temporal horizons, some actions over others. Likewise, to treat actions as structurally-constrained requires exploring the ways, if any, in which actors (individual and/or collective) take account of this differential privileging through ‘strategic-context’ analysis when undertaking a course of action. This does not mean that actors are constantly making (self-)reflexive strategic choices and/or providing a running commentary (as part of an ongoing internal conversation and/or for the benefit of significant others) about their real motives for action. But it does highlight the potential for such strategic reflection and the role of social action in reproducing-transforming social structures and their emergent properties. In short, the SRA is concerned with the relations between structurally-inscribed strategic selectivities and (differentially reflexive) structurally-oriented strategic calculation.” [Bob Jessop, “Critical Realism and the Strategic-Relational Approach.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory & Politics. Volume 56: Critical Realism Today. October, 2005. Pages 40-53.]

“As my approach … is rooted in Marxist theory but departs from many orthodox interpretations, it is worth listing some of the conceptual innovations that distinguish the proposed formanalytic and strategic-relational reading of Marxism from some of the more orthodox interpretations that have been developed during its long and troubled history. Many of these innovations have either been adumbrated or more fully developed elsewhere: for example, in the regulation approach. recent Marxist state theory and critical discourse analysis. My other source of inspiration is the theory of self-organizing systems, their structural coupling and co-evolution.” [Bob Jessop. The Future of the Capitalist State. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Inc. 2002. Page 34.]

“The strategic-relational approach (SRA) offers a particular critical realist account of the dialectic of structure and agency that is consistent with these ontological and methodological assumptions. It examines structure in relation to action, action in relation to structure, rather than bracketing one or the other. Thus structures are treated analytically as strategic in their form, content, and operation; and actions are treated analytically as structured, more or less context-sensitive, and structuring.” [Bob Jessop, “The Gender Selectivities of the State: A Critical Realist Analysis.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 2, June 2004. Pages 207-237.]

“… we believe that a critical realist, strategic–relational, form–analytic account of the reproduction and regulation of capitalism provides a solid theoretical basis for interpreting the historically specific dynamic of capitalist social formations.” [Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum. Beyond the Regulation Approach: Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. 2006. Page 321.]

“The strategic-relational approach also asserts the non-necessary correspondence of the various moments which comprise an historic bloc or the ‘society effect’ but it also suggests that this emerges just as much from empirical co-evolution (through such mechanisms as structural coupling and self-organization) as it does from the various mechanisms of discursive articulation.” [Bob Jessop. State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. 2003. Kindle edition.]

“… from a strategic-relational perspective, the state’s structural powers or capacities, their structural and strategic biases, and their realization do not depend solely on the nature of the state as a juridicopolitical apparatus – even assuming its institutional boundaries could be precisely mapped and prove stable. They also depend on diverse capacities-liabilities and forces that lie beyond it.” [Bob Jessop. State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2007. Kindle edition.]

“… I did wonder how to analyse the economy consistently with my ‘strategic-relational’ approach to the state. Initially my ideas developed through reading debates on the value form and re-reading [Antonio] Gramsci’s work on Americanism and Fordism.” [Bob Jessop, “State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis: debates and controversies.” Capital & Class. Volume 25, number 3, autumn 2001. Pages 83-92.]

“Institutions cannot be meaningfully or productively analysed without locating actors in a wider strategic-relational context. At any given instant, institutional analysis is prior to action – even if the latter subsequently transforms institutions and institutional contexts …. Interrelated constraints matter because actors cannot change all the conditions of action at once.… Social science explanations must be formally adequate in the sense that they explain all the effects included within the explanandum (which will not, of course, exhaust its referent); and they must be socially adequate in so far as they explain the discursive (intentional, meaningful, subjective, interpretive etc.) features that mediate the chain of events producing the explanandum …. Weak social constructionist forms of institutionalism can be useful here.” [Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop. Towards a Cultural Political Economy: Putting Culture in its Place in Political Economy. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. 2013. Pages 64-65.]

“Adopting a strategic-relational approach (or an equivalent) has several implications for how to take/make an institutional turn. First, institutions never exist outside of specific action contexts. They do not matter as such but in terms of their structurally-inscribed strategic selectivity: institutions select behaviours. This institutional framing role is now recognized, for example, within rational choice theories; but it is also conceded that institutions do not fully and precisely determine the course of action …. Instead actors have some freedom of manoeuvre more or less skillfully and reflexively to choose a path of action. Second, actors not only engage in action within a given institutional matrix but, in certain circumstances, can reflexively reconstitute institutions and their resulting matrix. Their capacity to do so depends both on the changing selectivities of given institutions and on their own changing opportunities to engage in strategic action.” [Bob Jessop, “Institutional (Re)Turns and the Strategic-Relational Approach.” Environment and Planning A. Volume 33, number 7, July 2001. Pages 1213-1235.]

“… my preferred alternative, the strategic-relational view … [states] that the state is a social relation.” [Bob Jessop, “The central bank of symbolic capital: Bourdieu’s On the State.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 193, September/October 2015. Pages 33-41.]

“… state power is an explanandum, not a principle of explanation. That is, rather than explaining specific events in terms of an immediate, unexplicated exercise of state power, it is necessary to problematise the effects of state intervention and examine their specific institutional mediation and social bases. It also means that power must be seen in conjunctural, relational terms rather than as a fixed sum of resources which can be appropriated by one social force to the exclusion of others. In short our third guideline is intended to redirect studies of state power away from simple instrumentalist or subjectivist views of the state to a complex investigation of state power as a form–determined condensation of social forces in struggle.” [Bob Jessop. The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods. Oxford, England: Martin Robertson & Company Ltd. 1982. Page 225.]

“This essay seeks to reframe recent debates on sociospatial theory through the introduction of an approach that can grasp the inherently polymorphic, multidimensional character of sociospatial relations. As previous advocates of a scalar turn, we now question the privileging, in any form, of a single dimension of sociospatial processes, scalar or otherwise. We consider several recent sophisticated ‘turns’ within critical social science; explore their methodological limitations; and highlight several important strands of sociospatial theory that seek to transcend the latter. On this basis, we argue for a more systematic recognition of polymorphy—the organization of sociospatial relations in multiple forms—within sociospatial theory. Specifically, we suggest that territories (T), places (P), scales (S), and networks (N) must be viewed as mutually constitutive and relationally intertwined dimensions of sociospatial relations. We present this proposition as an extension of recent contributions to the spatialization of the strategic-relational approach (SRA), and we explore some of its methodological implications. We conclude by briefly illustrating the applicability of the ‘TPSN framework’ to several realms of inquiry into sociospatial processes under contemporary capitalism.…

“… the actualization of specific sociospatial possibilities, in any TPSN combination, involves material interactions among different structures and strategies that draw upon these principles of sociospatial organization in differential, historically, and geographically specific ways. This structuration process imposes determinate limits on the form, shape, and trajectory of present and future TPSN combinations and on the sociospatial relations through which they are mediated, produced, and transformed.”

[Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones, “Theorizing sociospatial relations.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Volume 26, issue 3, 2008. Pages 389-401.]

“Conceptually, we seek to fill a gap in previous studies of the geoweb, which have often avoided explicitly theorizing the nature of sociospatial relations. Building on [Bob] Jessop et al.’s … Territory-Place-Scale-Network (or TPSN) framework for understanding sociospatial relationships, we analyze the territorial, platial, scalar and networked dimensions of digital data shadows to highlight the polymorphous and complex spatialities of user-generated content. This allows for a greater consideration of the relational geographies of big data and geosocial media, which have largely been neglected in the literature to this point, while retaining an attention to more conventional ways of understanding the spatialities of this data.” [Taylor Shelton, Ate Poorthuis, Mark Graham, and Matthew Zook, “Mapping the data shadows of Hurricane Sandy: Uncovering the sociospatial dimensions of ‘big data.’” Geoforum. Volume 52, March 2014. Pages 167-179.]

“… Jessop et al. suggest that territories (T), places (P), scales (S), and networks (N) must be viewed as mutually constitutive and relationally intertwined dimensions of sociospatial relations. They offer a TPSN framework as the starting point for this, whereby different dimensions of sociospatial analysis can be located in self-referential terms and in terms of their interactions ….” [Martin Jones, “Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 33, number 4, August 2009. Pages 487-506.]

“… [Bob] Jessop and colleagues design what they call – after territories, places, scales and networks – the ‘TPSN framework.’ … The authors do acknowledge that those included in the TPSN framework are not the only (important) spatial dimensions of social relations, but they argue that these are possibly the most salient in work on contemporary political-economic restructuring. The TPSN framework is intended to carry forward earlier work based on the SRA by 1) stressing the importance of all the four dimensions in the analysis of spatio-temporal fixes; and 2) highlighting that each particular spatio-temporal fix is a historically and geographically specific, strategically selective TPSN combination.” [Krisztina Varró. After resurgent regions, resurgent cities?: Contesting state geographies in Hungary and England. Radboud University Nijmegen. Nijmegen, the Netherlands. 2010. Pages 39-40.]

“Nowhere has the challenge for conceptualising ever more complex spatial configurations been more starkly exemplified than in Jessop et al.’s … Territory-Place-Scale-Network (TPSN) framework. Exasperated at the constant ontological privileging of single dimensions of sociospatial relations (territory or place or scale or network) – in particular, that following a given ‘spatial turn’ this single dimension is assumed to possess some exclusive explanatory power and predictive value – the TPSN framework signalled Jessop et al.’s attempt to analyse how the different dimensions of sociospatial relations (territory and/or place and/or scale and/or network) fuse in different ways, at different times, and in different contexts to secure the overall coherence of capitalist, and other, social formations. Founded on the authors belief that new conceptual frameworks are required to theorize the inherently polymorphic and multidimensional character of sociospatial relations, the TPSN framework is being regarded as a watershed moment for theorising sociospatial relations and a significant forward step conceptually.” [John Harrison and Anna Growe, “When regions collide: in what sense a new ‘regional problem’?” Environment and Planning A. Volume 46, number 10, 2014. Pages 2332-2352.]

“[Bob] Jessop, [Neil] Brenner and [Martin] Jones have termed their attempt to theorise polymorphy in sociospatial relations as the TPSN framework (territory-place-scale-network). Their objective is to promote investigations of how sociospatial relations interact in a particular spatiotemporal context under contemporary capitalism. In addition they seek to discuss how sociospatial relations reproduce and reorganise the geographies of accumulation, state power and hegemony. They also argue that their TPSN approach has significant implications in analysing and periodising the historical geographies of capitalist development. Jessop, Brenner and Jones allude to the idea that the TPSN combinations are more suited to a postnational, unevenly developing global economy and for the analysis of both historical and contemporary transformations of sociospatial relations ….” [Laura Leppänen. Changing statehood: The spatial transformation of the Finnish state. University of Turku. Turku, Finland. July, 2011. Page 30.]

“In their article ‘Theorizing sociospatial relations,’ [Bob] Jessop, [Neil] Brenner and [Martin] Jones … argue in favour of a polymorphous, strategic-relational analysis of sociospatial processes instead of one-dimensionalism. This polymorphy – i.e. the organisation of sociospatial relations in multiple forms – recognises the most important (which however are not the only ones) spatial dimensions of social relations, which are: territory (T), place (P), scale (S) and networks (N), upon which the authors build the TPSN framework.” [Daniela Coimbra Świątek. Governance in new European regions: the case of Centrope. Vienna University of Economics and Business. Vienna, Austria. November. 2011. Page 91.]

“This chapter has addressed the role of realist assumptions and arguments in the regulation approach and describes some of its implications for critical realism more generally. It has argued that the RA’s [regulation approach’s] import is as much methodological as substantive and that its research potential depends critically on how fully and explicitly the core methodological presuppositions are integrated into future studies …. Thus I identified four distinctive features of the RA. It works with a realist ontology and epistemology; adopts the method of ‘articulation’ in theory construction; operates within the general Marxist tradition of historical materialism with its interest in the political economy of capitalism and the anatomy of bourgeois society; and is especially concerned with the changing economic and extra-economic forms and mechanisms (institutions, networks, procedures, modes of calculation, and norms) in and through which the expanded reproduction of capital as a social relation is secured.” [Bob Jessop, “Capitalism, the regulation approach, and critical realism.” Critical Realism and Marxism. Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood, and John Michael Roberts, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Page 109.]

“Early studies decomposed the capital relation into a series of structural forms, each of which has its own characteristic contradictions and dilemmas, requiring specific forms of regulation. These are conventionally described as the wage relation (individual and social wage, wage form, lifestyle); the enterprise form and competition (internal organisation, source of profits, forms of competition, ties among enterprises and/or banks); money and credit (form and emission, banking and credit systems, allocation of capital to production, national currencies and world monies, and monetary regimes); the state (institutionalised compromise between capital and labour, forms of state intervention); and international regimes (trade, investment, monetary, and political arrangements that link national economies, nation states, and world system).” [Bob Jessop, “Revisiting the regulation approach: Critical reflections on the contradictions, dilemmas, fixes and crisis dynamics of growth regimes.” Capital & Class. Volume 37, number 1, February 2013. Pages 5-24.]

“The subject of this study is what during the recent ten years has been known as the Regulation Approach; a theoretical strand belonging to the radical heterodox traditions of economics (as opposed to neoclassical economic orthodoxy). This strand appeared in the middle 1970s when some French researchers … produced a series of studies of the capitalist mode of production drawing on a set of identical concepts, the most famous of which are those of the ‘regime of accumulation’ and the ‘mode of regulation.’ The ‘regime of accumulation’ is defined as the form of distribution of surplus between capital and labour required each period in order to coordinate the dynamics of production with social demand. It denotes the set of essential economic conditions for the operation of the productive system, including technology, the organisation of the labour process and the relations between the departments of production. The ‘mode of regulation’ designates the necessary institutional forms and social compromises for the reproduction of the regime of accumulation.” [Stavros Mavroudeas. Regulation Approach: A Critical Appraisal. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Birkbeck College, University of London. 1990. Page 6.]

“I now suggest how form-analysis and institutionalism can be combined in a logical-historical approach to produce a more powerful account of variegated capitalism as an alternative theoretical object to the understanding of capitalism posited in the CC [comparative capitalisms] literature. This synthesis can be justified by noting that (1) specific social forms can be studied as conflictual social relations …, and (2) that profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation is an instituted process …. More precisely, they can be examined in terms of how the changing institutional matrix through which social forms are instantiated is a product of past social conflicts and past institutional developments, and, as such, entails a selective terrain with specific structural and strategic biases favourable to some social forces rather than others …. This also holds for the capital relation.” [Bob Jessop, “Capitalist diversity and variety: Variegation, the world market, compossibility and ecological dominance.” Capital & Class. Volume 38, number 1, 2014. Pages 45-58.]

“Reluctant to accept the confines of any one of these categories, the author settled on a critical realist-interpretivist label, as well as tapping into a range of social theories and concepts.…

“Turning briefly to a critical realist-interpretivist ‘fit’ with ‘thinking space’, such an outlook understands social reality as stratified layers as well as the sum of symbolic meanings. This resonates with ideas about multi-level state space and imaginaries, although ‘stratified layers’ was initially misunderstood as suggesting top-down hierarchical or ordered layers. According to Andrew Sayer …, critical realists believe ‘there is a world existing independently from our knowledge of it’ and ‘independence of objects from knowledge immediately undermines any complacent assumptions about the relation between them.’”

[Julie (Jules) Channer. Forms, Fields and Forces: an exploration of state governance relating to the creative industries in South West England. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Exeter. Exeter, England. March, 2013. Page 31.]

“[Margaret S.] Archer’s … analytical history approach provides the framework for the method. This approach acknowledges the complex contextual interplay between structure and agency. It recognises the power of historic narrative to represent the nuance of causality and emergence within context, while avoiding over-simplified generalisations.…

“Following [Roy] Bhaskar …, the analytical histories described here attempt to explain three intermeshed levels of reality. First, the empirical level, that is, the experiences reported by the dyadic partners, each having their own perceptions. Second, the actual level: this contains all the events that happen in the empirical level. The partners will only have partial knowledge of these events and how they influence their relationship. Nevertheless, intricate patterns of events will be in play. Third, the real level: this contains the mechanisms that cause the events in the actual level ….”

[Rosie Boxer, Lew Perren, and Aidan Berry, “SME managing director and nonexecutive director trust relations: The dynamic interplay between structure and agency.” International Small Business Journal. Volume 34, number 3, 2016. Pages 369-386.]

“This project was a proof of concept: the beginning of a much longer journey. The main challenge theoretically has been in the paradigmatic worldview shift that is required in moving from a traditional social science approach to one informed by complexity thinking. The concomitant practical challenge how to measure and evaluate a wider set of student outcomes. Philosophically this shift requires a participatory paradigm which includes a critical realist epistemology, a theory of learning as becoming – rather than either acquisition or participation, and an approach to society which facilitates profound diversity, respecting community and tradition within a common framework.” [Ruth Deakin Crick, Steven Barr, Howard Green, and David Pedder, “Evaluating the Wider Outcomes of Schools: Complex Systems Modelling for Leadership Decisioning.” Educational Management Administration & Leadership. OnlineFirst edition. June, 2016. Pages 1-25.]

“The adaptation and development after persecution and trauma (ADAPT) model … posits that trauma endured by refugees has impacts on five key psychosocial domains or ‘adaptive systems’ ….

“… The ontological position underpinning this research was critical realism …: Participants’ accounts of their experiences were taken as reality, but were considered in terms of pertinent historical, political, and cultural contexts in which they operated ….”

[Lucy S. McGregor, Glenn A. Melvin, and Louise K. Newman, “An exploration of the adaptation and development after persecution and trauma ADAPT model with resettled refugee adolescents in Australia A qualitative study.” Transcultural Psychiatry. Volume 53, number 3, 2016. Pages 247-367.]

“The ADAPT model postulates that stable societies are grounded on ˘ve core psychosocial pillars that are fundamentally disrupted by mass conflict. These core pillars are: (1) Safety/Security; (2) Bonds/Networks; (3) Justice; (4) Roles and Identities; and (5) Existential Meaning. Repair of these pillars is considered essential to restoring communal mental health and psychosocial recovery.…

“… Most importantly, the ADAPT model encourages policymakers and planners to recognise the interaction between past conflict and ongoing social challenges that shape the process of adaptation (individual and collective). It is only within that broader eco/social and historical matrix that the sequential steps in the trajectories, leading from conflict to stress related mental disorder, can be understood in a comprehensive manner.”

[Derrick Silove, “The ADAPT model: a conceptual framework for mental health and psychosocial programming in post conflict settings.” Intervention. Volume 11, number 3, 2013. Pages 237-248.]

“Following the imperatives presented by a critical realist perspective …, namely that individuals’ experiences are affected by both the empirical (that which individuals personally experience) and the actual (that which influences experience, but is not directly experienced by individuals), this research is ethnographic in nature.…

“… socio-cultural accounts of learning, such as Communities of Practice theory, do not locate responsibility for learning within the individual learner, but distribute it across the community. Such accounts instead allow for an understanding of learning which is built on prior knowledge and experience through interactions with other members of the community – tutors and peers. It is this kind of understanding of learning which is compatible with the widening participation agenda and, given the views expressed by staff and students above, ought to be compatible with teaching and learning at postgraduate level.”

[Victoria L. O’Donnell, Jane Tobbell, Rebecca Lawthom, and Maria Zammit, “Transition to postgraduate study: Practice, participation and the widening participation agenda.” Active Learning in Higher Education. Volume 10, number 1, 2009. Pages 26-40.]

“The interdisciplinary research team shared a critical realist epistemological position.…

“The psychosocial determinants of protective influenza behaviours: ‘I guess it was all a risk benefit thing’ ….”

[Paul Flowers, Mark Davis, Davina Lohm, Emily Waller, and Niamh Stephenson, “Understanding pandemic influenza behaviour: An exploratory biopsychosocial study.” Journal of Health Psychology. June, 2014. Pages 1-11.]

“Critical realists … introduce notions of objectivity and truth via the idea of the internal critique, arguing that first-order activities can never be self-justifying …. The use of quantitative methods may allow us to generalise and, therefore, provide descriptions of structures in social life, but only if they can avoid essentialism, reconnect agency with structure, incorporate a notion of ontological and epistemological emergence, and do not lose explanatory power by conflating intensionality with extensionality. If they are not able to do this, then their use gives us incomplete and misleading accounts of social life that, given the close dialectical relationship between description and practice, act to reify practice and treat first-order activities concerning the way the world could and should be organised as self-justifying.” [David Scott, “Critical Realism and Empirical Research Methods in Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education. Volume 39, number 4, 2005. Pages 633-646.]

“… guided by recent advances in the life and ecological sciences, discussion centers on how an ecologically embedded sociology can remain critical and non-foundationalistic (in terms of its knowledge claims) while leaving space for a causally efficacious biophysical realm.…

“What [Roy] Bhaskar has done for us is, if you will, the philosophical heavy lifting. He gives us a logically coherent argument for the independent existence of a material reality that is constituted of non-linear causal forces that are directed both upwards and downwards. In doing this, he shows us that we can have an ecologically embedded sociology without falling into the thralls of biophysical reductionism.”

[Michael S. Carolan, “Realism without Reductionism: Toward an Ecologically Embedded Sociology.” Human Ecology Review. Volume 12, number 1, 2005. Pages 1-20.]

“A critical realist ethnography will also be evaluative of social action and aim to better understand human capabilities, vulnerabilities and values. People’s involvement and response to different forms of transgression are not reducible to the search for excitement, engaging in ‘edgework,’ the expression of resistance, or even the joy of transgression. We need to understand more about the ethical dimensions of social life and the complex mix of values, aspirations and concerns of those we study, including guilt, shame and responsibility, for example. Some account also needs to be taken of public opinion and social norms to understand why different forms of crime and deviance matter to people ….

“… I would suggest that if we are to construct some form of cultural realism then we have to think about the meaning of culture in deeper and broader terms. By ‘deeper’ is meant forms of social investigation that examine the underlying, often hidden but essential structures, on which social relations and interaction rest. This involves a detailed investigation of values, ethical concerns and emotions.”

[Roger Matthews, “Cultural Realism?” Crime Media Culture. Volume 10, number 3, 2014. Pages 203-214.]

“In short, critical realism maintains: (1) a stratified representation … of social reality; (2) a stratified temporization of social reality (the actual elaboration can represent a conditioning in the future); (3) the theory of emergence as pars construens of every relationship (the social elaboration is not equal to the sum of its parts). The set of logics generating social reality (not only from a voluntary and reifying point of view) can be also be explained through the concourse of the specific properties of human actions, as they are aspects that re-assign to a person the capacity to elaborate that part of reality that connotes social ontology.” [Luca Martignani, “The Place of Construction in Sociological Realism.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. February, 2016. Pages 1-20.]

“What the social sciences are in need of, according to these authors, is nothing less than a ‘re-naturalization’ of society, where an ecological interpretation of social life should be included in the social analysis ….

“… environmental realism advocates a re-naturalization of society in the sense that society’s ecological basis needs to be taken into consideration by sociology – that is, biophysical aspects of reality should be included in sociology’s analysis of society.…

“I do not give a detailed description of critical realism, nor describe all important aspects of it. Instead I only use that part which is of relevance to this article’s topic, namely that reality is stratified and that disciplines have evolved with regard to specific levels ….

“As this article has shown, there is a need to discuss how sociology should deal with non-social levels of reality.”

[Rolf Lidskog, “The Re-Naturalization of Society? Environmental Challenges for Sociology: A Challenge for Sociology.” Current Sociology. Volume 49, number 1, January 2001. Pages 113-136.]

“The realist account of scientific laws is compatible with the marxian notion of laws as tendencies. The law of value does not refer to an empirical regularity, nor a generalisation, nor a trend, but a mechanism which operates in virtue of the competitive nature of capitalist commodity production. The effects produced by it at the empirical level depend upon contingently related conditions, including those produced by other mechanisms which are sometimes called ‘counteracting tendencies.’ In the case of many of the tendencies of marxist theory, surplus empirIcal information has to be gained in order to know how the mechanism itself is operating.” [Andrew Sayer, “Abstraction: A Realist Interpretation.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 28, summer 1981. Pages 6-15.]

“Realism breaks with an assumption common to both sides of the old idiographic—nomothetic debate—the Humean association of laws and causation with regularities among events. Enduring, precise regularities need only occur in closed systems not available to social sciences. Instead, realism roots theory and explanation in the discovery of necessity. Thus history does not elude theory because of any lack of regularities in what it studies. Theory can grasp unique as well as repeated events, by demonstrating necessity in the world. Theory is no longer associated with generality in the sense of repeated series of events but with determining the nature of things or structures, discovering which characteristics are necessary consequences of their being those kinds of objects.” [Andrew Sayer, “The ‘new’ regional geography and problems of narrative.” Environment and Planning D. Volume 7, 1999. Pages 253-276.]

“My understanding of phenomena draws on a critical realist’s orientation to social science. Critical realists adhere to the belief that a real world exists independently of human perception, but that individual experience mediates one’s knowledge of reality ….

“… I will report here … on the development of the general model of organizational values, which, based on a retroductive analysis, takes note of patterns across organizational values research and discourse from a variety of disciplines.…

“… I sought to elucidate a general model of organizational values, based on values discourse in literature, and in keeping with the strengths of the method chosen at this phase of study. The model maximizes generality by incorporating broad patterns and commonalities across individual perceptions of the values and organizational values phenomena.”

[Robin Alison Mueller, “A general model of organizational values in educational administration.” Educational Management Administration & Leadership. Volume 42, number 5, 2014. Pages 640-656.]

“While [Louis] Althusser’s theory of science has been immensely refined and developed in the work of Roy Bhaskar …, the structure of the Althusserian concept of ‘problematic’ remains close to Bhaskar’s idea of the scientific ‘production of ideas from ideas’ …—both [Robert] Resch and [Andrew] Collier make this point …. Secondly, the Althusserian distinction between the knowledge-object and the real object is similar to Bhaskar’s distinction between, respectively, the transitive and the intransitive objects of science. There are two major differences between Althusser and Bhaskar. Firstly, Bhaskar maintains—and I support this conclusion—that within a realist ontology, the cycle of knowledge-generation must improve scientific knowledge of the intransitive object. This resolves the tension in the Althusserian conceptual universe between a theory of historical epistemology and Althusser’s commitment to realist materialism. Secondly, Bhaskar develops a non-metaphysical materialist dialectics—Althusser is an anti-dialectician—that, while highly critical of both Hegel and Marx, represents a major contribution to historical materialism …. Bhaskar’s dialectics revolves upon ‘transformative negations,’ that is, determinate ontological negations, and emphasises the irreducibility of dialectical contradictions to logical contradictions …. Broadly speaking, Bhaskar designates processes characterised by the unity (not the identity) of opposite determinations, in the form of enabling constraints on action that generate ‘double-bind’ situations, as ‘dialectical,’ and this is the sense of the word hereafter in this work ….” [Geoff Boucher. The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Lacau & Mouffe, Butler & Žižek. Open Access/Creative Commons. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: re.press. 2008. Page 14.]

“Applying critical realism in entrepreneurship research …

“This section provides examples to illustrate the proposition that research drawing on a CR perspective is capable of delivering more informed explanations of entrepreneurial activity. It reflects repeated calls to move beyond conceptual integration and attempt to replicate it in concrete, empirical research …. The aim is to connect the methodological debate to concrete research practices, noting both the limitations and potential of the paradigm.”

[Richard Blundel, “Critical realism: a suitable vehicle for entrepreneurship research?” Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Entrepreneurship. Helle Neergaard and John Parm Ulhøi, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2007. Pages 63-64.]

“Based on a structural and materialist interpretation of Marx, this paper proposes an alternative approach that theorizes organizational learning as an outcome of contradictory processes in which the productive forces are progressively socialized, albeit unevenly. This structural-Marxist theory of organizational learning offers a more fruitful account of learning in technologically advanced, competitive sectors such as the manufacturing and process industries. Increasingly, it also applies to private and public service provision.…

“… [The] effects [of tendencies] may or may not be salient in any specific organization. As I see it, these tendencies reflect the ‘causal power’ of socialization, where the concept of causal power is one I take from critical realism … as the ‘philosophical underlabourer’ to Marxism ….”

[Jonas A. Ingvaldsen, “Organizational Learning: Bringing the Forces of Production Back In.” Organization Studies. Volume 36, number 4, 2015. Pages 423-444.]

“Building on a critical realist perspective, we develop an analytical framework of organizational closure and apply it to an extreme case, an organization with an inclusive growth model that has sustained event regularities for more than two decades.…

“… In our investigations, we engage a critical realist perspective of closure that focuses on the coupling between structures, social mechanisms and outcomes to provide an explanation of how organizational closure is possible and how this relates to explicit and measurable dimensions of scaling.…

“… A hallmark of critical realism is the ontological commitment that differentiates reality into three dimensions. The empirical dimension refers to empirically observable events.… The link between mechanisms and outcomes represents the second dimension of the critical realist ontology the actual dimension. Mechanisms are enabled by structural configutations and thus by the powers of objects and their structural relations with each other. This is the third dimension, the real dimension.”

[Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair, “Organizational Mechanisms of Inclusive Growth: A Critical Realist Perspective on Scaling.” Working Paper (WP-840). IESE Business School, University of Navarra. Pamplona, Spain. January, 2010. Pages 1-24.]

“… I propose that a critical realist design science philosophy provides an appropriate basis for attempting to develop a more integrated and coherent body of theory and research pertaining to OI [organizational identity] and OID [organizational identitifation], one that draws variously on the functionalist, psychodynamic, social constructionist and postmodern perspectives, with a view to generating insights that are greater than the sum of the constituent parts. Predicated on complementary, or in some cases, seemingly conflicting ontological assumptions, all four perspectives are, at one and the same time, both useful and constraining.” [Gerard P. Hodgkinson, “Organizational identity and organizational identification: A critical realist design science perspective.” Group & Organization Management. Volume 38, number 1, 2013. Pages 145-157.]

“The question … becomes how structures, generative mechanisms and emergent properties are identified. It is difficult for mechanisms such as relations of class to manifest themselves in terms of the regularities sought by neo-positivist researchers. In part this is a consequence of the fact that social phenomena exist in open systems where experimental closure is almost impossible to obtain. The techniques of retroduction and abduction offer a way of addressing this methodological problem.” [Paul Higgs, Ian Rees Jones, and Graham Scambler, “Class as variable, class as generative mechanism: The importance of critical realism for the sociology of health inequalities.” Making Realism Work: Realist Social Theory and Empirical Research. Bob Carter and Caroline New, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Pages 91-110.]

“A critical realist framework of emergence is used to demonstrate the value of a stratified, non-reductionist approach to the geography of religion.…

“… Critical realism is used to highlight the stratified and emergent nature of the geography of religion and is presented as an additional and insightful approach to understanding religious adherence in ways that complement and strengthen other ongoing theoretical approaches in social practice, hermeneutics and new cultural geography.”

[Michael P. Ferber and Trevor M. Harris, “Critical Realism and Emergence in a Scaled Geography of Religion.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 3, 2013. Pages 183-201.]

“We propose that a critical realist concept of emergence is a valuable framework for addressing the scaled complexity of adherence and fidelity in Geography of Religion (GOR) and, indeed, in geography as a whole. Geographers of religion would certainly benefit from the ongoing dialogue on scale outlined above, not least because there has been little recognition in GOR regarding what scale is, or means, to religionists and religious studies …. This is not to suggest that all geographers of religion are unaware of the conversations that have taken place about scale …. Rather, it appears as though geographers of religion, as with many other scholars in the social sciences and humanities, have been content to allow these discussions to transpire in other communities and predominantly in human geography and ecology.” [Michael P. Ferber and Trevor M. Harris, “Resurrecting Scale in an Emergent Geography of Religion.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. Volume 1, number 12, September 2011. Pages 1-8.]

“Emergent powers and mechanisms exist in the denominational structures that are not possible in the present structure of the Independent church. Powers and mechanisms exist in local churches, including independent churches even though they do not have a strictly defined hierarchical structure, that have an impact at national and international scales. Yet, without the emergent powers of a church hierarchy this impact is arguably different. Thus while all three churches supported global outreach, the mechanisms and the emergent powers arising from these three church initiatives differed as the emergent powers of the church hierarchy came into play.” [Michael P. Ferber. A Leap of Faith: Scale, Critical Realism and Emergence in the Geography of Religion. Ph.D. dissertation. College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University. Morgantown, West Virginia. 2010. Page 113.]

“The critical realist explanation of the diffusion of international norms of sexual non-discrimination advanced in this chapter rests on an ontology of emergentism, treating structure and agency as interdependent but, at the same time, relatively autonomous entities, each possessing distinct emergent properties. It also rests squarely on a notion of time as a variable linking structure and agency. From a critical realist perspective, we can see that particular state actions are the outcome or result of a historical sequence of reciprocal structure–agency interaction involving changes in both international and domestic conditions.” [Lynn Savery, “On the ontology of international norm diffusion.” Contributions to Social Ontology. Clive Lawson, John Latsis, and Nuno Martins, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Kindle edition.]

“To guide our analysis, we have adopted a version of the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework …. In particular, the politicized IAD framework facilitates a structured and consistent approach to analyzing the ‘many faces of comanagement’ …, while advocating for a range of analytical methods designed to provide an integrated and critical understanding of the normative concepts associated with comanagement theory.…

“The research is situated within a critical realist paradigm ([Roy] Bhaskar …). Broadly speaking, critical realism combines a realist ontology with an interpretivist epistemology …. From this perspective, although a world, both physical and social, exists independently of the minds of humans, knowledge of this reality ‘is filtered through language and concepts that are relative and changeable in time and space’ …. Furthermore, reality has ontological depth ….

[Luke Whaley and Edward K. Weatherhead, “Using the politicized institutional analysis and development framework to analyze (adaptive) comanagement: farming and water resources in England.” Ecology and Society. Volume 20, issue 3, article 43, 2015. Online publication. No pagination.]

“Proponents of critical realism and interactivism are clear on the obstacles that have for so long prevented the development of an adequate account of emergence.… By adopting a process perspective it becomes possible to see how relations can be ontologically committing and how organising relational structure can be more than mere stage setting, it can in fact be the locus of causal power. According to the process theory emergence is a ubiquitous feature of the world. Moreover, for critical realists and interactivists alike a focus on organisation is crucial to an attempt to understand any level or sphere of reality. For both the interactivist and critical realist accounts of emergence the category of organising relational structure or constitutive organisation is of central importance and must be recognised as a higher level feature.” [Stephen Pratten, “Critical Realism and the Process Account of Emergence.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 43, number 3, 2013. Pages 251-279.]

“For business marketing, critical realism opens the door for building open-system theories of business markets that transcend context-dependent observations without falling back into the pitfalls of general theories.… Critical realists aim to gain a system-level understanding, by studying the dynamics of the business relationship and accounting for context factors that condition its emergence. So the impact of transaction costs might be shaped by context factors, e.g. supplier portfolios, or forces that have remained dormant, for example the impact of learning on transaction costs between a buyer and a seller over time.” [Michael Ehret, “Emergence of business markets – A critical realist foundation.” Industrial Marketing Management. Volume 42, issue 3, April 2013. Pages 316-323.]

“Constellationality is central to understanding questions of ethics in dialectical critical realism. The constellation complexly unites in this instance ethical demands and geo-historical developments, without reducing the issue one way or the other. The idea, rather, is that what appear to be separate categories are co-present and operate conjunctively in the world, without being reducible to or separable from each other.…

“The meta-ethical level is there in human being, but in a world of open historical totality subject to detotalization, alienation and heteronomy we need not expect it to be acted upon, except to the extent that people do in fact act upon it.”

[Alan Norrie, “Debate Hegel and Bhaskar.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 12, issue 3, January 2013. Pages 359-376.]

“The eudaimonistic ethics derived by [Sean] Sayers from the developmental character of human nature is at once historical and non-arbitrary. Historicity is conceptualised in terms of an orthodox Marxism which posits the contradiction between forces and relations of production as the mechanism of human development. Cultures are to be judged in terms, not of a metaphysical, transhistorical conception of human flourishing, but of what their particular mode of production allows them to actualise at a given point in time. For Sayers, this is an historical, rather than arbitrary relativism. The distinction between historical and arbitrary rests on the fact that there are real grounds for judging, namely the human essence and the potential for actualisation of human powers given by the character of a mode of production.” [Kathryn Dean, “Towards a Eudaimonistic Ethics.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 54-55.]

“We are all familiar with the muscle-bound, hammer-wielding workers of socialist propaganda, radiating cleanliness, honesty and all the other puritan virtues. But [Karl] Marx’s philosophy should not be confused with such images. It is wrong, I think, to interpret his philosophy and its producer ethic simply as a sort of socialist version of the Protestant work ethic …. On the contrary, the mindless Hero of Labour, the socialist Superman of the propaganda posters, is a crude and debased expression of the Marxist idea no more adequate as a moral ideal than his American comic-book counterpart.

“The idea of socialist morality which such propaganda represents is simply the direct opposite of [C. Wright] Mills’ philosophy, and equally one-sided. In place of Mills’ exclusive reverence for mental activity, it implies an exclusive reverence for manual labour. Marx’s idea is quite different …: it is the idea of the all-round and universal development of all sides of our nature. And this implies both an unalienated and attractive work life, and also sufficient leisure to consume the products of labour and to develop ourselves in other ways. The necessary condition for such a life is, as we have seen, the elimination of the division of labour as we now have it.”

[Sean Sayers. Marxism and Human Nature. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1998. Page 42.]

“The cover of Sean Sayers’s new study [Marxism and Human Nature] displays a black-and-white photograph of Karl Marx, the bushy dark patch of his mouth in arresting contrast with the encircling white halo of beard and hair. The book proposes an argument as bold, graphic and firmly delineated as its cover, though with something of the same lack of tint and nuance.

“For such a full-bloodedly Hegelian Marxist as Sean Sayers, the concept of human nature poses something of a dilemma. On the one hand, his Hegelian humanism spurs him to oppose those anti-humanist leftists who reject the idea of human nature completely; on the other hand, his Hegelian historicism results in a notion of human nature so thoroughly historicized that it is hard to know quite how it can be spoken of as a ‘nature’ at all.”

[Terry Eagleton, “Self-Realization, Ethics, and Socialism.” New Left Review. Series I, number 237, September–October 1999. Pages 150-161.]

“This paper argues that most … attempts at a discourse analysis of development were characterized by serious flaws related to scepticism, notably problems of performative contradiction and relativism. Consequently, the paper argues for an alternative approach in the form of a development ethics drawing on aspects of deconstructionist and critical realist thought.…

“… Clearly, the argumentation here represents only a beginning to the emergence of a development ethics informed by deconstruction and critical realism. However, it does indicate that such an enterprise seems viable and that it can make a contribution to development of a better, if not a eudaimonic, global society.”

[Trevor William Parfitt, “Post-Development and its Discontents.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 4, October 2011. Pages 442-464.]

“This paper examines ‘generalization’ within the broader context of explanation in the human sciences. Drawing upon the ontological, epistemological, and methodological pluralism of critical realism, it advocates realism as both a moral stance and as a meta-theoretical framework that offers an inclusive alternative to the unreflective positivism and the reductionist social constructionism that tend to polarize contemporary theoretical discourses in the human sciences.…

“Engaging in research … implicates the researcher and the research community in a set of moral relationships with the subjects or phenomena studied and with those to whom any knowledge claims are generalized, whether the purpose of the generalization is understanding, theory development, or application.”

[T. L. Shapiro, “Generalizing as Morally Implicative Practice: A Critical Realist Approach.” Communication Methods and Measures. Volume 1, issue 3, September 2007. Pages 191-206.]

“In this article, I examine this question of whether HRM [human resource management] can ever be ethical by exploring the notion of situated moral agency, the key underpinning of any form of ethical action.… Specifically, I consider the extent to which moral agency is possible in an environment where the market logics of twenty-first contemporary capitalism predominate …, given the potential for capitalism to ‘destroy’ the moral foundations of social interaction ….

“Within a critical realist ontological framework, agency and structure are distinct, ‘located within and reproducing or transforming the network of social relations we call society’ ….”

[Tracy Wilcox, “Human Resource Management in a Compartmentalized World: Whither Moral Agency?” Journal of Business Ethics. Volume 111, number 1, November 2012. Pages 85-96.]

“Moral utilitarianism is emotionally thin and unable to take cognizance of such moral categories as innocence that strongly resonate emotionally with most people. We saw the limits of—and, indeed, the problem with—moral utilitarianism in relation to the torture debate.

“The torture debate was instructive …. Although the religious publications argued against torture on grounds that were not religious, a fuller accounting against torture requires something more. It requires some account of who or what persons are that grants even to the worst of them a sanctity not to be desecrated by acts of torture. What is required is a moral ontology.

“Any kind of moral ontology has certainly been lacking even in the social sciences, where Margaret Archer and Christian Smith, coming from a critical realist perspective, have been doing their best to call for it. In the public sphere, as we observed, a moral ontology was precisely what was provided in one way or another by the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations that arose in opposition to torture. It remains for secular liberalism to provide something comparable.

“Without some comparable moral ontology, secular morality loses its emotional mooring, its attachment to those moral emotions that activate us to stand up for moral principle.”

[Douglas V. Porpora, Alexander Nlkolaev, Julia Hagemann May, and Alexander Jenkins. Post-Ethical Society: The Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 2013. Pages 200-201.]

“Post-Ethical Society asks whether religion is necessary for the public discussion of morality. Secularism, it is argued, has produced in the United States a religiously naked public square, and this in turn may have led to a morally naked public square. As a consequence, public discourse is morally impoverished, contributing to the moral failures of the Iraq war and Abu Ghraib.

“It would be unsupportable to argue that one cannot be moral without religion, and reflection on the Iraq war quickly brings to mind instances where religious reasoning has led to immoral actions. Since religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for moral actions, why even mention it?

“The argument is that, regardless of what may be philosophically defensible, in practice secular public discourse is largely devoid of moral content.”

[Jonny Scaramanga, “Post-Ethical Society: The Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 3, 2016. Pages 322-326.]

“Over the last 30 years or so critical realism has advanced its project of elaborating an ontology that can rival the empiricist ontology implicit in both positivist and idealist traditions. The ontology resulting from this collective effort should be capable of furnishing science, whether natural or social, with an explicit philosophical foundation. As early as in his first work [Roy] Bhaskar … employed the Lockean expression ‘under-labour’ to refer to the supporting role played by philosophy (particularly ontology) in scientific development.…

“The present [article] … seeks to underline the obvious mutual benefits that might accrue if the insights of critical realism could be combined with those put forward by [Georg] Lukács. One of these benefits relates exactly to the domain of ethics.”

[Mário Duayer and João Medeiros, “‘Under-Labouring’ for Ethics: Lukács Critical Ontology.” Contributions to Social Ontology. Clive Lawson, John Spiro Latsis, and Nuno Martins, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Pages 102-123.]

“Although it is not our intention to establish at each time a parallel between Lukács’ formulations and those of critical realism, it is worth calling attention to the fact that the dialectical relation between singular, particular and universal in its connection with the process of knowledge, as worked out by Lukács, bears a similarity with the dialectical relation between the empirical, the actual and the real domains in its connection to science, as described in the ontology of critical realism.” [Mário Duayer and João Medeiros, “Lukács’ Critical Ontology and Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 2, August 2005. Pages 395-425.]

“… he [Roy Bhaskar] has now moved on to a self-proclaimed new stage of development: transcendental dialectical critical realism (TDCR) or ‘meta-reality.’ …

“It is a distinctive feature of Roy Bhaskar’s turn to religious categories that … he adopts the productive category of love in order to establish an ethics of conviction within a reflective renunciative framework.… Bhaskar is not proposing a theo-ontology; rather what concerns him are the conditions of possibility of right-action, in which right-action is inseparable from a commitment to emancipation all the way down to the ultimatum and the beginning of the universe.”

[John Roberts, “The ethics of conviction: Marxism, ontology and religion.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 121, September/October 2003. Pages 36-47.]

“To what extent has critical realism opened up the discourse of economic thought for the possibility of communitarian anarchist economic ideas? As a consequence of the open nature of reality, there is the possibility of differing understandings of reality: ‘the different schools of thought within non-orthodox economics can be understood in terms of their different understandings of the nature of an open-system reality. Thus, for example, neo-Austrians focus on the individual within that open system, and Marxists on class.’ There is ample intellectual space here also for communitarian anarchist economic ideas, whatever they may be. Reality is ‘open.’ The world-view is also ‘open.’

“It is in this way that [Tony] Lawson can contribute a fascinating essay, in the context of feminist economics, which is more philosophical than economic in its focus. It is a philosophical approach which resonates sympathetically with the methodological approach of this study and, incidentally, with [Bob] Jessop’s ‘strategic-relational’ perception of the state. Lawson engages directly with ‘the possibility of human emancipation’ (within discussion of ‘the feminist project of emancipation’) and in understanding human nature he leans upon the reciprocity between individual agency and social structure which is embedded in critical realist philosophy: ‘An individual's actions, or things that happen to her or him, are comprehensible in terms of the individual’s socially conditioned capacities, powers, liabilities, and dispositions. The agency of each individual is thus conditioned by the relationships in which he or she stands or has stood, just as these relations, as with social structure in general, are in turn dependent upon the sum total of human doings.’”

[Rob Knowles. Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840-1914. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 62-63.]

“Robert Knowles’s Political Economy from Below is both an excellent scholarly study and an important contribution to contemporary political debates. The book provides an exhaustive review of the economic doctrines of classical anarchism. Its publication is timely, as the world’s fastest growing international political movement – the anti-globalization movement – draws inspiration from many of the principles advocated by the early anarchist theorists; and because many of the new digitally-enabled social movements are groping for a commons-based (and therefore non-state based) political strategy. The essential difference is that while the anarchists actively fought the emerging nation-state, contemporary forces seem inclined to bypass what they may consider an already weakening institution, and instead focus on the emergent powers of world governance. The vastmajority of our activist contemporaries may reject the traditional anarchist and socialist labels, but the similarities between those movements and modern-day anti-globalism nevertheless justify a renewed study of the historical tradition.” [Michel Bauwens, “Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840-1914.” Review of Political Economy. Review article. Volume 21, number 2, April 2008. Pages 336-337.]

“The stream of anarchism which sees the community and individual as necessarily interdependent—i.e. ‘communitarian’ anarchism—is identified as the area of study, individualist anarchism of the Josiah Warren type being declared of marginal interest only.… The work of the ‘critical realism’ school of Tony Lawson and others, and the work of Karl Polanyi, are emphasised as a means of showing respectively the open nature of an economy within which many agents and intentionalities are active and the social embeddedness of economic ideas. In other words ‘the state’ and ‘the economy’ are contingent social constructions and alternative arrangements are possible.” [John Quail, “Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840-1914.” Anarchist Studies. Review article. Volume 15, number 2, autumn–winter 2007. Pages 179-181.]

“The conception I defend, then, is of a social reality that is mind-dependent but not mind determined; there is always a practical dimension. A feature of this reality is a prevalence of structurally organised social totalities and in particular communities. Social reality is in large part at least structured by interlocking, internally related, often spontaneously emergent collective practices, carrying, in the sense of manifesting, (often contested) rights and obligations inter-relating the human beings who undertake these practices as positioned components of communities, of which the positions and practices in turn are properties. As such this social reality is in a sense both given to individual human beings at the moment each comes to act, as a (typically unacknowledged) condition of their individual (positioned) practices, and also reproduced and/or transformed as a (typically unintended) result of these individual practices taken in total..” [Tony Lawson, “Comparing Conceptions of Social Ontology: Emergent Social Entities and/or Institutional Facts?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 4, 2016. Pages 359-399.]

“The broad thesis I defend … is that reality everywhere, from quantum fields to the social domain, consists of emergent totalities formed as organisations of pre-existing elements, with such emergent totalities themselves in turn becoming very often organised as components of higher level totalities ….

“In the process whereby pre-existing elements come to be organised as components of totalities the various sorts of elements involved have somehow to bind together. This may happen through processes of chemical bonding, electrical attraction, collision, etc., and in the cases of artefacts through the use of glue, nails, cement, and so on.”

[Tony Lawson, “Ontology and Social Relations: Reply to Doug Porpora and to Colin Wight.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 4, 2016. Pages 438-449.]

“By emergence I mean the appearance of novelty or something previously absent or unprecedented, somehow fashioned out of, if remaining dependent upon, matters already in existence. Emergent phenomena, or at least those that interest me here, are bound up with novel (emergent) totalities or systems, and specifically those that express (or can be interpreted as expressing) a form of coherence at the system level. Any such emergent totality, I have elsewhere argued, typically comes into being via a process whereby pre-existing elements become (perhaps with some modification) relationally organised to constitute thereby components of a novel system. Such a process always occurs in a context, so that some of these components become also related to features of the local environment.” [Tony Lawson, “Comparing Conceptions of Social Ontology: Emergent Social Entities and/or Institutional Facts?” Working paper number 1514. Cambridge Working Papers in Economics. University of Cambridge. Cambridge, England. March, 2015. Pages 1-36.]

“… to be clear, I use the term emergence primarily to capture any processes whereby some pre-existing elements become organised into a totality or system, a system that is novel or unprecedented in relation to those elements and their context. In addition, I use the term emergent in reference to the totality itself, its causal properties, and the organisation of the elements. I do also express these developments by saying such novel features somehow emerge. However, the manner in which they do so is always a matter of investigation. None of the terms are interpreted as explanatory.” [Tony Lawson, “Some Critical Issues in Social Ontology: Reply to John Searle.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, number 4, 2016. Pages 426-437.]

“I am very grateful to Tony Lawson for the sheer amount of effort that he has put into examining my work on social ontology and comparing it with his own. The first draft of the paper he sent me was 38 closely written, single-spaced pages. After I worked on that for a while, he sent me another draft, this time 34 single-spaced pages. I am also grateful for his splendid hospitality when the Berkeley Social Ontology Group visited the Cambridge Social Ontology Group in 2014, and again when some of us visited in 2015. It is a wonderful thing in an era of hostility, obscurantism, pretentiousness, and sheer nonsense … to encounter an intelligent, civilized debate as I am currently having with Lawson.” [John R. Searle, “The Limits of Emergence: Reply to Tony Lawson.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 4, 2016. Pages 400-412.]

“… I do not find [Tony] Lawson’s discussion of emergence convincing. In particular, his example of a house does not seem to me to be a valid example of emergence as I understand it. The manner in which Lawson treats emergence means that almost anything that comes into being through the interaction of one or more things can be said to be emergent. Thus, if I meet a friend in the street, the conversation we have emerges out of the chance meeting. The conversation was previously absent, it came out of, although it is still dependent upon, matters (myself and my friend) already in existence. This is a very loose and certainly not philosophically interesting use of emergence. In previous work Lawson has supplied a much more nuanced account of emergence, but his treatment of the issue now seems much broader and lacks specificity.” [Colin Wight, “Over Socialising the Social World(s)?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 4, 2016. Pages 413-419.]

“… [Here] then is the basis of the position I am systematising as critical ethical naturalism. If terms like good or goodness have the same referent as human interests as construed here, we can say that the ultimate ethical good is generalised human flourishing. This is what we all ultimately value. Given our social natures this will entail a form of society or community in which we are situated. Of course, as well as having certain commonalities with all others (e.g., capacity for language) and other commonalities with but some others (e.g., age or specific languages or culture), we each are unique in a multitude of ways. So the ethical goal of generalised flourishing will be of a form in which we flourish in our own very different ways; a situation in which the flourishing of each and any of us is a condition of the flourishing of all others.” [Tony Lawson, “Critical ethical naturalism: an orientation to ethics.” Social Ontology and Modern Economics. Stephen Pratten, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Pages 359-387.]

“The concept of Critical Realism (and its later development using concepts from [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel and [Karl] Marx) known as dialectical critical realism (DCR), comes from philosophy, rather than social science. Its basic literature of explanation uses philosophical language and reasoning, which is often challenging for the social scientist who has had no grounding in formal logic, or in the discipline of philosophical analysis. DCR is not an account of social science, but rather a philosophy of how knowledge about people and their social structures may be construed, interpreted, described and fitted together. DCR assumes that although the ground of knowledge is real, it also has a value base: there is no such thing as value-free social science.…

“… CR [critical realism] uncouples itself from postmodernism, enabling researchers to describe the ‘real’ world through a grounded, value ontology.”

[Christopher Bagley, Alice Sawyerr, and Mahmoud Abubaker, “Dialectic Critical Realism: Grounded Values and Reflexivity in Social Science Research.” Preprints. September 18th, 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 1-16.]

“… a scientific realist approach commits one to treating values as socially produced and historically contingent.…

“Within this metaethical framework it is impossible to establish particular ethical conclusions either absolutely or monologically; an ethics for scientific realists cannot be logically entailed by any properties of human beings, for example, or of the natural world; nor can it be derived by individual thinkers in isolation from the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, within these limits it is possible to find ways of being judgementally rational about critical arguments.”

[Dave Elder-Vass, “Realist Critique without Ethical Naturalism and Moral Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 1, 2010. Pages 33-58.]

“Quite a few critical realists, let alone mainstream scholars, reject explanatory critique (the move from facts to values) …. [Mervyn Hartwig in Roy Bhaskar with Mervyn Hartwig. The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 212.]

“… its [critical realism’s transformational model of social activity provides a lens through which one can understand the independent existence but causal interdependence of agency and social structure. Thus, social structure, which might include morality, conditions agency, but is also conditional on it. A moral dimension therefore pre-exists agents’ actions based on it, but is also transformed and reproduced by those agents’ actions. As such, specific societies can have their own historically specific ethics without abandoning the concept of moral realism.” [Andrew Mearman, “Realism.” Handbook of Economics and Ethics. Jan Peil and Irene van Staveren, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. 2009. Pages 433-440.]

“… while it is easy to identify the performative and theory-practice contradictions involved in these positions, it is much more difficult to provide an account which does justice to lay normativity, which acknowledges both the validity and fallibility of lay ethical values, which tells us where such values come from, what encourages or discourages their development, and from where their force and legitimacy derive. This paper offers some suggestions towards this end, as regards ethical dispositions or moral sentiments and how they might be understood. It proposes a ‘qualified ethical naturalism’ which acknowledges both the intransitivity or otherness of human social being, its scope for both flourishing and suffering, and its possibilities for extensive cultural mediation, diversification and development. In other words it seeks to do justice to actors’ ethical dispositions or moral sentiments and hence offer a way of restoring the moral dimension to social scientific accounts.” [Andrew Sayer, “Restoring the moral dimension in social scientific accounts: a qualified ethical naturalist approach.” Presented at the annual meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. August 15th–17th, 2003. Pages 1-16. Retrieved on May 17th, 2016.]

“… action in regard to a self/other relationship, be it favoured or unfavoured, is the essence of morality. Thus an ontic morality is revealed as inherent in the objective fact of indirect reciprocity.” [Derek Brereton, “Ontic Morality and Human Being.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 21-29.]

“The fact that subsequent, particular, culturally inflected moralities depend on the prior emergence of ontic morality as an entailment of consciousness refutes judgemental relativism’s claim to priority, and identifies it as a political strategy.” [Derek P. Brereton, “The Emergence of Ontic Morality—Part I: The Schism and a Realist Restorative.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, number 1, August 2004. Pages 77-102.]

“The emergence of ontic morality creates the possibility of better or worse conditions for its substrate, life, and could not, as it were, advocate its own disappearance as being an improvement. Put another way, the very existence of morality itself makes the world in which it exists better than one ontically amoral.” [Derek P. Brereton, “The Emergence of Ontic Morality—Part II: Some Principles Applied.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 2, November 2004. Pages 270-304.]

“This paper will bring into the debate two relatively recent approaches to ethics, Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics (stemming from his critical theory) and the critical realist approach of Roy Bhaskar. These are interesting for several reasons: they both draw on traditional ethical theories, although different ones (particularly [Immanuel] Kant and Aristotle); they bring in new innovations of practical relevance; and they both share an over-arching critical perspective. The aim is to compare and contrast these with the traditional approaches to see to what extent they can generate a potential ethical framework for business.” [John Mingers, “Ethics for Business: The Contribution of Discourse Ethics and Critical Realism.” Presented at the annual meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism. King’s College. London, England. July 11th–13th, 2008. Retrieved on April 17th, 2016.]

“In my book Being and Worth I argue for objective real values; so what I have to explain – what is perhaps problematic for me – is what might be called the relativity of morals. By this I do not mean relativism, but simply the fact that different communities have different moral codes, and in complex communities, for instance the United Kingdom today, there are different moral codes even in what is in some sense the same community; or, to put it another way, there are different moral communities within the one community.” [Andrew Collier, “Objective Values and the Relativity of Morals.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 1, July 2000. Pages 6-9.]

“For though bad judgement does not diminish a person’s metaphysical worth as one who has a life to live, it does diminish their moral standing. All virtues involve (relatively) true opinions and all vices involve (relatively) false opinions, as I have argued earlier. Of course, opinions about different things are involved in different virtues and vices: one may be a great scientist but a lousy husband, or vice versa.” [Andrew Collier. Being and Worth. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1999. Kindle edition.]

“The position defended by [Roy] Bhaskar is a version of naturalism: values are inherent in facts about the world. Roy Bhaskar has done more than any other recent philosopher to rehabilitate naturalism after several generations of philosophers (with a few dissenting voices) have taught us to treat it as ‘the naturalistic fallacy.’ Moreover his refutation of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ fallacy i.e. his vindication of naturalism is based on explanatory critique, which is a form of argument central to the case which needs to be made for a realist ethics.” [Andrew Collier, “Realism and Formalism in Ethics.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1998. Page 695.]

“Saints are people who seem to us exceptionally good, and in religious terms are exceptionally close to God, but they are not necessarily exceptionally epistemically reliable people. Granted that they are unlikely to lie, they may nevertheless be ignorant, gullible or self-deceived. In assuming that they are not so, at least in the matters that affect their sainthood, I am assuming that virtue always involves knowledge and vice always involves error, that there is a correlation between truth and goodness.” [Andrew Collier. On Christian Belief: A defence of a cognitive conception of religious belief in a Christian context. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 84.]

“Being and Worth is a small book with a big argument, and in it Andrew Collier has made a significant contribution to contemporary thinking on ethics. Western philosophical tradition tends to concentrate on the subtleties of epistemology and ontology, considering ethics to be on different, less rigorous ground – when not ignoring it entirely.” [Wesley Shumar, “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Ethics.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 2, issue 2, July 1999. Pages 26-30.]

“For me, there are two major strengths of CR [critical realist] ethics – the idea (which it shares with other critical traditions) of the necessity of emancipatory critique; and some of the specific arguments that Bhaskar makes concerning the relations between facts and values. But there are many problems in ever realizing it in practice.” [John Mingers. Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“CR’s [critical realism’s] view of morality has two main principles:

“– Moral realism, that is, there are moral truths in the intransitive domain independent of the subjective views of individuals or traditions, ultimately grounded in characteristics of human nature.

“– Ethical naturalism, which implies that we can, through social science, discover what these moral truths are. This involves moving from facts, about the way things actually are, to values, regarding how they should be, and thus requires a refutation of ‘Hume’s law’ that you cannot derive ought from is. This is done by way of the concept of ‘explanatory critique.’”

[John Mingers, “Discourse Ethics and Critical Realist Ethics.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 8, issue 2, 2009. Pages 172-202.]

“The central aim of this chapter [Towards a sociology of global morals with an ‘emancipatory intent’] is to link this idea [that common humanity has profound ethical significance] with the notion of a sociology of global morals with an emancipatory intent. The principal objective is to build on previous endeavours to construct a distinctive mode of comparative sociological analysis that examines the extent to which basic considerations of humanity have not only influenced the conduct of international relations in different historical eras but may yet acquire a central role in bringing unprecedented levels of global connectedness under collective moral and political control.” [Andrew Linklater. Critical Theory and World Politics: Citizenship, sovereignty and humanity. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 178.]

“The purpose of this chapter is to buttress the case for a universal politics and ethics (of human emancipation or eudaimonia) based on materialist dialectics (i.e. the Marxian naturalistic anthropology of human-being-in-nature …). This will be accomplished by means of a critical engagement with the kinds of transhistorical ethical positions [transcendental dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality] that are in my view typical of theist (or absolute idealist) philosophical ontologies. My argument here will be that absolute idealism necessarily sustains ethical and political positions that are an obstacle to eudaimonia (human emancipation). By contrast, a humanist anthropology, underpinned by materialist dialectics, offers a far more promising way forward for a critical social science and liberatory politics. [Sean Creaven. Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism, and Critical Theory. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 322.]

“… the abstract articulation of values is the ‘ethical part’ of the permanent tension between conservative ontology and emancipatory ethics which can be perceived in the ‘social analysis’ of most economics and in the corresponding ‘social policies,’ be they based on an explicit definition of values (as in [Amartya] Sen’s [capabilities] approach) or on an implicit and even more abstract one” [João Leonardo Medeiros, “The Values of the World Against the ‘World’ of Values: Practical Contradictions of Economic Theories of ‘Welfare.’” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 1, April 2005. Pages 62-88.]

“[Enrique] Dussel’s ‘liberation philosophy’ has much in common with [Roy] Bhaskar’s philosophy of emancipation, including the grounding of emancipatory ethics in agency as well as discourse, but is considerably more hermeneutical and phenomenological in orientation, seeking to marry the insights of the linguistic turn with Marx and, relatively to critical realism, lacking in conceptual rigour and a metatheoretically grounded method of argument.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “Bhaskar’s Critique of the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 4, October 2011. Pages 485-510.]

“Why is this ethical naturalism a form of moral realism? I have suggested that (axiological) goodness relates to human flourishing, and that this requires conditions in which we can all flourish in our differences. Hence an objective or action is derivatively morally good or right if it contributes to fulfilling this end, to moving us towards eudemonia. Clearly whether or not an action or objective does fulfil this criterion is something about which we may, in forming a judgement, be mistaken. Morally good objectives for us to adopt exist independently of our knowledge of them.” [Tony Lawson, “Ethical Naturalism and Forms of Relativism.” Society. Volume 50, number 6, December 2013. Pages 570-575.]

“My own view – as should be evident by now – is that scientific realism (suitably defined) is the only approach that holds out the prospect of explaining how scientific knowledge has advanced in various regions of enquiry and how such advances can be put down to our better understanding of objective truths about a world of physical realia that must be taken to exist and exert their causal powers quite apart from our present-best state of knowledge concerning them.… However, the issue must finally come down to a choice between, on the one hand, a theory that entails no massive affront to the basic principles of causal reasoning and inference to the best explanation and, on the other, a theory that rejects those well-tried principles in favour of certain highly problematical and counter-intuitive theses such as those put forward by the adversary camp. I would hope to have marshalled sufficient evidence from various sources to vindicate scientific realism as by far the more rational approach, whatever the range of sceptical objections that are frequently raised against it.” [Christopher Norris. Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Page 174.]

“Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism fills an important gap in the debate on scientific realism by looking into Norwood Russell Hanson’s philosophy of science. Though [Christopher] Norris does not quite put it this way, I think Hanson’s key (though neglected before Norris’s book) contribution to the debate was that he made possible a non-sceptical version of scientific anti-realism. Put in a nutshell, Hanson’s idea is that one can believe in whatever is posited by modern science and accept that theories are, by and large, true, while avoiding metaphysical commitments to a mind-independent world and robust realist accounts of truth.” [Stathis Psillos, “Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 1, 2005. Pages 255-261.]

“In future comparative work, a concern with generative mechanisms, as observed causal tendencies in sociocultural phenomena and human patterns of action, will probably become much more central.…

“The concept of generative mechanism is central in the emerging epistemological tradition of critical realism, an approach that has as one of its aims to bridge the explanatory gaps between ‘structure’ and human ‘agency’ ….

“A significant factor that is reshaping local cultures and group relations in Ethiopia and elsewhere is state policy. Indeed, the policy and surveillance of the modern bureaucratically oriented state, even when less efficient or failing in Africa, has set a new discourse of control and regulation, thereby recreating identities and group relations.”

[Jon G. Abbink, “Comparing Cultures in Southern Ethiopia: From Ethnography to Generative Explanation.” Northeast African Studies. Volume 7, number 3, 2000. Pages 1-13.]

“Opening before us here is, as it might be termed, a venture towards imaginative critical realism. The philosophy of critical realism, as developed by Roy Bhaskar over the past thirty years, posits both a multilayered view of the world and our understanding of it and a multilayered sense of being in the world.

“So far as the world and our relationship to it is concerned, we should distinguish – according to Bhaskar – between the real, the actual and the empirical. The empirical is the world as it is experienced, the actual is the world as it actually presents itself in the world (which may or may not be experienced) and the real is the basic underlying structure of the world (which gives rise to the actual but is more basic than the actual). Universities, for example, will be experienced in different ways (at the empirical level); and in a complex mass higher education system, those experiences will differ profoundly. In part, those experiences will reflect the forms that universities are actually taking in the world (at the level of the actual). In turn, the actual forms being taken by universities are being prompted by the underlying structures (of global movements and national policies) that affect universities worldwide (at the level of the real).”

[Ronald Barnett. Imagining the University. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2013. Pages 28.]

“… utopian imaginative thinking would embody the spirit of the philosophy of ‘critical realism,’ especially as developed over the past thirty years by Roy Bhaskar. This particular form of critical realism both posits a real world independently of our knowing efforts (hence an objective ontology) and our efforts to come to know that world, which themselves can vary considerably (hence an epistemological relativism). Bhaskar … posits both a triply layered view of the world (the real, the actual, and the perceived) and a four-planar view of our being in the world (our relationship to ourselves, to others, to social structures and to the natural world). Partly, our perceptions of the possibilities for the world can reasonably emerge out of the ‘absences’ we detect in the world – such as an absence of equality, of general enlightenment, of life chances and so on. So while the spaces for our imaginations are infinite –there are any number of imaginative ideas of the university that we could come up with– the locus of those ideas is quite real; even if hard work needs to go in uncovering the character of the real world, overlain as it is by unequal power structures, ideologies and obfuscations.” [Ronald Barnett, “The Idea of the University in the Twenty-First Century: Where’s the Imagination?” Yükseköğretim Dergisi. Volume 1, number 2, 2011. Pages 88-94.]

“Critical realism has the potential to liberate educators from two extremes: (i) moral antirealism, with its tendency towards subjective moral relativity and (ii) moral naïve realism, with its bent towards rigid moralistic inculcation. Because critical realism avoids these extremes, educators can be free to deal more confidently with the ethical and moral ramifications of liberal education. Critical realism frees us to engage the moral layers of reality as they naturally emerge from the content we study.” [Joseph Poulshock, “Practical Critical Realism for Liberal Arts in Language Education.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 3, 2011. Pages 465-484.]

“At the core of dialectical critical realism’s meta-ethics is a sense of human beings as both individuated, self-acting individuals, and as beings who need the solidarity of others if they are to survive and act in the world.…

“… Perhaps our discussion of the meta-ethics of freedom, flourishing and solidarity might help here, especially if it is aligned with the two central issues we need to look at: the evil that is in the act and the evil that is in the motivation of the actor.”

[Alan Norrie, “The Scene and the Crime: Can Critical Realists Talk about Good and Evil?” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 1, February 2012. Pages 76-93.]

“The epistemological framework for this study is ‘realism’ – drawing on both the ‘subtle realism’ of [Martyn] Hammersley … and ‘critical realism’ advocated by [Andrew] Sayer … and [Berth] Danermark et al …. The ‘realism’ refers to treating the objects of study as real independent, knowable phenomena. The ‘subtle’ or ‘critical’ acknowledges that our observations are concept dependent – our cultural, professional, scientific assumptions colour what we see.…

“The approach taken can be categorised as empirical or descriptive ethics. We empirically explore but do not normatively appraise the clinical practices and decisions that we have observed.”

[Evan Doran, Jennifer Fleming, Ian Kerridge, and Cameron Stewart. Building Clinical Ethics Capacity: Final Report of the Developing Clinical Ethics Capacity in NSW Partnership Project. Sydney, Australia: Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. September, 2014. Pages 67-68.]

“The broad intention of this chapter is to stimulate deeper, more critical awareness of environmental ethics discourses circulating in the field of environmental education. It proposes that a critical realist understanding of the emergence of discourses in open, laminated social systems can develop our reflexive practice as environmental educators regarding the language, images and other discursive elements of educational practice.… Taking a critical realist approach, the chapter explores how discourses emerge relationally within complex, laminated, open social systems.” [Lausanne Laura Olvitt, “The emergence of environmental ethics discourses in laminated, open systems: some educational considerations.” Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change. Leigh Price and Heila Lotz-Sisitka, editors. London and New York: Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 137-158.]

“… at present, social work altogether lacks a discourse and thoughtful differentiation between what we will describe in this article as values-informed research and research-informed values. In some respects, values-informed research is self-evidently what social work is about and must be about what matters most to people and how things matter ….

“… We propose a critical realist approach … where facts are viewed as rooted in but not reducible to values. In short, we must examine the myriad ways that ‘ought’ necessarily emerges from ‘is.’

“How do we imagine an agenda for research-informed values? … In doing research, methodological choices bring values into facts, ought into is, and the aim should be to disentangle their contentious and always recursive relationship.”

[Jeffrey Longhofer and Jerry Floersch, “Values in a Science of Social Work: Values-Informed Research and Research-Informed Values.” Research on Social Work Practice. Volume 24, number 5, 2014. Pages 527-534.]

“… the integration of critical realism allows me to more fully explore the internal dynamics and causal mechanisms involved in the genesis of moral panic. The result is a deeper understanding of the ontological nature of moral panic.…

“… I argue that the critical realist conceptions of stratification and emergence that result from a critical realist ontology prove more valuable for enhancing scholarly understanding of the internal dynamics and variegated processes involved in the genesis of moral panic.”

[James Meades. Moral Panic and Critical Realism: Stratification, Emergence and the Internal Conversation. M.A. thesis. Department of Sociology, University of Victoria. Charlottesville, Virginia. Pages iii and 12.]

“Discourse as a mechanism in critical realism

“Nonhuman farming is not a natural scientific phenomenon. It is deeply affected and sustained by what people think about it – if they think about it at all. The meanings people make and the actions they take, or fail to take, depend upon how they understand the phenomenon and their part in it. This is where discourses are so important in sustaining and supporting all those involved in the phenomenon, from the consumer to the farmer to the breeder, the slaughterhouse owner, the seller of flesh.”

[Leslie Roy Mitchell. Discourse and the oppression of nonhuman animals: a critical realist account. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Rhodes University. Grahamstown, South Africa. December, 2007. Page 183.]

“… [One of the] models, relational spirituality, offers a realistic alternative to the irrealism of punctiliar spirituality. Where the model of punctiliar spiritual experience was grounded in the fall-out from the Enlightenment, this alternative understanding draws inspiration from the classical understanding of spirituality found in the three great Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – though, it should be emphasized from the outset, its commitment to epistemic openness means that it does not require a theistic worldview.” [Andrew Wright, “Beyond Fundamentalism: Spiritual realism, spiritual literacy and education.” Critical Realism and Spirituality. Mervyn Hartwig and Jamie Morgan, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 75-89.]

“… I will re-work integrated theories of social justice that attempt to reconcile the economy/culture/politics divide. I argue that integrated theories of social justice are compatible with a realist ontology and can be strengthened through an integration with critical realist ‘meta-theory.’ Integrated theories of social justice can be reworked in two main ways.

“First, as a philosophy of science, critical realism is as much about how we inquire into the social sciences as it is about determining the object of social scientific analysis. I argue that, in order to sharpen our understanding of the complex reality that is comprised of over-determining relationships contributing to instances of oppression, a realistinformed integrated theory of social justice calls for epistemological re-working of already existing theoretical and empirical research methods.…

“Second, developing an epistemological reconstruction of integrated theories of social justice requires the reframing of the ontological foundations of theories of social justice through a critical realist meta-theory. This requires an ontological approach that navigates past questions of knowledge and action in order to identify questions about what the world must be like for our objects of analysis to exist ….”

[Adam Patrick Molnar. Towards a Realist-Informed Integrated Theory of Justice. M.A. thesis. Department of Sociology, University of Victoria. Victoria, British Columbia. 2008. Pages 3-4.]

“If I were a proponent of TDCR [transcendental dialectical critical realism] I might think about using novelty in emergent disjunctures rather than [Roy] Bhaskar’s recent meta-Reality formulation as an initial starting point. One could, however, still take from Bhaskar, though perhaps more directly and recently from [John] Searle, that one cannot deal with the mind-body problem in terms of the analytical constructs of materialism and idealism as though one were real and the other irreal. The language of reality needs to be adjusted for this and critical realism obviously has a lot to say here.” [Jamie Morgan, “Analytical Philosophy’s Contribution to the Problem of Supervenience (emergence).” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 1, August 2004. Pages 169-185.]

“Contingent necessity or the idea of a necessity that ‘need not be’ seems formally nonsensical. However, within human systems the formally nonsensical need not be nonsense. This is because context can provide a semantic spur in the form of an imperative. One can work to realize a potential, where context, sufficiently understood and explicated, creates the grounds for an imperative: ‘we can’ becomes ‘we should’ becomes ‘we must.’ This by no means implies simple reduction to a There is No Alternative (TINA) position, since TINA is a rhetorical move to prevent understanding and forestall reasoned argument. Contingent necessity refers to ways to explore arguments. TINA is ideological positioning, and is purposively restrictive, as exclusionary, in a pre-emptive way. Contingent necessity is intended to be posed differently to this.” [Jamie Morgan, “A Note on the Contingent Necessity of a Morphogenic Society and Human Flourishing.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 3, 2017. Pages 255-267.]

“The study of intra-state conflict has increased exponentially during the post-Cold War period. This has given rise to a variety of competing approaches, which have (i) adopted differing methodological and social theoretical orientations, and (ii) produced contradictory accounts of the causes and nature of violent conflict. This project intervenes in the debates which have resulted from this situation, and develops a critical realist approach to conflict studies. In doing so it rethinks the discipline from the philosophical ground up, by extending the ontological and epistemological insights which are provided by critical realism into more concrete reflections about methodological and social theoretical issues.…

“… a CR [critical realist] approach … entails that our reflections about gender and conflict are attentive to the spatiotemporal context which they seek to study. This means, in short, that a CR-based approach to ‘gendering’ CS [conflict studies] would have to resist the urge to try and uncover the ‘covering laws’ which link certain types of behaviour – for instance, those associated with ‘hegemonic masculinity’ or ‘maternal caring’ – with the occurrence/continuation/prevention/termination of violent conflict.”

[Michiel van Ingen. Rethinking conflict studies: towards a critical realist approach. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Loughborough University. Loughborough, Leicestershire, England. April, 2014. Pages 3 and 248.]

“It is only when material things achieve a much higher degree of neurophysiological complexity than is possessed by my desk, however, that the irreducible/emergent causal powers of human agency, intentionality, intelligence, creativity, etc. appear. An adoption of the emergentist/powers-based ontology that proponents of critical realist philosophy have developed therefore does not just allow us to overcome the passive accounts of matter that modernism has historically inspired. Rather, this ontology also allows us to distinguish much more clearly than neo-vitalism can between causal powers as such and the smaller sub-set of these causal powers that are exercised intentionally (agentially/meaningfully, etc.) by human beings and other higher animals.” [Michiel van Ingen, “Beyond The Nature/Culture Divide? The Contradictions of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 5, 2016. Pages 530-542.]

“… the modern movement perhaps most explicitly dedicated to this project [‘The History of Religion’], theosophy, looks to adherents of more conventional religions like a pastiche, cutting and pasting different features of different faiths, joined together by what theosophists regard as the common search of all religions for an apprehension of the Absolute. In practice, this means the cultivation of higher intellectual powers – including telepathy, clairvoyance, channeling – that its detractors deem parapsychological pseudo-science. However, it would be a mistake to say that theosophy has not generated academic interest. (One contemporary philosopher who takes seriously theosophy’s self-understanding is the self-styled ‘critical realist’ Roy Bhaskar …, who postulates that a mind that robustly exceeds its material origins is a necessary precondition for the conduct of science.)” [Steve Fuller. Science vs. Religion: Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2007. Page 22.]

“Its [Theosophy’s] aims are several; but the most important of all are those which are likely to lead to the relief of human suffering under any or every form, moral as well as physical. And we believe the former to be far more important than the latter. Theosophy has to inculcate ethics; it has to purify the soul, if it would relieve the physical body, whose ailments, save cases of accidents, are all hereditary. It is not by studying Occultism for selfish ends, for the gratification of one’s personal ambition, pride, or vanity, that one can ever reach the true goal: that of helping suffering mankind. Nor is it by studying one single branch of the esoteric philosophy that a man becomes an Occultist, but by studying, if not mastering, them all.” [H. P. Blavatsky. The Key to Theosophy: A Clear Exposition in the Form of Question and Answer of the Ethics, Science, and Philosophy for the Study of Which The Theosophical Society has been Founded. London and New York: The Theosophical Publishing Company, Limited. 1889. Page 24.]

“The primary original contribution of this book, then, is to … allow the machine to be ‘seen,’ theorised and operationalised in the moment of interaction.…

“The assumption of agency theory also proposes the theoretical possibility of a nonhuman agent: the evinced agent. The evinced agent is dependent upon action and its observation within interaction and cannot be applied to all things that are non-human. It is distinct from both proposed types of human agency as these are acknowledged as possessing elements that the non-human agents cannot (whether or not these elements can be known about).…

“The final original contribution in what follows is an additional category of ontologically real …: virtually real. This arises from the inability of the user to perceive the machine as an ‘other’ during interaction which is theorised using the distinction between intra- and inter-subjective personal relations.”

[Kate Forbes-Pitt. The Assumption of Agency Theory: A realist theory of the production of agency. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Google Play edition.]

“The assumption of agency theory outlined in this paper describes how the application of the human knowledge and ability that routinely overcomes necessary human limitations within everyday interaction produces agency. It takes critical realist ontology as its philosophical foundation …. It proposes distinct types of human agency which are separated by access to privileged self-knowledge and it posits the processes by which these types of agency are routinely produced and maintained within everyday interaction. As a result of theorizing the production of agency as it does, the theoretical possibility of a non-human agency that is distinct from all types of human agency is proposed.” [Kate Forbes-Pitt, “The assumption of agency: a realist theory of the production of agency in everyday social life.” Privately published. October 4th, 2006. Pages 1-20. Retrieved on February 10th, 2016.]

“This article explores dynamic capability formation in new ventures examining technology commercialization at the microlevel of entrepreneurs’ actions and decisions.…

“… Dynamic capabilities have been defined as specific processes (i.e. product development, alliancing) by which managers configure and reconfigure their resource base to ensure at least a temporary competitive advantage relative to rivals ….

“Such first-hand experience informs theory development as it suggests relationships that would go undetected without intimate knowledge of the studied phenomenon, particularly emergent phenomena. Consistent with practitioner engagement, we adopt a philosophical perspective that is captured most closely by critical realism ….”

[Patricia D. Corner and Shuyuan Wu, “Dynamic capability emergence in the venture creation process,” International Small Business Journal. Volume 30, number 2, March 2012. Pages 138-160.]

“The present article draws upon two theoretical approaches: Marxist theories of the capitalist economy, and anti-representational theories of representative-democratic political institutions. These are chosen due to their focus on social relations (and therefore their compatibility with a critical realist method) and for their critical focus on potential sources of failure and decline (which we are arguably witnessing in the transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘new’ social democracy …. As such, what follows is a critical relational theory of ‘traditional’ social democratic party decline.…

“… There existed … clear tensions at the centre of ‘traditional’ social democratic party relations, between the demands of constituents for decommodification, the ability of party elites to contain those demands and the extent to which these demands, and their partial realisation, were compatible with the necessary expansion of capital–labour relations.”

[David J. Bailey, “The Transition to ‘New’ Social Democracy: The Role of Capitalism, Representation and (Hampered) Contestation.” British Journal of Politics & International Relations. Volume 11, issue 4, November 2009. Pages 593-612.]

“The limited evidence and guidance alongside the person-centred orientation of occupational therapy … suggests a need to establish what the occupational difficulties experienced by people who misuse drugs are and what importance and priority they attach to them.…

“A critical realist philosophical orientation informed this study …. This holds that there exists an external reality, which people share but may experience differently. People’s interpretations of the social world in turn form part of that world. Accordingly, it is valid to use people’s perceptions of a phenomenon to understand their individual perspectives and to make tentative generalisations about how others might experience it.”

[Rachel Davies and Josh Cameron, “Self-identified occupational competencies, limitations and priorities for change in the occupational lives of people with drug misuse problems.” British Journal of Occupational Therapy. Volume 73, number 6, June 2010. Pages 251-260.]

“The research design was underpinned by RE [realistic evaluation] and its philosophical heritage in critical realism …. As such, it was structured to discover the mechanisms (M) which, when activated (or not) within particular environmental contexts (C), influenced the outcome (O) of supporting or hindering individual practitioners to embed their learning into their daily practice.…

“… Occupational therapy leaders need to be carefully selected, appraised and supported in their ability to facilitate others to learn. Organisations must ensure sufficient, profession-specific, leadership capacity to initiate, steer and evaluate practice development activity ….”

[Jane Melton, Kirsty Forsyth, and Delia Freeth, “A practice development programme to promote the use of the Model of Human Occupation: contexts, influential mechanisms and levels of engagement amongst occupational therapists.” British Journal of Occupational Therapy. Volume 73, number 11, November 2010. Pages 549-558.]

“This study aimed to capture how occupational therapists working in adult social care perceive personalisation in terms of their role and the profession overall. The research question was ‘What are the perceptions of occupational therapists on the potential impact of the personalisation agenda on their role within adult social care?’ …

“The research epistemology, or philosophy, was guided by the critical realist approach, which involves reporting experiences, meanings and the participants’ reality …. This applies to this study because the interviews enabled participants to articulate their perceptions, and the data gathered reflect their experiences, enabling the researcher to theorise the meaning of the data.”

[Jacqueline London-Willis, Lorna Couldrick, and Linda Lovelock, “The personalisation of adult social care: occupational therapists’ perceptions.” British Journal of Occupational Therapy. Volume 75, number 3, March 2012. Pages 128-133.]

“Using a dialectical critical realist framework, and borrowing fairly freely from the work of, primarily, Marx, Arendt and Freud, the present study aims to understand public-spirited citizenship in terms of the constitution of, first, a relatively autonomous and, up to a point, public-spirited bourgeois subject and, second, the atomistic subject motivated by what Dryzek calls economic rationality. It does so by constructing a brief and schematic history of the emergence of economic rationality through the differentiations (instituted by different modes of capitalism) which effected the practical abstraction of rationality from sociability. The intention here is to show that what we take to be economic rationality is, in fact, part of a nexus of dispositions expressive of capitalism’s failure to satisfy the human need for an intelligible and sociable world. A task for responsible citizenship would be to understand and attempt to satisfy this basic human need. Yet, responsible citizenship is most likely to be found where this need has been recognized and attended to.” [Kathryn Dean. Capitalism and Citizenship: The Impossible Partnership. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 4.]

“… in drawing upon both Marxist and anarchist theories of social democratic parties, the study has sought to conceptualize the social relationships that constituted ‘traditional’ social democratic parties and which constitute the ‘new’ social democratic parties they have become. On this basis it has been possible to derive an explanation for the paradox of the ‘new’ social democratic turn to ‘Social Europe.’ The particular merit of the critical realist approach, therefore, is that in pointing towards a focus upon the social relationships that have generated particular events, it forces an awareness of both the structures within which actors are located, and the motivations of actors within those structures, whilst nevertheless avoiding a determinism that views one as the linear and invariable cause of the other. Critical realism, therefore, provides us with the methodological apparatus through which to provide explanations for a social reality that by its very nature resists empirical regularity as either a criterion for verification or the basis for falsification.” [David J. Bailey. The Political Economy of European Social Democracy: A Critical Realist Approach. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 262-263.]

“… a relational approach to environmental learning, including the exploration of the relationships between the transitive and the intransitive, provides a potential ‘grounding,’ an iterative truth-seeking process between what is and what is perceived to be. Furthermore, such an approach enables ‘the exercise of constructing models of alternative ways of living on the basis of some assumed set of resources’ …. This is what [Roy] Bhaskar terms ‘concrete utopianism’ which functions to ‘pinpoint the real, but non-actualised possibilities inherent in a situation, thus inspiring grounded hope to inform emancipatory praxis’ ….” [Ingrid Joan Schudel, “Exploring critical realist insights into transformative environmental learning processes in contexts of social-ecological risk.” Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change. Leigh Price and Heila Lotz-Sisitka, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 254-272.]

“A critical realist theory underpinning the methodology enables a view of agency as emergent from social structures and mechanisms as elaborated in [Margaret S.] Archer’s … model of morphogenesis and [Roy] Bhaskar’s … model of four-planar being. The critical realist methodology also enables a view of emergent active learning processes as open-ended, responsive to particular potential, but dependent on contingencies (such as learning and teaching support materials, tools and methodologies).

“The analysis of emergent active learning processes focuses particularly on Bhaskar’s … ontological-axiological chain (MELD schema) as a tool for analysing change. The MELD schema highlights 1M ontological questions of what is (with emphasis on structures and generative mechanisms) and what could be (real, but non-actualised possibilities). It enables reflection on what mediating and interactive agential processes either reproduce what is or have the potential to transform what is to what could be (2E). Thirdly, the MELD schema enables reflection on what should be – this is the 3L “axiological moment” … where questions of values and ethics in relation to the holistic whole are raised. Finally, the schema raises questions (4D) of what can be, with ontologically grounded, context-sensitive and expressively veracious considerations.”

[Ingrid Joan Schudel. Examining emergent active learning processes as transformative praxis: The case of the schools and sustainability professional development programme. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Rhodes University. Grahamstown, South Africa. December, 2012. Page i.]

“This paper describes a critical realist intensive case study, which develops and tests a ‘dialectic process model of transformative learning.’ The model is inspired by [Roy] Bhaskar’s … onto-axiological chain (or MELD Schema) as outlined in his formulation of dialectical critical realism. The study describes transformative environmental learning processes focusing on food security in two primary schools in rural South Africa. The model elaborates on the four links in the onto-axiological chain by describing four knowledge interests across the two cases: knowledge of ‘what is and what is not,’ knowledge of ‘what could be,’ knowledge of ‘what should be,’ and knowledge of ‘what can be.’ The model also highlights the emergent nature of epistemic relations in transformative learning processes. The paper discusses the model in relation to a transformative, open-ended and context specific approach to Environmental Education (EE)/ESD. The paper illustrates that Bhaskar’s MELD is a robust schema for investigating learning-led change in EE and suggests its relevance in other research contexts concerned with societal transformation.…

“In this paper, I describe how I developed and tested Bhaskar’s onto-axiological chain though a two-step analysis of two cases of transformative environmental learning in South African primary school classrooms. As part of this process, I elaborated and deepened the understanding of the dialectical relationships integral to learning, knowledge and change. Additionally, by applying the dialectical process model of transformative learning to the case studies, it became apparent that different knowledge interests are present at different links in the onto-axiological chain.”

[Ingrid Joan Schudel, “Modelling Dialectical Processes in Environmental Learning: An Elaboration of Roy Bhaskar’s Onto-axiological Chain.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 2, February 2017. Pages 163-183.]

“… critical realism is not only a critique: it offers an alternative ontology, an alternative conception of causality, an alternative conception of law as tendency, and an alternative mode of theorising. [Karl] Marx’s work is one of the few actual examples of this alternative approach.…

“… the … critique of deductivism and Humean laws (and of their alter ego, the functional relation) [was] elaborated above.”

[Steve Fleetwood, “Causal Laws, Functional Relations and Tendencies.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 13, issue 2, April 2001. Pages 201-220.]

“Critical realists, like myself, reject the existence of labour supply and demand curves because LMs [labor markets] are open, not closed, systems – i.e. there are no event regularities between wage rates and quantities of labouring services supplied and demanded. This does not mean there are no forces generated by changes in labour demand, labour supply, and/or in wage rates. It does mean that these forces are unlikely to be law-like. This is why these forces do not appear in the SELMCR [socio-economics of labour markets: critical realist] model as supply and demand curves.” [Steve Fleetwood, “Conceptualizing Future Labour Markets.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 13, issue 3, June 2014. Pages 233-260.]

“Besides coercing mechanisms, there might exist other mechanisms that intervene in the reproduction of the constraining and the conditioning structures and that might either reinforce or contrast the action of existing coercing mechanisms. The existence of these mechanisms might be either independent from the general conditions of reproduction of the decision making system or an endogenous product of this process, a consequence of existing coercing mechanisms. Only in this second case, do these mechanisms assume scientific relevance and are an integral part of the ontology of power. Otherwise, they play the role of simple exogenous forces in the decision making system.

“When these mechanisms develop as endogenous reactions against some coercing mechanisms, I shall call them ‘counter-mechanisms.’ Unlike coercing mechanisms, they are not a logical necessity in this ontology of power. Their concrete development is only a theoretical possibility created by the existence of coercive mechanisms. As reactions against other mechanisms, however, counter-mechanisms presuppose conscious action as well. They do not develop automatically.”

[Giulio Palermo. Economics and Power: A Marxist critique. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Page 122.]

“Critical realism in economics is a project oriented to underlaboring for a more fruitful science of economics. It can provide a perspective on the nature of science and society, but it cannot do the work of science.” [Tony Lawson, “Developments in economics as realist social theory.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 54, number 4, winter 1996. Pages 405-422.]

“… there is no doubt that I am reading [Thorstein] Veblen’s writing through the lens of someone familiar with modern realist social thinking and specifically the project of critical realism in economics.” [Tony Lawson, “Institutionalism: on the need to firm up notions of social structure and the human subject.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 37, number 1, March 2003. Pages 175-207.]

“In opposition to … [the] mainstream project [in economics], and ex posteriori to investigating the nature of social material, I have favoured an alternative causalist approach in its place, one which has been developed under the heading of critical realism in economics.” [Tony Lawson, “Economics and Explanation.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Volume 55, number 217, September 2001. Pages 371-393.]

“While the general perspective on reality as structured and intransitive has been stylized as transcendental realism, the specific version of it that has been developed for, or, more accurately, extended to include the specificities of, the social realm can, following [Roy] Bhaskar …, be gathered under the heading of critical realism. If a key feature of critical realism is the hermeneutic insight of the concept-dependent nature of social material, an equally fundamental aspect is the recognition that social structure is also dependent upon human activity or praxis.” [Tony Lawson, “The Nature of Post Keynesianism and Its Links to Other Traditions: A Realist Perspective,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 16, number 4, summer 1994. Pages 503-538.]

“… the goal is simply to open up the economics academy to a more intellectual orientation, allowing, in particular, the combining of high standards of research with a return to variety and greater (albeit critically informed) pluralism in method.” [Tony Lawson, “Back to Reality.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 2, July 2001. Pages 58-59.]

“Economists who have contributed to, or who have been informed by, the project of critical realism in economics have, in their more substantive contributions, generated economic theories that posit a variety of novel entities which in large part at least are unobservable.” [Tony Lawson. Reorienting Economics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 68.]

“The argument of the Cambridge group appears to make a very strong general claim viz. that all formalism is always wrong when employed in social and economic theory. This goes way beyond what, in our view, would flow in a straightforward manner from the tenets of critical realism. Not only is this argument contentious from within the perspective of critical realism, it is also an argument that goes way beyond what is necessary in order to critique mainstream economics. All that is needed is to argue that formalism cannot be the main tool of economics and social theory, contra the mainstream view. It should be noted that [Tony] Lawson … appears to affirm that critical realism, on his interpretation, does not lead to the blanket ban on formalism that he has sometimes been interpreted as advocating. However, anyone who has discussed specific cases where formalism has been employed, will find that the Cambridge group seem to be totally against any specific instances of econometrics or mathematical modelling in practice.” [Philip Arestis, Andrew Brown, and Malcolm Sawyer, “Critical realism and the political economy of the euro.” Working paper number 352. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Annandale-On-Hudson, New York. 2002. Pages 1-7.]

“[Tony] Lawson’s various activities over the last twenty five years include founding and chairing the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group and serving as the director of the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.” [Clemens Hirsch and C. Tyler DesRoches, “Cambridge social ontology: an interview with Tony Lawson.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 2, issue 1, summer 2009. Pages 100-122.]

“… I am actually very happy to be perceived as a critical realist. It is not at all a misinterpretation. But it is important to see this project as multifaceted and continuously evolving. And it is also variously interpreted. You mentioned critical realism in terms of economics, but critical realism has now taken on so many forms in so many disciplines. The emphasis and presentation vary depending on where you go. So incidentally does its reception. Critical realism in some disciplines, say in human geography, is almost mainstream. It is big too in sociology and critical management studies.” [Tony Lawson in Clemens Hirsch and C. Tyler DesRoches, “Cambridge social ontology: an interview with Tony Lawson.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 2, issue 1, summer 2009. Pages 100-122.]

“If being subject to continued development and enthusiastic criticism are signs of a project in a good state then the venture systematised as critical realism in economics is in a healthy condition indeed. So much is this so that special issues of economics journals are appearing devoted wholly to this project’s development or to debating its limitations.” [Steve Fleetwood, “Preface.” Critical Realism in Economics: Development and debate. Steve Fleetwood, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Page xii.]

“One might argue … that critical realism, with or without theory, shares with heterodoxy in general—rather than being separated by it—a basic strategic dilemma in critique: how should, or even should one engage with a powerful and indifferent mainstream? Clearly, should any mainstream practitioners venture to initiate such an engagement, a response is called for, since to do otherwise might indicate a lack of confidence in the plausibility of the grounds of critique. But the circumstances of that engagement are quite different from the sacrifices required in shifting into the fields of power of the mainstream. [Tony] Lawson and other critical-realist critics of the mainstream are quite aware of this. For that reason, the mainstream is Lawson’s subject, but his powers of persuasion and his rhetorical endeavours are mainly otherwise directed. The fact that he has remained at Cambridge—in a department that no longer appears to be overly sympathetic to either heterodoxy or to his own project—speaks volumes for his commitment, and that of some of his colleagues, to ensuring that economics undergraduates are at least made aware that there is a critique of the mainstream.” [Jamie Morgan and Peter Nielsen, “From mainstream economics to the boundaries of Marxism.” Capital & Class. Volume 89, summer 2006. Pages 91-120.]

“The starting point in the Cambridge analysis, specifically, is the unhealthy state of contemporary economics. The objective is to understand, explain and rectify this situation. Here the categories of open and closed systems are commandeered as a means to an end; that end being a radical reorientation of the practices and procedures of the modern discipline.” [Vinca Bigo, “Open and Closed Systems and the Cambridge School.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 64, number 4, December 2006. Pages 493-514.]

“Critical realism builds on earlier Cambridge traditions of ‘stylised facts’ – superficial events and structures isolated and collected by preconceived theory, which they then help to test. But the abductive use of ‘analogy and metaphor’ to move from surface to underlying reality contrasts with partial-equilibrium neoclassicists’ deductive manipulation of models based on ‘inductive’ assumptions or axioms; and with general-equilibrium neoclassicists’ argument for direct conformity with model-based observation of reality to obviate the need to seek correspondence with an ‘underlying’ reality too invisible or impenetrable to reward direct study.” [Alan Shipman, “Pragmatism, Realism and the Economist/Economy Divide.” Foundations of Science. Volume 8, issue 1, March 2003. Pages 23-50.]

“New realism arrived in economics largely through the work of the Tony Lawson’s … critical realism which followed the work of Roy Bhaskar’s … transcendental realism. In essence, Lawson sought to explain the inadequacies of mainstream economics in terms of inadequate concern with ontology. His basic critique was that any attempt to identify regularities on the surface of economic phenomena is doomed to failure. Instead, explanation must lie with the identification of underlying causal tendencies and mechanisms, of which there are many.” [Jason Potts, “Ontology in Economics.” Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives. Roberto Poli and Johanna Seibt, editors. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. 2010. Page 280.]

“… one does not need critical realism merely to show that mainstream economics is preoccupied with quantification and is unable to deal (meaningfully) with the kind of qualitative issues that arise when investigating atypical employment: this is a well known criticism. One does, however, need critical realism to explain this state of affairs. Without a critical realist perspective, the explanation of this state of affairs would be ad hoc, turning on things like subjective preference (i.e. a quantitative approach is simply preferred), or lack of sociological sophistication on the part of mainstream economists. With a critical realist perspective, however, the explanation ceases to be ad hoc.” [Steve Fleetwood, “Conceptualizing Unemployment in a Period of Atypical Employment: A Critical Realist Perspective.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 59, issue 1, March 2001. Pages 45-69.]

“… realist social ontology is an attempt to derive a set of general characteristics of social reality, including economics. The general characteristics are derived from many sources of argument, ranging from an adapted Kantian transcendental question form in philosophy (what must be the case for x?), to immanent critiques of inter-theory disputes regarding some specific problem from which a further solution is proposed (e.g., the problem of individualism vs. collectivism), to inferential claims based on given and possibly disputed empirical evidence.” [Jamie Morgan, “Seeing the Potential of Realism in Economics.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 45, number 2, 2014. Pages 176-201.]

“… few have offered meta-theoretical reflections on tendencies; and although a few Marxist political economists have toyed with the idea of tendency as powers, no one has tried to connect Marxist and critical realist conceptions of tendency. Indeed, almost nothing has been written by Marxist political economists on the nature of tendencies in the last few decades.” [Steve Fleetwood, “Laws and tendencies in Marxist political economy.” Capital & Class. Volume 36, number 2, 2012. Pages 235-262.]

“… the argument is being put forward, particularly by critical realists … that a pluralist methodology is the best approach to knowledge, ie an apparently monist argument at the meta-methodological level. Critical to this argument is the view that, however orthodox economics may have changed in content, it still employs a monist methodology based on mathematical formalism. Rather it has been argued that there is, or should be, only one heterodox methodology, and that that methodology should be pluralist in the sense of employing a range of methods. The reasoning behind this is that the subject matter of economics, the social system, is an open system and as such a closed-system methodology of mathematical formalism cannot identify underlying causal mechanisms.” [Sheila C. Dow, “Plurality in Orthodox and Heterodox Economics.” The Journal of Philosophical Economics. Volume I, number 2, 2008. Pages 73-96.]

“Possibly the most important contribution of [Tony] Lawson’s work to our reflection on our teaching is the important and ultimate role of context in shaping a reality. It is here that the role of analogical and metaphorical thinking, as well as the value of narrative, comes into play. It is through contextualized narrative accounts of actual human lives that the interdependence of social structure and human agency is perhaps best demonstrated. It is here that one can see that human actions and powers, while not independent of the rest of reality, are not reducible to it either. It is here that the unpredictability, uncertainty, and openness of social (and natural) structures and mechanisms is most evident.” [Zohreh Emami and Timothy Riordan, “Tony Lawson on Critical Realism: What’s Teaching Got to Do with It?” Review of Social Economy. Volume 56, number 3, fall 1998. Pages 311-323.]

“First, [Tony] Lawson’s critique of ER [Humean empirical realism] is an important part of the story, but in its role as one possible (albeit prominent) philosophical foundation for deductivism and as a backdrop against which he develops his own ontology. Second, Lawson’s critique of mainstream economics is directed at its unquestioning adoption of deductivism, and is logically independent of whether or not particular mainstream models are instances of ER. Third, TR [transcendental realism] does not claim that there are no empirically identiable regularities in the social world, merely that few have been found that approach the strictness and sharpness of the regularities expressed by and within the models of mainstream economics (and excepting, of course, those that have been deliberately engineered by us).” [Jochen Runde, “On Stephen Parsons’ Philosophical Critique of Transcendental Realism.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 13, number 1, January 2001. Pages 101-114.]

“… since the rootedness of Post Keynesianism in something like critical realism is rarely made explicit, there are likely to be tensions here also. Post-Keynesians do not consciously ground their work within critical realism or any related philosophical perspective and given the dominance of the deductivist method in contemporary economics this can lead to inconsistencies. It may therefore be the case that Post-Keynesianism remains uneasily anchored within critical realism. Meanwhile neo-Ricardian economics faces a clear dilemma. It can either retain its commitment to deductivism, and continue to run parallel to, if not actually constitute a substrand of, orthodoxy, or abandon this commitment and in the process lose what are perhaps its most distinctive characteristics.” [Stephen Pratten, “The ‘Closure’ Assumption as a First Step: Neo-Ricardian Economics and Post-Keynesianism.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 54, number 4, winter 1996. Pages 423-443.]

“[Tony] Lawson makes three related points in favor of critical realism and against positivism. The first is that positivism has led economists to neglect topics that are of clear relevance to the behavior of economic agents and economic systems. In simply presuming that observed data can be described by universal quantitative relationships, positive economists make an ontological assumption that blinds them to important sources of dynamism in an economy—sources such as human intention, knowledge, and emotion. Second, he argues that the underlying realities shaping economic behavior are highly variable and may be relatively short-lived.… Finally, he argues that error is best attributed to inadequate knowledge of underlying causes or structures.” [A. Allan Schmid and Paul Thompson, “Against Mechanism: Methodology for an Evolutionary Economics.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Volume 81, number 5, Deember 1999. Pages 1160-1165.]

“In extending [Roy] Bhaskar’s ontological approach to the social realm, [Tony] Lawson’s arguments provide further criteria for determining consistency between specific research projects and critical realism. Lawson argues that the social realm is distinguished by the following three characteristics: (i) it is an open system; (ii) it includes mechanisms and structures that both depend on human agency and condition it; and (iii) its structures are formed by rules and conventions that govern internal relations between individuals within a society ….” [Therese Jefferson and John King, “Nicholas Kaldor and Critical Realism.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 21, number 3, July 2009. Pages 463-480.]

“For two decades Tony Lawson has been developing a research programme termed ‘critical realism’ and encouraging economists to consider a range of associated philosophical and methodological issues. While his research programme is outlined extensively in two books on the subject … he has also published a number of articles that address the relevance of his research programme for specific schools of thought within heterodox traditions. In this article we consider the debate and discussion generated by Lawson’s programme in two schools: Post Keynesian economics and feminist economics. We contrast the nature of the debate in each of these schools and consider some possible reasons for the varied reception it has received. We conclude the article by making some comments about the factors affecting the success and spread of new ideas in economic thought.” [Siobhan Austen and Therese Jefferson, “Comparing responses to critical realism.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 13, number 2, June 2006. Pages 257-282.]

“As a methodology, critical realism purports to provide a theory of how human beings can acquire knowledge about the world. In its most general form, critical realism describes the process of obtaining knowledge (a process Lawson calls transcendental analysis) as encompassing two steps. The first involves the recognition of some aspect of our existence that is of interest to us. The second involves the identification of underlying structures, powers, mechanisms, and tendencies that make possible this centrally important aspect of our existence …. We have selected our words carefully, for it is important to recognize that generative mechanisms make possible, and do not necessarily efficiently cause, these centrally important aspects of our existence.” [Diane C. Zannoni, “Post Keynesian economics and critical realism: A reply to Parsons.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 22, number 1, fall 1999. Pages 57-70.]

“… since TCE [transaction cost economics] fails to break away from its positivistically grounded view of science, it remains unable to systematically elaborate a structured social ontology.…

“… once deductivism is jettisoned and critical realism adopted, a more compelling treatment of institutions, social structure, and their relationship with human agency is opened up. Science, according to critical realism, is not a matter of seeking correlations at the level of actual events, but is primarily concerned with identifying their underlying causes. Science, typically, moves from phenomena at one level to their causes lying at a different level. In social science, according to this perspective, the event analogues are human activities, and the primary aim is to identify and understand the social structures that render possible such activities as occur.”

[Stephen Pratten, “The Nature of Transaction Cost Economics.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 31, number 3, September 1997. Pages 781-803.]

“… for a critical realist, in order to explain economics phenomena it is necessary to determine a hypothesis of mechanism.… In order to illustrate this, I now borrow an example from physics: magnetic forces may not be seen or experienced directly, but can be evidenced by moving a magnet under a piece of paper sprinkled with iron filings. For the social sciences, [Roy] Bhaskar … advocates following a ‘DREIC’ [description, retroduction, elimination, identification, and correction] model of enquiry. When trying to understand a phenomenon, the first step is description (as in hermeneutics), followed by retroduction, the process of generating explanatory hypotheses. The next stage is to eliminate unlikely hypotheses and, by doing so, identify the ones that seem to best explain the phenomenon. The final process is an iterative one where corrections are made and the phenomenon is examined again to see if the explanatory mechanism has been identified.…

“… My argument is that economics is inherently about values. The rekindled interest in the subject stems from students wanting to understand the uncertain world in which they live. Additionally, for many students, there is also a desire to make the world in which we live a better place. So, there is a need for agency, and here critical realism offers economics a way forward.”

[Jacek Brant, “The Case for Values in Economics Education.” Citizenship, Social and Economics Education. Volume 10, numbers 2 and 3, 2011. Pages 117-128.]

“My own research has focused on the nature of closed and deductive versus open systems and the appropriate language or heuristical structures that emanate from such orthodox versus realist frameworks …. Here the question that interests me, in light of the realist program espoused by [Tony] Lawson, is: can the relevant language structure of closed systems be used to understanding economic processes in which relationality, especially internal relationality matters? …

“… to use the language of critical realism, relations among firms are profoundly internal, in that changes in money wages (to ostensibly clear the so called labor market) affect the abilities of firms to sell their products, i.e., changes in the distribution of income cause changes in earnings, which affect the underlying circumstances which in turn affect employment decisions. Money wage changes may affect price level changes; real wage changes and employment changes become indeterminate.…

“…Once the relationship between agent (actor) and structure (market) takes on a revised form, such that agents committing resources affect others’ abilities to commit resources (strategic complementarities), then the necessary requirement of closure, which allows one to ask questions and use the language of relative price changes when exogenous nominal shocks occur, is upset.”

[Roy J. Rotheim, “On Closed Systems and the Language of Economic Discourse.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 56, number 3, fall 1998. Pages 324-334.]

“The pressures for the privatization of public services over the last 30 years are the reaction to the perceived excesses, inefficiencies, and inadequacies of public provision. They drew strength from the spirit of neoliberalism and the logic of neoclassical economics and its offshoot, rational choice theory. The dilemma that has now emerged is that there is a nascent gap between the aspiration of business for the profitable private provision of public services and the reality of reforming governments by removing political pressures from stakeholder interest groups and by demanding significant regulation of privatized public services in order to protect and promote the public interest. This business aspiration–political reality gap has its origin in contending and conflicting privatization perspectives, which are grounded in irreconcilable epistemological and ontological assumptions that underpin neoliberalism’s neoclassical free-market economic roots. This either-or conflict makes the closing of this gap a win-lose struggle.…

“Homo economicus represents the epistemological position that the world—including each individual present in it—has properties that exist when they are not being experienced and that are independent of any human belief about their actuality (metaphysical realism), which gives them cognitive authority …. This makes the world real (realism), material (materialism), and objectively knowable (objectivism) by the adoption of naturalist epistemologies ([according to Roy] Bhaskar …). The truthfulness of a knowledge claim should, thus, be determined only by applying objective truth criteria, which means that for a knowledge claim to be true, it must either correspond to, or be in agreement with, an extra-linguistic fact (the correspondence theory of truth) … or be logically consistent with, and mutually supported by, other knowledge claims (the coherence theory of truth) ….”

[John Dixon, “Naive Neoclassical Economics and the Promised Land of Privatization: A Critical Deconstruction of Homo Economicus.” Administrative Theory & Praxis. Volume 32, number 3, September 2010. Pages 348-372.]

“The article set out to establish what users of ‘well-built/well-specified’ financial risk models should learn from this failure [of financial risk models in 2007]. To that end, it applied principal tenets of critical realism, bringing these insights to bear on the problems with financial risk modelling and regulation.…

“Reacting to the failure of models by trying to specify and calculate models capable of envisaging ‘exceptional times’ (by capturing more extreme data) merely addresses the symptoms of the problem. It does not address the root causes of the issues.…

“On balance, the current regulatory policy response insufficiently addresses international coordination of macro-economic policies and the integration of macroeconomic policies and market regulation. It thus misses an opportunity to stabilize and manage important generative structures of events and consequently the output of models.”

[Mattia L. Rattaggi, “Financial Risk Models in the Light of the Banking Crisis 2007–2008: An Application of Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 11, issue 4, January 2012. Pages 462-486.]

“We believe that there is a need for practical guidance in conducting research projects informed by Critical Realism, and in this chapter we argue, drawing upon ongoing work, for the adoption of triangulation as a principle of research design. Triangulation is commitment in research design to investigation and inference via multiple methods that are not placed in any a priori hierarchy. We argue that triangulation allows retroduction to be made operational, facilitates pluralism—rather than rejecting outright entire methods—and allows economics to be reorientated towards other social sciences, as [Tony] Lawson recommends ….

“… a Critical-Realist position can provide an ontological justification for triangulation; and triangulation is a necessary element of the logic of retroduction and hence is crucial for operationalising Critical Realism ….

“… triangulation allows economics to be reoriented towards the social sciences, as Lawson recommends in Reorienting Economics.”

[Paul Downward and Andrew Mearman, “Reorienting economics through triangulation of methods.” Ontology and Economics: Tony Lawson and His Critics. Edward Fullbrook, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 209-225.]

“… what can triangulation add to the perspective I have set out in Reorienting Economics? In truth, I am not sure, and I turn to examine what [Paul] Downward and [Andrew] Mearman have to say below. There is no doubt that the perspective I defend supports a plurality of methods being employed in combination. For example, the detection of surprising contrasts will involve a different set of practices than does the retroduction of possible causes. And assessing the explanatory power of competing causal hypotheses will require a different set of methods again. If this reliance at different stages on different methods or procedures is triangulation then I have no problem with it. Indeed, I clearly already triangulate, as I suspect we all do. But I am not sure that we need the label, or (as I say) that the term triangulation is especially appropriate, or that using it takes us any further forward.” [Tony Lawson, “Triangulation and social research: Reply to Downward and Mearman.” Ontology and Economics: Tony Lawson and His Critics. Edward Fullbrook, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 226-249.]

“Heterodox economists have criticised the ahistorical character of orthodox economics, focusing on its inadequate ontological foundation. This paper adds to the ontological critique of orthodox economics by arguing that organically based atomism, [Karl] Marx’s ontology specifying social relations and conditions under capitalism, explains the appearance of social atomism as a result of capitalism’s organic interdependencies. It elucidates how organically based atomism, which is composed of original accumulation and alienation, abstract-alienated labour and the exposition of the value forms, and Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, can be used to criticise the ahistorical character of orthodox economics.…

“… The analysis I develop below supplements [Tony] Lawson’s explanation, while being critical of the implicit assumption that the use of ontological atomism is a philosophical error on the part of the orthodox economist. By conducting an ideology critique of the horizon of bourgeois economics, I add a dimension missing from Lawson’s account … – a dimension that, furthermore, seeks to explain the appearance of social atomism as a result of the organic interdependencies under capitalism.…

“Since, in the case of economics, the ontological realm under investigation is social, it is partly dependent on human agency or praxis. Human agency or praxis is intentional and conditioned by its constitutive context(s). As such it is both dynamic and internally related, where ‘dynamic’ refers to the historical coming into being, existence (with changes and developments), and eventual demise of a structure, social practice, institution, and so on.”

[Dennis Badeen, “An organicist critique of the ahistorical character of orthodox economics.” Capital & Class. Volume 39, number 1, February 2015. Pages 51-64.]

“Ontological atomism and the atomic notion of experience underwrite Neoclassical economics. Ontological organicism and the organic notion of experience underwrite [Karl] Marx’s political economy. This study develops a Marxist critique of the ontological foundations of Neoclassical economics and develops an approach to Marxist political economy grounded upon adequate experiential and ontological foundations. This is accomplished by tracing the problems of Neoclassical theory back to their ontological foundations in logical and moral atomism and demonstrating how its ontology is responsible for the disappearance of the object and the subject of political economy.” [Dennis Badeen, A Marxist Critique of the Ontological Foundations of Neoclassical Economics. Ph.D. dissertation. York University. Toronto, Ontario. April 2011. Page iv.]

“More recently an ontological turn has taken place regarding the critique of Neoclassical economics and articulations of alternatives. In this respect it has been the Heterodox/Pluralist camp that has led the charge. Similarly an ontological turn has taken place in certain approaches to Marxist political economy as a means to establish, or rather reestablish, it against the reductivist and economistic tendencies of orthodox Marxism and against mainstream, Neoclassical theory. The critique of Neoclassical economics, and subsequent development of Marxist political economy, offered within this study, takes place both within and against the backdrop of these ontological turns.” [Dennis Badeen, A Marxist Critique of the Ontological Foundations of Neoclassical Economics. Ph.D. dissertation. York University. Toronto, Ontario. April 2011. Page 1.]

“… neoclassical economists approach the analysis of social reality armed with inappropriate tools, with the result that they fail to illuminate, or at best they limit the scope of economics to those few cases, if any, where localised stabilities or uniformities may occur. Whatever else it may be, neoclassical economics, according to [Thorstein] Veblen, is a line of thinking that falls short of determining methods that are appropriate to addressing the causal-processual nature of social reality that its practitioners nevertheless, at some level, widely recognise.

“Although recognition of a causal-processual ontology is regarded by Veblen as an advance of neoclassical over classical thinking, the persistence with taxonomy (in the form of deductivism) is the dominating feature that determines the form of the research findings. That is why it makes sense for Veblen to have characterised the project or strand of thinking in question not, say, as post- or counter-classical, but as modernised or neoclassical, signalling that it constitutes a continuation of the same basic taxonomic project, at least at the level of method, even if its ‘adepts’ at some level hold to a worldview ultimately inconsistent with such a taxonomic orientation.”

[Tony Lawson, “What is this ‘school’ called neoclassical economics?” What is Neoclassical Economics?: Debating the origins, meaning and significance. Jamie Morgan, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 51-107.]

“… if social reality depends on transformative human agency, its state of being must be intrinsically dynamic or processual. Think of a language system. Its existence is a condition of our communicating via speech acts, etc. And, through the sum total of these speech acts, the language system is continuously being reproduced and, under some of its aspects at least, transformed. A language system, then, is intrinsically dynamic, its mode of being is a process of transformation. It exists in a continual process of becoming. But this is ultimately true of all aspects of social reality, including many aspects of ourselves, including our personal and social identities. The social world turns on human practice.” [Tony Lawson. Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 49.]

“To date, formalistic methods that presuppose an atomistic ontology have met with very little success, and from the perspective of the ontological framework I defend, this is none too surprising. But even if the ontology I defend is roughly right, there may yet be pockets of social reality that provide the appropriate conditions for successes when utilizing methods of formalistic modeling, as I regularly acknowledge. In addition, of course, I recognize that the ontological conception I defend may yet turn out to be significantly mistaken in various ways; all knowledge claims are fallible. So no one wants to inhibit any serious methodological experimentation, whether involving formal techniques or otherwise. All that is being rejected by heterodoxy, on my conception, is the orthodox constraint on a pluralistic approach to economic analysis. This takes on a special significance just because the mainstream is constituted through this constraint. But if that is the nature of the beast, we just have to accept that opposing the mainstream (rejecting its constitutive doctrine) is a pro-, not an anti-, pluralistic stance.” [Tony Lawson. Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 191.]

“No attempt will here be made even to pass a verdict on the relative claims of the recognized two or three main ‘schools’ of theory, beyond the somewhat obvious finding that, for the purpose in hand, the so-called Austrian school is scarcely distinguishable from the neo-classical, unless it be in the different distribution of emphasis. The divergence between the modernized classical views, on the one hand, and the historical and Marxist schools, on the other hand, is wider,—so much so, indeed, as to bar out a consideration of the postulates of the latter under the same head of inquiry with the former.…

“… the work of the neo-classical economics might be compared, probably without offending any of its adepts, with that of the early generation of Darwinians, though such a comparison might somewhat shrewdly have to avoid any but superficial feature.…

“In consonance with this quasi-evolutionary tone of the neo-classical political economy, or as an expression of it, comes the further clarified sense that nowadays attaches to the terms ‘normal’ and economic ‘laws.’”

[Thorstein Veblen, “The Preconceptions of Economic Science: III.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Volume 14, number 2, February 1900. Pages 240-269.]

“As an open-system thinker, we would expect [Tony] Lawson to employ categories in the sense of the age of resemblance, i.e. categories which are vague, evolving and whose boundaries may shift over time. Certainly there has been evolution and the identification of new boundaries in the form of his exploration of [Thorstein] Veblen’s understanding of neoclassicism as an additional category. But the classification of these boundaries is anything but vague – it is crystal clear in the distinction between a closed-system ontology and an open-system ontology. Further it is a new classification which, rather than being mutable, can be applied across the history of heterodox economics as well as orthodox economics. It is a continuing refrain from orthodox economists in response to heterodox critiques that the mainstream has evolved in ways that are not being accounted for. Yet Lawson has always argued persuasively that his critique continues to hold.” [Sheila Dow, “Neoclassicism, critical realism and the Cambridge methodological tradition.” What is Neoclassical Economics?: Debating the origins, meaning and significance. Jamie Morgan, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Pages 131-149.]

“According to [Tony] Lawson … [in his article, ‘What is this “school” called neoclassical economics?’], based on his reading and advocacy of Thorstein Veblen’s original use of the term … [in his article, ‘The Preconceptions of Economic Science: III’], many heterodox economists (as much if not more so than most mainstream economists) are properly categorized as ‘neoclassical’. This is obviously a provocative claim, not least because heterodox economists see themselves as being in opposition to neoclassical economics. It may even appear reckless, given that heterodoxy is sometimes characterized by its critics as amounting to little more than a general opposition to neoclassical economics. But on closer inspection, Lawson’s claim deserves more careful attention. An important part of its substance is that heterodox economists’ widespread use of mathematics in economic theory is contradictory to their (implicit) open-systems ontology …. The purpose of this chapter is to address this criticism directly, and suggest that it need not be correct: there need be no contradiction between the use of mathematics and adherence to the ontological postulate that the economy is an open system.” [Mark Setterfield, “Heterodox economics, social ontology, and the use of mathematics.” Working paper number 03/2015. Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research, The New School. New York, New York. May 11th, 2015. Pages 1-17.]

“Tony Lawson … recently provided a stimulating and provocative account of neoclassical economics. According to Lawson … [in his article, ‘What is this “school” called neoclassical economics?’], neoclassical economics is characterised by a methodological inconsistency. Drawing upon Thorstein Veblen’s … usage of the term ‘neo-classical’ [in his article, ‘The Preconceptions of Economic Science: III’], Lawson … argues that neoclassical economists adopt ‘a taxonomic orientation in the form of deductivism at the level of method’ which is inconsistent with the ‘historical processual ontology of unfolding causal sequence at the level of events’. That is, neoclassical economists are a group of economists who employ deductivist methods which presuppose closed systems (that is, systems in which regularities of the form ‘if event X then event Y’ are ubiquitous) while simultaneously acknowledging that the social realm is a dynamic and evolving open system.” [Nuno Ornelas Martins, “Why is This ‘School’ Called Neoclassical Economics? Classicism and Neoclassicism in Historical Context.” Working paper number 01/2015. Catholic University of Portugal. Lisbon, Portugal. 2015. Pages 1-23.]

“Tony Lawson’s ‘What is this “school” called neoclassical economics?’ draws on Thorstein Veblen’s original use of ‘neoclassical economics’ to critically interpret contemporary employment of the term, and argue for jettisoning the category of neoclassical economics altogether on the grounds that its use obfuscates effective critique of mainstream economics …. The looseness with which he believes the term and category have been generally applied has in his view allowed a whole range of disparate arguments about neoclassicism to compete for attention, resulting in a failure on the part of many commentators to see what is fundamentally problematic about mainstream economics. However, Veblen is hardly only valuable to Lawson because his initial conception of the term and category is an obvious starting point. His primary value resides in his evolutionary approach to science and associated critique of what he regarded as a primitive metaphysics of science particularly in the economics of his own time.” [John B. Davis, “Lawson on Veblen on Social Ontology.” Working paper number 2015-03. College of Business Administration, Marquette University. Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 2015. Pages 1-16.]

“The book by Tony Lawson entitled Essays on the nature and state of modern economics comes at a particularly fitting time in the history of the economic academic discipline. After what has been regarded by many as one of its major setbacks—namely the failure to predict the 2008 global financial crisis—economics has been severely shaken, marginally challenged, but ultimately left untouched by the debates on its conditions that have sparked in the last few years. Therefore, Lawson’s choice to assemble a number of previously published papers and a new one into this collection constitutes an important and welcome contribution to the methodology and philosophy of economics literature.” [Marco Sebastianelli, “Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics.” Review article. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 9, issue 1, spring 2016. Pages 180-187.]

“A theory of social ontology

“By social reality or the social realm, I mean that domain of all phenomena whose existence depends at least in part on us. Thus, it includes items such as social relations which depend on us entirely, but also others like technological objects, where I take technology to be (or anyway to be included within) that domain of phenomena with a material content but social form.

“Now if social reality depends on transformative human agency, its state of being must be intrinsically dynamic or processual.…

“… My claim is that something like the alternative ontology described above … systematises the implicit preconceptions of the various heterodox traditions, and ultimately explains their enduring opposition to the mainstream.…

“… I do not claim that such an ontological orientation is always explicit in heterodox contributions. Indeed, the term ontology itself is rarely mentioned.”

[Tony Lawson, “The nature of heterodox economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 30, number 4, July 2006. Pages 483-505.]

“I have suggested … that the various heterodox traditions can be identified as heterodox through a recognition of the fact that they advance claims or practices or orientations which are either concrete manifestations of, or presuppose for their legitimacy, a social ontology of the (seemingly coherent) sort set out above. In short, the set of projects currently collected together and systematised as heterodox economics is, in the first instance, an orientation in ontology.” [Tony Lawson. Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 52.]

“… it is easily shown that the widespread emphasis on uncertainty, historical processes, real choice, and the like, reveals a commitment by Post Keynesians to something like the open, structured, and dynamic ontology such as elaborated and systematized within critical realism. So, too, the classical economists looked to by Post Keynesians can be shown to adopt the same sort of ‘world view.’ And, of course, the noted heavy Post Keynesian emphasis on methodology ties in with critical realism directly.” [Tony Lawson, “Connections and Distinctions: Post Keynesianism and Critical Realism.” Review article. Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 22, number 1, autumn 1999. Pages 3-14.]

“Proponents of CR [critical realism], such as [Tony] Lawson … and [Steve] Fleetwood …, often point to affinities between CR and various heterodox approaches to economic analysis (Post Keynesian, Marxian, Austrian, Institutionalist, Feminist, and so on). These affinities stem from a shared ontological orientation, and it is natural that this should be so.” [Paul Lewis and Jochen Runde, “A Critical Realist Perspective on Paul Davidson’s Methodological Writings on—and Rhetorical Strategy for—Post Keynesian Economics.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 22, number 1, autumn 1999. Pages 35-56.]

“Let me refer to … partial regularities … as demi-regularities or demi-laws. A demi-regularity, or demi-reg for short, is precisely a partial event regularity which prima facie indicates the occasional, but less than universal, actualization of a mechanism or tendency, over a definite region of time-space. The patterning observed will not be strict if countervailing factors sometimes dominate or frequently co-determine the outcomes in a variable manner. But where demi-regs are observed there is evidence of relatively enduring and identifiable tendencies in play.

“Now, a realisation that such demi-regs do occur, and the suggestion that they are even pervasive, may, on the face of things at least, seem rather remarkable. After all we have observed that the social world is perpetually changing, being continually transformed. Even supposing that certain structures and mechanisms of interest are often reproduced over significant regions of time-space and that countervailing mechanisms are such that the primary mechanism often dominates and/or shines though them, the numerous background factors which constitute the social and natural environment nevertheless remain in play.”

[Tony Lawson. Economics and Reality. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 204-205.]

“Since the late 1980s, Tony Lawson, followed by a group of economists originally based at Cambridge University, has given voice to critical realism in economics. The most comprehensive statement of their common position … is found in Lawson …. Lawson has added significantly to the critical realist method. Whereas [Roy] Bhaskar argued simply that ‘preconceptions’ provide the key to social scientific retroduction, Lawson argues that the social world gives rise to ‘partial’ or ‘demi-’ event regularities. It is such ‘demi-regs,’ rather than simple ‘preconceptions’, that, in general, enable retroduction, according to Lawson. These ‘demi-regs’ do not presuppose an atomistic reality, as in positivism. Instead, they serve to direct social scientists’ attention to where underlying social structures and mechanisms may be located. Lawson gives as an example the ‘demi-regularity’ of the historically poor comparative productivity performance of the UK. This ‘demi-reg’ initiates an investigation into the underlying social structures that may account for it; Lawson’s previous work argued that one such social structure is the system of industrial relations.” [Andrew Brown, “Critical Realism.” The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2003. Pages 82-86.]

“In this paper, we challenge … [a] (admittedly appealing) general approach to belief in action by building on an alternative conception rooted broadly in dispositionalism.…

“… the reformulation of belief from a dispositionalist perspective … posits a relationship of ‘acceptance’ without a propositional content that is internally represented ….

“Drawing on practice and field theories … we argue that actors form pre-theoretical and pre-conceptual practical belief about the world that generates an open directedness and intentionality without a representational/propositional content ….

“Margaret Archer … has developed an extensive, influential account of reflexivity from within a “relational-realist” framework conceptualizing reflexivity as fundamental human capacity that is historically, socially and contextually variable in its manifestation. Her account dovetails with ours but departs from substantially different premises, especially with regard to the role of self-consciousness in routine activity and the underlying conceptualization of social ontology. However, we share a similar emphasis on the importance of the analytic and empirical distinction between the multiple temporalities of practice and ‘structure’ (for us conceptualized as environments) and their propensity to ‘fall out of phase’ at certain junctures. As such, we see our formulation as largely complementary to her effort.”

[Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo, “The Hysteresis Effect: Theorizing Mismatch in Action.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. Eary View edition. August, 2016. Page 1-31.]

“Field theory is a more or less coherent approach in the social sciences whose essence is the explanation of regularities in individual action by recourse to position vis-à-vis others. Position in the field indicates the potential for a force exerted on the person, but a force that impinges ‘from the inside’ as opposed to external compulsion. Motivation is accordingly considered to be the paramount example of social structure in action, as opposed to a residue of chance or freedom. While field theory is often castigated for its necessarily tautological definition, this may be far more of an advantage than a defect. Field theory offers social scientists a combination of analytical insight and attention to the concrete; further, the implicit definition of ‘explanation’ that it brings is one that, unlike conventional sociological definitions, is internally consistent and in accord with everyday usage.” [John Levi Martin, “What Is Field Theory?” American Journal of Sociology. Volume 109, number 1, July 2003. Pages 1-49.]

“It is difficult to choose models of processes that would explain our data when we are not yet sure what aspects of the data we are trying to explain. Yet such model-independent measures are not yet on hand for field theoretic analyses. In an effort to bridge this gap, we draw on random field theory, focusing in particular on approaches to quantifying the ‘range’ of order. In the least ordered case, in which every domain is independently oriented, we may say that the order is completely local. In the most ordered case, in which every domain is oriented identically, the order is completely global. In between, we may expect that weaker fields have a lesser range of order.” [John Levi Martin, Adam Slez, and Chad Borkenhagen, “Some Provisional Techniques for Quantifying the Degree of Field Effect in Social Data.” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. Volume 2, January–December 2016. Pages 1-18.]

“What happens … when we cast aside the market metaphor? … In what follows we go on to use field theory to discuss how such a problematization can be made; we argue that this extends Weberian action theory in a more satisfactory manner than the market approach. Indeed, the question of the organization of sexual value comes directly out of [Max] Weber’s own work, but his approach relies on … premises that are remedied by attention to the sexual field.” [John Levi Martin and Matt George, “Theories of Sexual Stratification: Toward an Analytics of the Sexual Field and a Theory of Sexual Capital.” Sociological Theory. Volume 24, number 2, June 2006. Pages 107-132.]

“… ‘insecurity’ might be a qualitative experience that (on average) varies over city blocks in a metropolitan area. If we were to hypothesise that people tended to leave insecure areas and relocate in secure ones, we actually have a straightforward model for flow of persons across positions, though we could also study it in other ways. Further, if we were to find that some sort of action were predictably related to the experience – for example, let us say that those in positions of insecurity are more likely to cast a vote for municipal leaders from a right party – then each of these relations can also be seen as a vector, and that’s a second way of using field theoretic principles to quantify the study of experience. I’m actually working on that with some colleagues right now.” [John Levi Martin, “(Explaining)²: John Levi Martin talks explanations, causality and social aesthetics.” Irish Journal of Sociology. Volume 22, issue 2, 2014. Pages 102-126.]

“The paper develops a conceptual framework to advance understanding of the institutional structure of the economy and to enrich the philosophical basis of institutional economics. To achieve this, key elements from the tradition of Original Institutional Economics (OIE) are subsumed into the philosophical platform of Critical Realism (CR).…

“OIE on the whole has much to gain, and certainly nothing to fear, from its engagement with the CR ontology. A thorough understanding of the underlying reality of its subject matter will enhance its conceptions, improve its thinking, encourage communication with other economic approaches and, overall, will provide a much robust institutional edifice …. This applies also to the specific strand of American OIE, which, according to [Tony] Lawson …, has moved too far in the direction of relativism. Furthermore, there is normative point here; those who, following [Thorstein] Veblen …, intend treating ‘economics as an evolutionary science’ need to be open to new ideas and developments in the philosophical discourse.”

[Paschalis Arvanitidis, “A Framework of Socioeconomic Organisation: Redefining Original Institutional Economics Along Critical Realist Philosophical Lines.” Presented at the 46th Congress of the European Regional Science Association, Enlargement, Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. August 30th–September 3rd, 2006. Pages 1-27. Retrieved on August 5th, 2016.]

“Mobilities research has instigated a creative recombination of existing theoretical traditions, methodological approaches, epistemologies, and even ontologies of a world constituted by relations rather than entities, which is why it is sometimes referred to as a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ …. It is neither structuralist nor poststructuralist, but instead advocates for a realist relational ontology for contemporary social science capable of transcending old debates and bridging disciplinary boundaries.

“… It [mobilities theory] is also potentially in dialogue with critical realism, with its emphasis on emergent processes and relationality ….”

[Mimi Sheller, “The new mobilities paradigm for a live sociology.” Current Sociology Review. Volume 62, number 6, 2014. Pages 789-811.]

“Money continues to present theoretical and conceptual difficulties for mainstream neoclassical micro- and macroeconomics.… Many of these diffculties are resolved if money is conceptualized as a structure of social relations.…

“… although money should be seen as having ‘social’ conditions of existence, sociology, with the notable exceptions of Weber and Simmel, has contributed very little directly to the study of the actual social production of money as a system of social relations, sui generis.…

“Obviously, money is socially produced in the sense that it does not occur naturally, and it also mediates and symbolizes social relations—for example, capital-wage labor.…

“The position taken here is similar in all important respects to the ‘critical realist’ perpective in economics.”

[Geoffrey Ingham, “Money is a Social Relation.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 54, number 4, winter 1996. Pages 507-529.]

“This article reviews studies of the work of Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), by examining some of the ideological determinants that have in fluenced criticism from the publication of La Regenta in 1884 up to this moment of great change, and also to suggest what the future of Clarín studies should be within Hispanic studies. My own view of Clarín studies is inspired by the critical realist approach of Roy Bhaskar and especially of social theorist Margaret Archer, who critique the reductionist and essentialist interpretations of subjectivity and the operations of cultural systems. I employ a simplified version of Archer’s model to help describe the fluctuations in approaches to human agency and determinism.” [Lou Charnon-Deutsch, “Between Agency and Determinism: A Critical Review of Clarín Studies.” Hispanic Review. Volume 76, number 2, spring 2008. Pages 135-153.]

“The city of heroes was having a nap. The south wind, warm and languid, was coaxing grey-white clouds through the sky and breaking them up as they drifted along. The streets of the city were silent, except for the rasping whispers of whirls of dust, rags, straw and paper on their way from gutter to gutter, pavement to pavement, street corner to street corner, now hovering, now chasing after one another, like butterflies which the air envelops in its invisible folds, draws together, and pulls apart. This miscellany of left-overs, remnants of refuse, would come together like throngs of gutter urchins, stay still for a moment as if half asleep, and then jump up and scatter in alarm, scaling walls as far as the loose panes of street lamps or the posters daubed up at street corners; and a feather might reach a third floor, and a grain of sand be stuck for days, or for years, in a shop window, embedded in lead.” [Leopoldo Alas. La Regenta. John Rutherford, translator. London and New York: Penguin Books. 2005. Page 19.]

“It [critical realism] does not reject the existence of a ‘real’ world but acknowledges that our understanding of the structures of the society and of the biophysical world is partial and depends on social and political framings that influence research approaches. Critical realism maintains that all environmental problems are perceived differently according to cultural beliefs, the claim of belonging to a social group or political reasons. Critical realism thus provides a coherent and solid ontological basis for applying the extended framework since it encourages relying on both realist and constructivist approaches, using biophysical data to assess environmental change while at the same time critically evaluating how the latter is socially constructed through discursive analysis.” [Floriane Clement, “Analysing decentralised natural resource governance: proposition for a ‘politicised’ institutional analysis and development framework.” Policy Sciences. Volume 43, number 2, June 2010. Pages 129-156.]

“Heterodox approaches in economics tend to advocate mixed methods, combining quantitative and qualitative aspects of economics and non-economics disciplines, sometimes drawing upon realist arguments – to be found across the social sciences – in order to achieve this …. [S]uch approaches link with research agendas and debates that are common to other social sciences.…

“… We do not underestimate the tensions and differences over language and concept that exist even within heterodox economics, let alone those that are likely to arise in any attempt to bring together sociology and heterodox economics.… While there are no doubt deep challenges to the interdisciplinary research we advocate, there are also several opportunities, and the argument advanced here is that these opportunities ought to be actively realised via a dialogue and eventual alliance between sociology and heterodox economics.”

[Andrew Brown and David A. Spencer, “Understanding the Global Financial Crisis: Sociology, Political Economy and Heterodox Economics.” Sociology. Volume 48, number 5, October 2014. Pages 938-953.]

“In this paper I have tried to make the connection between the methodological critique of orthodox economic knowledge and its real world consequences beyond the academy. I have argued that this relationship is not simple in a number of ways. Ontological errors implicit in method such as closure, atomism and constant conjunctions have no necessary policy implications (beyond a commitment to a narrowly controllable reality engineered in terms of x and y).… Moreover, standard economic methods such as varieties of analytical statistics and total factor productivity modelling, that are themselves based on closure, atomism and constant conjunctions, are used to provide empirical claims in support of the broad understandings of orthodox theories and models and neo-liberalism more generally.” [Jamie Morgan, “The Global Power of Orthodox Economics.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 2, July 2003. Pages 7-34.]

“The fact that human activity is constrained/enabled by a hierarchy of causal structures and processes gives us a purchase from which to assess the relevance of statistical and econometric methodologies. For example, it seems likely to be the case that when we are dealing with something that is bound by time-space extensive physical/biological constraints, such as human height, it is reasonable to use statistical methods. We should expect that height will vary according to a well-behaved distributional form, and that the error terms associated with measurement will be normally distributed.… In other words, when we are dealing with aspects of human behaviour that are governed by strong, simple, physical and biological constraints, statistical methods relevant to an ergodic system may be more or less appropriate.” [Brian Pinkstone, “Underlabouring Postkeynesian Economics.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 1, July 2000. Pages 45-48.]

“… [An] aspect of the critical realist program that deserves brief mention is its conception of the role and scope of policy. Realists support the notion that public policies should be directed at providing vehicles for the achievement of human emancipation and social transformation. In regard to transforming society, critical realists put great emphasis on the possibility of explanatory critique: ‘This follows,’ Lawson observes, ‘from a recognition that social structures unlike natural ones are concept and practice-dependent. This bears the consequence that, because it lies within the competence of social science to change such conceptions, so it can facilitate a transformation in social practices and thereby in social structure’ ….” [Roy J. Rotheim, “Post Keynesian Economics and Realist Philosophy.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 22, number 1, autumn 1999. Pages 71-103.]

“David Hume is depicted by critical realists as inspiring the logical positivism against which critical realism is a reaction. Further, [Roy] Bhaskar introduces transcendental realism in terms of a dialectic in relation to classical empiricism (derived from Hume) and transcendental idealism, which implies some sort of progression towards transcendental realism (and thus critical realism). Critical realism is thus seen as the end-process of a (dialectical) progression of thought from the Enlightenment period, so that any return to Enlightenment thought would imply regression.…

“… the critical realist account of human agency and social structure would benefit from a Humean account of belief, imagination and sympathy. This is important not only for human agency as subject matter, but also for human agency with respect to scientific knowledge.

“The argument that [David] Hume’s ideas may be relevant for critical realism requires some discussion of context. For all the differences between eighteenth century Scotland and twenty-first century western society, there are nevertheless some important parallels.”

[Sheila C. Dow, “Historical Reference: Hume and Critical Realism.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 26, number 6, 2002. Pages 683-695.]

“Being fully cognisant of the problems that can arise from a lack of ontological reflection, critical realism takes ontology seriously.…

“At the basis of all human life is a material-technical transformation brought about by labouring activity whereby matter is transformed from one state to another, more useful, state.…

“If this material-technical transformation is to occur, however, millions of isolated, atomised producers must enter into relations to co-ordinate and regulate their labouring activities.”

[Steve Fleetwood, “What Kind of Theory is Marx’s Labour Theory of Value? A Critical Realist Inquiry.” Capital & Class. Issue 73, April 2001. Pages 41-77.]

“Heterodox economic theory is a encompassing theoretical explanation of the social provisioning process within the context of a capitalist economy and therefore is concerned with explaining those factors that are part of the process; and heterodox microeconomic theory is one component of the whole. To use critical realism and the method of grounded theory to develop a microeconomic theory means first delineating the empirically grounded causal mechanisms and structures that make up the constituent parts of the economy and their interdependencies; and secondly developing theories or analytical narratives of how they contribute to explaining the social provisioning process. Thus, the research and referencing requirements for developing an empirically grounded microeconomic theory are significant; and in some instances the necessary empirical evidence does not yet exist.” [Frederic S. Lee, “The Making of Heterodox Microeconomics.” Munich Personal RePEc Archive. May 12th, 2011. Pages 1-70. Retrieved on April 8th, 2016.]

“… a general account of the individual as socially and economically embedded for heterodox economics could be based on a critical realist agency-structure model enlargcd with social psychology thínking about the self-concept. Different heterodox schools give different kinds of emphasis to institutions and social values, but the agency-structure model can make use of both types of means in terms of two reciprocally occurring processes, ínstitutions/individua1 interaction and social values/shared personal values, which each have effects upon one another. This overall framework, I suggest, is reflective of heterodox economics as a research programme alternative to mainstream economics. From this perspective, the different schools within heterodox economics might be classified according to their implicit implementation of this framework. At the same time, in so doing a general account of the individual as socially embedded begins to emerge for heterodox economics.” [John Davis, “The Agency-structure Model and the Embedded Individual in Heterodox Economics.” Transforming Economics: Perspectives on the critical realist project. Paul Lewis, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2004. Pages 132-151.]

“John Davis’ contribution [to Transforming Economics: Perspectives on the critical realist project], ‘The agency-structure model and the embedded individual in heterodox economics,’ … picks up the theme that agency needs to be further explored. Davis contrasts two forms by which individuals are embedded in an agency-structure relationship in heterodox economics, in contrast to the atomic individual of mainstream economics. For Davis, critical realism also emphasises the structural and formal institutionalised features of transformation, whilst acknowledging the situational rationality of individuals.” [Paul Downward, Sheila Dow, and Steve Fleetwood, “Transforming Economics Through Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 5, issue 1, April 2006. Pages 139-182.]

“… what do we make of the relationship between theory and reality? Particularly if the ultimate purpose is to propose policies to change reality, and particularly if the change involves transformation, we need to understand that reality and how change might impact upon it. But we also need to be sure we understand the relationship between economic theory and economic reality.

“The critical realist critique of mainstream economics has brought these important issues to the surface of debate.”

[Sheila C. Dow, “Critical realism and economics.” Applied Economics: A Critical Realist Approach. Paul Downward, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 12-26.]

“Continued intellectual engagements of critical realists, both among themselves and with work from other positions, have ensured the possibility of referring to the work of the ‘school of critical realists’ or ‘the critical realist work’ and being reasonably sure that the central tenets of CR [critical realism] are recognised …. It is the scope of this academic engagement that I wish to further in this paper by attempting to evaluate the critical realist stance on several pertinent issues, from a perspective inspired by some of the insights of poststructuralism, feminism, deconstruction and postcolonial theory (hereafter called the post’ist position).…

“I conclude now with a very rough sketch of a possible praxis – Contextual Social Political Economy (CSPE), which is hopefully a move beyond dichotomies and either/ors to critical productive and realistic contextual understandings. As the name implies, it has the (latent) potential of authoring contextualised theories with methodological pluralism which will advance certain relevant notions in our economic consideration of the world. It is necessarily a non-universal praxis, a call for attention to contexts, and for the practising of a wider Social Political Economy so that diverse insights can be accommodated. An imperative to attend to localised settings with a historicised present.”

[Nitasha Kaul, “A critical ‘post’ to critical realism.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 26, issue 6, November 2002. Pages 709-726.]

“Economic violence, which is caused by spurious economics, deserves to be recognized as such and alternatives reflected in the teaching machine and research incentives (unknown to outsiders, the field of economics is highly segmented, and with centuries of alternative theories and thinkers). Economics needs to be seen as econo-mixes, a plural set of theories, prescriptions, and outcomes that do not reflect the expertise of scientific detachment or neutral consensus, but are amix of various social and political motivations that retain relevance only within a certain empirical context at a given time ….” [Nitasha Kaul, “The Economics of Turning People into Things.” Development. Volume 52, number 3, 2009. Pages 298-301.]

“‘Moral economy’ reinstates the ethical approach to economy. Like ‘geography,’ the term can refer either to a kind of study or the object of that study. As a way of studying the world, it examines and assesses the moral justifications of basic features of economic organisation, in particular property relations and what institutions and individuals are allowed and required to do. It also examines and assesses the moral influences on, and implications, of economic activities, and how economic practices and relations are evaluated as fair, unfair, good or bad by those involved in them.… Moral economy treats the economy not merely as a machine that sometimes breaks down, but as a complex set of relationships between people, and between people and nature, increasingly stretched around the world, in which they act as producers of goods and services, investors, recipients of various kinds of income, lenders and borrowers, and as taxpayers and consumers. As a critical approach it goes beyond the usual focus on irrationality and systemic breakdown, to injustice and the moral justifications of taken-for-granted rights and practices. It’s not only about how much people in different positions in the economy should get paid for what they do, but whether those positions are legitimate in the first place.” [Andrew Sayer, “Time for moral economy?” Geoforum. Volume 65, October 2015. Pages 291-293.]

“In this paper I revive this focus by using a moral economic perspective to examine some of the ways in which markets and associated economic phenomena both depend on and influence moral/ethical sentiments, norms and behaviours and have ethical implications. As a kind of inquiry, ‘moral economy’ is the study of how economic activities of all kinds are influenced and structured by moral dispositions and norms, and how in turn those norms may be compromised, overridden or reinforced by economic pressures …. On this definition, all economies – not merely pre- or non-capitalist ones – are moral economies …. We can also use the term ‘moral economy’ to refer to the object of this kind of inquiry. Of course, just what counts as moral, as opposed to immoral, behaviour is contestable; some forms of moral economy, for example, that of the patriarchal household, might be deemed immoral, or as domination disguised as benevolence and fairness. Moral economy could most easily be accommodated in social science as a positive form of study, but it can also be developed in a normative direction. Like any kind of social relation, all economic relations have ethical implications, so a normative moral economy could also be developed to evaluate them.” [Andrew Sayer, “Moral Economy.” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Lancaster, England. July, 2004. Pages 1-15.]

“… the most developed accounts of the potential contribution of moral economy to social science understandings of economic life, including capitalism as a system, have been provided by Andrew Sayer in a series of articles and book chapters that build on his earlier sympathetic critique of radical political economy from a critical realist position. Here, I draw on writings by Sayer … to make three key points about moral economy approaches.” [David Hesmondhalgh, “Capitalism and the media: moral economy, well-being and capabilities.” Media, Culture & Society. April, 2016. Pages 1-17.]

“The methodological approach that has been chosen to meet the aims and objectives of this research is influenced by a realist ontology. The core idea of realism suggests that agency and structure are distinct objects that each embodies a variety of powers and properties …. This assumption has significant consequences for the conceptualisation of human agency, as people’s powers are understood to emerge from the interplay between structural properties of societies and people’s capacities to reflect, mediate and exercise power …. In this respect, the interplay between agency and structure determines the features of social order in a society which frame conditional constraints and enablers for people’s faring and flourishing ….

“Realist ontology is at the heart of the theoretical framework of moral economy and labour process theory. This realist theory offers an analytical scaffold that carries down the analysis of structure (markets, organisation of work) to the organizational actor and showcases people’s ability to reflect, mediate, resist and comply with existing social, political and economic relations. In this respect, the theoretical framework and the realist ontology are particularly well-suited for understanding people’s human and social powers that enable them to reflect, resist, comply and mediate structures.”

[Knut Laaser. The moral economy of work and employment in banks. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Strathclyde. Glasgow, Scotland. 2013. Pages 6-7.]

“… [There is] the critical realist interpretation of evolutionary economics that this paper is proposing. Critical realism, in fact, criticizes the use of formal models because these imply the adoption of a deductive mode of reasoning that aims at identifying constant conjuctions of events – ‘whenever this then that.’ But universal laws can never be found in a complex, uncertain and ever-changing social realm, so formal modelling exercises do not lead to the advancement of knowledge about economic real processes…

“… it is relevant to point out that the evolutionary field seems to be increasingly moving in a critical realist direction, where formal theorising looses ground, and appreciative research tends to become more influential over time. Recent advances in evolutionary economics have therefore mostly been led by an increasing use of the retroductive model of explanation related to appreciative theorising, rather than by the use of deductive reasoning implied in formal modelling exercises.”

[Fulvio Castellacci, “A critical realist interpretation of evolutionary growth theorising.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 30, issue 6, November 2006. Pages 861-880.]

“We would have taken the theoretical and empirical—although often disjointed—insights available in the existing socioeconomic literature, and welded them together in order to form a systematic, critical-realist’socioeconomic account of labour markets. We would have completed our ‘theorising.’

“If labour markets just are, or are exhausted by, the very social structures that constitute them, then the interaction between human agents and social structures should form the basis of the account, determine the field of study, and ground policy prescriptions.”

[Steve Fleetwood, “Rethinking labour markets: A critical–realist–socioeconomic perspective.” Capital & Class. Volume 30, number 2, summer 2006. Pages 59-89.]

“Polanyi was a precursor to, engaging in the construction of, what the social philosopher Roy Bhaskar calls a metacritique.

“Bhaskar’s theory of explanatory critique, which culminates in metacritique, argues, against Hume’s Law, that social science can move from facts to value judgments, or explain how theory can affect practice. It sustains an ethical naturalism that holds that it is possible to derive moral truths from facts, necessarily denying any ‘inseparable barrier between “is” and “ought” statements ….’ In short, Bhaskar maintains that scientific explanation in the human sciences can generate the explanatory–critical conditions for human emancipation.…

“… critical realism and dialectical critical realism offer Polanyi philosophical support and disclose the great methodological coherence of both his technique of critique and its ontological result, i.e. metacritique. Polanyi’s work should be viewed as an exemplar of explanatory critique ….”

[Hans G. Despain, “Karl Polanyi’s Metacritique of the Liberal Creed: Reading Polanyi’s Social Theory in Terms of Dialectical Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 3, 2011. Pages 277-302.]

“Market society was born in England—yet it was on the Continent that its weaknesses engendered the most tragic complications. In order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England. The nineteenth century, as cannot be overemphasized, was England’s century. The Industrial Revolution was an English event. Market economy, free trade, and the gold standard were English inventions. These institutions broke down in the twenties everywhere—in Germany, Italy, or Austria the event was merely more political and more dramatic. But whatever the scenery and the temperature of the final episodes, the long-run factors which wrecked that civilization should be studied in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, England.” [Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press. 2001. Pages 32.]

“AN EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE …

“… The research highlights the importance of multi-actor, structural, and evolutionary thinking, going beyond either pure individualism or structuralism, toward appreciating the complexity of institutional processes and nuanced outcomes. Future research should seek to further explore such phenomena in more diverse fragile settings, and the role of religion, actor cognition, and networks. To this end, this paper argues for a more collaborative, dynamic and interdisciplinary approach … to the critical study of institutions.…

“… In the research analysis I drew partly on techniques derived from critical realism …. This included (i) initially, drafting a rich description of situations, events and roles of different actors in the course of institutional transformation and development; (ii) secondly, identifying key components of these descriptions; (iii) thirdly, reflecting upon the theory and emerging research findings; (iv) fourthly, identifying key mechanisms in institutional processes, and examining the subtle influence of structure and agency; (v) fifthly, analyzing those mechanisms; and (vi) finally, consolidating research material with cross-case analysis.”

[Holly A. Ritchie, “Unwrapping Institutional Change in Fragile Settings: Women Entrepreneurs Driving Institutional Pathways in Afghanistan.” World Development. Volume 83, July 2016. Pages 39-53]

“At the heart of this critical realist evaluation of causal holism lie, arguably, three fundamental areas of disagreement: differential approaches to unobservable entities, description, and explanation.…

“The causal holist constructs a novel philosophical framework by synthesising [Willard Van Orman] Quine’s holism with [Bastiaan Cornelis van] van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. One way of illustrating the essence of this synthesis is by considering description and explanation and the dimensions to which they pertain, namely, the epistemic and pragmatic respectively. Theories are evaluated in terms of their descriptive adequacy in the epistemic dimension, whereas theories are applied in the pragmatic dimension in the sense that they provide answers to ‘why’ questions, in specific contexts – e.g. why is unemployment currently falling in the UK.…

“The causal holists’ weakness is their ontological-epistemological tension. The result is an ontology that extends to unobservables coupled to an epistemology that is not equipped to evaluate anything other than observables. This tension subsequently damages their understanding of the meaning and role of description by generating an inconsistency vis-à-vis the ‘description’ of unobservables.”

[Steve Fleetwood, “Boylan and O’Gorman’s causal holism: A critical realist evaluation.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 26, issue 1, January 2002. Pages 27-45.]

“With its central focus on models and their descriptive adequacy, causal holism is clearly within the empiricist tradition and it attempts to spell out in what sense economies is an empirical science. Moreover, with its context-laden approach to economic explanation, it avoids any temptation to read economic theory in a metaphysical way. However, unlike the main empiricist movement in the first half of this Century, it does not read economic theory in either a descriptivist or an instrumentalist way. The adaptation, extension, or revision of economic theory is driven by its inability to furnish the appropriate conceptual resources for the construction of economic models which in turn furnish theory-laden descriptions of economic systems and their evolution in real historical time. In short it attempts to negotiate some middle ground between the excesses of both rhetoric and realism, as expounded in recent debates.” [Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O’Gorman, “Causal holism and economic methodology: theories, models and explanation.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie. Volume 55, number 217, September 2001. Pages 395-409.]

“In its original presentation, causal holism used the methodological writings of the Cambridge economist, Nicholas Kaldor, to illustrate how orthodox economists could learn from experience. Kaldor, however, saw orthodox economics as being in a state of crisis.…

“The end of any science is a pluralism of theories and [Willard Van Orman] Quine’s naturalism denies that there is anything special or unique about economics as a human science which would make it any different. In light of this Quinean background, causal holism has argued for a pluralism in economics at the level of theory construction. The hegemony of orthodoxy must be, on Quinean grounds, rejected.

[Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O’Gorman, “Pragmatism in Economic Methodology: The Duhem-Quine Thesis Revisited.” Foundations of Science. Volume 8, issue 1, March 2003. Pages 3-21.]

“There remains … a causal holism that we must take seriously if we are to develop an epidemiology of beliefs. This is not the simple minded holism frequently championed by some humanists; it is a limited (domain-specific) holism participating in a causal, evolutionary relationship that can be explored via the regular methods of cognitive psychology. The holism is limited because we are uncertain how broad the set of ideas is that a learning mechanism takes into account.” [Brian E. Malley, “Causal holism in the evolution of religious ideas: A reply to Pascal Boyer.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. Volume 9, number 4, 1997. Pages 389-399.]

“Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) are very large and complex software packages that run every aspect of an organization. Increasingly, ERP systems are being used in higher education as one way to teach business processes, essential knowledge for students competing in today’s business environment.…

“All students who experienced ERP systems performed better on the business simulation game the second time they played it, after their class was completed. For the students in classes that didn’t study with ERP, their results the second game play were mixed. Half of that group of students did worse the second time they played the game. In addition, GPAs [grade point averages] were significantly higher in the one non-ERP class. Consequently, it may be inferred that there is something in the ERP curriculum that allowed these lower GPA students to absorb more from their class to enable them to improve on the business simulation game. This work has sought to answer this question using a critical realist philosophy. By performing a second phase of the research, understanding of the mechanisms and causality behind students’ learning in the two distinct classes was achieved. Under this view of critical realism, it is inadequate to determine any theory from empirical observations solely.”

[Ellen F. Monk and Mark Lycett, “Measuring business process learning with enterprise resource planning systems to improve the value of education.” Education and Information Technologies. Volume 21, issue 4, September 2014. Pages 747-768.]

“The resonances [of Gilles Deleuze’s work] with [Roy] Bhaskar’s distinction between closed systems and open systems, the critique of laws, and the advocacy of causation as ‘conjunctural’ is quite striking. Indeed, both Deleuze and Bhaskar stake their ontology of open systems in the natural and social world on similar ground, the critique of accounts grounded in repetition (Deleuze) or constant conjunction (Bhaskar). Both appeal to a language of production (Deleuze) or generation (Bhaskar) characterized by assemblages (Deleuze) or conjunctural causation (Bhaskar). Where Bhaskar uses the language of generative mechanisms and overdetermination, Deleuze favours the language of machines, yet both concepts play a similar role.” [Timothy Rutzou, “Finding Bhaskar in all the wrong places? Causation, process, and structure in Bhaskar and Deleuze.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. April, 2017. Pages 1-16.]

“… while the critical-realist literature is somewhat diverse, a key presupposition of this paper is that there exists a ‘Cambridge school’ view developed by Tony Lawson … and others, mainly those (mostly at Cambridge University) closely influenced by Lawson. This view has figured prominently in this journal …. Again, there is variety within this group; however, there is sufficient coherence on key issues to justify the description of the group as a distinct school. Arguably, ‘open systems’ is, along with ontological depth, one of the two most important concepts in this Cambridge school view.…

“… The aspiration for the economist should then be to adopt an open-systems methodology: one that accepts and takes seriously an ontology of open systems and does not merely ignore disjunctures between ontology and methods used. This methodology seems a reasonable aspiration for CR, given its ontological focus. However, it is argued that the Cambridge school of CR in economics has tended to adopt a strategy of rejection of what shall be called here ‘closed-systems’ methods, i.e. techniques which presuppose closure, be that defined in terms of event regularities or beneath the level of events.”

[Andrew Mearman, “Critical Realism in Economics and Open-Systems Ontology: A Critique.” Review of Social Economy. Volume LXIV, number 1, March 2006. Pages 47-75.]

“… [Part of this paper] can be thought of as an attempt to answer Bruce Caldwell’s call for an immanent critique of praxeology ….

“… [This paper] draws out the implications of this critical realist reconceptualisation of [Ludwig von] Mises’s work for three key methodological issues, namely the relationship between theory and history, the possibility of naturalism, and the place of Austrian economics within the discipline as a whole. It will be argued in particular that taking seriously the ontological position staked out by Mises suggests that, far from being a ‘unique methodological stance [that] separates it from the rest of the economics profession’ …, praxeology is most sustainably viewed as a specific example of a general heterodox, ontologically oriented approach to the analysis of the socio-economic world.” [Paul Lewis, “Certainly not! A critical realist recasting of Ludwig von Mises’s methodology of the social sciences.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 17, number 3, September 2010. Pages 277-299.]

“This article examines the problems that arise from borrowers’ growing aspirations for credit in rural South India.…

“The firmness of our findings rests in part on our ontological starting point as critical realists, and in part on the field experience of the various researchers and the secondary data which strengthen the case for our argument. Aspiration problems are growing and are a serious, worrying component of modern Indian rural capitalism in southern Andhra Pradesh.”

[Wendy Olsen and Jamie Morgan, “Aspiration Problems in Indian Microfinance: A Case Study Exploration.” Journal of Developing Societies. Volume 26, number 4, December 2010. Pages 415-454.]

“… this paper takes a critical realist approach, and therefore goes beyond the empirical evidence pointing towards mere economic factors that have caused farmer suicides.…

“… the paper makes use of the Rural Livelihoods System (RLS) Mandala Framework …. The nine-square mandala is a very well-known and widespread symbol in the Indian culture. It serves as an extremely useful analytical tool, as it epitomises the ‘universe’ of a typical rural resident of India (in the context of this research – the farmer). Livelihoods security is a major concern for all small and marginal farmers in India given the changing agrarian scenario. However, saying that livelihoods is restricted to economic security alone would be reductionist. This research broadens the conceptualization of livelihoods to encompass economic, social, psychological as well as emotional security. The Mandala framework enables such a holistic analysis and helps to validate the relationship between livelihoods insecurity and farmers’ suicides.

“… the nine-square Mandala … consists of three levels.…

“From the analyses in this paper it can be said that moving beyond the epistemological boundaries of empiricism and adopting a critical realist approach helps to unearth causes behind social phenomena which may at the outset seem unrelated. However, on closer enquiry and investigation linkages can be established in the form of direct and indirect as well as combined causes.”

[Namrata Chindarkar, “A Comparative Analysis of Farmers’ Suicides in Andhra Pradesh, India.” Methodological Innovations Online. Volume 2, number 2, 2007. Open access. Pages 6-19.]

“… the ‘transformational model’ of society—[Roy] Bhaskar’s description—logically entails a concept of articulation, and I now want to show that this demands a double concept of spatial structure. Its first specification is in the immediate sense of the ‘binding of space and time’ in the modalities which connect systems to structures.…

“… [The] second specification is in the distantiated sense of ‘the uneven development of different sectors or regions of social systems.’ I wish to propose that the contingent and differential engagement of the modalities of structure depends upon and is structured by a definite spatial structure of relations.… Bhaskar provides [an] … accessible and acceptable entré to these notions by arguing that the transformation model further requires ‘a system of mediating concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxix, designating the “slots,” as it were, in the social structure into which active subjects must slip in order to reproduce it; that is, a system of concepts designating the “point of contact” between human agency and social structures. Such a point, linking action to structure, must both endure and be immediately occupied by individuals.’ The point-patterns which these articulations trace out are defined by a position-practice system which, Bhaskar … insists, ‘must be conceptualized as holding between the positions and practices (or better, [positioned-practices, not between the individuals who occupy/engage in them.’ In other words—and this is the crux of the matter—it must be located not at the level of social interactions but at the level of social relations.”

[Derek Gregory, “Solid geography: notes on the recovery of spatial structure.” A Search for Common Ground. Peter Gould and Gunnar Olsson, editors. London: Pion Limited. 1982. Pages 187-219.]

“The Learning … to Change the World methodology proceeds through seven stages: problem clarification, literature review, faith-learning integration, interdisciplinary research contextualization, ethical/social leadership, and lifelong learning evaluation, Grounded in a Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation metaphysical world view, it assumes a critical realist epistemology to engage real-world challenges. The process accommodates multiple research methods and aims for a redemptive-ethical transformation of social problems.…

“… Alister McGrath argues for the transcendental contribution of divine revelation in the Bible and ecumenical orthodoxy in the Christian theological tradition. McGrath’s insights supply a framework for interdisciplinary integration of knowledge for various levels of reality, focusing on ‘the critical relationship between theology and the natural sciences,’ but applicable to ‘other areas as well’ …. McGrath’s critical realist epistemology is adapted from Roy Bhaskar, a philosopher of science, consistent with a traditional Christian understanding of knowing truth …. Bhaskar’s approach corrects the epistemic fallacy both of modern positivism and postmodern constructivism because it is non-reductive as well as ontologically realist.”

[David C. Ward, “Interdisciplinary Faith-Learning Integration for Social Change.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Volume 26, issue 1/2, January 2014. Pages 29-56.]

“… in a realist philosophy of science, such as Roy Bhaskar’s, … explanation by ‘natural necessity’ is not a case of positivism’s ‘covering law.’ It allows for the stratification of nature, emergence of levels of nature, each with its own laws, whereas determinism is a reductionism to natural laws or pointed abstract (e.g. hedonistic) ‘laws of nature.’” [James Daly. Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment. London: Greenwich Exchange. 2000. Page 91.]

“The two claimants to enlightenment are polar opposite orientations. The materialistic one sees itself as this-worldly, and condemns the other as irrational because other-worldly. The spiritual enlightenment however sees itself as questing for the fullest rational understanding of the human world in its totality, and condemns its opponent as not in fact earthy, but in essence hellish. The Platonic Socrates classifies Sophists not among intellectuals, as a rival group to philosophers, but among pimps. [Thomas] Aquinas classifies unjust laws not among laws at all but among acts of violence. For Aquinas, nature is law; and the nature of law is not the same as that of an act of violence. For Thucydides and [Thomas] Hobbes on the contrary nature is violence, and law is the product of successful counter-violence. For the dialectical [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte the age of Hobbes and Locke is ‘the age of complete sinfulness’ – … of the sundering … of the mind from its essential self.…

“The essence of the natural law tradition deriving from the thought of Plato and Aristotle is found in the fundamental principle of the natural law according to Aquinas, ‘Good is to be done and pursued, and bad avoided.’ Aquinas puts this, as the basis of all intelligibility in practical reasoning, on a par with the principle of non-contradiction, the basis of all intelligibility in theoretical reasoning.” [James Daly. Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment. London: Greenwich Exchange. 2000. Pages 14-16.]

“An adequate understanding of [Karl] Marx’s thought about justice requires an understanding of the philosophical tradition from which it comes. That is the rich and complex essentialist and dialectical philosophical tradition which aims at scientific and spiritual enlightenment. Its roots are in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy, but it has been enriched by conflicts and accommodations with Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy.…

“The two claimants to enlightenment, as ‘ideal types,’ were clearly exemplified in the conflict between Socrates and the Sophists. One of them, to which [Karl] Marx’s thought belongs, is an authentic humanism which respects the specificity of the human mind and spirit, its power of universalizing; the other is an atomistic materialism which reduces the spiritual to the lower level of the biological, or to the even lower level of the mechanical. Unfortunately, ever since in 1886 – three years after Marx’s death – Engels … placed Marxism in the second camp, Marx has been thought by both enemies and alleged friends to be on the anti-humanist side of this transhistorical conflŹict.” [James Daly, “Marx and Justice.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Volume 8, number 3, 2000. Pages 351-370.]

“Today [Karl] Marx’s true legacy can best be appreciated from the vantage point of the Bhaskarian vindication of emergentist ontology and natural kinds, and explanatory critique. [James] Daly does not discuss Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy at any length [in Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of Enlightenment], but a clear implication of his account is that Bhaskar’s thought (including the spiritual turn) is no departure from, rather an elaboration and development of, the work of Marx within the tradition of dialectical enlightenment.” [Mervyn Hartwig, “Paradigms of Enlightenment.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 2, July 2001. Pages 49-54.]

“m-health is a new and evolving research discipline. The term mobile health or m-health, also written as m-health, describes the use of mobile telecommunication and multimedia technologies as they are integrated within increasingly mobile and wireless health care delivery systems. It can also be described as ‘mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies for health care’ ….

“The philosophy of critical realism is adapted in order to maintain a solid ontological ground for this research and to establish the existence of a reality independent of observation while accepting the relativism of knowledge as socially and historically conditioned in the epistemological domain.”

[Moses Lemayian Nooseli and Tonny Kerage Omwansa, “Towards a Critical Realist Epistemology for M-Health Research.” International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Research. Volume 3, number 6, June 2013. Pages 205-210.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s critique of totality would seem to have a number of resonances with [Pierre] Badiou’s thinking on multiplicity: for example, both are ordered yet fundamentally open, and both would seem to resist sublation as a necessary aspect of the new (this would seem to be inherent in the distinct event). Where Bhaskar and Badiou would seem to diverge is in terms of the associated emphases. Bhaskar, for example, is interested in the general conditions of freedom related to the generalized conditions of structure and agency. Here, transformative potential within open totalities is a central theme. But the potential for transformation is a rather different focus than Badiou’s focus on stating the distinct event and on stating the actuality of genuine events in given dimensions of human experience.” [Jamie Morgan, “The Significance of the Mathematics of Infinity for Realism: Norris on Badiou.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, Issue 2, April 2011. pages 243-270.]

“The ideal upon which this engineering model of communication [the triple junction model] rests is preservation of the transparency of transmission (media) lines. That is, noise that could interfere with or interrupt transmission is reduced or excluded.…

“… The asymmetrical and opaque triple junction model consistently proves to be the most realistic model in both the mobile and post-mobile society.

“Today, whether we own mobile devices or not, there is an uneven distribution of power that we cannot observe and the exercise of violence on a daily basis, along with inequality, imbalance, alienation, and interruption. This has been the case since ancient times. Mobile media’s ability to disconnect removes the veil of the myth of communication (an ideal and illusion), revealing reality.

[Kenichi Fujimoto, “The ‘triple junction model’ of mobile media Two dogmas of the ‘myth of communication.’” The Post-Mobile Society: From the smart/mobile to second offline. Hidenori Tomita, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2016. Google Play edition.]

“Although [Roy] Bhaskar’s position offers insights that help us re-think some of the flaws in the three theoretical logics [Jürgen Habermas’ reconstructive science, Pierre Bourdieu’s constructivist structuralism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-structuralist political theory of discourse], its philosophical ontology of the real is problematic from the post-structuralist perspective on discourse put forward here. I turn, therefore, to post-structuralist feminist epistemology, which has more convincingly dealt with the question of realism.…

“Which is the terrain of convergence between feminist work and critical realism? As I mentioned, this is a post-positivist epistemology, that all knowledge is discursively constructed and historically contingent, and a pragmatist methodology, that there is no single scientic method, but distinct methodological strategies proper to address particular questions, depending on the nature of inquiry.…

“Instead of coupling a post-positivist epistemology with a realist ontology, á la [Roy] Bhaskar, I would take a feminist position, which builds on post-positivism by combining a constructionist ontology with a realist epistemology. This position accepts that although the social world is constituted in articulations of meaning and power, our ways of knowing about it (our meta-languages) construe social practice ‘as if’ it were ‘real’—which means provisionally accepting the ‘immediate givenness’ of the various dimensions that are at play within a practice.”

[Lilie Chouliaraki, “‘The Contingency of Universality’: Some Thoughts on Discourse and Realism.” Social Semiotics. Volume 12, number 1, 2002. Pages 83-114.]

“… the multimodal analysis of realist narratives also reveals that certain forms of realism are behind any claim of the news to represent reality as an immediate and authentic experience for the spectator. It is, ultimately, the study of multimodality that enables us to trace down the process by which a singular representation of suffering comes to articulate a ‘universal’ value – the values that connect the feelings of the individual spectator with the objectivity of public action.” [Lilie Chouliaraki. The Spectatorship of Suffering. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2006. Page 82.]

“[Lillie] Chouliaraki marries constructionist ontology with a critical realist epistemological position and the union is achieved in a particularly interesting way. The crux of her argument relies on a pretext which avoids compulsion to a singular, definitively specified reality. It does so by leaning considerably on [Jacques] Derrida’s account of signification and how his theory extends to questions of epistemology.…

“The pragmatic benefits stimulated by [John] Shotter’s constructionist account and Chouliaraki’s version of critical realism allow for reflexive consideration of the nature of embodied and discursive contexts and opens options divergent to dorninant disciplinary explanations and DPEC [epistemological constructionism] positions.”

[Tim Corcoran, “Second nature.” British Journal of Social Psychology. Volume 48, number 2, 2009. Pages 375-388.]

“Those who speak with a prior commitment to a ‘realist’ rhetoric or idiom claim authorization for a way of talking that assumes the already finalized or completed existence of certain ‘things,’ ‘entities’ or ‘structures’—and claims that our only problem is to ‘measure’ their character etc.—when no such ‘things’ may in fact exist at all! In the view proposed here, although I have no space to argue its merits, talk ‘about’ or ‘of’ such ‘things’ takes on a different function. We can assume such ‘arguable objects’ to exist only to the extent that, in playing their part in a conversation, they serve to make a certain form of human being possible—‘to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’” [John Shotter, “In Conversation: Joint Action, Shared Intentionality and Ethics.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 5, number 1, 1995. Pages 49-73.]

“… I will … inquire into the prospects for establishing a helpful critical realist-inspired economic methodology. More specifically I will argue the case for a critical realist meta-theory that offers a consistent set of philosophical resources, tenets and heuristic ideas that may underpin a self-contained and potentially fruitful position of economic methodology.… Against what many advocates of critical realism within the discipline of economics seem to uphold then, I do indicate that there may be something like a critical realist-inspired approach to economic theorising and economic analyses.” [Bjørn-Ivar Davidsen, “Towards a critical realist-inspired economic methodology.” The Journal of Philosophical Economics. Volume III, number 2, spring 2010. Pages 74-96.]

“Until a clear statement is given to the contrary, the fact remains that the essence of what is communicated is that the critical realist critique of mainstream economics characterises the latter as underpinned by the philosophical position of empirical realism and its associated positivist conception of science.” [Bjørn-Ivar Davidsen, “Arguing Critical Realism: The case of economics.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 2, August 2005. Pages 291-314.]

“Towards a critical realist-inspired economics …

“In order to develop domain-specific ontological theories within the realm of economics, existing theories and explanations pertaining to substantive economic issues and phenomena may be subjected to immanent critiques probing into the question of whether the theories at hand offer adequate and consistent accounts of the reality they purport to explain. To the extent that they do not, ideas and hunches as to how to provide a more satisfactory account will readily ensue. The next step in the process then is actually to work out an alternative account overcoming and transcending identified deficiencies and shortcomings. In a critical realist approach to economics, these undertakings will naturally be guided by the precepts flowing from the general critical realist account of social reality.”

[Bjørn-Ivar Davidsen, “Critical realism in economics: A different view.” Ontology and Economics: Tony Lawson and His Critics. Edward Fullbrook, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Pages 71-98.]

“… in exploring the processes of transaction, he [John R. Commons] indicates how definite structures endure and change and how human intentions and purposes influence such processes ….

“Its [Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatism’s] subject-matter is the whole concern of which the individuals are members, and the activities investigated are their transactions governed by an entirely different law, not a law of nature but a working rule, for the time being, of collective action ….

“… a new transaction theory could be based on Commons’s analytical unit-transaction and [Douglass C.] North’s transaction costs. Critical realism points us in a new direction, and institutionalists now must develop substantial theory.”

[Cheng-Ping Cheng, “Critical Realism and Institutionalism: Integrating the Scientific Method of John R. Commons and Douglass C. North.” Soochow Journal of Economics and Business. Number 51, December 2005. Pages 297-318.]

“FB [family business] is a diverse area that may involve multiple theoretical lenses and levels of analysis, and this variety should be mirrored in the ways in which case study is employed ….

“… FB authors justified the theory-building role of case study research by showcasing the contribution of their research to the extant literature.…

“The critical realist case study purports to describe the boundaries between the natural and social worlds, employing a causal language to describe phenomena. The ontology of critical realism lies in the notion of an existing independent reality, even though such a reality is only imperfectly apprehensible.…

“Rather than seeing a tension between the context and robust scientific explanations, the causal explanations generated by critical realism are required to account for both.”

[Tanja Leppäaho, Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki, and Pavlos Dimitratos, “The Case Study in Family Business: An Analysis of Current Research Practices and Recommendations.” Family Business Review. Volume 29, number 2, 2016. Pages 159-173.]

“… we introduce contextualised explanation to the IB [international business] field …. Given this method is a more recent development, it exhibits less consistency and uniformity than can be found in the other three methods we have profiled. Critical realism forms the ontological basis for this method, but social scientists are still debating how to apply this philosophy in practice.…

“… There are multiple variants of critical realism, so the focus in this paper will be on the most influential: Roy Bhaskar …, and those who have introduced his philosophies to practising social scientists …. Bhaskar is realist in the sense that he acknowledges the existence of a reality that is independent of our perceptions of it, but he also regards our comprehension of reality as theory-laden and subjective, and social phenomena as concept-dependent (in other words, constituted by the meanings we attach to them).”

[Catherine Welch, Rebecca Piekkari, Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki, and Eriikka Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, “Theorising from case studies: Towards a pluralist future for international business research.” Journal of International Business Studies Volume 42, number 5, June/July 2011. Pages 740-762.]

“This paper presents a novel research model – Contextual Constructs Model (CCM) and the theory that underpins it – Contextual Constructs Theory (CCT). First developed as part of a complex project investigating user perceptions of information quality during Web-based information retrieval, the CCM is not a single research method per se, but is a modelled research framework providing an over-arching perspective of scientific inquiry, by which a researcher is able to identify multiple possible methods of study and analysis according to the identified research con-structs and their contexts. Central to CCM/CCT is that all research involves the fusion of two key elements: 1) context; and 2) cognitively-driven constructs; and that the co-dependent nature of the relationship between these two research components inform the research process and eventual outcomes. The resulting CCM is one that frames research as a contextual process of phases, in-dentifying the conceptual, philosophical, implementation, and evaluation tasks associated with a research investigation. The value of framing research within a CCM comes from its capacity to frame complex, real world phenomena since its epistemology is a blend of a critical-real world view – where reality can be both constructed and constant; within a systems-science paradigm – where constructs are not reduced to isolated parts, but investigated in terms of multiple co-constructions and the contextual relationships between them.…

“A research context is the associated entities surrounding the research and researcher such as the following: the discipline of the research project …; the phenomenon (also called the research object) being investigated …; previous theory related to the research object …; the researcher … – including their evolving ‘research lens’ …; and the conceptualisation of how the research object will be investigated, or research problem ….

[Shirlee-ann Knight and Donna Cross, “Using Contextual Constructs Model to Frame Doctoral Research Methodology.” International Journal of Doctoral Studies. Volume 7, 2012. Pages 39-62.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar rarely uses the term ‘emergence,’ and his way of describing his argument is as one for the real ‘stratification’ of the world.… [T]here are at least two ways in which Bhaskar uses the term ‘stratified.’ It will be important to distinguish them more carefully than he does for the purposes of the analysis and criticism which follows. In the thinner sense, which I will call weak stratification, a stratified world is one in which there is a ‘real distinction’ between sequences of events and the ‘generative mechanisms’ which give rise to the events …. In the thicker sense, which I will refer to as strong stratification, on the other hand, a stratified world is one in which there is some variety in the kinds of generative mechanisms responsible for the flow of events …. [David Spurrett, “Bhaskar on Open and Closed Systems.” South African Journal of Philosophy. Volume 19, issue 3, 2000. Pages 188-209.]

“Post-socialist suburbanisation has been one of the most visible processes of socio-spatial differentiation in eastern Europe.…

“This paper endorses the critical realist view … that meanings and reasons are causative of action, yet action is ineluctably shaped by unacknowledged structural conditions thus generating unintended consequences, which form the context of subsequent interaction.…

“Long-suppressed urbanisation and a dramatic housing backlog resulted in extensive peri-urban growth in Tirana, which during the 1990s doubled the size of the city whereas war refugees put pressure on cities of former Yugoslavia. Elsewhere processes of suburbanisation seemed dominant, but their pace differed according to housing shortages, available finance, preferences and the degree of ‘permitted’ informality.”

[Adriana Mihaela Soaita, “Romanian Suburban Housing: Home Improvement through Owner-building.” Urban Studies. Volume 50, number 10, August 2013. Pages 2084-2101.]

“I will argue that the critical realist meta-theoretical solution to the sociological problematics of structure, agency and social action (as exemplified in the work of Roy Bhaskar and others) is implicitly applied in [Pierre] Bourdieu’s substantive research and theory, specifically in his utilization of the concepts of habitus and field. It will argue that the related functioning of these concepts specifically depicts the mechanisms whereby individual choices and actions are imbricated in the broader processes of structural causality. Thus, in essence I will be arguing that though Bourdieu’s achievements are widely acclaimed, their scope has yet to be fully appreciated. The critical realist understanding of the relationship between social structure and action (in the abstract) is in effect concretized by Bourdieu’s substantive work.” [Garry Potter, “For Bourdieu, Against Alexander: Reality and Reduction.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 30, issue 2, 2000. Pages 229-246.]

“Critical realism can be classified as a ‘middle ground’ theory. It sees structure and agency as separate, independent concepts, which are interrelated but which do not conflate either into individualism or into structuralism …. Social structures are not independent of the activities which relate or give rise to them, nor do structures exist independently of agents’ conceptions of their actions …. Social structures also exist in specific contexts and in specific temporal spaces. Some structures will be more universal than others and may indeed be sustained for long periods of time. For example, the capitalist economic system has been sustained in western countries for many years and facilitates or determines a series of economic choices for individuals. Yet this economic system is not the only possibility. The economic events which led to the worldwide economic crisis of 2008-2010 led many commentators to question the validity of some of the capitalist system’s practices.” [Lorcán Ó hÓbáin. The emergence of dynamic capabilities in SMEs: a critical realist study. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Dublin City University Business School. Dublin, Ireland. April, 2012. Page 18.]

“The ontology of critical realism can address some of the gaps and inadequacies in … [various] understandings of what leads children to go to school. First, it offers conceptual tools with which to understand individual children as human beings with their own properties and powers, who act because they care about things …. Human beings are moral, social beings, who act in part on the basis of instrumental rationality but also commit themselves to ‘ultimate’ concerns that lead them to choose certain paths of action …. In this article, the concept of ‘ultimate concerns’ is used to consider the moral and social reasons that were leading children to commit themselves going to school, to achieving certain forms of childhood and adulthood and to becoming ‘good’ people.” [Lydia Marshall, “‘Going to school to become good people’: Examining aspirations to respectability and goodness among schoolchildren in urban Ethiopia.” Childhood. Volume 23, number 3, 2016. Pages 423-437.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar … describes hermeneutics as ‘the generic term for the activity of rendering intelligible what is at present unintelligible. It is the attempt to normalize discourse – that is, paradigmatlcally it is discourse (from within some normal discourse) about abnormal rather than normal discourse.’ Yet he suggests that hermeneutics should not be presented as solely addressing abnormal discourse since in its everyday practice it also has a clear role in understanding normal discourse. The external realist approach of critical realism requires this everyday understanding as Bhaskar … suggests ‘hermeneutics, or the interpretive understanding of meaningful objects, is always necessary in social life—and within it, as well as about it.’ Bhaskar sees that this interpretation and reinterpretation should not be presented as being deliberate and separate from social life—it is a fundamental part of living in society.” [Philip J. Dobson. Moving from interpretivism to critical realism in IS research: an exploration and supporting IT outsourcing example. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Edith Cowan University. Joondalup, Western Australia, Australia. January, 2003. Pages 265-266.]

“I have referred to the type of realism defended by Bhaskar as ‘depth realism.’” [Andrew Collier. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1994. Page 42.]

“If transcendental realism is depth realism in that it looks beneath the course of events to the mechanisms that generate it, and beneath each layer of mechanisms to the one that founds it, it also recognizes a depth dimension in the object of science.” [Andrew Collier. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London and New York: Verso Books imprint of New Left Books. 1994. Page 50.]

“I have utilized policy network analysis as the theoretical framework for my investigation of animal research policy. Policy network analysis is a prominent, orthodox tool in public policy research. It takes the relationships between group and state actors in a particular policy sector as its starting point in trying to explain policy processes. The most influential policy network typology was developed by [David] Marsh and [R. A. W.] Rhodes ….

“Underlying these advances in policy networks and historical institutionalism has been an attempt to grapple with a more fundamental method issue—how we understand the relationship between structure and agency, or between institutions and the individuals within them. To what extent do institutions constrain individual agency, or how can agents affect or act independently of their institutional context? I have taken a ‘critical realist’ approach to these questions.…

“For critical realists, social reality is highly complex, irregular, and dynamic.”

[Dan Lyons, “Protecting Animals versus the Pursuit of Knowledge: The Evolution of the British Animal Research Policy Process.” Society & Animals. Volume 19, 2011. Pages 356-367.]

“We outline a dialectical model of policy networks …. It highlights the three dialectical relations identified to date. More specifically, it acknowledges that:

[David Marsh and Martin Smith, “Understanding Policy Networks: towards a Dialectical Approach.” Political Studies. Volume 48, 2000. Pages 4-21.]

“The concept of policy networks is becoming ubiquitous. The term is most commonly used as a metaphor. It is infrequently used with precision. It is rare for it to have any explanatory value. There is no existing, comprehensive review of literature. Consequently, this article seeks to draw attention to the variety of usages.…

“The British contribution to the study of policy networks has demonstrated that the concept has considerable utility for the analysis of policy-making in Western democracies. Its heuristic value remains considerable, primarily because the concept directly confronts, even mirrors, the administrative and political complexity of advanced industrial societies.”

[R. A. W. Rhodes, “Policy Networks: A British Perspective.” Journal of Theoretical Politics. Volume 2, number 293, 1990. Pages 293-317.]

“A policy community has the following characteristics: a limited number of participants with some groups consciously excluded; frequent and high quality interaction between all members of the community on all matters related to the policy issues; consistency in values, membership and policy outcomes which persist over time; consensus, with the ideology, values and broad policy preferences shared by all participants; and exchange relationships based on all members of the policy community controlling some resources. Thus, the basic interaction is one involving bargaining between members with resources. There is a balance of power, not necessarily one in which all members equally benefit but one in which all members see themselves as in a positive-sum game. The structures of the participating groups are hierarchical so leaders can guarantee compliant members. This model is an ideal type; no policy area is likely to conform exactly to it.” [R. A. W. Rhodes, “Policy Network Analysis.” The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy. Robert E. Goodin, Michael Moran, and Martin Rein, editors. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pages 423-45.]

“Network analysis comes in many guises. It is common to all the social science disciplines. This discussion paper focuses on that species of network analysis most common in political science and public administration – policy network analysis. Few social science disciplines can ever agree on the meaning of an idea. So, a policy network is one of a cluster of concepts focusing on government links with, and dependence on, other state and societal actors. These notions include issue networks: iron triangles, policy sub-systems, policy communities, and epistemic communities ….” [R. A. W. Rhodes, “How to Manage Your Policy Network.” Presented at the Commonwealth Secretariat. February 15th, 2013. Retrieved on May 11th, 2016.]

“[R. A. W.] Rhodes uses the notion of a policy network to explore the relationship between central and local government and describes both the rules of the game and strategies used by central and local government in the intergovernmental network, The strategies for managing the relationship include incorporations, consultation, bargaining, avoidance, incentives, persuasion, and professionalization. The game-like quality of network management is not specific to federal systems.” [R. A. W. Rhodes, “The New Governance: Governing without Government.” Political Studies. Volume XLIV, 1996. Pages 652-667.]

“My original account of policy networks was based on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council between 1979 and 1985. By the 1990s, much had changed. I asked what had changed, and why, in central government, in local government, and in our relations with the European Union (EU). I explored the implications of these changes not only for the theory of policy networks but also for how we studied British government. The study of networks mutated into the study of governance, and positivism gave way to an interpretive stance.” [R. A. W. Rhodes, “Understanding Governance: Ten Years On.” Organization Studies. Volume 28, number 08, 2007. Pages 1243–1264.]

“One of the main themes of the governance literature has been the argument that networks have replaced hierarchy as the dominant mode of governance …. Here, the idea is that, in an ever-more complex environment, governments need, increasingly, to involve experts in policy making. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize that there are many who argue that emphasis on network governance has been overdone, suggesting, instead, that network governance occurs in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ ….” [David Marsh and Matthew Hall, “The British Political Tradition and the Material-Ideational Debate.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Volume 18, number 1, 2016. Pages 125-142.]

“Our interview data reported below suggest two clear conclusions. First, it is not easy for senior bureaucrats to maximize the policy function for two reasons. The simple distinction between the policy advice function and the management function on which much of the model is based is problematic in practice. At the same time, the job of senior officials, in particular the permanent secretaries, inevitably involves major managerial responsibilities. Secondly, not all senior civil servants attach such a high value to policy work and such a low value to management as the bureau-shaping model assumes.” [David Marsh, M. J. Smith and D. Richards, “Bureaucrats, Politicians and Reform in Whitehall: Analysing the Bureau-Shaping Model.” British Journal of Political Science. Volume 30, number 3, July 2000. Pages 461-482.]

“… [We summarize] three different approaches to conceptualising and representing a narrative/reality dichotomy (adapted from [Roy] Bhaskar …).… That is, Western knowledge is often represented as treelike (as in Linnaean taxonomies), with hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm foundations.… Naïve constructivism could be represented as a tree in which nature and society are rooted in human narratives. Merchant’s dialectic would thus be an orchard or grove of trees of both types, growing together in a mutualistic (or commensal) relationship. We could extend this metaphor by noting that naïve realism and naïve constructivism cannot ‘survive’ by themselves, because they are so easily understood as untenable.” [Noel Gough and Leigh Price, “Rewording the World: Poststructuralism, deconstruction and the ‘real’ in environmental education.” Southern African Journal of Environmental Education. Volume 21, 2004. Pages 23-36.]

“This paper develops a general-purpose framework for the governance of projects. The framework is structured by the concepts of governmentality and governance of projects, in the context of different levels of projectification in organizations. It visualizes the organization-specific profiles for these concepts. The dimensions and scales underlying the three concepts derived mainly from the literature on governance, general management, and project management.

“… we choose Critical Realism … as philosophical perspective. Critical Realism assumes that a mind independent reality exists and theory possibly captures partial aspects of it. Its underlying three layers of mechanism, events and experiences link an objective reality with the subjectivity of individuals in a given situation …, where mechanisms give rise to events, which in turn give raise to individuals experiences. It provides for a robust philosophical framework which allows to combine underlying objective facts (mechanisms) with the situations which individuals are exposed to (events) and their subjective experiences through that (experiences).”

[Ralf Müller, Li Zhai, Anyu Wang, and Jingting Shao, “A framework for governance of projects: Governmentality, governance structure and projectification.” International Journal of Project Management. Volume 34, issue 6, August 2016. Pages 957–969.]

“… critical realism in project management …

“As the future work in project management become more and more interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of how project team members, through [Étienne] Wenger’s concepts of participation and reification, assigning meaning to events and experience developments within projects. The philosophical paradigm that these studies need to adopt is therefore best aligned with the critical realist school of thought.…

“Research following the perspective of critical realism seeks to subject reality to the widest possible critical examination to understand reality as closely as possible …, thus we propose that future research in project management use mixed methodologies to serve this purpose.”

[Saleem Gul, “Critical realism and project management: Revisiting the noumenal and phenomenal.” African Journal of Business Management. Volume 5, number 31, December 2011. Pages 12212-12221.]

“… I propose a critical realist account of comparison. Like positivism, critical realism suggests that comparison is an indispensable part of any social science. Against the positivist understanding, however, comparison cannot be understood as the only legitimate style of research; case studies and explicit theoretical work are equally essential parts of any social science.…

“The hermeneutic program is not antithetical to critical realism. By emphasizing the concept dependence of human action, critical realism acknowledges that social comparison necessarily involves interpretation and translation.”

[George Steinmetz, “Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and ‘Small N’s’ in Sociology.” Sociological Theory. Volume 22, number 3, September 2004. Pages 371-400.]

“The aim of our analysis is to produce a critique of real business cycle theory ….

“As a macroeconomic theory, real business cycle theory tries to explain economic growth and fluctuations over the long and short run.… Four main stages of a business cycle can be distinguished: peak, recession, trough and recovery.…

“… We adopted a transcendental realist point of view and based our arguments on [Roy] Bhaskar’s basic critical realism.…

“We argue that real business cycle theory imposes artificial closure on the economy it is studying.”

[Kirsten Burkhardt and Simon Virely, “Real Business Cycle Theory and Critical Realism (Transcendental Realism).” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 3, June 2015. Pages 287-305.]

“Institutionalist theory forms the basis of our proposition of the NBM [normative business model]. Of course institutionalist scholarship is vast, with tentacles originating in different traditions in sociology, economics and cultural theory.… The NBM concept foregrounds the de-facto normative orientations of actors and how these become institutionalised, whether or not there exists a formal business model artefact or “device” in the form of a business model strategy document, or template.…

“Following [Margaret S.] Archer …, we will argue that reflexivity is a critical component of both agency and institutional transformation, and we extend this point to suggest that reflexivity plays a crucial role in enabling of normative questioning.”

[Sally Randles and Oliver Laasch, “Theorising the Normative Business Model.” Organization & Environment. Volume 29, number 1, 2016. Pages 53-73.]

“The journey to developing my own understanding of research philosophies, in general, and critical realism in particular, is the subject of this paper.… [S]ince I first worked on this paper, other scholars have begun to discuss the features of critical realism in accounting research scenarios ….

“Accounting research conducted within a critical realist paradigm thus has its basis in replicability, coherence and consensus, since results obtained from applying both qualitative and quantitative methodologies can be judged on these bases.”

[Jayne Bisman, “Postpositivism and Accounting Research: A (Personal) Primer on Critical Realism.” Australasian Accounting, Business and Finance Journal. Volume 4, number 4, 2010. Pages 3-25.]

“In critical realist sociology …, only persons are agents, but social structures have powerful causal impact in the lives of agents simply because those agents will make decisions to accomplish their goals within a field of restrictions, enablements, and incentives generated by the relations into which they enter.…

“Markets are social structures.…

“The chain of relations that makes up the market for shirts extends then from consumer/clerk to clerk/supervisor, and through a series of intermediate relations to the relation of factory owner/factory supervisor in China and the relation between supervisor and seamstress.”

[Daniel K. Finn, “Philosophy, Not Theology, is the Key for Economics: A Catholic Perspective.” Econ Journal Watch. Volume 11, number 2, May 2014. Pages 153-159.]

“What conclusions may we draw from this about the kind of ethics we need in our treatment of each other? What kind of care and what kind of justice will it lead to? Will it generate egalitarian conclusions (and if so which ones) or will it lead to a hierarchy within humankind, as part of the ‘great chain of being’ to which we belong? This chapter tries to answer some of these questions.” [Andrew Collier. Being and Worth. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1999. Page 90.]

“… [Karl] Marx’s humanism is rooted in a tripartite of being: natural, species and social. [Andrew] Collier … refers to this as an ontological ‘chain of being’ that stretches from non-human nature through to human socio-cultural realties. It expresses an inter-dependence of power relations where natural ‘laws’ (or, rather, ‘tendencies’) of being are basic in underpinning species-being on which social being in turn rests ….

“The ‘chain of being’ emphasises natural necessity but avoids reductionist humanism. It sees human nature resting in a realist ontology of natural necessity, an epistemology of stratified explanation, and an axiology of ethical naturalism …. As Collier puts it, the power of human species being is that ‘ability to know and value things other than ourselves’ ….”

[Grant Banfield, “Reclaiming History: Marx, Education and Class Struggle.” International Journal of Educational Policies. Volume 8, number 1, 2014. Pages 5-24.]

“… the conception of the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question – the conception of the universe as a ‘Great Chain of Being,’ composed of an immense, or – by the strict but seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of continuity of an infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape nonexistence, through ‘every possible’ grade up to the ens perfectissimum [most perfect being] – Of, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite – everyone of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below it by the ‘least possible’ degree of difference.” [Arthur O. Lovejoy. The Great Chain of Being—A Study of the History of an Idea: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University, 1933. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1964. Page 59.]

“Based on the aim of this study, a critical realist view is adopted accepting an objectively knowable, mind-independent reality, while acknowledging the roles of perception and cognition.… The research project reported in this article employs a qualitative research approach to evaluate the impacts of the 2008 Olympic sailing regatta on mass sport development in Qingdao and examine the extent to which mass sport policy, facilities, participation and national physique have been affected in the city, based on the material drawn from semi-structured interviews and official documents. The interviews were conducted in Chinese and translated into English.” [Weiming Wang and Eleni Theodoraki, “Mass sport policy development in the Olympic City: the case of Qingdao – host to the 2008 sailing regatta.” The Journal of The Royal Society for the Promotion of Health. Volume 127, number 3, 2007. Pages 125-132.]

“This paper forwards a realist conception of organizational knowledge … and argues that consciousness and organizational memory play primary underlying roles as knowledge processes and structures even though they may not be directly observable. The theoretical framework is influenced by Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist conception of explanation. This is based on a three-level hierarchy underlying all social phenomena of structures, processes and events. The other major influence in this paper is John Searle’s notion of consciousness ….” [Ashok Jashapara, “Moving beyond tacit and explicit distinctions: a realist theory of organizational knowledge.” Journal of Information Science. Volume 33, number 6, 2007. Pages 752-766.]

“Following a brief review of the character of critical realism as a view of science more generally, I will outline the understanding of critical realist sociologists that social structures emerge from the activity of individuals, yet have independent causal impact on people through the way structures affect the (free but constrained) choices persons make. Finally, I explore the meaning of ‘sinful’ as applied to social structures, employing both theological insights into original sin as a precondition for human choice as well as the social scientific typology of inclusive and extractive institutions. The aim is to understand more adequately the way that structures can make sinful outcomes more likely.…

“Critical realist sociology arises out of a critical realist understanding of science more generally, encompassing both natural and social science. The central figure here is the late philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar, who set out to overturn 250 years of empiricism since David Hume. He makes clear that there are, and we can learn about, ‘ontologically real’ things that cannot be perceived by our five senses.”

[Daniel K. Finn, “What is a Sinful Social Structure?” Theological Studies. Volume 77, number 1, March 2016. Pages 136-163.]

“… we will examine a … theoretical perspective which offers a distinctive approach to the analysis of trust/control relations and their impact on organizational behaviour – that is, critical realism.… [T]he reduction of complex social structures or mechanisms, such as trust/control relations, to a simplified unity – such as a ‘generalized system resource’ or a ‘discursive formation’ – prevents us from viewing the production and reproduction of such relations as complex, emergent, multi-levelled, multi-formed, interactive and contextualized.… [C]ritical realism is necessarily attuned to the emergent and enduring structures of domination and governance within which trust/control relations are embedded ….” [Michael I. Reed, “Organization, Trust and Control: A Realist Analysis.” Organization Studies. Volume 22, number 2, 2001. Pages 201-228.]

“… the article outlines a new approach, titled ‘social ideation studies’ (SIS) which constitutes a meta-theoretical base for integrative and interdisciplinary studies.…

“… [I am] relying on a ‘dialectical critical realist’ account of ideas ….

“… SIS is intended to balance ‘practice’ and ‘structure’ by theoretically recognizing a relatively autonomous role for social ideation as the third dimension. It is also grounded in the assumption that ideations are not reducible to either everyday life processes of meaning construction or organization processes of ideology/knowledge construction. In the following sub-section, I attempt to define this approach by discussing the underlying assumptions rooted in a critical-realist perspective ….”

[S. A. Hamed Hosseini, “Theorizing Social Ideations: Beyond the Divide between Humanities and Social Sciences.” The International Journal of the Humanities. Volume 9, issue 5, 2012. Pages 53-68.]

“Perhaps critical realism can offer an escape from circling the wagons or celebrating the semiotic fragments, … a re-visioning of sociology, and of social science. I want to suggest that with its realist ontology and its method of explanatory critique of human affairs, critical realism represents such a middle course, between traditional views of science and social constructivist nominalism—not a conflation of or compromise between these perspectives, but ‘a standpoint in its own right’ …. Insisting that the world precedes the word, but granting that language and textuality play a constitutive role in understanding and in human affairs, critical realism can include within social science the important postpositivist insights from the discursive turn without lapsing into antirealist nominalism, all the while holding onto the crucial lessons of historical materialism, social science's original critical paradigm.

“Critical realism addresses the crisis of sociology, and related crises in other social science fields, not by shoring up spurious divisions nor by retreating into nominalism, but by offering a coherent social ontology from which we can ground a transdisciplinary science of humanity in nature.”

[William K. Carroll, “Discipline, Field, Nexus: Re-Visioning Sociology.” Canadian Review of Sociology. Volume 50, number 1, February 2013. Pages 1-26.]

“In my brief discussion [in the article, ‘Discipline, Field, Nexus: Re-Visioning Sociology’] of CR [critical realism], I did not call for a sociology defined exclusively around it. Instead, I presented CR as philosophical perspective for natural and social science, offering ‘a coherent social ontology from which we can ground a transdisciplinary science of humanity in nature’ ….

“As for CR itself, anyone with a glancing familiarity knows that it was first advanced by Roy Bhaskar … as a postpositivist philosophy of science. Later, as CR gained influence particularly in British academe, Bhaskar and a growing number of colleagues turned attention to the social sciences ….”

[William K. Carroll, “Critical Nexus or Chaotic Discipline? Re-Visioning Sociology Again.” Canadian Review of Sociology. Volume 53, number 2, March 2016. Pages 244-252.]

“Utilizing a critical realist frame of reference, I explore the core notions of the EBM [Evidence Based Management] movement, while illustrating how critical realism can offer a richer epistemological insight into the search for evidence, meaning, and theory in organization studies. This article therefore outlines the key propositions of the EBM movement, problematizes them, and outlines a critical realist framework that offers an alternative account of causality and theory building in organization studies. In so doing, I also suggest that we move on from the notion of Evidence Based Management, and reposition the discussion in terms of ‘Evidence Oriented Organizing’ (henceforth, EOO).…

“The notion of EOO is thus consistent with challenges to the view of organizations as having a taken for granted existence as material entitles, separate and apart from their discursive constructions …. Rather, the organizational world can be depicted as a plenum of agencies. Their intersection is what constitutes reality.”

[Dennis Tourish, “‘Evidence Based Management,’ or ‘Evidence Oriented Organizing’?: A critical realist perspective.” Organization. Volume 20, number 2, 2012. Pages 173-192.]

“Postpositivist Critical Realism … [incorporates:]

“Ontology … An objective social world exists.…

“Epistemology … Knowledge is incomplete and socially conditioned.…

“Methodology … Seeks to reveal oppression and inequality.…

“Methods … Interviews, ethnography, mixed methods, surveys, and quantitative analysis.”

[Celine-Marie Pascale. Cartographies of Knowledge: Exploring Qualitative Epistemologies. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2011. Page 49.]

“Drawing on sources in realist philosophy of science …, and in solidarity with the progressive goals of postmodernist thinkers, recent versions of realist theory, identified as ‘critical realism’ or ‘postpositivist realism,’ attempt to go beyond both idealism and positivism without relying on the relativist and skeptical stance that characterizes postmodernist thought of various stripes (see [George] Steinmetz … on ‘critical realism,’ inspired by [Roy] Bhaskar’s work …).” [Satya P. Mohanty, “Realist Theory.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Second edition. William A. Darity, editor. Macmillan Reference USA imprint of Cengage Learning. 2007. Pages 97-98.]

“A sharp-eyed reader, David Amor at Knox College, wonders if there might not be some connection between [Satya P.] Mohanty’s work and the ‘critical realism’ of Roy Bhaskar. An excellent question, to which, presumably, no short answer is possible. There do appear to be areas of overlap. Bhaskar’s early work, at least so far as I understand such things, could certainly be called ‘postpositivist.’ Both CR [critical realism] and PPR [postpositivist realism] have roots in Marxist work on the philosophy of science. To flesh that out would probably require starting with the way each develops a critique of [Louis] Althusser.

“But Mohanty never refers to Bhaskar in Literary Theory and the Claims of Theory. Nor do the other postpositivist-realists I’ve read cite him. And the silence was there even before Bhaskar’s work took its turn, a few years ago, toward what can only be called mysticism.”

[Scott McLemee. Cogito archive. Blog. February 11th, 2004. Retrieved on December 25th, 2015.]

“Postpositivist realism … provides an interpretive approach that resolves the dilemmas that attend absolutist conceptions of identity, objectivity, and knowledge, going beyond both dogmatic certainty and unyielding skepticism. Moreover, the postpositivist realist theory of identity is able to do what other theories of identity cannot. It can account for the causal influence that categories of identity like race, sex, and socioeconomic status have on the formation of identity, even as it accounts for how identities can adapt to changing historical circumstances. It is, I argue, the sophisticated and nuanced theory of identity needed by ethnic studies scholars who are moving into the twenty-first century.…

“… In refusing to draw a firm distinction between Chicana feminism and Chicana feminist theory, I am following Satya Mohanty, Sandra Harding, and Richard Boyd in making the more general Marxian theoretical point that knowledge is produced not in isolation from the world but through engagement with it.”

[Paula M. L. Moya. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2002. Google Play edition.]

“When I speak of postpositivist realism in this article, I am referring to an epistemological position and political vision being articulated by a growing number of scholars in the United States and abroad who are developing an alternative to the reductionism and inadequacy of essentialist and postmodernist approaches to identity. Broadly speaking, to be a realist in a given domain is to believe in a reality that is, at least in part, causally independent of humans’ mental constructions of it.…

“Underlying postpositivist realist epistemology is a conception of objectivity that avoids the aporias of essentialist and (ironically) postmodernist epistemologies by opposing error not to ccrtainty but rather to objectivity as a theory-dependent, socially realizable goal.”

[Paula M. L. Moya, “Chicana Feminism and Postmodernist Theory.” Signs. Volume 26, number 2, Winter 2001. Pages 441-483.]

“While I am not about to give up on progressive identity politics—and I would consider the call for a specifically Latino public intellectual to be a form of progressive identity politics—I am willing to practice them actively only as long as I can discern within them a politics to which I can subscribe. In the dual term ‘identity politics,’ the politics are more important to me than is the particular identity.” [Paula M. L. Moya, “With Us or Without Us: The Development of a Latino Public Sphere.” Nepantia: Views from the South. Volume 4, number 2, 2003. Pages 245-252.]

“Our work is based on the theoretical perspectives of feminist standpoint theory … and postpositivist realism …, which recognize the necessity to write of identity categories while understanding these categories as socially constructed.” [Delores D. Listen and Regina E. Moore-Rahimi, “Disputation of a Bad Reputation: Adverse Sexual Labels and the Lives of 12 Southern Women.” Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between. Pamela J. Bettis and Natalie G. Adams, editors. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers. 2005. Page 212.]

“… [Paula M. L.] Moya … describes … [the] concept of identity (called postpositivist realist theory) by contrasting it to postmodern concepts of identity. She writes that postpositivist realist theory requires that we acknowledge the reality of a social location and the categories within it, such as ‘race, class, gender, and sexuality.’” [Louis Frankenthaler. Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism: Defection as Deconversion. M.A. thesis. Melton Center for Jewish Education, School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Israel. June, 2004. Page 64.]

“… it is precisely the epistemic distinctions engendered by a postpositivist realism that make such discriminating judgments [being mistaken about one’s own sexuality] possible.” [Linda Martín Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García, editors. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2000. Page 314.]

“Chauvinist legitimation narratives that portrayed European-based societies as the progressive vanguard of the human race produced an almost invisible support structure for the collective self-esteem of all those who could claim such a European identity. In the first half of the twentieth century, the plausibility of these narratives was undermined by the profit-motivated violence of World War I and the technologically orchestrated genocides of World War II. As a response to that disillusionment, new narratives were developed, based on a thorough repudiation of ‘old world’ ethnic hatreds and blind political obedience.” [Linda Martín Alcoff, “What Should White People Do?” Hypatia. Volume 13, number 3, summer 1998. Pages 6-26.]

“… to characterize whites as the enemy of black liberation occludes white poverty and class oppression, upon which a coalition might be built, and misnames the structural dynamic. Thus I would say that the fact that mistakes can be made in formulating how identities figure into power dynamics is not to say that identities do not figure. Workers in the United States are fundamentally racialized, taking up their position in the labor pool as largely determined by their race, gender, and immigration status as much as by their class genealogy. Thus, in the struggle against the social destruction wrought by private profiteering, we need a more precise and realistic articulation of what identities are in order to produce more precise and realistic social theories of oppression and strategies of liberation.” [Linda Martín Alcoff. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford, England, and New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Page 85.]

“Naturalistic approaches to the ‘real’ – in which conceptual frameworks are thought to be determined by nature herself – cannot make sense of the cultural variety, recent history and biological invalidity of race, though there are some positions that endeavour to define race in this way nonetheless. Universalistic political systems in which justice is predicated on sameness cannot help but view racial consciousness with consternation and dismay. Thus, within the modern episteme, the continued use of racial categories leads inevitably to paradox.” [Linda Martín Alcoff, “Towards a phenomenology of racial embodiment.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 95, May/June 1999. Pages 15-26.]

“A more realistic account of identity, I’ll argue, would be a realist view that understands identities to be significant aspects of the social world and of our lived sense of who we are and how we are positioned in the immediate social environs in which we live and work. Government policies can play a large role, but not an absolutely determinative one. Part of this more realist view will involve an understanding that the categories of race and ethnicity are not always easily separable, no matter how much academics or policymakers have wanted to parse the distinction. In the real world, ethnic groups are often racialized, and racialized groups are clearly noticeable as we move through social spaces, whether they are allowed on government forms or not. The racial diversity, or lack thereof, of our immediate social space can profoundly affect how relaxed, or how fearful, we are. Even though races are not found objects, they cannot be so easily legislated away or wished out of existence.…

“If we try a realistic approach to how social categories of identity operate in our lives, it is clear that we cannot always choose when our identities are politically salient, or how they are salient, or how much. This has often been recognized as true for those whose social identities are the occasion for discrimination and violence, but it is equally true for those whose identities are not social liabilities, such as whites. There is a limit to how much individuals can control their social environment, and even groups cannot control how a given group identity will be seen in the larger society. I cannot decisively control the way others interpret my actions, nor can I always predict the effects of my actions.”

[Linda Martín Alcoff. The Future of Whiteness. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2015. Wiley ebooks edition.]

“Knowledge claims are contingent on theories that are themselves contingent in the sense that they might have developed otherwise.…

“The sort of postpositivist realism invoked in this volume will thus be more familiar in analytic philosophy circles than in literary theory circles.… However, it is the case, within the context of philosophy, that the word realism is known to admit of many different formulations and that functionalists and positivists have no copyright on it.”

[Linda Martín Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-García, editors. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2000. Page 317.]

“… we need one that can do two things the anti-essentialist positions cannot do: (1) take into account the full force of race as a lived experience, understanding this not as mere epiphenomenon but as constitutive of reality; and (2) acknowledge and account for the epistemological and theoretical importance racial perspective has had on, for example, the undermining of modernist teleologies (e.g. [W. E. B.] Du Bois’ use of slavery to undermine US supremacist claims, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of Western rationality from the perspective of the Holocaust). These facts suggest that we need to understand racial identity as having both metaphysical and epistemological implications.” [Linda Martín Alcoff, “Philosophy and racial identity.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 75, January/February 1996. Pages 5-14.]

“An immanent realism would be one that eschewed the Cartesian bifurcations between ‘man’ and the world, culture and nature, mind and reality.… What is much more real than a conceptual thing-in-itself is the lived world we share, a world of complexity, ambiguity, and richness that exceeds simple dualism.” [Linda Alcoff. Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. 1996. Page 213.]

“Immanent realism makes it possible to understand why context must always be introduced as a significant variable in determinations of truth, because for an immanent realist the aboutness of truth is not transcendental.” [Linda Alcoff. Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. 1996. Page 219.]

“Proponents of postmodernist epistemology are in fact often wary of objectivity to the extent that they have an undifferentiated view of error as ubiquitous and inevitable. The alternative epistemological position I have sketched here—that of a postpositivist ‘realism’—offers a less extreme view of knowledge, for it proposes that theoretical accounts of objectivity depend on explanatory accounts of error and distortion. Both kinds of accounts base understanding—as well as its limits—in social practice.… For we can be right or wrong (in different ways, in varying degrees) about the way our social locations enable or inhibit certain kinds of understanding. Our methodological and moral scruples refer beyond ourselves, beyond our immediate relationships, to the social world; in fact, those scruples are part of its fabric, its essential furniture.” [Satya P. Mohanty, “Epilogue: Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Volume 110, issue 1, 1995. Pages 108-118.]

“Beginning from the lives and interests of marginalized communities of women, I am able to access and make the workings of power visible—to read up the ladder of privilege. It is more necessary to look upward—colonized peoples must know themselves and the colonizer. This particular marginalized location makes the politics of knowledge and the power investments that go along with it visible so that we can then engage in work to transform the use and abuse of power. The analysis draws on the notion of epistemic privilege as it is developed by feminist standpoint theorists (with their roots in the historical materialism of [Karl] Marx and [Georg] Lukács) as well as postpositivist realists, who provide an analysis of experience, identity, and the epistemic effects of social location. My view is thus a materialist and ‘realist’ one and is antithetical to that of postmodernist relativism. I believe there are causal links between marginalized social locations and experiences and the ability of human agents to explain and analyze features of capitalist society. Methodologically, this analytic perspective is grounded in historical materialism.” [Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2003. Pages 231-232.]

“By focusing on the representation of women in the third world, and what I refered to earlier as Western feminisms’ self-presentation in the same context, it seems evident that Western feminists alone become the true ‘subjects’ of this counter-history. Third world women, on the other hand, never rise above their generality and their ‘object’ status. While radical and liberal feminist assumptions of women as a sex class might elucidate (however inadequately) the autonomy of particular women’s struggles in the West, the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks.” [Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2. Volume 12, number 3, spring–autumn 1984. Pages 333-358. Alternatively: Feminist Review. Number 30, autumn 1988. Pages 61-88.]

“Karma is not rigidly determined by a pregiven identity; social identities are secondary.

“Nowhere does this emphasis become more clear than in the way even the goddess’s own identity is shown to be layered and complex, and in part a product of her own will and changing values.”

[Satya P. Mohanty, “Alternative Modernities and Medieval Indian Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy.” Diacritics. Volume 38, number 3, fall 2008. Pages 3-21.]

“… [Martin Luther King, Jr.,] constructs the identity of the audience—as children of God, as citizens of the world, and as Americans whose ‘allegiance and loyalties’ exceed the bounds of nationalism.

“The importance of this conception of identity for postpositivist realism comes clear if we compare it to an influential and radically different conception of ‘calling’—[Louis] Althusser’s notion of interpellation (‘inter-calling’ or ‘hailing’).”

[Paul Sawyer, “Identity as Calling: Martin Luther King on War.” Identity Politics Reconsidered. Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2006. Pages 74-75.]

“The novel, as well as the African American theoretical concepts of double-consciousness and rememory in the novel and that emerge from African American sociopolitical and historical realities suggest a postpositivist realist reading of experience, identity, and objective truth. The reading of experience involves the reckoning with life through dialogue that is both dialectic and dialogic that yields objective fallibilistic knowledge out of which identity is multiply constructed ….” [Johnnella E. Butler, “African American Literature and Realist Theory: Seeking the ‘true-true.’” Identity Politics Reconsidered. Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2006. Page 186.]

“Our deepest aesthetic values are clearly relational, grounded in what we humans happen to be like contingently. But to say that what constitutes aesthetic value for us is not part of the architecture of the extrahuman cosmos is not to deny it objectivity. It may not hold for all sentient creatures but if it holds (potentially) for all humans because of our common genetic endowment, it is objective enough! To claim that only completely universal and invariable values are objective is to reify objectivity and to have an inaccurate picture of what values are.

“I have been pointing to a level at which our aesthetic responses are shaped innately, by human nature.”

[Satya P. Mohanty, “Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics.” New Literary History. Volume 32, number 4, Autumn 2001. Pages 803-833.]

“In contrast to positivism, a postpositivist realism puts people in the world with nothing but theories and presuppositions to make sense of it. As many scholars have noted, the best scientific inquiry (especially new discovery) proceeds from an acknowledgment of the lack of absolute certainty for our current scientific beliefs, and of the possibility that they are in error. Many scientists and scholars of science have long accepted that knowledge is partly shaped by the theories with which one proceeds, by one’s expectations, and even by the tools of one’s inquiry. If the best scientific knowledge about chemistry, physics, and biology need not be absolute or fixed in order to be sufficiently reliable and accurate to put out grease fires (regularly), to fly planes (most of the time), and to cure dis eases (some of the time), then why set a higher bar for knowledge about culture and society?

“Realism entails an account of how our beliefs about the social world can refer with some degree of reliability or accuracy to reality—and of how one can verify that reference. Realists about identity take from the study of science and from the philosophy of knowledge an acknowledgment that our beliefs and discoveries remain at least partly contingent on other beliefs, on our theoretical models, and on the tools of our inquiry.”

[Michael Hames-García. Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 2011. Page 16.]

“… I explore an alternative theoretical position drawn from Indigenous oral philosophy, which I call tribal realism. I link this view with other minority scholars, who develop a similar ‘postpositivist realist’ view, which allows for genuine debate and exchange across cultures, while still respecting how social location may grant special access to knowledge. Though all of us may share a world, that world is also different for tribal peoples, especially as long as colonialism exists. Indeed, in recognizing these social facts of colonial control, tribal realism develops more secure knowledge about American Indian culture and literature. From this more grounded perspective, our theoretical attachments to history or culture are less obstacles to block objective knowledge than they are tools to serve it.” [Sean Kicummah Teuton. Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2008. Page xvi.]

“Realist theorists … argue that the situatedness of inquiry not only cannot be avoided but also should not be avoided—some theoretical dependence might even serve our inquiries.… A realist theory of knowledge … holds that social identities, for example, function like theories, processing data as they appear, and, like theories, they are capable of producing normative knowledge of the world. Built on our experiences, our identities are clearly constructed, but the fact that they are theory mediated is not peculiar to identities; in fact, all inquiry—scientific and otherwise—proceeds with inherent historical and social attachments.” [Sean Kicummah Teuton. Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2008. Pages 31-32.]

“Recently, minority and Third World scholars have begun to draw on the strength of a moral universalist position … to support a workable theory of knowledge, culture, and social equity. Scholars implementing what is called ‘postpositivist realism’ do not struggle to overcome universalism but actually harness a general conception of humanity and its entitlements to defend cultural pluralism and international justice.” [Sean Teuton, “Internationalism and the American Indian Scholar: Native Studies and the Challenge of Pan-Indigenism.” Identity Politics Reconsidered. Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Hames-García, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M. L. Moya, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2006. Page 272.]

“By bringing postpositivist realism to bear on the multicultural writing class, I encourage my students to wrestle with their cultural assumptions as they interpret and make meaning of ethical dilemmas in preparation for their reading of Beloved. Respecting their ‘right’ to embrace theories of relativism, I nonetheless hope to persuade them that even committed relativism limits what we can accomplish rhetorically, ethically, and politically, while a socially derived, nonneutral conception of objectivity moves us toward equality and justice.” [Laurie Grobman, “Postpositivist Realism in the Multicultural Writing Classroom: Beyond the Paralysis of Cultural Relativism.” Pedagory: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. Volume 3, number 2, 2003. Pages 205-225.]

“By combining elements from Murray Krieger’s and Satya Mohanty’s aesthetic theories, I will theorize a crucial role for multiethnic aesthetics in the service of left politics. Specifically, I will argue that Krieger provides an understanding of the creative and thus social possibilities of literary art, while Mohanty directly addresses multiethnic literature’s capacity to influence anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other progressive politics. Together, these theories shape a unique role for multiethnic aesthetics to contribute to social change.” [Laurie Grobman, “Mediating Politics and Aesthetics in Multiethnic Literary Pedagogy.” Melus. Volume 30, number 2, summer 2005. Pages 139-155.]

“[Satya P.] Mohanty … discusses the tendency for literary scholars’ awareness of cultural difference and of their own fallibility to shade into a paralyzing relativism and proposes what he terms ‘postpositivist realism’ as a practical foundation for respectful ethical judgment and action.” [Kimberly A. Nance, “Reading Human Rights Literature in Undergraduate Literature Classes: Professorial Desire, Disciplinary Culture, and the Chances of Cultivating Compassion” Journal of Human Rights. Volume 9, 1010. Pages 161–174.]

“A theoretical movement known as ‘postpositivist realism’ may offer a way to understand [the] … multiple identities within [Maria Campbell’s] Halfbreed.…

“… For an introduction to post-positivist realist approaches to identity see Paula Moya’s introduction to Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism.”

[Kristina Fagan, Stephanie Danyluk, Bryce Donaldson, Amelia Horsburgh, Robyn Moore, and Martin Winquist, “Reading the Reception of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies. Volume 29, number 1/2, 2009. Pages 257-281.]

“The general consensus regarding all sorts of identity theories is that without the social dimensions of subjective and collective identity formation processes, individuals cannot constitute respective identities without ‘others’ recognizing them. In this dialectical relationship, as the postpositivist realist theory of identity opines, there cannot be any ‘final agreement between the individual, on the one hand, who seeks to express his/her identity and the collective, on the other hand, that offers the symbolic tools to do so’ ….” [Manash Pratim Borah, “Ramanujavian Notions of Identity and Memory: A Reading of the Dialectics of Reflexive/Selfreflexive, Context-Sensitivity/Context-Free in Select Non-Fictional Prose of A. K. Ramanujan.” ResearchersWorld—Journal of Arts, Science & Commerce. Volume 3, Issue 1, July, 2012. Pages 34-40.]

“One of the more interesting implications of [Satya P.] Mohanty’s postpositivist realist epistemology is that social arrangements become the subject of epistemological investigation. In the realist view, as in the poststructuralist view, our knowledge-claims are always mediated by theory, which is itself a product of social and cultural practices. However, whereas poststructuralists respond to this situation by asking us to interrogate the methodologies and the discursive logics that subtend our knowledge, realists direct us to ‘creat[e] the conditions for the production of better knowledge’ …. With feminist epistemologists, the authors identify one such condition as the existence of struggles for social change, for we learn about how the world actually operates, when we confront obstacles in our efforts to change the world. In addition, they argue that more objective knowledge demands public spaces for sharing socially and culturally specific perspectives.” [Shari Stone-Mediatore, “Postmodernism, Realism, and the Problem of Identity.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Volume 11, number 1, spring 2002. Pages 125-138.]

“… the final essay purports to engage with post-positive realism but ends up once again mostly quoting [Elvira] Pulitano as a convenient representative of Euro-Western thought.” [James Mackay, “Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective.” Review article. Journal of American Studies. Volume 44, issue 01, February 2010. Pages 1-2.]

“As the social crisis (of transnational capitalism) deepens, the urgency for articulating historically viable forms of subjectivity intensifies, and, at this time, I believe this need will be most effectively met by postpositivist realism—a knowledge practice which reconstitutes the humanist subject and suppresses intelligibility of the logic of capitalist totality. Despite its aim to provide an explanatory model, postpositivist theorists direct attention away from considering the cause of social oppression and exploitation: capitalism.” [Robert Young, “Postpositivist Realism and the Return of the Same: The Rational Subject and Post(post)modern Liberalism.” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory & Praxis. 2002. Open access. Electronic journal. No pagination.]

“In an atmosphere of disillusionment, retrospection and fear most voices in the academia rushed to explain the cultural trauma, defend postmodernism and prove its imperishable existence or to define, label and theorize the grand transitional epoch.

“Labels such as POSTmodernism, neo-realism, hyper-realism, dirty realism, spiritual realism and post-positive realism have been coined to describe such turning point in human history. New insights have germinated based upon the notion that ‘absolute truth does exist, yet must be understood in terms of personality and animation.’”

[Mayy ElHayawi, “Beyond 9/11: Poetics of Transcultural Agency in Contemporary Ethnic American Poetry.” Altre Modernità. Open access/Creative Commons. 2011. Pages 173-189.]

“[Paula M. L.] Moya’s theoretical approach to minority subjectivity is useful for its early insistence that ‘identity, experience, and knowledge’ can be conceived of in ways that are not so reliant on poststructuralism that the arguments succumb to political irrelevance. Yet identity, for Moya, is not a purely biological category either; it is a ‘socially significant and context-specific ideological’ construct that refers to ‘verifiable aspects of the social world’ ….” [Sarah Eden Schiff. Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American Literature. Ph.D. dissertation. James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University. Atlanta, Georgia. 2010. Page 315.]

“Relation, together with semiotics, is for [John] Deely also the key to the concept of objectivity. He rejects the customary opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, arguing that the true contrary to subjectivity is inter-subjectivity (a set of relations), and inter-subjectivity he considers the necessary presupposition of objectivity, or (we can say) its condition of possibility. This insight is rather underdeveloped, but it bears comparison with Satya Mohanty’s ‘postpositivist realist’ case for a multicultural society as the best social condition in which we can seek objective knowledge about human flourishing.” [Tobin Nellhaus, “Realism for the Twenty-First Century: A John Deely Reader.” Review article. Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 10, issue 1, December 2011. Pages 136-138.]

“Postpositivist realism relies on two important precepts. The first is epistemic privilege, defined by [Paula M. L.] Moya … as ‘a special advantage with respect to possessing or acquiring knowledge about how fundamental aspects of our society (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) operate to sustain matrices of power’ …. The second is that of theory mediated experience [meanings as conditioned by ideologies] ….” [Lee Woodham Digiovanni. Becoming Multicultural Teachers: An Exploration of Transformation in White Female Elementary Educators. Ed.D. dissertation. Georgia Southern University. Statesboro, Georgia. Spring, 2005. Page 39.]

“Realism as a philosophical position has existed for more than 2,000 years, but within contemporary literary theory it tends to refer to a set of related theories that emerged in the 1990s as a critical response to the dominance of postmodernism in the humanities and social sciences. These more recent versions of realism – sometimes referred to as ‘postpositivist realism’ in the United States and ‘critical realism’ in Great Britain – share a sense that the epistemological skepticism identified with postmodernism is philosophically unfounded and politically debilitating. The most significant version of realist theory was formulated by scholars associated with the Future of Minority Studies Research Project, who argued that the critique of objectivity and truth by postmodern theories often undermines the experiences of minorities as significant sources of cultural and political knowledge. Initially drawing on philosophers of science including Hilary Putnam and Richard Boyd, and more indirectly on the political philosophy of Karl Marx, scholars of realist theory have attempted to provide a theory that contributes to progressive social struggles.” [John J. Su, “Realist Theory.” The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Michael Ryan, editor. 2011. Credo Reference (online). No pagination.]

“Historical materialism, … in its rejection of idealism, is realist. Like poststructuralism, historical materialism rejects idealism; unlike poststructuralism, it seeks to understand social reality as a totality, however difficult that prospect might be. Within the social sciences and philosophy, post-positivist realism and critical realism investigate these possibilities.” [Angela E. Hubler, “Introduction: The Case for Historical Materialist Criticism of Children’s Literature.” Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature. Angela E. Hubler, editor. Jackson, Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi. 2014. Google Play edition.]

“Given its focus on solidarity … [Chandra Talpade] Mohanty’s perspective could benefit from a more nuanced engagement with certain theoretical currents her work criticizes. While laying out a theoretical and methodological perspective informed by ‘postpositivist realism’ and historical materialism, Mohanty maintains that the kind of cultural relativism endorsed by some postmodern thinking creates a dangerous ‘separate but equal’ perspective that discourages both systemic analysis of oppression and the cross-cultural solidarity necessary for decolonizing feminist thought.…

“While I share Mohanty’s concern that crude antifoundationalism and critiques of identity politics can contribute to the problems she identifies, her critique of ‘postmodern’ thought is too broad.”

[Kathryn Trevenen, “Stretching ‘the Political’: Governmentality, Political Society, and Solidarity across Borders.” Review article. Political Theory. Volume 33, number 3, June 2005. Pages 426-431.]

“Contemporary realism began taking shape in the 1960s primarily as a philosophy of science, and hit its stride in the 1970s. Initially, it was mainly a British development, but in recent years several variants emerged in the United States, such as ‘postpositivist realism’ and ‘embodied realism.’ Due to the rigor of his analyses and his ceaseless pursuit of their implications, Roy Bhaskar became the leading philosopher of what was eventually called ‘critical realism.’ But as Bhaskar himself points out, several of critical realism’s fundamental ideas derive from the work of earlier writers, including Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx.” [Tobin Nellhaus. Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2010. Page 2.]

“… attempts at a new theory of identity, carried out under the name of postpositivist realism, took issue with various aspects of the postmodern critique of identity, citing similarities between it and the modernist theory that it had assailed. Identity, according to these theorists, is an indispensable concept because it links the theoretical and the empirical, the conceptual and the historical. Identity is a result of the fact that things happen to people and that people try to make sense of these things.” [Raúl Sánchez, “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity.” College English. Volume 74, number 3, January 2012. Pages 234-246.]

“Postpositivist realism, which may sound like another postmodernist weasel-word, in fact takes its cue largely from American pragmatism, a philosophy put into motion around the turn of the 20ᵗʰ century by Charles Peirce and William James and later refined by John Dewey and, most recently (and somewhat controversially), Richard Rorty, a Stanford professor of comparative literature. Pragmatism, at its root, is interested in the practical function of knowledge; for pragmatists, ideas are tools for living, not ingredients for doctrines, as influential idealists such as Karl Marx believed. In other words, pragmatists believe the meanings of ideas and things stern from their observable consequences.” [John Sanford, “Identity matters: Paula Moya on learning from experience.” Stanford News Service, Standford University. June 10th, 2002. Retrieved on March 27th, 2016.]

“There is much that is right about the ‘postpositivist realist’ theory. Their adherents’ discontent with the unreconstructed linguistic determinism of most postmodern theory and their attempt to bring politics back into theory, to look at the practical consequences of the theoretical positions we inhabit is cogently argued and persuasive. But I think that these theorists go about their critique in the wrong way. [Paula M. L.] Moya and [Satya Prakash] Mohanty claim to be challenging the realist/anti-realist dichotomy. But in practice they do not succeed in doing so. Their end result is to redefine realism, not to displace the dichotomy.” [Susan Hekman. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 2010. Page 104.]

“Feminist empiricism reflects a union of postpositivist realism and liberal feminism. Because neither of its traditions call for structural changes in either science or society, this epistemological framework focuses on how to make our theories of knowledge less susceptible to gender bias. Feminist empiricism is based on the ontological assumption that a real, objective world does exist; therefore, the goal of the scientist is to capture and explain that social world in such a way that does not reflect gender biases.…

“… Feminist standpoint theory is based upon postpositivist critical theory informed by the traditions of radical and socialist feminism as well as womanism.”

[Rebecca Campbell and Sharon M. Wasco, “Feminist Approaches to Social Science: Epistemological and Methodological Tenets.” American Journal of Community Psychology. Volume 28, number 6, December 2000. Pages 773-791.]

“Postpositivist realism is aligned with and further advances a pragmatic approach to identities insofar as it foregrounds a view of human consciousness as an awareness that results from the interactivity of human subjects with the natural and social world of which they form a part.…

“… A basic claim of post-positivist realism is that social knowledge is not simply out there in the world waiting to be apprehended, but is always derived from embodied experience. Further, experiences only come to be experiences as we interpret them. Because postpositivist realists posit a cognitive conception of experience, one that depends upon our narratives and paradigms for their illumination, it becomes possible to understand experience as having a conscious element. Thus, although error is always possible, experiences can, when subjected to empirical and theoretical verification processes, yield objective knowledge about the social realm and about women’s lives, that is, the meanings of what it is to be female within specific contexts ….” [Laura Gillman. Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2010. Pages 6-8.]

“… I develop an analysis of the relevance of postpositivist realism to feminism. In particular, I indicate its utility for culling out the limitations of current theoretical orientations, that of post-modern feminism, with regard to the feminist goal of empowerment and liberation..” [Laura Gillman. Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2010. Page 22.]

“Postpositivist realist literary critic Satya Mohanty offers a view of narrative, which he links to identity, that resonates with philosophical conceptions of metaphor. In contradistinction to the positivist conception of a nonmediated, transparent objective reality, or the postmodernist conception that denies the human subject access to the world ‘out there,’ Mohanty suggests that experience, as a building block of identity, is a mechanism for knowing the world. But ‘knowing the world’ is necessarily a theory-dependent process that can yield both accurate and erroneous evaluations. Arguing against the tenets of epistemological foundationalism, with its universalizing theories of justification, Mohanty turns to naturalized epistemologies, as espoused by W. V. O. Quine, to argue that genuine social knowledge can be produced when we ‘examine the production, justification, and regulation of belief as social processes’ ….” [Laura Gillman, “Narrative as a Resource for Feminist Practices of Socially Engaged Inquiry: Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness.” Hypatia. Volume 28, issue 3, summer 2013. Pages 646-662.]

“For [John H.] Zammito and [Satya] Mohanty, [George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s] embodied realism provides a solid empirical foundation for much of their postpositivist realism. Its cognitive science demonstrates how cross-cultural commonality is constituted and provides for the possibility of scholarly objectivity of the realist variety based in the universals of embodied experience. Because these universals occur at the unconscious level, however, they do modify Mohanty’s optimistic claims for human agency.” [Bruce McConachie, “Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians.” Theatre Journal. Volume 53, number 4, December 2001. Pages 569-594.]

“Paula M. L. Moya is one of the forefront activists in the postpositivist realism movement and boils the theory down into two interdependent pieces, identity and experience. For Moya, identity goes beyond the essentialist views whereby identity is defined by membership to a particular group. Instead, an individual can inhabit more than one kind of identity and the collection of those identities shapes each and every interaction with society …. [Danielle M. Eadens. Police Officers’ Perceptions Regarding Persons with Mental Retardation. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Psychological and Social Foundations, College of Education, University of South Florida. Tampa, Florida. May, 2008. Page 21.]

“According to Satya Monanty, a ‘postpositivist realist’ approach to identity and values entails both a critical reconceptualization of objectivity and an analysis and accommodation of the sources of error, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of both essentialist and relativist problems of identity and justice.” [Michael Hames-Garcia, “Dr. Gonzo’s Carnival: The Testimonial Satires of Oscar Zeta Acosta.” American Literature. Volume 72, issue 3, September 2000. Pages 463-493.]

“The postpositivist realists aim to couple a deconstructionist and an essentialist mode of understanding identity in the Americas (mostly North America) as unique to localized social, economic, gendered forces and having the possibility of reaching beyond the local. For example, according to the theorists of postpositivist realism, there can be an essential, say, female identity. Thus an individual experiences the world according to his or her perception of himself or herself and interaction with a world where opportunities and resources are distributed according to being identified as a type: black, white, or brown and either woman or man.” [Frederick Luis Aldama, “Poststructural Sand Castles in Latin American Postcolonial Theory Today.” Latin American Research Review. Volume 37, number 3, 2002. Pages 201-216.]

“Postpositivist realism acknowledges the mediated nature of language and reference, but it also argues that we can still come to know something about the world, to distinguish truth from error, fact from fiction, and even the normal from the pathological. From this perspective, objective knowledge is gained not by rejecting all form of bias (which is the positivist take) but rather by examining and taking into account the epistemic consequences of the bias. This is central to counselling, which needs to do exactly this to consider, given the contextual situation, the epistemic bias that can be uncovered and consider alternative paths to take in the intervention.” [Zvi Bekerman and Moshe Tatar, “Overcoming modern-postmodern dichotomies: Some possible benefits for the counselling profession.” British Journal of Guidance & Counselling. Volume 33, number 3, August 2005. Pages 411-421.]

“It [postpositivist realism] recognizes that theoretical conceptualizations, although they are valid, might not influence the world as much as the constructed perspectives of hegemonies. All our high/postmodern ‘isms’ might be theoretically right, that is, they might offer a good description of an empirical world, but they are not stronger than the powerfully ‘constructed’ reality of a consequential hegemony that significantly affects our lives and sets the limits on where we can live, whom we can marry, and what educational and employment opportunities are available to us …. If so, acknowledging reality (nation-state and its invented identities and culture) – although epistemologically wrong – might be the best way to start. The one thing of which we might want to be careful is not to allow this reality to confuse the educational aim. This in itself is a serious problem we must confront.” [Zvi Bekerman, “Reappraising Critical Perspectives in Popular Culture and Education.” Counterpoints. Volume 338, 2008. Pages 55-67.]

“We have recently considered what has come to be called postpositivist realism …. This view, though acknowledging post-structuralist critiques, realizes that goods and resources are still distributed according to identity labels, be they ethnic, national or religious. Our approach asks for the realization that post-structural theoretical conceptualizations, though true in that they seem to serve as a better description of the ways we experience and shape our present environments, might not influence the world to the extent that these theories presume. Post-structuralism might be theoretically ‘right,’ providing a good description of an empirical world, but it is no stronger than the powerfully constructed ‘reality’ of consequential hegemony which significantly affects our lives and sets the limits for where we can live, whom we can marry, what educational and employment opportunities are available to us, and the location of the boundaries of that which is considered to be ‘normal.’ If so, acknowledging ‘reality,’ as if working within a positivist perspective, while epistemologically wrong, might be the best way to start.” [Zvi Bekerman and Michalinos Zembylas. Teaching Contested Narratives: Identity, Memory and Reconciliation in Peace Education and Beyond. Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Page 218.]

“[Sherman] Alexie’s collection also resonates with a trend in critical theory—represented by ‘postpositivist realism’ in ethnic studies, most notably—in which ‘realism’ and ‘objective’ experience can exist as long as they remain ‘theory-mediated’ …. These scholars are turning to a theoretical framework that allows them to make ‘evaluative claims’ that do not depend on essentialism ….” [Jennifer K. Ladino, “‘Sovereignty of the Self’: Interspecies Ethics in Sherman Alexie’s Face.” Studies in American Indian Literatures. Volume 24, issue 4, 2013. Pages 28-47.]

“Notably, postpositivist realism is … empirical while taking into account the standpoint of people of color ….” [Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality in the Social Sciences in a Post–Black Feminist Era.” Feminist Formations. Volume 24, number 1, spring 2012. Pages 1–25.]

“Steeped in Feminist Standpoint Theory … and the emerging perspectives of Postpositivist Realism …, our theoretical framework acknowledges the social construction of reality, and also takes into account the real material influences upon these social constructions.” [Regina Rahimi, “What Does She Expect When She Dresses Like That?: Teacher Interpretation of Emerging Adolescent Female Sexuality.” Educational Studies. Volume 45, issue 6, November 2009. Pages 512-533.]

“I suggested … that the recent directions in minoritized studies – subaltern studies, the coloniality of power, and postpositivist realist studies – could be taken as the most significant movements in US postcolonial studies rather than as blueprints or master discourses to be imposed worldwide.” [José David Saldívar, “Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste: Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Martinez’s Parrot in the Oven, and Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Cultural Studies. Volume 21, numbers 2-3 March/May 2007. Pages 339-367.]

“… I am still not clear on the distinction on which [Satya P.] Mohanty is basing so much of his analysis, namely, between the reality of the real of lived experience, the reality of the ground from which a subject can be a subject, and the reality of Mohanty’s evaluative notions that reflect what we currently know about humankind and its possibilities. What is the epistemic status of reflections within the realist theory of knowledge? In the absence of answers to these questions, one can only remain unconvinced that it is time to abandon the hard-won position that value and judgment—ethical, aesthetic, and political—must best be made from within the context of the local cultural conditions of knowledge.” [Ramón Saldívar, “Multicultural Politics, Aesthetics, and the Realist Theory of Identity: A Response to Satya Mohanty.” New Literary History. Volume 32, number 4, autumn 2001. Pages 849-854.]

“As an alternative to the Kantian universalism in [Paula M. L.] Moya’s and [Michael] Hames-García’s post-positivist realist project, I propose that Gloria Anzaldúa’s, Victor Martínez’s, and Arundhati Roy’s imaginative works belong to a ‘diversalist’ cross-genealogical field that I term (after [Anibal] Quijano) the coloniality of border and diaspora power: ‘coloniality’ because of the many structural and ethno-racial similarities about identity formations binding them to a colonizing past, but ‘border and diaspora power’ because there are certainly many discontinuities—the outer-national dimension of represented space—to dictate the cognitive metaphor of the ‘world-system’ text, which, as I have been suggesting, recalls the world political economy of [Immanuel] Wallerstein and Quijano.” [José David Saldívar. Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2012. Page 10.]

“The continued search to map out the contemporary emergence of U.S. Latino subaltern voices becomes one of the goals of Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (2012). In this book, José David Saldívar sets out to reframe the development of literary works by subalterns and their impact on literary criticism in transnational and hemispheric modes.…

“The author illustrates how, in using old words in new ways, border epistemologies reveal the braids of a global coloniality inscribed in language. His use of postpositivist realism and transnationalism grapple with the ways border epistemologies present in literary and cultural expressions work to offer a realist view of identity as multicultural.”

[Elena Avilés, “Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico.” Review article. Mester. Volume 42, number 1, 2013. Pages 145-148.]

“Guiding [José David] Saldívar’s critical project is his conviction in the creative and restorative possibilities available to writers, readers, and scholars who are willing to imagine alternatives. Trans-Americanity offers a daring remapping of ‘recent directions in minoritized studies—subaltern studies, the coloniality of power, and post-positivist realist studies,’ in order to ‘provide an alternate way to think beyond what Benedict Anderson … has called “the specter of comparisons”’ …. Saldívar is the first to acknowledge the inherent complexities and sites of difference within ethno-specific histories, and he demonstrates an ability to engage critically with an impressive breadth of scholarship outside his immediate fields.” [Danelle Dyckhoff Stelzriede, “Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico.” Review article. Modern Fiction Studies. Volume 61, number 1, spring 2015. Pages 181-183.]

“There is a theory behind the Future of Minority Studies project – one with a name, in fact, though not a very catchy one. It is called ‘postpositivist realism.’ Henceforth let it be abbreviated as PPR, given the brevity of life. Some discussion of PPR has taken place in New Literary History and Diacritics – journals prominent in literary studies. But PPR is not a dominant or even particularly well-known force within that field (as yet anyway). Its influence has grown quietly, in a somewhat roundabout way, through disciplinary exchanges and multicultural alliances.” [Scott McLemee, “The Power of Postpositive Thinking.” Inside Higher Ed. August 2nd, 2006. Retrieved on May 8th, 2016.]

“I have recently considered what has come to be called post-positivist realism …. This view, though acknowledging poststructuralist critiques, recognizes that goods and resources are still distributed according to identity categories. It recognizes that theoretical conceptualizations, though valid, might not influence the world as much as the constructed perspectives of hegemonies. Poststructuralism might be theoretically correct; that is to say, it might offer a good description of an empirical world, but it is not stronger than the powerfully ‘constructed’ reality of a consequential hegemony which significantly affects our lives and sets the limits for where we can live, whom we can marry, and what educational and employment opportunities are available to us ….” [Zvi Bekerman, “Rethinking intergroup encounters: rescuing praxis from theory, activity from education, and peace/co-existence from identity and culture.” Journal of Peace Education. Volume 4, number 1, March 2007. Pages 21-37.]

“We have recently begun to consider the use of an approach that is based on what has come to be called postpositivist realism …. This view, although acknowledging poststructuralist critiques, realizes that goods and resources are still distributed according to identity categories. It realizes that theoretical conceptualizations, although true, might not influence the world as much as do the constructed perspectives of hegemonies.… Allowing for the recognition of the work identity and culture do in real life soothe the suspicion our previous arguments raised with Palestinian and Jewish shareholders.” [Zvi Bekerman, “Troubles With Identity: Obstacles to Coexistence Education in Conflict Ridden Societies.” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research. Volume 5, number 4, 2005. Pages 341-357.]

“[Judith] Butler’s ‘contingent foundations,’ Gayatri Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism,’ and Satya P. Mohanty’s ‘postpositivist realism’ represent feminism’s constructivist use of essentialism—as a modified, contingent, fluid use of commonality to enable strategic formations of unity. In their balance of postmodernist fissures with the strategic use of commonality, these contingent deployments of essentialism may be read as modified arguments for dissenting community—a theory of community that negates the values and politics of idealized community while still maintaining a sense of unity that ‘works.’” [Sue-Im Lee. A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction. Columbus, Ohio: The University of Ohio Press. 2009. Page 19.]

“‘Post-postmodernism’ is an ugly word. And not in the sense that swear words or racial slurs are ugly, or even in the way that ‘rightsizing’ or ‘outsourcing’ are ugly words (which is to say, evasive spin-doctored words that try to paper over something foul). Post-postmodernism is, one might say, just plain ugly: it’s infelicitous, difficult both to read and to say, as well as nonsensically redundant. What can the double prefix ‘post-post’ possibly mean? Insofar as postmodernism was supposed to signal the end of modernism’s fetish of the ‘new,’ strictly speaking, nothing can come after or ‘post-’ postmodernism, which ushered in the never-ending end of everything (painting, philosophy, the novel, love, irony, whatever).” [Jeffrey T. Nealson. Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Standford, California: Stanford University Press. 2012. Kindle edition.]

“According to Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism, postmodernism has changed its stripes. There’s no critical consensus on what to call postmodernism’s successor. Strong candidates include globalization, cosmodernism, metamodernism, altermodernism, digimodernism, performatism, postpositivist realism, the New Sincerity, or, for more lexically austere analysts, the contemporary [or, perhaps, Bhaskarian critical realism? – Foster]. These terms refer to as many domains as postmodernism itself once did ….” [Lee Konstantinou, “Periodizing the Present.” Contemporary Literature. Volume 54, number 2, summer 2013. Pages 411-423. The links were added to the original text.]

“Post-positivist realists, in regard to identity, argue that one’s identity is ‘real’ in the sense that people perceive themselves as really of their identity, and others perceive them as of that identity. In other words, in the world of social relations, identity is real and objectively so. The point of PPRs [postpositivist realists] is that identity has validity, and there are better and worse explanations and descriptions of the world of identity. One way to know whether an explanation of an identity is a good one is to talk about the nature of error in any analysis. While it may be hard to describe objectivity, it is easier to describe error. And we can discuss, according to PPRs, the kinds of error present in an argument and ultimately achieve a better description of an argument about identity than we had before.” [Lennard J. Davis. The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. 2013. Page 21.]

“Scholars such as Paula Moya … and others involved in The Future of Minority Studies Research Project (FMS), a transnational and interdisciplinary network of scholars, have … argued to understand identity through ‘postpositivist realism’ to foreground the multiple ways in which identity is fluid or flexible, yet real, a meaningful and embodied experience of contemporary social life.” [Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson, “Bridging Common Grounds: Metaphor, Multitude, and Chicana Third Space Feminism.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies. Volume 11, number 3, 2012. Pages 492-511.]

“In this paper, I argue that a postpositivist realist theory (PPRT) of identity in teacher education curricula could transform and empower the challenging, yet productive relationship between teacher and female immigrant English language learners (ELLs).… I particularly focus on PPRT’s conception of experience to provide a framework for teacher candidates to develop what I call habits of inquiry. Such inquiry, I believe, can foster more accurate evaluations of female immigrant language learners and expand preservice teachers’ notions of gender in ways that support their students’ academic achievement.” [Tonda Liggett, “Postpositivist Realist Theory of Identity: Expanding Notions of Gender in Teacher Education.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. Volume 26, number 2, 2010. Pages 90-101.]

“Instead of defining mixed people as sell-outs by default, or isolating them from those we perceive as ‘different’ from them, we might allow them the freedom to stake out alliances and oppositions that make sense to them, that dove-tail with their own experience. Postpositivist realism can help provide the framework for such freedom of choice. [Paula M. L.] Moya argues that people have different experiences in the world based on which aspect of their identity is emphasized I contend that it is just as crucial to recognize the ways identity can be multiple even within the same ‘category,’ like race.” [Victoria Bolf, “Mestizaje Revisited: Cherrie Moraga, Mixture and Postpositivist Realists.” Constructing Identities: The Interaction of National, Gender and Racial Borders. Antonio Medina-Rivera and Lee Wilberschied, editors. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2013. Pages 74-88.]

“I’ve … been reflecting on this idea [the situated/embodied subject] from a different perspective—[Satya P.] Mohanty’s work on ‘postpositivist realism.’ He argues that we have to remember that experience does matter; that it is always already a theoretical construction of the world. And so if you are in a subaltern position, this does give you epistemic privilege. What [Karl] Marx said in his famous critique of [Ludwig] Fuerbach is relevant here. He said that philosophers don’t only have to interpret the world; the point is to change it. This is not an anti-theoretical perspective, it’s a theory based on experience, on the body and its relations.What he’s suggesting is that workers have understood what capital and capitalism have done to their wage-earning bodies. This is akin to the theoretical perspective that many of us in Chicana/o cultural studies are articulating and to what Mohanty calls ‘epistemic privilege.’ So, I think that those gestures from the autobiographical in my work point to a theoretical construction that not only seeks to interpret our world but to also change it.” [José David Saldívar in Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, Michelle Habell-Pallán, David Román, Aída Hurtado, George Mariscal, Chela Sandoval, Raymond Rocco, Mary Pat Brady, José David Saldívar, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, Vicki Ruiz, Richard Chabrán, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, C. Ondine Chavoya, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Renato Rosaldo, Emma Pérez, Ramón García, Alejandra Elenes, and Alvina Quintana, “Staking the Claim: Introducing Applied Chicana/o Cultural Studies.“ The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Forum: Critical and Ethnographic Practices. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, editor. New York: New York University Press. 2007. Pages 54-132.]

“What [Satya P.] Mohanty offers in place of both Enlightenment reason and debilitating relativism is ‘postpositivist “realism”‘ …, which argues that not all cross-cultural disagreement is unsettleable but that ‘we can understand both differences and commonalities adequately only when we approach cross-cultural disputes in an open-ended way.’

“Mohanty’s argument allows for the possibility of migrants who are ‘insiders’ neither in their birthplaces nor in their host countries. More important—because experience is not the only form of epistemology—Mohanty’s argument makes vital the kind of project I attempt in my article: a cross-cultural communication using postcolonial theory to critique some modes of resistance and to suggest others.”

[Houston A. Baker, Jr., Teresa Dovey, Rosemary Jolly, and Herbert Deinert, “Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition.” PMLA. Volume 110, number 5, October 1995. Pages 1047-1052.]

“The formation of a functioning Pequot [a Native American tribe from present-day Connecticut] polity out of the present-day populations heterogeneous experience calls for the assertion of a cultural essence that can serve as a backdrop, a protean core from which contemporary identity formations can presume to draw their terms. We might say, therefore, that this essence, like identity itself, is in process as much as contemporary efforts to recuperate and express it are. Call this postmodern essentialism or a form of postpositivist realism; the contradiction jars, but it has a clear pragmatic viability.” [Mary Lawlor, “Identity in Mashantucket.“ American Quarterly. Volume 57, number 1, March 2005. Pages 153-177.]

“The novelist Octavia E. Butler can be approached as an exponent of the … postpositivist but realist view. Kindred, her 1979 historical novel about slavery, installs markers that profoundly question the process of discovering or recovering history. Yet it also depicts that very process at great lengths and in a realistic fashion, elaborately redeeming it from relativism, and consequently creating the space for the development of a speculative philosophy of history.…

“Satya P. Mohanty … argues that ‘the extreme constructivism of many postmodernists is not satisfactory today.’ As a counterpart he develops a philosophy he calls ‘postpositivist realism,’ which is ‘attentive to the postmodernist’s cautions about the social and historical entanglements of knowledge’ and yet ‘can provide us with a sophisticated and usable notion of objectivity.’ He defends this new philosophical position as both epistemologically sound and politically viable.”

[Christine Levecq, “Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred.’” Contemporary Literature. Volume 41, number 3, autumn 2000. Pages 525-553.]

“In what might appear like a flashback to the 1990s, feminist philosopher Linda M. Alcoff offers, in her 2006 book entitled Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and Self, a ‘sustained defense of identity as an epistemically salient and ontologically real entity’ …. This defense, she further adds, is made ‘against the critics of identity politics and those who see the attachment to identity as a political problem, psychological crutch, or metaphysical mistake’ ….

“Alcoff describes her realist account of identity as a ‘postpositivist realism’ … that while recognizing that identities cultural and social negotiations still asserts that ‘identities refer outward to objective and causally significant features of the world, that they are thus nonarbitrary, and that experience provides both an epistemic and political basis for understanding’ ….”

[Mabel Wong, “Reclaiming Identity: Rethinking Non-Territorial Autonomy.” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe. Volume 12, number 1, 2013. Pages 56-75.]

“… realists do not hanker after an impossible ideal of a mode of knowing absolutely free of bias or error but, instead, celebrate fallibilism as a necessary part of scientific enquiry. The realist admits that identities may indeed be ideological constructs but insists that they are not less real for that reason since her notion of a post-positivist realism disavows a vulgar, essentialist idea of identity that presumes a natural correspondence between experience and the phenomenal world. In the words of the feminist philosopher and scholar, Linda Martin Alcoff, identities are, in this way, no more than ‘positioned or located lived experiences in which both individuals and groups work to construct meaning in relation to historical experience and historical narratives.’” [Ogagaoghene Emerotowho Ifowodo. Re-Constructing Identities: History, Trauma and Healing in the Post-Colonial Narrative. Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell University. Ithica, New York. August, 2010. Page 127.]

“According to postpositivist Realist theory, theoretical knowledge about the world is acquired by examining a range of beliefs, judging those for their explanatory power, and affording marginalized groups epistemic privilege.… Postpositivist realist theory problematizes dominant notions of power and knowledge by interposing and validating the points of view of traditionally marginalized groups through epistemic privilege.” [Polly Stewart Holder. Different Lattitudes [sic; Latitudes], Different Attitudes: Educator Narratives of a Professional Development in Honduras. Ed.D. dissertation. Georgia Southern University. Statesboro, Georgia. 2009. Page 30.]

“Postpositivist realist perspectives on identity started to emerge in the early 2000s partly as a reaction to postmodernist attempts at discrediting identities as sources of knowledge and a basis of politics. Their approach to the concept of identity is based on the assumption that identities are no less real and socially significant while at the same time unstable, complex, and changeable …. Thus, arguing against the postmodernist (queer) assumptions that identities are inherently negative, exclusionary, and fictional categories imposed onto otherwise free individuals, realists emphasize the positive impacts identities often have, especially in the lives of the underprivileged.” [Katja Kahlina. Sexual Politics of Belonging: Sexual Identities, Nationalism, and Citizenship in Post-Yugoslav Croatia. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Central European University. Budapest, Hungary. 2012. Page 56.]

“[Paula M. L.] Moya’s post-positivist realism is thus generative, rather than isolating or conformist. And because it departs from an acute understanding of the colonial structure on which identities and knowledges exist, it is fundamentally oriented by the task of decolonization. In that sense, the ethical, the political, and the epistemological are linked together in a powerful form. This is, indeed, one of the features of the decolonial turn, that is, the refusal to segregate epistemology from ethics, politics, and other areas of human creation.” [Nelson Meldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction.” Transmodernity. Fall 2011. Pages 1-15.]

“Post-positivist realism is not claiming what is the truth, but it does not avoid pursuing the truth …. It recognises that individual experiences are not personal constructs; rather it is determined externally by the outward system, shared by other individuals …. Post-positivist realism respects an individual’s real experience that arises from his or her social location, but when individuals’ real experiences are compared, we need to carefully examine the theories (episteme) behind these experiences and work out how this assignment bring us close to reality.” [Man Tat Cheng. Cultural Identities of Chinese Visitors to the UK: An Exploratory Study of Structure and Agency. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Exeter. Exeter, England. June, 2015. Pages 8-9.]

“The general consensus regarding all sorts of identity theories is that without the social dimensions of subjective and collective identity formation processes, individuals cannot constitute respective identities without ‘others’ recognizing them. In this dialectical relationship, as the postpositivist realist theory of identity opines, there cannot be any ‘final agreement between the individual, on the one hand, who seeks to express his/her identity and the collective, on the other hand, that offers the symbolic tools to do so’ ….” [Manash Pratim Borah, “…amnesia is a curse—Ramanuhanian Notions of Identity and Memory: A Reading of the Dialectics of Reflexive/Self-Reflexive Context-Sensitivity/Context-Free in Select Non-fictional Prose of A. K. Ramanujan.” Researchers World: Journal of Arts, Science and Commerce. Volume III, issue 3, July 2012. Pages 34-40.]

“Satya P. Mohanty, Linda Martin Alcoff, [Paula M. L.] Moya, and other scholars have made numerous efforts, starting in the early 1990s, to posit a Postpositivist Realist Theory of identity that answers the poststructuralist critiques. Moya summarizes hers and other scholars’ main motivation for offering Postpositivist Realism as a solution in her claim that ‘the prevailing theories of identity lack the intellectual resources to distinguish between different kinds of identities’ …. The solution Postpositivist Realists offer is to situate identity locally, in an effort to contextualize an individual’s identity with as much nuance as possible. By contextualizing identity, essentialism is easy to avoid, and identity is also viewed as something that is real and constructed. Furthermore, contextualizing an individual’s or a group’s identity allows them to make claims about themselves objectively, but allows those individuals and groups to refrain from making their experience absolute for everyone.” [Robert James Tousley. Constitutive Rhetoric of Secular Identities: Conversions Away From. M.A. in English thesis. Texas Christian University. Fort Worth, Texas. December, 2011. Page 14.]

“Paula Moya, Satya Mohanty, and María Lugones deserve special recognition. For very different reasons, each of them has played a crucial role in the development of my ideas, and their close mentorship and friendship has meant a great deal to me. This book would not have gone to press without Paula’s discerning eye and unfaltering support. Satya (generous with his time and always encouraging me to clarify) gave me invaluable criticism and advice throughout.” [Ernesto Javier Martínez. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2013. Pages xi-xii.]

“In this book I juxtapose key texts produced by black, Latino, and Asian queer writers and artists to argue that, across ethnic groups and genres, and over an extended period of time, queers of color have been developing a decolonial realist understanding of knowledge acquisition in oppressive contexts, one distinguished by a recurring preoccupation with intelligibility. This preoccupation is best understood as a concern with the everyday labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others in contexts of intense ideological violence and interpersonal conflict.…

“… this book highlight[s] two innovative routes of social theorizing, one having to do with the ways queers of color have represented the process of knowledge acquisition about oppression spatially, often as a process of ‘migrating’ in and out of different collectivities, and the other having to do with strategic shifts in narrative perspective, direct confrontations with where one reasonably should expect to hear queer stories of resistance and resilience. In both cases, we witness a decolonial realism in practice, particularly as these forms of social theory help us to reframe communities of color as locations from which to elaborate liberatory possibilities.”

[Ernesto Javier Martínez. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2013. Pages 30-31.]

“… ‘postpositivist realists’ … have been developing a theoretical model that ‘shows how identities can be both real and constructed: how they can be politically and epistemically significant, on the one hand, and variable, nonessential, and radically historical, on the other.’ …

“Postpositivist realists consider ‘objective knowledge’ not as infallible and unchanging, but as contingent and open to revision, each new interpretive framework adding more objective knowledge about real systems of social power ….”

[Carrie Sandahl, “Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance.” Theatre Journal. Volume 56, number 4, December 2004. Pages 579-602.]

“Reinvesting newer dimensions to our attitude to theory, I suggest the neologism ‘(In)fusion Approach’ that legitimises our interpretive territoriality within ‘connectors’ and ‘crossroads’ of multiple theory or conceptual paradigms. (In)fusion Theory or (In)fusion Approach promotes a cross conceptual and cross-paradigm plexus. It strokes at the transversality in critical play that discounts overdeterminism of one theory over the other—preventing ‘the suppression of questions by the dominant opinion’—but promotes a communicative space that visits a multiplicity of view points, perspectives, belief systems and regions of concern. The approach leads to a structure, though not final, which is open to the dynamic influx of several systemic variations and epistemic interventions. It promotes a ‘reactivated’ space where the reified concepts with their historical metamorphoses can come to be re-defined and regrafted. The (In)fusion approach, thus, demands a ‘decolonised’ mind (I mean discounting the hegemony of one paradigm)—a mind privileged to pry into any theoretical premise, East or West, sans prejudice.” [Ranjan Ghosh, “The (In)fusion Approach: The Critical Manifesto.” (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits: (In)fusionising a Few Indian English Novels. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc. 2006. Pages 1-19.]

“… [The] ‘aesthetics of hunger’ can be argued through what I have termed elsewhere as ‘(in)fusion approach.’ Complicit in risk, romance, horizon-fusing, freshness, culture of dissent, and democratic criticism, (in)fusion approach has come to question the politics of ‘border patrol,’ the logic of interpretive knowledge formations and ‘talking’ across cultures, traditions, systems in our understanding of the other. It is through (in)fusion approach that one comes to acknowledge the scientific, moral, aesthetic, and religious claims of the text without the monadic conceptual matrix, the one theory jacket, single-concept strapping.” [Ranjan Ghosh, “Aesthetics of Hunger: (In)fusion Approach, Literature, and the Other.” Symplokē. Volume 19, numbers 1-2, 2011. Pages 143-157.]

“… the (in)fusionist transcultural now in going beyond the global submits to abandoning both ‘phantasms: reader’s free play as well as historical unicausality,’ inaugurating a new literary history. Transcultural engagements, unlike simple comparatist modes of study, are not always complete in that they transform understanding and initiate dislocations within established meaning-patterns. There is a ‘somewhere’ between dreams and events, an interspace, an evocation that is not always representational and has a perversity in conceits and excess.” [Ranjan Ghosh, “Reading and Experiencing a Play Transculturally.” Comparative Drama. Volume 46, number 3, fall 2012. Pages 259-281.]

“Literature’s counterfeiting ability goes beyond its power to generate ‘fiction,’ the imagined, and to transform the obvious. Indeed literature stands for culture (in the sense of the known, the normative, the understandable) as well as for anarchy (chaos, confusion and creativity). Flying the contact of society, thus, is both fleeing from a point and inviting a chase, in order to possibly meet at a certain point. Can we then interrogate the power of literature/the scholar-gipsy to see whether the their counterfeiting ability is indeed lost or is simply elusive?” [Ranjan Ghosh, “Rendezvous with the Scholar-Gipsy.” SubStance. Volume 42, number 2, 2013. Pages 3-11.]

“Briefly, postpositivist realism has its intellectual roots in the work of philosophers like Hilary Putnam, who seek to chart a middle course between (postmodernist) scepticism, on the one hand, and (positivistic) certaintism on the other. It is post- and not anti-positivist in that it seeks to reject scepticism about objectivity while remaining deeply circumspect about the fallibility inherent in (and arguably central to) the various ways in which we accumulate and systematise knowledge. Rather than grant the fundamental incommensurability of realist and constructivist positions—which might very roughly be taken to be the views, respectively, that there exists a mind-independent world ‘out there’ against which the cogency and completeness of our various belief sets may be decisively tested, and that there only exists a world ‘in here’ to the extent that it arises from our conventionalised (and therefore irreducibly social and political) languages of description—the postpositivist realist cannibalises both views, accepting the inevitability of bias and error getting in the way of our knowledge of the world, and yet at the same time maintaining that ‘objective knowledge can be built on an analysis of the different kinds of subjective or theoretical bias or interest.’ In other words, our experience of the world may yield reliable objective knowledge, our particular biases and interests notwithstanding, pending an adequately critical reflection on the terms of and (usually pragmatic) consequences of those ‘investments.’” [Adam Muller, “Taking ‘Experience’ Seriously in Anita Desai’s The Village By the Sea. (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits: (In)fusionising a Few Indian English Novels. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc. 2006. Pages 117-135.]

“… the poet-reader aesthetic in [Ben] Jonson submits to the (in)fusionist transcultural now, both in ‘relativity of simultaneity’ and in ‘a plurality of operative nows’ ….” [Ranjan Ghosh, “Ben Jonson and His Reader: An Aesthetics of Antagonism.” The Comparatist. Volume 37, May 2013. Pages 138-155.]

“There was, in the first place, a philosophical and moral intention, which, however veiled in fanciful imagery and clothed in limpid verse, is yet not content to be an inspiring principle and artistic occasion of the poem, but obtrudes itself directly in the length of some of the speeches; refuses, that is, to subserve the aesthetic purpose, and endeavours to divert the poetic beauty to its own non-aesthetic ends. In the second place, and probably of greater importance as regards the actual success of the piece on the stage, it contained somewhat of dramatic emotion, of incident which depended for its value upon its effect on the characters involved, which was ill served by the spectacular machinery and necessary limitations of the composition, while at the same time it must have interfered with the opportunity for mere sensuous effect which it was the main business of the masque to afford.” [Ben Jonson. Complete Works of Ben Jonson. Hastings, East Sussex, England: Delphi Classics imprint of Delphi Publishing Ltd. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“… I have tried to approach this revisionist aesthetics ‘(in)fusionally.’ I have tried to establish a critical communication among different levels of interpretative thought, drawing upon the Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, the Hebrew/ʿIḇəriyṯ, the medieval and the postmodern theories and concepts of imagination. This transversality in theoretical-conceptual trafficking is not mindless code-switching; rather, there is a communicative and praxial validity which the (In)fusion approach promotes and establishes, helping us in the process to understand the ‘moves’ and ‘turns’ in Rashid Khalifa’s aesthetic growth.…

“… In … transformative praxis Rashid is seen to have reached a ‘sensitised solidarity’ (in the words of Roy Bhaskar it is a solidarity that respects differences, situations and respects uniqueness of identity); he has understood the postmodern pragmatics of ‘sharing’ – the creative sharing (commonly shared telos) that both resuscitates his story-telling voice and reinstates Soraya’s singing voice.…

“… Rashid’s aesthetico-moral reflection is socialized and without any intractable moral conflict he repositions himself to recognize the ‘other.’ This is the domain of totality for Rashid, the aesthetic Yogi; it is not far from Bhaskar’s perspective of critical realism. Unlike what happens in the pre-Kahani Alifbay, Rashid at the end of the novel finds his ‘relations’ as not merely external but very internal too. Rashid and the rest are joined not by the mere formality of relations. Bhaskar argues: ‘That is, my relationship, my being will be effected by your being, my essence will be effected by your essence. It has been said that to be is to be related.’”

[Ranjan Ghosh, “Imagination, Imaging, and Revisionist Aesthetics in Rushdie’s ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’: An (In)fusionist Approach.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. Volume 8, number 2, spring 2007. Pages 1-20.]

“Rashid had often told Haroun about the beauty of the road from the Town of G to the Valley of K, a road that climbed like a serpent through the Pass of H towards the Tunnel of I (which was also known as J). There was snow by the roadside, and there were fabulous multicoloured birds gliding in the gorges; and when the road emerged from the Tunnel (Rashid had said), then the traveller saw before him the most spectacular view on earth, a vista of the Valley of K with its golden fields and silver mountains and with the Dull Lake at its heart—a view spread out like a magic carpet, waiting for someone to come and take a ride.” [Salman Rushdie. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books in association with Viking Penguin. 1990. Pages 33-34.]

“Rashid had often told Haroun about the beauty of the road from the Town of G to the Valley of K, a road that climbed like a serpent through the Pass of H towards the Tunnel of I (which was also known as J).There was snow by the roadside, and there were fabulous multicoloured birds gliding in the gorges; and when the road emerged from the Tunnel (Rashid had said), then the traveller saw before him the most spectacular view on earth, a vista of the Valley of K with its golden fields and silver mountains and with the Dull Lake at its heart—a view spread out like a magic carpet, waiting for someone to come and take a ride.” [Salman Rushdie. From Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London, England: Puffin Books imprint of Penguin Books. 2013. Google Play edition.]

“I have … offered a new line of theoretical inquiry, feminist dialectical realism and offered a qualitative study to suggest its theoretical utility. The feminist dialectical realist approach to knowledge, I have argued, does not entail moving beyond identity. Instead, it acknowledges the dialectical engagement of identities or subjects who are objects in the world and the objective, non-arbitrary, causally significant features of the world against which identities push.

“Feminist dialectical realism also offers the potential to move previous iterations of postpositivist realism beyond its current impasses, in particular, in its development of an ontological approach to the real.”

[Laura Gillman, “Critical Realist and Postpositivist Realist Feminisms: Towards a Feminist Dialectical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 15, issue 5, 2016. Pages 458-475.]

“… the primordial condition of originally separate and autonomous groups is understood to be the permanent foundational ontology on which a secondary structure of relations among disparate groups has been socially constructed. This layering of achieved and therefore reversible relationships over an a priori and therefore immutable disjuncture establishes what Roy Bhaskar … describes as ‘ontological stratification.’ Although each level of reality in a stratified ontology entails practical tendencies, these tendencies emerge from, and are influenced by, the deepest level of being.” [Michael W. Scott, “Ignorance is Cosmos; Knowledge is Chaos: Articulating a Cosmological Polarity in the Solomon Islands.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice. Volume 44, number 2, November 2000. Pages 56-83.]

“Justin’s research began with adapting the critical realist tradition by emphasising the need for conceptual development in empirical research with this being applied to empirical research into unemployment. He subsequently moved away from critical realism, taking more of an interest in debates about fallibilistic models of science, pragmatism and [Karl] Popper’s philosophy.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Dr Justin Cruickshank—Department of Political Science and International Studies: Senior Lecturer.” Academic website. University of Birmingham. Birmingham, England. 2016. Retrieved on February 22nd, 2016.]

“… the main claim of realist anti-foundationalism is that we can have a fallible access to a reality that is irreducible to our interpretations of it, the main tenet of philosophical logic of immediacy is that we have an unmediated and direct access to the truth. This can be a direct access to a material realm with the foundationalist philosophical logic of immediacy, or it can be in the form of having a direct access to social norms or concepts within a perspective qua truths, with the relativist philosophical logic of immediacy. So with the foundationalist philosophical logic of immediacy it is held that the mind can mirror discrete facts (or that propositions can correspond to discrete facts), and with the relativist philosophical logic of immediacy, to know the prevailing norms or concepts is to know the truth as truth is reduced to such norms or concepts. Against this, realist anti-foundationalism accepts that we know the world through perspectives but qualifies this by saying that truth is irreducible to perspectives because truth concerns an interpretation of a world that is irreducible to our interpretations of it, and such interpretations are fallible given the lack of direct access.” [Justin Cruickshank. Realism and Sociology: Anti-foundationalism, ontology and social research. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 3.]

“Throughout the book [Realism and Sociology: Anti-foundationalism, ontology and social research] I argue for what I call realist anti-foundationalism, which refers to the combination of the correspondence theory of truth, conceptual relativity and metaphysical realism. Concerning this main conceptual frame Curry is silent. Realist anti-foundationalism is set up in opposition to post-Wittgensteinianism, which leads me, after a short interlude discussing empiricism and methodological individualism, to develop internal critiques of [Richard] Rorty’s and [Anthony] Giddens’ very different forms of the post-Wittgensteinian turn to practices. The purpose of these internal critiques is to show how such post-Wittgensteinian positions unfold into the positions they seek to overcome, which means falling back into what I refer to as the philosophical and sociological logics of immediacy (i.e. claims premised upon the truth being manifest). I then move on to situate the critical realist substantive ontology within realist anti-foundationalism.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Response to Neil Curry’s Review of Realism And Sociology.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 1, August 2004. Pages 165-168.]

“This book is an important contribution to the continuing methodological debates within the social sciences. [Justin] Cruickshank constructs a novel argument based on a realist approach that is tempered by an anti-foundationalist view of knowledge. This argument is used by Cruickshank to provide an intriguing way through issues such as the structure/agency debate, realism versus relativism, and the relationship between truth and knowledge.” [Will Gibson, “Realism and Sociology: Anti-foundationalism, Ontology and Social Research.” Review article. Sociology. Volume 42, number 3, June 2008. Pages 580-581.]

“Not much is said about metaphysical realism in the work of critical realists, but as it is a necessary presupposition for critical realism and, further, as many people hostile to critical realism conflate metaphysical realism with what may be called a ‘metatheoretical’ realism, then something needs to be said about metaphysical realism. Perhaps the best way to start is with a definition, as it seems that much philosophical dispute can be generated by semantic misunderstandings, with the protagonists arguing past one another. By metaphysical realism I simply mean the claim that there is a reality independent of our perspectives of it (which is not to say that we and our perspectives are not part of reality).” [Justin Cruikshank, “First Principles: What Are They And Who Needs Them? (Or, Is Critical Realism An Underlabourer Or Overseer?).” Paper presented at the fifth annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism. Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. August 17th–19th, 2001. Retrieved on November 14th, 2015.]

“… [A] social ontology ought to be constructed so that it guides research, rather than forcing research findings to fit preconceived categories. An ontology that can resolve the structure-agency problematic, by saying how social reality provides enablements and constraints for individuals, is required to function as an ‘underlabourer,’ providing precepts to guide research, and avoiding the role of ‘master-builder,’ whereby an ontology is taken to be a definitive map of social facts.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Underlabouring and unemployment: Notes for developing a critical realist approach to the agency of the chronically unemployed.” Critical Realism: The Difference it Makes. Justin Cruickshank, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Pages 111-112.]

“… social theorists often commit the scholastic fallacy, because agents are presented as detached rational atoms that are always ‘knowledgeable.’ This is defended on the grounds that it avoids derogating agents, i.e. it avoids presenting agents as structural dopes whose conformist behaviour is determined by the prevailing structures. However, talk of knowledgeable social agents is not a result of any serious attempt to produce a concept of agency that has a rich explanatory value.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Postdisciplinarity and the Study of Lay Normativity: Re-theorising Class in Social Science.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 5, issue 1, April 2006. Pages 110-121.]

“… critical realists make a distinction between the unchanging intransitive domain of reality and the transitive domain of changing scientific knowledge. Given this conception of knowledge and reality, the task of philosophy is taken to be that of an underlabourer rather than a guarantor of certainty in science. That is, philosophy cannot supply epistemic guarantees to underwrite the claims of the sciences by saying how such claims will mirror reality and eventually result in a finished science. What it can do, however, is assist the growth of fallible knowledge by clearing away any conceptual confusion concerning the fundamental assumptions in the transitive domain, which means, for critical realists at least, clearing away any confusion over ontological assumptions.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Some Realistic Considerations on the Death of Philosophy.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 7, issue 2, October 2008. Pages 314-329.]

“A social realist meta-theory is not simply an extra ‘addon.’ It is necessary because one’s conception of social ontology will influence methodology. To draw upon a notion of structures as enabling and constraining is to link structure and agency, which means that research will set out to focus upon how individuals face particular sets of limits on, and potential opportunities for, action (and, correspondingly, how individuals may rework the situation in which they find themselves, to change the social structures over time). Conversely, if one held to an individualist ontology, whether implicitly or explicitly, then ultimately one could not say how an objectively real social context influenced individuals’ actions.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Overcoming Essentialism: Notes On The Underclass Debate.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 1, July 2000. Pages 29-35.]

“Epistemological individualism is the defining feature of foundationalist epistemology. This is because foundationalism (i.e. rationalism and empiricism) holds that knowledge turns on certainty, and that certainty in knowledge is possible because the mind of each individual has the capacity to ‘mirror’ reality as it ‘really is.’” [Justin Cruickshank, “Postmodern Politics: Rorty on the Self, Agency and Liberalism.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 1, issue 2, July 1998. Pages 2-4.]

“… my concern is with concept-formation, meaning that I am concerned to show how the concepts that constitute the critical realist social ontology are derived. I focus on these issues concerning the development of critical realist ideas (rather than their application) because undertaking such a task is necessary to rebut the criticism that, in developing an ontology, critical realism seeks to claim absolute knowledge.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Critical Realism and Critical Philosophy: On the Usefulness of Philosophical Problems.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 1, July 2002. Pages 49-66.]

“SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AS A FORM OF CRYPTO-REALISM …

“To be clear here, a realist position is one that invokes, explicitly or implicitly, the notion of a stratum of social reality that was more than individuals. For critical realists, this stratum is constituted by structures as emergent properties and, for micro-level social constructionists, it is constituted by the intersubjective norms that agents rework in their dialogic interaction.…

“Critical realism … acknowledges that phenomena exist and operate within open systems and, accordingly, a plethora of different contexts and mechanisms can affect outcomes. These contextual factors may be geographical, historical, social, cultural, environmental and physical …. For instance, programmes are enacted in a social context which contains rules, norms, values and associations that either support or inhibit their effectiveness and are also, at least in part, a product of the interpretation of those providing the interventions ….” [Alexander M. Clark, Paul D. MacIntyre, and Justin Cruickshank, “A critical realist approach to understanding and evaluating heart health programmes.” health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. Volume 11, number 4, 2007. Pages 513-539.]

“For [Richard] Rorty, realism moves from the obvious to the impossible. Realism is correct to hold that there is a reality which exists beyond our ideas, but it is wrong to assume that our ideas can mirror that reality as it ‘really is.’ We approach reality from different conceptual perspectives, but we cannot ‘step outside’ our perspectives to see if they do indeed mirror reality as it really is. To step outside our ideas is impossible. We should therefore move beyond the ‘representationalist problematic.’ This sought to give the honorific status of ‘knowledge’ to some ideas which represent what is beyond those ideas.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Rorty on Pragmatism, Liberalism and the Self.” After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. José López and Garry Potter, editors. New York: The Athlone Press. 2001. Pages 215-224.]

“My concern in this chapter is to argue that rational choice theory (henceforth: RCT) is untenable because it is a form of essentialism. Against RCT I argue for the use of social realism. The underclass issue is used to illustrate the usefulness of social realism together, conversely, with the problems associated with essentialism and RCT. The underclass concept is connected to right-wing essentialist arguments, and this leads some to reject the concept. I argue that it is useful to retain the concept, as individuals in chronic unemployment are in a position which is different from the working class. I develop this argument by using social realism to interpret empirical studies of unemployed individuals.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Social theory and the underclass: Social realism or rational choice individualism?” Rational Choice Theory: Resisting colonization. Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Pages 75-92.]

“… with macro-level social constructionism, … if one adheres to the notion of the death of the subject with macro-level discourses shaping individuals, then one is obviously making a crypto-realist claim about a discourse functioning as a form of unobservable social structure that controls agents.”

[Justin Cruickshank, “Positioning positivism, critical realism and social constructionism in the health sciences: a philosophical orientation.” Nursing Inquiry. Volume 19, number 1, 2012. Pages 71-82.]

“For those critical realists who regard critical realism as a form of neo-Marxism, the task of social science is not just that of explaining how structures and agents interact but also that of criticism …. Their argument runs thus. Any scientific account of how the capitalist structure works will show how it is oppressive and exploitative. It will also show how this structure needs to generate ideological beliefs to mask its nefarious character.” [Justin Cruickshank, “The positive and the negative: Assessing critical realism and social constructionism as post-positivist approaches to empirical research in the social sciences.” Working paper 42. August, 2011. International Migration Institute, University of Oxford. Oxford, England. Pages 1-20.]

“If we accepted [Roy] Bhaskar’s fact-to-value argument and/or his value-to-fact argument, then, for reasons of cognitive economy, we would have to be an ethical ‘blank sheet.’ …

“… the criticism of Bhaskar’s arguments is not meant to motivate a return to the positivist commitment to value neutrality (which, ironically, is of course based on a value judgement to value value-neutrality over value-judgements). Rather, it motivates a critical approach to politics, with criticism rooted in rationally held values rather than putatively logical derivations or ‘valuey’ facts. The value-to-value argument gives values their due.”

[Justin Cruickshank, “Structures, Agents and Criticism: Assessing Bhaskar’s Fact-To-Value and Value-To-Fact Arguments.” Politics. Volume 30, number 3, 2010. Pages 168-173.]

“The critical realist problem situation is to be rejected because there can be no conceptual re-tooling of the sciences based on one ontology, without presuming that ontology to be the definitively correct definition of an ultimate stratum of reality, which is an assumption based upon metaphysical dogmatism. The definition of ontology as mirroring the intransitive domain thus needs to be rejected. We can though accept that ontological presuppositions frame how people theorise and research the social world, which means that these presuppositions need to be supported in a theoretically rigorous manner.” [Justin Cruickshank, “A tale of two ontologies: an immanent critique of critical realism.” The Sociological Review. Volume 52, issue 4, November 2004. Pages 567-585.]

“[Richard] Rorty’s conception of how actual liberal democracies function, as opposed to his arguments about liberalism as a political philosophy, is quite similar to what [Karl] Popper called ‘piecemeal social engineering.’ Certainly, Popper would have had no quarrel with Rorty’s view that politics ‘is a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms and compromises.’” [Justin Cruickshank, “Ethnocentrism, social contract liberalism and positivistic-conservatism: Rorty’s three theses on politics.” Res Publica. Volume 6, number 1, 2000. Pages 1-23.]

“… it is argued in this article that it is critical realist philosophy that renders itself redundant. The argument against critical realism has two steps. First, it is argued that the critical realists have to restrict the recognition of fallibilism to the substantive knowledge claims of the sciences and treat the ontological definitions posited by critical realism as infallible. Second, it is argued that critical realism operates within the ambit of the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy because it is concerned with definitions. For critical realists, the task of philosophy is to render explicit the ontological precepts taken to be implicit in the sciences, in order to furnish a set of definitions that scientific language must adhere to in theory construction if it is to avoid misconceptualising causal relations.” [Justin Cruickshank, “The Usefulness of Fallibilism in Post-Positivist Philosophy: A Popperian Critique of Critical Realism.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 37, number 3, September 2007. Pages 263-288.]

“The problem for realism (as espoused, for example, by [Roy] Bhaskar) … is that in seeking to decode the hidden mechanisms behind observable events it fails to take account of how ‘intransitive’ mechanisms are actually ‘transitive’ because they are mediated by agents’ meanings.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences.” Review article. Cultural Sociology. Volume 7, number 1, 2013. Pages 104-105.]

“When it came to the issue of transcending the domination of instrumental rationality, or tackling any form of reification, the education process would be vital to stop people treating others and their own thoughts as just thing-like entities. So, for example, one way to begin dealing with the problems of instrumental rationality and reification could be to challenge the current neo-liberal changes occurring in some higher education sectors. In the UK the Campaign for the Public University drew explicitly on [John] Dewey’s work to argue for higher education as a ‘public good’ rather than a ‘positional good’ ….” [Justin Cruickshank, “Democracy versus the Domination of Instrumental Rationality: Defending Dewey’s Argument for Democracy as an Ethical Way of Life.” Humanities. Volume 3, 2014. Pages 19-41.]

“I’d like to start by noting that my attempt to rescue Popper and Rorty from posterity was an implicit engagement with the social production of knowledge, because it recognised the power of traditions to shape how ideas are received and problem-situations discursively configured. Further, [Karl] Popper and [Richard] Rorty were, ironically, aware of the power of traditions to influence the reception of their normative claims about the extreme openness of belief change, but failed to analyse the power of traditions and their constitutive role in all belief formation and the reception of ideas.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Problem-Solving and the Social Production of Knowledge: A Reply to Isaac Reed.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 3, number 2, 2014. Pages 24-33.]

“… contrary to the view that [Karl] Popper was a technocratic positivist and Cold War liberal, who fetishised the authority of science for its alleged ability to furnish an algorithm that produces knowledge that is qualitatively different from lay knowledge, we saw that Popper advocated a problem-solving epistemology, where all beliefs, practices and policies were open to change through critical dialogue.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Anti-Authority: Comparing Popper and Rorty on the Dialogic Development of Beliefs and Practices.” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy. Volume 29, number 1, 2015. Pages 73-94.]

“… the focus will be on how [Karl] Popper and [Richard] Rorty’s concern with establishing a dialogic community based on problem-solving was motivated by a fear of the domination of monologic political doctrines, with this resulting in them constructing science and the humanities, respectively, as idealised domains of dialogue, that is, as dialogic ethical and epistemic exemplars. These constructions misconstrued the domains of science and the humanities and misconstrued the social nature of dialogue outside these putative exemplars, which cannot approximate to an ideal domain of undistorted communication.” [Justin Cruickshank, “From Ex Cathedra Legislators to Dialogic Exemplars? Popper, Rorty and the Politics and Sociology of Knowledge.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 3, number 5, 2014. Pages 1-12.]

“For both [Karl] Popper and [Richard] Rorty education was of central importance in creating a citizenry able to understand and criticise social, economic, political and moral matters. With an educational system and culture that valued ideas and rational dialogue there would be an appropriate interlocutor audience for public intellectuals, assuming they could find an outlet.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Public Intellectuals, Education and the Need for Dissatisfaction: Comments on Raphael Sassower’s Discussion of Popper, Rorty and Democracy.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 3, number 7, 2014. Pages 1-4.]

“Creating networks and spaces within and outside institutions to rethink the meaning and practice of pedagogy and its relation to politics is what is needed. The issue here is how to create knowledge within spaces which acknowledge equality of capacity. Interventions are necessary, both from within and from outside of academia, through dissemination of knowledge in an accessible way, community engagement, union organising and through a more dialogic and horizontal, intellectual relationship between academics, students and lay people.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Exit, Voice and Loyalty in the Public Sphere: On the Hollowing Out of Universities and the ‘Trojan Horse’ Attack on the Muslim Community in the UK.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 3, number 9, 2014. Pages 57-71.]

“We hold that the end of political change, which hopefully academics can be part of, is the creation of a more dialogic democracy that would move us away not just from neo-liberal plutocracy but ultimately from the existing liberal – capitalist system which allows economic and political elites unfettered freedom to pursue self-interest and exploit the population.” [Justin Cruickshank, “The Cost of Public Intellectuals: Reflections On Raphael Sassower’s Call for Intellectuals To Influence Elites and Their Publics.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 3, number 3, 2014. Pages 16-26.]

“The Digital Age of Big Data is one that re-inscribes neoliberal corporate capitalism. Techno-capitalists promised capitalism with better consumerism—or ‘Postcapitalism’— but as with the claim for free electricity, this was hubris, and the reality is increased corporate exploitation. Academics need to challenge this rather than being co-opted by corporations like Google and people need to reject their governments’ decisions to capitulate to capital with TTIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership].” [Justin Cruickshank, “Big Data, TTIP and the Hubris of Techno-Capitalism.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Volume 4, number 3, 2015. Pages 45-55.]

“… he [Karl Popper] turned to a modified conventionalism, arguing that simplicity ought to determine theory choice …. This was a point Popper would retain in. his later work, arguing that the best scientific theories were the most falsifiable, and the most falsifiable were the simplest At this time though Popper had not developed the notion of falsification. Nor had he introduced his argument for deductive reasoning for all the sciences, over the inductive reasoning favoured by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. Instead, he just argued for a conventionalist approach, but one that retained an emphasis on the importance of experience and testing in theory selection.” [Justin Cruickshank, “How Popper became Popper.” History & Philosophy of Psychology. Volume 5, number 1, 2003. Pages 94-111.]

“… all knowledge is problem-solving and the search for better solutions only opens up more interesting problems.

“We may refer to this as a dialogic approach to knowledge, in contrast to monologic criticism, which is only concerned with repeating some tenets that are taken to be the definitive last word.”

[Justin Cruickshank, “Seeking the Tower of Babel.” Sociology. Volume 41, number 4, August 2007. Pages 741-748.]

“… we may say that the attempt to avoid the epistemic fallacy by turning to ontology, and treating metaphysics as a conceptual science, failed because it fell foul of the putative epistemic fallacy itself. If the social sciences could also be treated as a self-justifying epistemic exemplar then the same problem would, obviously, reappear. However, the social sciences clearly lack the same explanatory power as the natural sciences and the social sciences lack agreement over ontological assumptions. Given this, critical realists have two options. First, they could hold that the task of underlaboring for the social sciences would have to be postponed until such time as the social sciences managed to arrive at a set of correct ontological assumptions. Second, critical realists could seek out a domain of knowledge that acted as a surrogate for social scientific knowledge, from which ontological assumptions could be derived and turned into a set of ontological definitions to guide the social sciences.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Knowing Social Reality: A Critique of Bhaskar and Archer’s Attempt to Derive a Social Ontology from Lay Knowledge.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 40, number 4, 2010. Pages 579-602.]

“The difficulty with critical realism … is that its critical aspects (by calling into question the notion of a preordered world) is at odds with its realist aspect (which asserts the existence of such a pre-ordered world). Because of this difficulty it is not at all clear that critical realism is a coherent philosophical position ….

“So, the ‘critical’ aspect of ‘critical realism’ pertains to knowledge being anti-foundational, whereas the ‘realist’ / ontological aspect of ‘critical realism’ pertains to an essentialist doctrine, whereby concepts directly mirror fixed discrete essences. On the one hand we have perspectives, or discourses, and on the other hand, we have reality-in-itself.”

[Justin Cruickshank. Anti-Foundationalism And Social Ontology: Towards A Realist Sociology. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. Coventry, England. February, 2000. Pages 246-247.]

“Overall this book [Justin Cruickshank’s Realism and Sociology: Anti-foundationalism, ontology and social research] is an extremely coherent and well argued defence of critical realism carried out through the philosophical concept of immediacy. This culminates in an application of the underlabourer approach to the issue of the chronically unemployed. The book is robust, consistent and for the most part fairly convincing. My main issue is with the lack of innovative argumentation and to this extent the book remains firmly located within the confines of something akin to a critical realist canon. For my own part I would like to see more open dialogue and risk taking, with more emphasis placed on the transitive dimension and therefore conjoining with Marxism in a critique of late capitalism.” [Neil Curry, “Mediating Realism and Sociology.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 2, issue 1, 2003. Pages 157-160.]

“Two prominent theoretical traditions consistent with a cultural perspective are critical realism (CR) and neoinstitutional theory (IT). Research which draws on these may help to invigorate the normative aims of B&S [business-and-society] scholarship. In particular, CR and IT locate firm behavior within delimited but causally complex social contexts (or fields) and this provides a useful lens to study socially beneficial and harmful corporate practices, the mechanisms which rouse them, and the outcomes they produce. Moreover, by embracing an emancipatory edict and casting light on the multiplex actors and mechanisms at play within fields, CR and IT come together in ways that point to opportunities for B&S scholars to contribute to social good beyond advancing arguments that appeal to the strategic or moral sensibilities of cor- porate decision-makers.” [Tyler Earle Wry, “Does Business and Society Scholarship Matter to Society?: Pursuing a Normative Agenda with Critical Realism and Neoinstitutional Theory.” Journal of Business Ethics. Volume 89, number 2, October 2009. Pages 151-171.]

“The critical realist agrees that our knowledge of reality is a result of social conditioning and, thus, cannot be understood independently of the social actors involved in the knowledge derivation process. However, it takes issue with the belief that the reality itself is a product of this knowledge derivation process. The critical realist asserts that ‘real objects are subject to value laden observation’; the reality and the value-laden observation of reality operating in two different dimensions, one intransitive and relatively enduring; the other transitive and changing. [Roy] Bhaskar argues that a lack of recognition of this division is a fundamental error of much of postmodernist work. This so-called epistemic fallacy assumes that statements about being (ontological statements) can be analysed in terms of statements about knowledge of that being (epistemological statements).” [Philip J. Dobson, “Critical realism and information systems research: why bother with philosophy?” Information Research. Volume 7, number 2, January 2002. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The realist critique of the Humean conception of causality and of the different forms of actualism which ground it constitutes, in my view, one of the most coherent approaches to the (non-deterministic) relation between structure and agency in the social sciences. To the extent that it accounts for the necessary powers of both types of agents and the way they affect each other (including the possibility of one tendency being neutralised by another), the notion of necessity which allows for the differentiation between causal and spurious relations can be maintained, without the need to assume that this necessity is deterministic in any actual sense.

“The adoption of such an ontology of structures, meaning that the world is both structured and stratified, allows for different levels of explanation without having to reduce one level of reality to another, a reduction which often allows for ‘half-explanations’ based on the higher stratum, as is the case with methodological individualism.”

[Cynthia Lins Hamlin. Beyond Relativism: Raymond Boudon, cognitive rationality and critical realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Google Play edition.]

“In developing her critical realist critique of [Raymond] Boudon, [Cynthia Lins] Hamlin uses the method of immanent critique. That is, throughout her book she seeks to explore to what extent Boudon’s nominalist methodological individualism is able to account for social phenomena. Hamlin argues that Boudon’s nominalism prevents his analysis from providing an adequate explanation. As this nominalism precludes realism and ontology, we can only construct models and test these without trying to define the reality we seek to know.” [Justin Cruickshank, “Ontology and Nominalism: On the Case for Critical Realism.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 1, July 2002. Pages 165-167.]

“In line with Robert Paul Resch and Andrew Collier, I second Roy Bhaskar’s arguments from A Realist Theory of Science (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978) and The Possibility of Naturalism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979) defending scientific realism and would argue that it accords with Althusser’s notion of reality and of science’s role in producing an understanding of it. Like [Robert Paul] Resch but unlike [Andrew] Collier, I would suggest that immanent rather than transcendental realism suffices for a reconstructed Althusserian Marxism and, further, that an immanent realism is the only type that his description of ‘actually existing’ practices allows.” [William S. Lewis. Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2005. Page 211.]

“While I am generally in agreement with [William S.] Lewis’s argument, and I would certainly recommend his book to all interested in [Louis] Althusser, there is one specific point where I found his argument deficient: his discussion of Althusser’s supposed ‘epistemological conventionalism,’ an argument which he has elaborated at greater length elsewhere …. I would like to spend the rest of this review suggesting where exactly the problem arises and what might be an alternative way of understanding Althusser’s epistemology.

“… [One] difficulty revolves around Lewis’s appropriation and deployment of a thesis taken from an earlier book on Althusser by Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (1992). Lewis himself notes that in many of the points he makes regarding Althusser’s epistemology he is ‘indebted to Resch’s work’ …. Resch’s reading of Althusser, like that of several others, attempts to open up the possibility of correcting Althusser’s philosophy through importing certain concepts from the ‘critical realism’ of Roy Bhaskar.”

[David McInerney, “Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism.” Review article. Borderlands E-journal. Volume 4, number 2, 2005. Online publication. No pagination.]

“[Louis] Althusser’s materialism cannot, in my view, be understood precisely as ‘realism.’ It is not a belief that philosophy and science ‘provide a description of the laws that underlie appearances.’ Following [Baruch] Spinoza, Althusser holds that appearances have their own laws proper to the nature of appearances, or the realm of thought as such. The ‘autonomy of theory’ can be understood in terms of irreducibility of thought to matter, and vice versa. Thought, ideas, and knowledge must be understood on their own terms, according to their own dynamic, because there is no exit from thinking to extended reality.” [Hasana Sharp, “Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism.” Review article. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Volume 20, number 4, 2006. Pages 328-330.]

“[William S.] Lewis bypasses [Louis] Althusser’s specifically Marxian critical engagement with postmodernism. Instead, he gives Althusser a realist (à la [Roy] Bhaskar) interpretation and dismisses all postmodernism in a sentence. An argument by Lewis against postmodernism and Althusser’s complex critique of it would have helped the book to achieve its aim: clarifying Althusser’s relations to [French Communist] Party and fellow Marxist intellectuals. When Althusser opposes any inter-theoretic standard of truth that could function to distinguish true from false social theories, ‘ideologies’ from ‘sciences,’ this is a crucial and widely influential position that clashes with Bhaskar’s realism as with the Party’s position. Althusser’s position demands serious engagement given Lewis’ objectives; yet none is offered.” [Richard D. Wolff, “Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism.” Review article. Science & Society. Volume 71, number 4, October 2007. Pages 490-493.]

“Roy Bhaskar, whose Althusserian critique of empiricism … I am following here, has demonstrated how the empiricist position amounts to an absurd claim that human beings create natural law: if the laws of nature are simply constant conjunctions of events, and if constant conjunctions occur only under closed conditions, and if, finally, scientists alone can create such conditions, then scientists create the laws of nature! Furthermore, with respect to open systems—systems in which experimental controls are impossible and constant conjunctions do not obtain—Bhaskar maintains that the empiricist position implies either causal indeterminacy (there are no laws of nature) or an absurd claim that science has not yet discovered any laws applicable to open systems (there is as yet no applied science).

“The correct interpretation of experimental activity, Bhaskar points out, recognizes that the object of scientific practice is knowledge of causal mechanisms, not patterns of events. To conceive of the laws of nature in terms of generative structures, tendencies, and powers is to admit that while such structures may be isolated in closed conditions, they are also operative in open, uncontrolled systems as well. [Louis] Althusser’s notion of structural causality, the articulation of structural tendencies and powers, expresses rather well the operation of causal laws in open systems. In social systems, a structural mechanism exists as a power or tendency whether or not it is empirically realized, an outcome that depends on the effectivities of other structures as well as its own. Furthermore, if the object of science is knowledge of causal structures and not constant patterns of events, then there is no reason why the term science should be restricted to those practices capable of creating controlled experimental environments. Finally, the open nature of social formations explains why historical materialism is necessarily explanatory and not predictive and why this fact in no way disqualifies the claim that its explanations are scientific.”

[Robert Paul Resch. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 1992. Page 198.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s works are of particular interest because of the Althusserian influence upon his attempt philosophically to defend scientific realism and critical naturalism by transcendental rather than empiricist or rationalist means.…

“Having a realist and materialist concept of ideology … provides [Louis] Althusser with the philosophical ground for a general, if circular, defense of materialism (without, of course, providing any rationalist proof of it). His position appears to be very close to the ‘transcendental realism’ elaborated by Roy Bhaskar …, who maintains that realism can be philosophically defended if one begins with the practice of science itself and its effects and ‘transcendentally’ deduces the material conditions for such a practice and such effects to exist.”

[Robert Paul Resch, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Social Theory: A Comparison of Althusser and Foucault.” Poetics Today. Volume 10, number 3, autumn 1989. Pages 511-549.]

“[Gregory] Elliott attempts to establish ‘the continuing productivity and vitality of the Althusserian research programme’ through a lengthy citation of writings in the social sciences, philosophy, historiography, aesthetics, cultural studies, literary criticism and feminist theory. Impressive as the list is, it is impossible not to have some reservations concerning it. For one thing, the criteria for inclusion are generously vague and yield somewhat motley results. Thus, to stay with the British contingent, it will be obvious to any reader of Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science and John Taylor’s From Modernization to Modes of Production that these remarkable works could be said to exemplify an ‘Althusserian research programme’ only in quite different usages of that description.” [Joseph McCarney, “For and Against Althusser.” New Left Review. Series I, number 176, July–August 1989. Pages 115-128.]

“No cursory list can do justice to the continuing productivity and vitality of the Althusserian research programme. But a few pointers can be offered. Thus, among historical works significantly indebted to the meta-historical labours of [Louis] Althusser and [Étienne] Balibar, one could cite Guy Bois’s extraordinary study of Norman feudalism, building into an analysis of the laws of motion of the feudal mode of production; Robert Linhart’s challenging re-examination of Leninist theory and Bolshevik practice on the peasant question and the organisation of industrial labour in the fledgling, embattled Soviet state; Peter Schöttler’s rewarding exploration of the contradictory nature and chequered history of the bourses de travail in Third-Republic France, which attests to the fertile aspects of later Althusserian propositions on ideology and class struggle; or, outside France and Althusser’s immediate orbit, Perry Anderson’s marvellous syntheses of European historical development from antiquity to Absolutism and Gareth Stedman Jones’s signal contributions to English working-class history. Althusserianism, then, has influenced concrete analyses and explanations of the past that are as empirically controlled as they are conceptually engaged. Add to this its part in a renaissance of Marxist anthropology – whether via Emmanuel Terray’s defence of the applicability of historical materialism to ‘primitive’ social formations or Pierre-Philippe Rey’s profound survey of the effects of colonialism in the Congo – and its capacity for engagement with the real world should not be in doubt.” [Gregory Elliott. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2006. Pages 308-309.]

“There is, first and foremost, the fact that [Louis] Althusser’s rereading of the classics reconnected Marxism with vital, non-Marxist currents of thought (e.g. psychoanalysis and linguistics), restoring their brutally interrupted communication and facilitating a series of new departures (especially in the theory of ideology and cultural criticism). Secondly, his philosophy for science at once registered the autonomy of the natural and social sciences, and vindicated the possibility of science as the (intenninable) production of rectifiable, objective knowledge of its object. Thirdly, the Althusserian critique of the Hegelian dialectic (and its Marxist avatars) as intrinsically teleological released Marxism from a series of false promissory notes …. Finally, the systematic reconstruction of historical materialism reclaimed it as an open scientific research programme, taking deadly aim at a crippling economic detenninism and its corollary, economic reductionism, as it pertained to political practice and cultural production alike.” [Gregory Elliott, “The Lonely Hour of the Last Instance: Louis Pierre Althusser, 1918–1990.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 57, Spring 1991. Pages 28-30.]

“Recently—as is well known—[Louis] Althusser has developed this notion [of social formation], arguing that the social formation exists as a complex totality containing a number of different practices—economic, political, ideological and theoretical—whose unity constitutes what he terms ‘social practice.’ Despite their particularity, each of these practices has a common invariant structure, in which a determinate raw material is transformed into a specific product; this transformation being effected by a labour which utilises particular means of production. Thus, economic practice requires a transformation of nature into social products through the methodologically organised use of means of human labour (means of production); ideological practice exists as a transformation of subjects’ lived relations to the world through means of ideological struggle; political practice as a transformation of existing social relations into new Social relations; and theoretical practice as the transformation of concepts existing within ideological discourses into a specific product, Scientific knowledge, by means of an abstract labour which works on concepts that ideologically define the field in which the problems of science are initially posed. Within the unity of practices in a social formation, economic practice is ultimately determinant, and structures the inter-relation of the various practices. Developing Althusser’s reading of [Karl] Marx on this point, it is essential that we now examine the component practices of the social formation in greater detail.” [John G. Taylor. From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1979. Pages 106-107.]

“My intent is not an explication of [Slavoj] Žižek’s theory but a reconstruction of Structural Marxism after Žižek. What I need to do is to show that the proposed theoretical extension of the Althusserian research programme solves conceptual problems within Structural Marxism and that Žižek’s conceptions of the Lacanian subject and mutual recognition, considered as rectifications of this field, yield the required dual perspective theory ….” [Geoff Boucher, “Enjoyment as an Aesthetic Factor: The Specificity of the Aesthetic in Late Marxism.” Parallax. Volume 16, number 4, 2010. Pages 29-44.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s critique of ‘the British post-Althusserians’ … comes in the midst of a detailed examination of positivism and of its continuing legacy in the philosophy of science. He locates twin, symmetrical dangers in rationalism of the [Karl] Popper–[Imre] Lakatos sort and in empiricism. A corollary of the latter position, he suggests, is the [Paul] Feyerabend–[Gaston] Bachelard line ‘that philosophy should have no effect on science’, on which view positivism has always depended.” [Michael Sprinker, “The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.” New Left Review. Series I, number 191, January–February 1992. Pages 122-144.]

“I did not choose [Louis] Althusser by chance, I chose Althusser because he was one of the most influential authors both for Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and for Cultural Studies (especially in the 1970s and 80s) ….

“Roughly one could say that Bhaskar has supplemented Althusser’s theory of epistemology (which he has adopted) with a new theory of ontology (which possibly is present implicitly in Althusser’s texts); while Cultural Studies – though critically – adopted the conceptions of ideology as lived relation of individuals to their conditions of existence and the conception of ideological apparatuses; in the 1990s they increasingly included the question of the constition of subjectivities, esp. in their research about racism, anti-racist resistance ….

“The most important contribution of Critical Realism to the debate on ideology concerns the science-ideology-relation: as I have mentioned at the beginning, Bhaskar adopted much of Althusser’s epistemological theses: the concept of the knowledge process as a process of production; the critique of empiricism, pragmatism, individualism; etc.”

[Hans Puehretmayer, “Critical Realism, Cultural Studies and Althusser on Ideology.” Paper presented at the fifth annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism. Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark. August 17th–19th, 2001. Pages 1-13. Retrieved on July 9th, 2016.]

“The project of ‘situating emotion’ is the critical-realist attempt to identify emotion’s role among the many factors that produce behavior.…

“… This is a critical realist and situationist account of emotion …. It is situationist because it views emotion not as a mere object of people’s choices, but instead as one of a myriad of often unseen situational factors that generate human behavior. We can think of this view as emotional situationism or emotional realism.”

[David J. Arkush, “Situating Emotion: A Critical Realist View of Emotion and Nonconscious Cognitive Processes for Law and Legal Theory.” Brigham Young University Law Review. Volume 5, 2008. Pages 1275-1366.]

“… ‘situationism’ refers to the view that behavior is produced more by contextual factors and people’s attempts to respond to them (‘the situation’) than by stable characteristics within people (‘dispositions’).” [David J. Arkush, “Situating Emotion: A Critical Realist View of Emotion and Nonconscious Cognitive Processes for Law and Legal Theory.” BYU Law Review. Footnote. Issue 5, article 1, 2008. Pages 1275-1366.]

“I find the critical realist perspective to be the most helpful and straightforward way of understanding the social world, because it allows for complexity. Critical realism means acceptance of an external reality: rather than resorting to relativism or extreme constructionism, critical realism attends to the independent existence of bodies which sometimes hurt, regardless of what we may think or say about those bodies.…

“The difference between my interactional approach and the social model is that while I acknowledge the importance of environments and contexts, including discrimination and prejudice, I do not simply define disability as the external disabling barriers or oppression.…. The problems associated with disability cannot be entirely eliminated by any imaginable form of social arrangements, as I showed earlier. The priority for a progressive disability politics is to engage with impairment, not to ignore it.”

[Tom Shakespeare. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. Second edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“The interactional approach is based on critical realism, a philosophical, metatheoretical perspective that addresses basic issues such as the nature of reality and humans’ knowledge of the world …

“From a critical realism perspective, disability is a complex phenomenon partially constructed from people’s beliefs but with components that are independent of what humans believe. The phenomenon consists of numerous levels, and on each level are causal mechanisms and constituent elements that interact within and across levels. These interactions coalesce into the experience of disability.…

“… [There is] a melding of the interactional approach, critical realism, and ecological model into in a framework well-suited for capturing the complex interplay of elements giving rise to the experience of disability. Adopting the resulting deepened ecological model has many implications for TR [therapeutic recreation] but none as important as forging a fresh perspective of disability …. In this perspective, disability is malleable and scalar; potentially positive; and a contributor to human flourishing ….”

[James B. Wise, “Deepened Ecological Model: A Fresh Perspective on the Experience of Disability.” Therapeutic Recreation Journal. Volume 50, issue 3, July 2016. Pages 199-212.]

“… [A] key issue I should like to raise in this critical realist reconstruction of the disability debate returns us full circle, to a reassertion of real bodies and real selves as an ‘antidote’ to the playful deconstructions of postmodernism, including a ‘realist defence’ of biomedicine itself in the face of its critics, both inside and outside the disability movement.…

“… Taking as its point of departure the contested nature of the body, both in mainstream theory and the sociology of health and illness alike, I have sought, albeit tentatively, to chart what a critical realist alternative to these debates entails using the controversial terrain of chronic illness and disability as a case-study or litmus paper test. A critical realist approach … enables us to: (i) bring the biological body, impaired or otherwise, ‘back in’; (ii) relate the individual to society in a challenging, non-conflationary or non ‘uni-directional’ way, and; (iii) rethink questions of identity, difference and the ethics of care through a commitment to real bodies and real selves, real lives and real worlds.”

[Simon J. Williams, “Is anybody there?: Critical realism, chronic illness and the disability debate.” Sociology of Health & Illness. Volume 21, issue 6, November 1999. Pages 797-819.]

“[Simon J.] Williams … discussed the realities of chronic illness involving pain and discomfort and argued that the ‘endorsement of disability solely as social oppression is really an option, and an erroneous one at that, for those spared the ravages of chronic illness’ ….” [Dimitris Anastasiou, James M. Kauffman, and Domna Michail, “Disability in Multicultural Theory: Conceptual and Social Justice Issues.” Journal of Disability Policy Studies. Volume 27, number 1, 2016. Pages 3-12.]

“It [Roy Bhaskar’s book, From East to West] develops the essentialist and hierarchical – or realist and emergentist – thought which is implicit in any dialectic, and which is the source of a spiritual enlightenment about the embeddedness of values in reality which challenges its antithesis, the worldly wise bourgeois enlightenment, to which [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel’s dialectic, unlike [Karl] Marx’s, is an accommodation.… The book interweaves two processes; one is exposition of a Vedantic philosophy, the other the device of a narrative of the reincarnations of a soul in search of absolute truth.” [James Daly, “Dialectical Enlightenment.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 11-13.]

“Drawing on psychoanalysis and attachment literature alongside critical social psychology we take readers through the analysis of an interview extract with a particular mother.…

“Our approach in this study is, firstly, to develop a rationale for a psychosocial conceptualisation of disability by providing a brief outline and critique of two distinct areas of research or theorising relevant to childhood disability – the social model of disability and the attachment literature. We argue that these totally separate bodies of work point to the social–psychological dualism in the literature which maintains the false and unhelpful division between inner and outer worlds critiqued in an emerging field of research called psychosocial studies.…

“A psychosocial perspective, while not at odds with the critical realist perspective …, which conceptualises disability as the interaction between individual and structural factors, emphasises that this interaction is such that it is neither possible nor helpful to continue to think about individual factors as being in the person and structural factors as being outside the person. Rather, inside and outside are two sides of the same coin; what one considers to be ‘outside’ can also conceivably be thought about as ‘inside.’”

[Lisa Saville Young and Jessie Berry, “Slipping and holding minds: A psychosocial analysis of maternal subjectivity in relation to childhood disability.” African Journal of Disability. Volume 5, number 1, 2016. Pages 1-9.]

“Despite the rise of disability humor as a form of activism, scholars have identified disability humor as an undertheorized area.…

“… disability is ‘‘both individual and social; both biological and cultural. It is a complex, nuanced,embodied and socially contextualized experience’’ … in which social and cultural oppression interacts with bodily experiences. This emerging view, which is sometimes referred to as critical realism, can be seen in the humor of the comedians interviewed for this project. They are using humor in ways that bring this nuanced and holistic view of disability—interlocking embodiment, attitudes and biological realities all at once—to a broader audience. The comedians we interviewed spoke candidly about their bodies in ways that foreground impairments such as stuttering, physical stature, facial features, and bone structure, rather than attempting to sterilize these elements or focus only on the sociocultural aspects of the disability experience. The sophisticated multidimensional treatment of disability performed by these comedians is quite consistent with the nuanced views emerging among academics and activists.”

[Shawn C. Bingham and Sara E. Green, “Aesthetic as Analysis: Synthesizing Theories of Humor and Disability through Stand-up Comedy.” Humanity & Society. Volume 40, number 3, August 2016. Pages 278-305.]

“Taking a critical realist approach, we then present the findings from qualitative analysis of consumers’ ethical food practices to empirically demonstrate the role of human agency and social structure in creating and shaping ethical consumption.…

“… a critical realist perspective provides an effective means of conceptualising and studying consumer behaviour as it necessitates an acknowledgement of the ontological integrity of both agency and structure, and encourages an exploration of their contributions to personal and social outcomes. [Margaret] Archer’s … work incorporating reflexivity into a critical realist conception of human activity is particularly suitable for explaining the causal efficacy of individual consumers in relation to their surrounding contexts.…

“… By conferring ontological status on the unobservable, yet real entities and processes that profoundly affect agential actions, i.e. emotions, concerns and reflexive deliberations, a critical realist framework allows us to effectively account for the altruistic and selfless aspects of ethical consumer behaviour.…

“… We argue strongly for the benefits of critical realism for developing a more nuanced and comprehensive perspective on ethical consumption and consumer behaviour more broadly. Our empirical examples focus on a range of ethical consumer practices (e.g. vegetarianism, eating local, shopping for fair trade and organic); as such, the study addresses a limited scope in consumption studies. We encourage the field to engage with a critical realist framework which, as this paper suggests, has high potential to steer consumption studies towards a more inclusive understanding of consumer behaviour.”

[Yana Manyukhina, Nick Emmel, and Lucie Middlemiss, “Exercising moral agency in the contexts of objective reality: toward an integrated account of ethical consumption.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. June 2017. Pages 1-17.]

“With this paper we have argued that critical realism can contribute to the philosophical underpinnings of the field of AT [assistive technology]. We have briefly discussed the various conceptualisations of disability and then introduced the critical realist perspective in Disability Studies. Inspired by the appealing features of both, the resulting multi-facetted, interactional model of disability, and the original philosophy of science, we have made the case for a critical realist perspective on designing technology for people with disabilities.” [Christopher Frauenberger, “Disability and Technology: A Critical Realist Perspective.” Assets ’15. Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS (Association for Computer Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) Conference on Computers & Accessibility. October 26th–28th, 2015. Pages 89-96. Retrieved on December 20th, 2015.]

“The kind of realism that new materialist ontology suggests is, however, closer to critical or dialectical realism than to neo-positivism. It takes an empirical interest in emergent materialisations without being simply empiricist; it does not call for the abandonment of constructivist investigations and critiques of power relations but seeks to contextualise them more broadly; it is not a crude representationalism or uncritical return to some putative immediacy. Rather, it recognises the way concepts and experience, meaning and matter, emerge historically and reciprocally as embodied actors immerse themselves in and engage with/within material and social environments. In this process, the creativity and intransigence of materiality verify or negate, guide and inspire, theoretical and empirical investigations of evolving structures. There is a back-and-forth, question and answer, in which situated knowledge is generated and refined over time through experience and learning. So this is far from positivism, while it is normatively agnostic on the question of political realism. It reopens the real to social scientific inquiry, but without renouncing the critical reflexivity that constructivism insists upon.” [Diana Coole, “Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 3, June 2013. Pages 451-469.]

“Like any other form of healthcare, acupuncture takes place in a particular context which can enhance or diminish treatment outcomes (i.e. can produce contextual effects). Patients’ expectations of acupuncture might be an important component of contextual effects, but we know relatively little about the origins and nature of patients’ expectations or wider preconceptions about acupuncture.…

“We took a critical realist approach to this work. Our ontological assumption is that while we cannot objectively observe participants’ experiences by attending to their accounts, we can treat their accounts as a representation of their experiences. Epistemologically, we assume that the interviewer has an unavoidable role in shaping the interviewee’s accounts (for example merely asking a question invites the interviewee to produce an account of a particular experience) and that the analyst similarly brings existing theories and knowledge to bear when interpreting interviewees’ accounts.”

[Felicity L. Bishop and George T. Lewith, “Patients’ preconceptions of acupuncture: a qualitative study exploring the decisions patients make when seeking acupuncture.” Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Volume 13, number 102, 2013. Open access. Pages 1-10.]

“Participants conceptualised acupuncturists in three ways: technician, caring professional, and wise and gifted healer. Each conceptualisation had different implications for patient health.…

“Interviews were transcribed verbatim and identifying details were disguised, e.g. real names were replaced with pseudonyms. We have previously described in detail our epistemology (critical realist) and analytic approach. In brief, we began by using techniques from framework analysis to organise patients’ talk into five domains of contextual features: themselves in relation to acupuncture, acupuncture consultations and treatments, their acupuncturist, their relationship with their acupuncturist, and the physical and institutional setting of acupuncture.”

[Felicity L. Bishop and George T. Lewith, “A qualitative exploration of how patients conceptualise their acupuncturists: Technicians, caring professionals, and wise healers.” Complementary Therapies in Medicine. Volume 27, August 2016. Pages 74-81.]

“… the following [is a] 2 × 2 table of commitments in philosophical ontology and the methodologies that arise from those commitments:

Diagram F

“Fleshing out the specifics of the four cells of this table—both explaining what each of these philosophical-ontological commitments entail in greater detail, and clarifying the methodological implications of each for IR [international relations] scholarship—will be the task of the remainder of this book.… This typology is not an exhaustive account of debates in the philosophy of science; it is not even articulated in terms that philosophers of science would necessarily use to describe their own positions.…

“Finally, the typology is also ideal-typical in the precise sense that Max Weber used the term: instead of a representation or a depiction, it is a deliberate over-simplification of a complex empirical actuality for the purpose of highlighting certain themes or aspects that are never as clear in the actual world as they are in the ideal-typical depiction of it ….”

[Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of science and its implications for the study of world politics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Page 37.]

“It may seem odd that I am passing from neopositivism to critical realism, given that many critical realists (especially those in IR) ground their work in a critique of neopositivist research practice. But while critical realists mount powerful criticisms of the neopositivist reduction of causality to its Humean, cross-case-correlation variant, they remain similar to neopositivists in regarding the task of research to involve a closer approximation to an externally existing real world. Critical realism is just as dualistic as neopositivism, and as such the differences between the two approaches may be regarded as more tactical and operational than strategic and fundamental.” [Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Foregrounding ontology: dualism, monism, and IR theory.” Review of International Studies. Volume 34, issue 1, January 2008. Pages 129-153.]

“… Colin [Wright] … tries to transform a disagreement between us into a misunderstanding of critical realism on my part. He is correct that I ‘claim that [for critical realists] the scope of theorization is “strictly and sharply limited by factors deliberately and decisively beyond the theory’s grasp” and present this point, which is at the heart of the critical realist distinction between the transitive and intransitive dimensions, as a critique of critical realism,’ but he fails to appreciate the broader point that I am making: presuming the stability of certain theoretical elements prevents the theorist from even posing the question of how those elements are ongoingly stabilized. Hence, the presumption of a mind-independent reality to which theory at some level corresponds can act as a serious impediment to an explanation of social life.” [Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Pragmatic, Not Dogmatic, Ontology: A Reply to Colin Wight.” Cooperation and Conflict. Volume 43, number 3, September 2008. Pages 354-357.]

“In his [Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s] The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, Patrick Jackson identifies four distinct ways of studying world politics: ‘neopositivism,’ ‘critical realism,’ ‘analyticism’ and ‘reflexivity.’ …

“It is important to note that this pragmatic model of action, although superficially similar to the ‘cognitive bricoleur’ … frequently seen in critical realist accounts of social life, differs in one crucial respect.… But, where realists maintain that those capacities and conditions of possibility are real and therefore, in principle, knowable in the abstract by a scholarly analyst, pragmatists ground social capacities—much like goals and judgments and intentions …— in the creative action of concrete actors involved in concrete situations.” [Gunther Hellmann, Gunther Hellmann, Helena Rytövuori-Apunen, Jörg Friedrichs, Rudra Sil, Markus Kornprobst and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Pragmatism and International Relations.” International Studies Review. Volume 11, number 3, September 2009. Pages 638-662.]

“My argument, which has emerged through a rethinking of Jackson’s work, suggests that the four methodologies differ in the types of questions they ask. How we can predict and thereby possibly control, or prepare for, the occurrence of a certain kind of event is one kind of question. How a certain event came to occur, or a situation evolved, is another. What the factors are, in a given society as well as in the way we speak about and study it, which contribute to the reproduction of the social structure in which the problems we want to address arise is yet another.”

[Hidemi Suganami, “Meta-Jackson: Rethinking Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s Conduct of Inquiry.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 2, 2014. Pages 248-269.]

“Given the scope of [Patrick Thaddeus] Jackson’s account of IR [international relations] meta-theory, this article will specifically be concerned with evaluating the practical pay-offs Jackson identifies as following from his proposed taxonomy. I will argue that although Jackson delivers a thoughtful and rich analysis, his account remains problematic, particularly in relation to three areas: its assumed conception of what constitutes IR, its posited homogeneity of the taxonomical categories and its call for a pluralist science of IR. In order to highlight these remaining tensions in Jackson’s account, the article will use a narrative approach focusing on the internal coherence of his arguments.” [Torsten Michel, “When One World Is Not Enough: Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry as a Narrative of IR Meta-Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 2, January 2013. Pages 270-289.]

“The significance of Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations is threefold. Firstly, it is, in its own right, a substantial work of meta-theory which does much to clarify the kinds of philosophical commitments which might and do underpin alternative methodological approaches in International Relations (IR).… Secondly, it thereby serves to undermine claims to methodological hegemony.… Thirdly, it offers a basis on which to identify what methodological claims are at work in IR and to explore their impact on substantive inquiry.” [Adam R. C. Humphreys, “Applying Jackson’s Methodological Ideal-Types: Problems of Differentiation and Classification.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 2, January 2013. Pages 290-308.]

“The field [international relations] should feel indebted to Patrick Jackson for accepting and clarifying the contributions of feminist IR [international relations] to IR.…

“Yet I encourage the field to be leery of some of his claims, as pointed out here. The claim that reflexive feminist IR and feminist scholarship in general aim for a successor science to those that are riddled with biases – a claim that is fundamental to his argument that feminist science is exemplary – is based on writings that came out before difference feminism was all the rage; [Sandra] Harding’s later writings were instrumental in complicating the very notions of successor science that she had introduced.”

[Christine Sylvester, “The Elusive Arts of Reflexivity in the ‘Sciences’ of International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 2, January 2013. Pages 309-325.]

“… reflexivity is an integral aspect of critical realism, and cannot be separate to it. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that Pierre Bourdieu features as an advocate of reflexivity in [Patrick Thaddeus] Jackson’s account, whereas Bourdieu’s many pronouncements on the issue indicate that he is, in fact, a scientific realist, and considers himself to be so. Equally, critical realists, such as Margaret Archer have explicitly integrated reflexivity into their frameworks.” [Colin Wight, “The Dualistic Grounding of Monism: Science, Pluralism and Typological Truncation.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 41, number 2, 2013. Pages 326-345.]

“Critical realism reflects the recent postpositivist philosophies of science that have been critical of the antimetaphysical attitude of positivism. It seeks not just covariant laws but the genuine causes of phenomena as well. While similar in many respects to neopositivism in her commitment to empirical methods and a mind independent reality, the realist wants to go beyond the directly observable. While a positivist might agree that salt dissolves in water, a realist will want to claim that salt always has the unobservable disposition of solubility, even when it is sitting dry on the table. Reference to such dispositions becomes important in realist IR case studies.” [Daniel McArthur, “The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of science and its implications for the study of world politics.” Review article. Education and Culture. Volume 27, number 2 2011. Pages 97-100.]

“Patrick Thaddeus Jackson offers a useful way of framing the current methodological debate about philosophical ontology. Our approach contrasts with that of the critical realists’ use of ‘ontology’, which is generally used to mean the object of critique or investigation. In our view, ‘ontology’ consists of the logically prior presuppositions that support or make possible that (or any other) particular methodological perspective. Following Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, we propose two ontological positions – dualist and monist.… These are two logically distinct and consistent ontological starting points open to CTS [critical terrorist studies] researchers.” [Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit, “Toward a Completely Constructivist Critical Terrorism Studies.” International Relations. Volume 26, number 2, June 2012. Pages 199-217.]

“In Patrick Jackson’s recent examination of a ‘pluralist science of IR,’ he takes reflexivity as one of four major ‘ideal-type’ methodologies practised in the field (the others being neopositivism, critical realism and analyticism). Jackson draws upon different inspirations in order to historically ground the notion of reflexivity. For instance, one can see how Immanuel Kant characterised reason in terms of self-reflexive, intersubjective practices: it was only through critique that reason could examine itself and, hence, the proper authority of reason could be determined.” [Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, “Advancing a Reflexive International Relations.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 39, number 3, May 2011. Pages 805-823.]

“This position [critical realism] acknowledges the material reality of the subject, but sees that reality as mediated by culture, language, and politics.…

“Thus, a critical realist position acknowledges that the individual woman who adopts or is subjected to the diagnostic label of depression is situated within a specific social, historical, and cultural context that interacts with the unique distressing circumstances of her life that shape both individual and dominant conceptualizations of ‘depression.’ …

“In building a discourse that is based on a critical realist position, using women’s own words and lived experiences, it may be possible to create a language that sustains the social–medical tension in feminists’ understanding of depression rather than force its resolution.”

[Jenna M. MacKay and Alexandra Rutherford, “Feminist Women’s Accounts of Depression.” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. Volume 27, number 2, May 2012. Pages 180-189.]

“… we need to make a number of distinctions: between those writers who draw on the Engelsian continuity between Marxism and early Christian eschatology (principally Marxists); those who identify philosophy with the limits of reason and see this as an invitation to explore the intersection of philosophy and theology (Kantians, deconstructionists and theological phenomenologists); those who treat Christianity and other religions as an actual revolutionary critique and extension of Marxism as such (the Christian ontologists, and ecumenical libertarians); and the post-Marxist or neo-Marxist revolutionary secular defenders of Christian universalism. The first category would include Slavoj Žižek and Timothy Bewes; the second Jacques Derrida, Hent de Vries and Jean-Luc Marion; the third John Milbank, Philip Goodchild and Roy Bhaskar; and the fourth Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri.…

“… what connects Žižek, Bhaskar, Badiou, Agamben and Negri is a striking recourse to the temporal/atemporal triadic framework of Judeo-Christian transcendentalism: ‘the already,’ ‘the not yet’ and the ‘to come.’”

[John Roberts, “The ‘Returns to Religion’: Messianism, Christianity and the Revolutionary Tradition. Part I: ‘Wakefulness to the Future.’” Historical Materialism. Volume 16, number 2, 2008. Pages 59-84.]

“Truth is produced at the interface between the singularity of the decision for truth, and the infinity of truth’s emergence. In this sense, in subjecting truth to a fidelity to truth, truth is opposed to the universalisability of truth as a finite path of becoming. And this is where [Alain] Badiou’s commitment to an immanent ‘transcendentalism’ becomes clearer. The transcendent character of the Truth-Event lies not in its amenability to finite possession by the subject, but in its infinite productive and processual powers of creativity.” [John Roberts, “The ‘Returns to Religion’: Messianism, Christianity and the Revolutionary Tradition. Part II: The Pauline Tradition.” Historical Materialism. Volume 16, number 3, 2008. Pages 77-103.]

“For Roy Bhaskar … in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, ‘there are times when it is essential to disconnect, separate, distinguish, and divide.’ The proposition ‘that differentiation is a necessary condition of totality and diversity of unity’ is one that ‘all good dialecticians have understood’ throughout the history of philosophy. Complicating this, however, according to Bhaskar, is ‘the characteristically subjectivist totalizing idealism of Western Marxism.’ In the name of combatting Cartesian dualism (as well as Soviet dialectical materialism), western Marxism has commonly projected an abstract, hypostatized reality in which the larger material world outside society is almost entirely absent, except as the product of the social domination (or social production) of nature. ‘Monism and subject-object identity theory,’ Bhaskar contends, are associated with ‘the anthropic fallacy,’ whereby being is reduced to human being, and the objective world to society. But in today’s age of epochal ecological crisis, to fall prey to such a narrow anthropic monism could prove fatal to a majority of the world’s species, not excluding humanity itself.” [John Bellamy Foster, “Marxism in the Anthropocene: Dialectical Rifts on the Left.” International Critical Thought. Volume 6, number 3, 2016. Pages 393-421.]

“In seeking to understand better how these two schools [the network governance school and the policy network analysis school] might be combined, we adopt a critical realist approach and make a distinction between vertical coordination on the state–society axis and horizontal coordination on the interest integration axis. This produces a typology of governance arrangements, which are evaluated according to the level of input and output legitimacy that they are likely to generate, two criteria that are taken as overarching measures of how governance outcomes vary between different governance arrangements.…

“Cell I … combines state-centred governance with a relatively exclusive policy network.…

“Cell II … combines state-centred governance with a relatively inclusive policy network.…

“Cell III … combines society-centred governance with a relatively exclusive policy network.…

“Cell IV … combines society-centred governance with a relatively inclusive policy network.”

[Paul Fawcett and Carsten Daugbjerg, “Explaining Governance Outcomes: Epistemology, Network Governance and Policy Network Analysis.” Political Studies Review. Volume 10, issue 2, May 2012. Pages 195-207.]

“This ‘cynical’ perspective draws on the ‘clinical’ appraisal of IR, and complements it with a Bourdieusian understanding of reflexivity as ‘subversive action,’ to explore the means these scholars have of turning their disadvantaged, non-native habitus into an agency of structural change. The clinical-cynical narrative proposed here is itself the product of thinking from the ‘periphery,’ from a self-consciously experienced space of ‘difference.’

“… [Pierre] Bourdieu’s praxeological approach … informs this clinical-cynical perspective ….

“The meta-level is required for a redefinition of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ (the field’s central values) that would allow the coexistence of different epistemologies alongside objectivism (constructivist, post-structuralist, critical realist, pragmatist) and simultaneously legitimate the introduction of new, qualitative methodologies that can better account for the ‘complexity’ of international politics (interpretative, historical, sociological, philosophical).”

[Inanna Hamati-Ataya, “IR Theory as International Practice/Agency: A Clinical-Cynical Bourdieusian Perspective.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 40, number 3, June 2012. Pages 625-646.]

“Within natural science the phenomenalist programme of observation was increasingly dethroned (albeit not abandoned); black holes and quarks became constituent parts of scientific knowledge despite their apparent unobservable nature. The positivist programme was irrevocably tarnished.… The stratified view of scientific activity underpinning the influential philosophy of [Roy] Bhaskar suggested the view of science premised on observables was one-dimensional and erroneous.… [T]heories played a crucial role in shaping our observations and observational activity is reliant on our prior theoretical framework. Positivist demarcations of ‘the’ world and our thoughts about it are replaced by an awareness of the conceptual apparatus utilised in the process of seeing.” [Neil T. Lunt. Contested Inheritance: The Emergence of Social Science Research in New Zealand. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Massey University. Palmerston North, New Zealand. 2004. Pages 47-48.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s ‘Althusserian’ Analysis …

“… [Louis] Althusser’s early writings conceive of science as the theoretical ‘other’ of the various ideologies. In contrast, Bhaskar’s conception is far more materialist, viewing ideology as primarily a function of distorted appearances. Unlike the sciences, ideologies tend to ruminate on the surface of society, a fact as true of Hegelian idealism as empiricist phenomenalism …. This being the case, Bhaskar follows [Karl] Marx’s lead in Capital, by engaging in a triple critique of (1) (bourgeois) theoretical philosophies (2) the every-day conceptions that these philosophies reflect and/or rationalize and (3) the types of social relations that render these conceptions necessary for the agents engaging in them ….”

[Brian O’Boyle and Terrence McDonough, “Critical Realism and the Althusserian Legacy.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 46, issue 2, 2015. Pages 143-164.]

“The dynamics and nature of management accounting changes are understood by drawing on critical realism, a theoretical framework pioneered by Roy Bhaskar …. Our analysis revealed that a changed wider structural environment, changed control needs of owners and ‘politics of control within capital’ between competing management positions … precipitated the changes in the management control practices of the organization.” [Stergiou Konstantinos, Muhammad Junaid Ashraf, and Shahzad Uddin, “Understanding Management Accounting Changes in a Family-Owned Company: A Greek Case Study.” Colchester, England: Essex Business School, University of Essex. May, 2010. Pages 1-30.]

“… I … present the following heuristic of strong and weak critical realism. Strong critical realism encompasses Bhaskarian critical realism in toto, which includes his arguments regarding collectivist emergentism, sociological realism, and his transformational model of social activity. Weak critical realism, on the other hand, stops short of sociological realism, while accepting [Roy] Bhaskar’s broader philosophy of science that social phenomena remain a component of a larger stratified, emergent, and rooted whole. Thus, henceforth, when I speak of critical realism, I am speaking of the latter weak variety (unless indicated otherwise). In making this distinction, I hope to reinvigorate the debate surrounding critical realism by illustrating that Bhaskar’s insights as to the ontological stratification between the social and the biophysical cannot be discarded by way of the same arguments that are used to refute his broader sociological realist claims.” [Michael S. Carolan, “Society, Biology, and Ecology: Bringing Nature Back Into Sociology’s Disciplinary Narrative Through Critical Realism.” Organization & Environment. Volume 18, number 4, December 2005. Pages 393-421.]

“I’ve thought of myself for a long time as a critical realist with a small ‘c’ and ‘r.’ In other words, I find myself very much in agreement with, and influenced by, the broad conception of the sciences that Roy [Bhaskar] advanced, particularly in his writings of the seventies.‰

“… I think it is that those who want to be critical realists, whether with a lower or upper case C and R—those who want to draw on the very rich body of work that Roy [Bhaskar] and his collaborators have developed, for which, notwithstanding my criticisms, I have the greatest admiration—should be much more modest about how they conceive the role of philosophy.”

[Alex Callinicos in Roy Bhaskar and Alex Callinicos, “Marxism and Critical Realism: A Debate.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 2, November 2003. Pages 89-114.]

“… [There is a] distinction between what Alex Callinicos has termed ‘lower case’ critical realism and ‘Upper Case’ Critical Realism …. That is, Marxists such as Callinicos (and others from other theoretical traditions) can find a great deal of value in the work on ontological issues but would want to resist the grander claims made by Upper Case Critical Realists—in particular, the claims towards spiritual understanding made in the later [Roy] Bhaskar. I would place myself firmly in the former camp, and it is on that basis that I develop the ideas here.” [Alistair Mutch, “Critical Realism, Agency and Discourse: Moving the Debate Forward.” Organization. Volume 12, number 5, September 2005. Pages 781-786.]

“In a recent debate with [Roy] Bhaskar, Alex Callinicos describes himself as a lower-case critical realist. In terms of the attempt to provide an alternative to empiricism and idealism, he finds a great deal of common ground with its proponents on substantive issues in philosophy of science and social science. But he is not an upper-case critical realist. This way of framing the debate tends to tacitly situate Callinicos as progressive and open-minded and upper-case critical realism as fixed and conservative.” [Jamie Morgan, “The Nature of a Transcendental Argument: Toward a Critique of Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 2, June 2004. Pages 305-340.]

“Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been dissected into many components by many authors, each with a different agenda. These include inclusive terms such as corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, sustainability, and corporate social performance. While these terms are used synonymously by many, others argue corporate sustainability is a subset of CSR ….

“… the theory behind CSR is normative, following both the critical realism and neo-institutional theory ….

“Toward a universal framework of corporate social responsibility

“The variation in the development and application CSR opens the door for other approaches, including divergence among researchers and practitioners in their focus and intent ….”

[Ina Freeman and Amir Hasnaoui, “The Meaning of Corporate Social Responsibility: The Vision of Four Nations.” Journal of Business Ethics. Volume 100, number 3, May 2011. Pages 419-443.]

“Original institutional economics (OLE) has three significant, but apparently contradictory, definitions of institutional) stemming from Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, and J. Fagg Foster. In this first installment of a two-part paper I address this apparent contradiction by developing an ‘irenic reconciliation’ of these definitions using a methodological approach I call ‘critical institutionalism’ – a synthesis of the OLE …, the pragmatism theory of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, the critical realist methodology of Margaret Archer, and the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar.…

“… I articulate the critical institutionalist definition of an institution as a structurally actualized emergent process, in opposition to the notions of an institution simply as a special type of structure or as agentless ‘rules of the game.’ I defend the assertion that an institution, as a structurally actualized emergent process, must be hypothesized, rather than merely observed, while calling on the work of Walter C. Neale for support.”

[Linwood F. Tauheed, “A Critical Institutionalist Reconciliation of ‘Contradictory’ Institutionalist Institutions: What Is an Institution?” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume XLVII, number 1, March 2013. Pages 147-167.]

“By social structure I mean the constraints and enablements of a material and ideational nature that enable or constrain one from accomplishing all that one does or desires to do. To avoid terminological contusion, I will refer to Margaret Archer’s social structure as s-structure to distinguish it from Roy Bhaskar’s deep structure or d-structure.” [Linwood F. Tauheed, “A Critical Institutionalist Reconciliation of ‘Contradictory’ Institutionalist Institutions: Institutions and Social Provisioning.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume XLVII, number 4, December 2013. Pages 827-853.]

“Critical institutionalism is my synthesis of Margaret Archer’s … morphogenetic approach in sociology and social theory, which is aligned with the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar … and institutional economics in the tradition of [Thorstein] Veblen … and John Commons …, which is aligned with the pragmatism of John Dewey ….” [Linwood F. Tauheed, “Black Political Economy in the 21ˢᵗ Century: Exploring the Interface of Economics and Black Studies—Addressing the Challenge of Harold Cruse.” Journal of Black Studies. Volume 38, number 5, May 2008. Pages 692-730.]

“This paper develops an analysis of innovation … [using the] themes of ontological priority, agency-structure and critical realism.…

“The research problem that emerges is how to identify and exposit a realist and sustainable theory of human action in the innovation process. Orthodox economics conceptualises a general ontology of the economic agent that is based on human action, to which innovation is only one specific application. The results of this approach have been inadequate.

[Jerry Courvisanos, “The ontology of innovation: human agency in the pursuit of novelty.” History of Economics Review. Volume 45, 2007. Pages 41-59.]

“This paper argues that while critical realist insights are important for heterodoxy, any engagement with the economic mainstream must remain faithful to [Roy] Bhaskar’s original formulation with its explicit focus on ‘ideology critique.’ The article proceeds by distinguishing Bhaskar’s more Marxian-inspired realism from the broadly heterodox variety of the ‘critical realism in economics’ (CRE) project. It then highlights the weaknesses of the CRE critique of the economic mainstream before positing an alternative critique in terms of ideology.…

“… We wish to propose an alternative line of critique of neoclassical economics to that developed within the CRE project, which is more in line with the more explicitly Marxian position of the (early) Bhaskarian tradition within critical realism).…

“… Contrary to the Lawsonian position, we follow Bhaskar in arguing for a critique that moves beyond the shortcomings of specific theoretical productions to the conditions that are necessary for their dominance. Yet this invariably means doing what the CRE project has failed to do, and that is to focus much more explicitly on the relations between the levels of theoretical productions and the real-world structures that both condition and support them.”

[Brian O’Boyle and Terrence McDonough, “Critical realism, Marxism and the critique of neoclassical economics.” Capital & Class. Volume 35, number 1, February 2011. Pages 3-22.]

“… the SSA [social structure of accumulation] approach is an intermediate level of analysis which affirms the ‘laws of motion’ laid down in Capital, while seeking to ground them in concrete historical processes. Thus …, the approach is ‘more general and abstract than a detailed historical account…but more specific and concrete than the usual abstract theory of capitalism-in-general’ …, and this allows the SSA theorists to follow [Roy] Bhaskar in acknowledging the importance of abstractions that identify the underlying causal structures, whilst simultaneously eshewing all approaches which fail specify the concrete conditions in which they are reproduced …. Hence in critical realist terms, the social strucutres are located at a deeper level of reality and are therefore ultimately determinate, but their actual manifestations at the empirical level are likely to vary (sometimes considerably) and as such the particular institutions composing each historical economy must be discovered through a process of empirical investigation.…

“… whilst there is little doubt that critical realist ontological prescriptions are sufficiently broad to encompass much of the theory in the heterodox tradition the foregoing analysis has hopefully illustrated that the SSA approach is actually the classic example of a substantive adoption of Bhaskar’s ontology. That is an ontology which is open and structured, dynamic and contingent and is characterised by a level of emergence and internal relationality.…

“… given that the task of socialist analysis is not to anticipate the future, but to show what will shape it, a critical realist SSA theory is essential in emphasising that social structures ultimately rest on points of change, and moreover, that structural transformation is generally most feasible during periods of crisis. Finally all of this involves the SSA project following Bhaskar’s dismantling of the fact/value distinction that has for too long been a deleterious taboo within the social sciences. As such ‘if we accept [Karl] Marx’s critique of political economy, which is also a critique of the illusory or false consciousness which capitalist society generates, we may—indeed must—pass immediately to a negative evaluation of those strutures and to a positive evaluation of action rationally directed to changing them’ …. Adhering to this principle will not only reposition SSA theory more squarly within the Marxian framework. It will also recover its normative basis thus ensuring that the SSA approach is more than just a descriptive analysis of capitalist relations but becomes a tool for their eventual transcendance.”

[Brian O’Boyle, “Meta-Theory: Critical Realism and Social Structures of Accumulation Theory.” Growth and Crisis, Social Structure of Accumulation Theory and Analysis. Terrence McDonough, Michael Reich, David M. Kotz, and Maria-Alejandra Gonzalez-Perez, editors. Galway, Ireland: Social Sciences Research Centre and Centre for Innovation & Structural Change at the National University of Ireland, Galway. December, 2006. Pages 115-136.]

“… I begin with critical normative epistemology as the starting point. This philosophy is an integrated view combining critical realism, emancipatory epistemology, and a normative perspective of human practice. The critical realism of [Roy] Bhaskar … provides a beginning point for this epistemology.… Bhaskar proposed critical realism for social sciences emphasizing the incorporation with situated hermeneutics, noting the reality that the social sciences are part of their own field of inquiry. This position means that the social sciences must be self-reflexive, critical, and totalizing. This approach is contrary to what is typical of the natural sciences. Bhaskar feels that the chasm between the natural and human sciences can be bridged.” [Hesook Susie Kim, “Critical Narrative Epistemology.” [Hesook Susie Kim, “Critical Narrative Epistemology.” Nursing Knowledge Development and Clinical Practice. New York: Springer Publishing Company, LLC. 2007. Pages 201-213.]

“We can use … [the] sense of dialectical connection and contradiction to locate the problems of difference, exclusion and partiality poststructuralism identifies, without being drawn onto a metaphysical plane, if we recognise that these problems are the effects of social and historical conflicts, and contradictions which penetrate and constitute the forms through which we live. If the world is contradictory, then we need to understand phenomena like law, legal justice and subjectivity in their contradictory aspects. Theory must be able to identify and explain the different, opposing and exclusionary propositions that a social and historical phenomenon generates.” [Alan Norrie, “The Limits of Justice: Finding Fault in the Criminal Law.” The Modern Law Review. Volume 59, number 4, July 1996. Pages 540-556.]

“Critical realists … argue that the stratification of reality is reflected in the stratification of science, so that different sciences will take different strata as their objects of inquiry. However, in this paper I argue that the differentiation of the natural sciences reflects differences between strata whereas the differentiation of the social sciences reflects differentiation of the objects lying at one particular level. In other words, whereas natural structures and mechanisms emerge at different levels of reality, social structures and mechanisms emerge at the same level. If social structures and mechanisms are ontologically interdependent, I argue, the unification of the social sciences is required to understand this interdependence. Moreover the interaction between social and natural structures and mechanisms ultimately entails the unification of the social and natural sciences and a broader understanding of the term ‘society.’” [Dominic Holland, “Unifying social science: A critical realist approach.” Graduate Journal of Social Science. Open access. Volume 2, issue 2, 2005. Pages 1-31.]

“The research methodology used to demonstrate the application of critical realism in supply chain research by explaining the persistent residue inventory in the perishable multi-seasonal goods supply chain followed the same process. That is, initially a case study was developed by employing different data collection and research methods to describe and analyse the situation (description of issue stage).” [Emmanuel D. Adamides, George Papachristos, and Nikolaos Pomonis, “Critical realism in supply chain research: Understanding the dynamics of a seasonal goods supply chain.” International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management. Volume 42, number 10, November 2012. Pages 906-930.]

“Temporality is a relatively under-explored factor in international relations. The concept of timescape refers to the temporal timeframe of institutional processes and/or the timeframes of causation at different levels. Said concept has powerful explanatory potential in the case of complex, fragmented entities such as the European Union (EU). Critical realism offers a historicist meta-theoretical framework for delineating and analysing timescapes of different forms.…

“… [Timescape] is expanded on here to go beyond institutional timescapes and address the different causal timescapes in international relations; in critical realist terms, the different causal complexes and generative structures of international relations …. This expanded concept of timescape offers a lens with which to trace the complexity and stratification of the EU’s institutions, policies and action. More specifically, the focus on temporality allows us to delineate the particular imagined timescape of EU external action as a liberal teleological vision, and to critique this with an analysis informed by more historicist and complexity-sensitive understandings of international change. The research rests on a critical realist ontology as this historicist and stratified ontology is highly congruent with the timescape concept.”

[Patrick Holden, “Eternal potential? Temporality, complexity and the incoherent power of the European Union.” Cooperation and Conflict. Volume 51, number 4, December 2016. Pages 407-427.]

“In this article, I trace the origins of my epistemological stance as a biracial woman with multiple marginalized identities that caused me to span categorical boundaries in life. My perspective has become one in which I am positioned in an ambivalent, hybrid, liminal space. I respond to the epistemological positions taken by other doctoral students and consider our common struggles with situating ourselves among established theories that do not easily accommodate the complexity and ambiguity of our lived experiences.…

“Unable to be in agreement with the idea that reality is completely contextual or constructed of interpretations, I also embrace critical realism. Realists suggest that there is a material world that exists independent of our knowledge of it and that both the knower and the very act of knowing play a part in what is known …. Context matters, but [Roy] Bhaskar … points out that realists distinguish between things like human behavior, which we can study empirically, and the explanations we give for that behavior, stating that the ‘real’ humans and their behavior exist, regardless of how we go about explaining them. Real things have structures and causal powers to make things happen in a variety of contexts, although explanations of those ‘real’ things may vary from one context to another.”

[Kiara Moore, “Living liminal: Reflexive epistemological positioning at the intersection of marginalized identities.” Qualitative Social Work. Volume 15, numbers 5–6, September–November 2016. Pages 715-726.]

“… what counts in ideological analysis is the extent to which a given account, explanation or narrative justifies (unjust) unreciprocal or unequal relationships between persons. It follows that critique guided by universal ethical foundation should operate on an empirical, historical and case-by-case basis. When approached in this way it becomes clear that ideology can operate at a range of levels. But even at its most macro, as for instance in the proposition that the market is the only natural, efficient and fair way of provisioning, it may be ignored, rejected, or simply not get through to everyone. In short, considered as a speech act ideology is often infelicitous, and when it is most powerful in its effects it is never all powerful. This suggests that quite apart from a self-reflective practice called ideology critique there is a lay outside to ideology, a place where ideology is resisted, ignored or where it simply does not reach.”

“The implications of critical realism for ideology critique are that we can indeed pose an ‘outside’ from which it is possible to gather evidence and make judgements about ideology in the real social world. But there is no possibility of certainty about such judgements, as is implied in the attribution of ‘false consciousness’ to a subject, or in those theories which have ideology as a total system, more or less coterminous with consciousness itself. Rather, we argue that ideology critique needs to take a more modest position, from which it is possible to ‘call out’ ideology, but only on the familiar basis in social science of empirical methodology.”

[John Downey and Jason Toynbee, “Ideology: towards renewal of a critical concept.” Media, Culture & Society. Volume 38, number 8, November 2016. Pages 1261-1271.]

“By incorporating the new philosophical position of transcendental materialism and the new cultural-historical theory of pseudo-pacification, ultra-realism can advance the alternative paradigm of critical realism, hitherto seriously neglected and under-used in criminological theory, to a position where it can be adopted as a more revealing theoretical framework and research programme.” Page 4.]

“… [The] constant multipolar misrepresentation is one of the main reasons why, as we shall argue later, criminology needs a new ‘ultra-realist’ agenda. We will also see that, paradoxically, although it rejects idealism and interpretivism, ultra-realism is not an attempt to reject ideology and interpretive powers per se in search of pure largescale empirical truth. As we have seen, the dream of pure empirical truth produced by scientific methods – especially when exclusively positivist methods are used – is multipurpose ideology in its purest form, an ideological mercenary that can serve any political purpose.

“Ultra-realism is an attempt to use a combination of ethnographic methods and sophisticated theory in order to dig underneath existing political positions and their associated ideological assumptions and social scientific paradigms in order to construct parallax views …. These are new perspectives from which the world looks different than it does when viewed from the perspectives presented by existing dominant and subdominant ideological positions.”

[Steve Hall and Simon Winlow. Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a new Ultra-Realism. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 72.]

“Critical criminology must move beyond twentieth-century empiricist and idealist paradigms because the concepts and research programmes influenced by these paradigms are falling into obsolescence.… Most importantly, critical criminology must avoid political pragmatism and adopt a more critical stance towards consumer culture‘s spectacle. A searching analysis of these issues suggests that, ultimately, criminology is weighed down with obsolete thinking to such an extent that to remain intellectually relevant it must move beyond both Left Realism and Critical Realism to construct a new ultra-realist position.…

“… Ultra‐realist criminology would move beyond Left Realism’s inherent pragmatism and Critical Realism’s flawed conception of subjectivity. As a first step towards the construction of a philosophical basis for ultra‐realist criminology, we have to accept that Bhaskar’s naturalistic metaphor for subjectivity does not work. There is no natural human essence of love and creativity but, as Fromm (1956) reminded us, it can be cultivated in a nurturing society. For [Jacques] Lacan and [Slavoj] Žižek, the ‘essence’ of human subjectivity is, paradoxically, a non‐essential void of conflicting drives, not a natural and inexhaustible Bergsonian ‘élan vital’ …. Our potential to be loving and creative is always offset by an equal potential to be hateful, prejudiced, apathetic or nihilistic. The material core of the human being is anxious, contingent and flexible, far more complex and unpredictable – and certainly more susceptible to obscene enjoyment – than any naturalistic or transcendental idealist metaphor can represent.…

“… For criminology to begin its investigation of the forces and processes that underlie life in advanced capitalism requires a move beyond both Left Realism and Critical Realism to Ultra-Realism.”

[Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, “Realist Criminology and its Discontents.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Volume 5, number 3, September 2016. Creative Commons. Pages 80-94.]

“One of the principal motivations behind this book was the wish to make a small contribution to the revival of a critical approach to sociology and criminology. Social science appears to have been partially neutralized and increasingly immobilized in the centre of a triangle of powerful romantic forces. At one corner stands conservative declinism seeking to restore some mythological Golden Age of order and virtue, and at the other two the defensive optimism of the liberal-humanist left, which politicizes street-crime and violence as a signifier of potential resistance to the dominant order, and the overt utopianism of neo-liberalism that sees the market mechanism as a panacea for all our social problems and the key to the good life. Critique hung on in some schools of thought such as Left Realism and feminism, but during the brief insurgency of post-modernism it became devolved as the tra ditional class power-struggle was imagined to be fragmenting into elementary dyads of oppression and resistance that were connected to single-issue ‘gesture politics’ …. Only the politics of gender and race could still lay claim to be addressing ‘big’ social issues, but their inherently tight focus and their tendency towards liberal reformism and culturalism weakened their grasp on the totality of relations in advanced capitalist societies. As we have argued at further length in the past … the existence ofinex haustible sources of cultural autonomy and resistance – whether reactionary or progressive – is the common assumption shared by these influential discourses. We do not suggest that autonomy and resistance will be impossible to bring about in the future, but we do suspect that, in their current conditions, youth cultures are showing very few signs of anything that could not be postulated as a form of incor poration into the logical requirements of consumer capitalism.” [Steve Hall and Simon Winlow. Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture. Oxford, England, and New York: Berg. 2006. Page 181.]

“Steve Hall and Simon Winlow … in an initial polemic denounced the celebratory idealism, romanticizing of the offender, and failure to grasp the full implications of neo-liberal capitalism’s destructive power in much cultural criminology. Across a series of subsequent publications they have continued the critique, most recently explaining that cultural criminology ‘is not really criminology, it’s the sociology of peripheral mischievousness’ having little to say on serious and harmful crimes like ‘domestic violence, homicide, and violent organized crime, yet it also fails to investigate state and corporate crime, which it leaves to more traditional critical criminologists’ …. Their own approach, dubbed ‘ultrarealism,’ is derived primarily from contemporary radical philosophy, which they strive to differentiate from the more familiar Left realist position that emerged in the mid-1980s ….” [Eamonn Carrabine, “Changing Fortunes: Criminology and the Sociological Condition.” Sociology. Volume 50, number 5, October 2016. Pages 847-862.]

“Retroduction is associated with the critical realist philosophical perspective … and differs from induction and deduction in that it is a process of forming explanatory hypotheses about the generative mechanisms of an observable phenomenon and then testing them in order to determine their validity …. Retroduction ‘is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea and leads to new knowledge’ ….

“Th emethodology presented in the paper, operationalizes retroductive hypothesis testing through system dynamics modeling and simulation. The methodology is applied to a novel multi-system transition case concerning the functional foods niche, which emerged through interactions of event producing mechanisms in the converging socio-technical systems of food and pharmaceuticals ….”

[George Papachristos and Emmanuel Adamides, “A retroductive systems-based methodology for socio-technical transitions research.” Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Volume 108, July 2016. Pages 1-14.]

“The task of the analyst is … to propose a ‘sociology of translation’ which deciphers the artefact as a formed content, that is as a content which is formed by the structure of social relations in such a way that the concrete appearance of the network is understood in its actuality as an empirical emanation of a field of structural tensions which tends to exclude alternative orderings from sight. Such a dialectical sociology of translation, which dissolves the facticity and the fixity of the given, cannot remain content with a ‘flat ontology’ but has to adopt a more stratified view of reality that distinguishes the overlapping domains of the real, the actual and the empirical ….” [Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Reconstructing Humants: A Humanist Critique of Actant-Network Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 19, number 5/6, 2002. Pages 51-67.]

“… [This paper] explains the rationale for a more critical realist approach to investment analysis.…

“… Our view is … that a critical realist approach, rather than a positivist approach, more effectively interprets information relating to the complex interplay of the creation of tangibles in the investment process.”

[Loretta O’Donnell, Robin Kramar, and Maria Dyball, “Complementing a positivist approach to investment analysis with critical realism: Challenges and a way forward.” Qualitative Research in Financial Markets. Volume 5, number 1, April 2013. Pages 6-25.]

“Within the developing critical realist approach to organization studies the process through which agents actively engage with structural conditions has not been emphasized; that is, the process of structural conditioning that agents experience remains mysterious, as analysis has concentrated on how the objective impinges on the agent rather than how agents engage with structures ….” [Scott Taylor, “Gendering in the Holistic Milieu: A Critical Realist Analysis of Homeopathic Work.” Gender, Work and Organization. Volume 17, number 4, July 2010. Pages 454-474.]

“This paper outlines and evaluates recent contributions by Nicos Mouzelis and Margaret Archer to the structure–agency debate. Mouzelis offers an internal reconstruction of Giddens’s structuration theory; Archer an external alternative. I show that, although representing an advance on Giddens’s position, Mouzelis’s account fails because he relies on the former’s definition of structure as comprising rules and resources. I then examine Archer’s solution to the problem. I argue that her definition of activity-dependence makes her account of the relationship between agents and structures unclear. I outline an alternative account in terms of supervenience, and argue that it contains the minimum ontological claim necessary for a realist understanding of the structure–agent relationship.…

“… in the syntagmatic case, distance between subject and object generally implies a lack of power, and most likely (though not necessarily) a lack of knowledge as well.…

“This metaphor of distance, shared between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels but with opposite implications in each case, makes these categories less exclusive than Mouzelis might like. In fact, it builds circularity into his argument. I argue that this problem has its roots in Mouzelis’s acceptance of Giddens’s basic view of structure, despite his rejection of structuration.”

[Kieran Healy, “Conceptualising constraint: Mouzelis, Archer and the concept of social structure.” Sociology. Volume 32, number 3, August 1998. Pages 509-522.]

“What [Kieran] Healy has captured is the truism of methodological individualism: no people – no society. However, both [Margaret S.] Archer … and [Roy] Bhaskar … readily acknowledge this humble point. Supervenience in this format is quite consistent with their realist framework. Furthermore, supervenience is in fact nothing more than the aforementioned exhaustion principle; a principle that no sociologist could possibly doubt. If we are to be generous to Healy we might conclude that supervenience has highlighted this truism in a way that Archer took for granted. But, against Healy’s claim that supervenience captures the present-tense relation between agents and the demographic structure we ought to note that the above diagrams are in one important respect inaccurate.” [Shaun Le Boutillier, “Theorising Social Constraint: The Concept of Supervenience.” Sociology. Volume 35, number 1, February 2001. Pages 159-175.]

“Realism, and in particular critical realism, is considered by some marketing academics as an integrative philosophical position between positivism and interpretivism, as well as a preferred philosophical stance of marketing research …. Critical realism was introduced by Roy Bhaskar, under the term ‘transcendental realism.’ Critical realism recognises the existence of reality, but also asserts that there are ‘structures’ and underlying mechanisms that exist beyond reality and that are not knowable (Bhaskar, 1998). A critical realist approach is a good fit for this thesis enquiry.… [T]he theories in social influence acknowledge that changes are not limited to the behavioural outcomes, but they also acknowledge that cognitive and attitudinal processes can be affected by the presence of other …. In addition, the reviews of social influence theories from a conformity …, social norms … and compliance (Section 2.8) perspective are evidence that depending on the theoretical underpinnings of the theory, social influence can be explained, which makes is theory-laden.” [Rodrigo Perez Vega. Measuring the effect of immediacy on consumer engagement behaviours in social media settings. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Heriot-Watt University. Edinburgh, Scotland. April, 2016. Page 125.]

“In order to theorise leadership practice in highly functional, disadvantaged schools, we draw on a critical realist … meta-theoretical perspective to view leadership practice and social realism … as a theory to make meaning of the structural, cultural and agential mechanisms that influence leadership practice. In educational leadership research, not many studies have embraced what critical realism might offer for understanding and making meaning of educational leadership practice, and how it might be used within the field …. Moreover, there are few studies in the South African context that employ social realism in theorising school leadership practice.” [Inbanathan Naicker, Carolyn (Callie) Grant, and Sivanandani (Sivie) Pillay, “Schools performing against the odds: Enablements and constraints to school leadership practice.” South African Journal of Education. Volume 36, number 4, article 1321, November 2016. Pages 1-10.]

“… drawing on the resources of critical realism, this thesis’ further contribution to knowledge is in revealing the positive psychological resources associated with an autonomous reflexivity intervention. By adopting an evidence-based realist review followed in sequence by a large scale survey and structural equation modelling, the findings suggest that autonomous reflexivity potentially holds the key to unlocking the resources that underlie positive psychological capital (PsyCap). In turn, PsyCap seems to operate in the intervening space between internal conversation and action accounting for the positive sense of self associated with autonomous reflexivity.” [Royston Francis Meriton. Advancing a Morphogenic Understanding of Personal Behaviour: An Investigation into the Psychological Mechanisms and Organisational Behavioural Tendencies of Autonomous Reflexivity. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Leeds. Leeds, England. September, 2016. Page II.]

“This is the first study to explore the spiritual issues of people living with advanced heart failure in Kenya.…

“We acknowledge that spirituality is a complex phenomenon and definitions vary. In this paper, we embrace a broad definition: ‘spirituality is the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek and express meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred.’ …

“This research was underpinned by a critical realist theoretical orientation. Critical realism is a philosophy between relativist and objectivist theoretical perspectives. It claims to be a realist ontology and a constructivist epistemology. Reality is viewed as being external and independent but individually constructed. It underpins several analytic approaches including thematic analysis.”

[Kellen N. Kimani, Scott A. Murray, Liz Grant, “Spiritual issues of people living and dying with advanced heart failure in Kenya: a qualitative serial interview study.” BMJ Global Health. Volume 1, 2016. Pages 1-8.]

“… theory-based policy evaluation using intervention theory and empirical checks can be argued to be akin to process tracing. Process tracing is a case study research technique for capturing causal mechanisms to derive or test theories and explanations …. In the case of policy, it is the intervention theory which is being tested and the causal mechanisms being traced. The strength of using this technique to guide the empirical checking of intervention theory is its emphasis on collecting evidence from different sources and also widely considering alternative explanations. This in turn, can help make the conclusions drawn from the policy evaluation more robust.

“Using intervention theory can also help to focus the scale (or multiple levels) of the policy (for example, from national to local) and identify stakeholders addressed by the evaluation …. It is worth noting that there can also be several intervention theories as different stakeholders can hold varying views on the intended outcomes of an intervention …. A stakeholder approach to the evaluation elaborates upon the basic intervention theory with the perspectives of key stakeholders.”

“… This research is framed by critical realism, an epistemological framework that encompasses a wide range of ontologies, which has been argued as a necessity for interdisciplinary research and when researching complex sustainability issues …. The critical realist approach is arguably rooted in the positivist view of a world independent of human consciousness but also acknowledges in part some aspect of a subjectivist view of a world socially constructed because our view of the world is influenced by our own perspectives and limitations in understanding its true nature. Thus, critical realism views science as a continuous endeavour to improve our understanding of a changing, multi-level world.”

[Jessika Luth Richter. Extended Producer Responsibility for Closing Material Loops: Lessons from energy-efficient lighting products. Licentiate dissertation. Lund University. Lund, Sweden. December 2016. Pages 10-12.]

“… critical realism (associated with Roy Bhaskar) aims to extend Hegelian thinking and to recognize the ‘emergent properties of the social realm.’ Social phenomena can be seen to contain emergent properties as part of an open system that generates new possibilities. An understanding of adaptive systems informs this view, and also undermines any teleological or linear understanding of history (associated with [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel and aspects of [Karl] Marx in particular), making it far more recursive. However, the dialectical concept of negation is not rejected but redefined as something more transformative, dynamic, and contingent. Drawing on second-order cybernetics, Bhaskar describes the world as an open system, or more exactly as an ‘open-systemic entropic totality, in which results … are neither autogenetically produced nor even constellationally closed, but the provisional outcome of a heterogeneous multiplicity of changing mechanisms, agencies and circumstances.’ He conceptualizes agency similarly, in terms of incompleteness or insufficient totality that drives transformation. This is characterized by the concept ‘transformative agency,’ to stress the importance of ideas and the active role of people in historical development; and also to recognize that people do not simply make their own history nor are determined by history, but both: they both act and are acted upon. In other words, there is a feedback loop that describes the way the historical subject can reassemble itself or self-organize, in the passage from in-itself to for-itself.” [Geoff Cox and Alex McLean. Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 2013. Page 43.]

“The methodological structure of this study is shaped under the fundamentals of Roy Bhaskar’s ‘dialectical critical realism’ – hereafter ‘DCR’ – as a philosophy of science that is very briefly expounded with respect to its involvement in social sciences. In the first part, from a philosophical perspective, some major points of DCR related to the study are briefly introduced. Secondly, the ontological approach of DCR as material practice is presented.” [Özgür Yalçın. Islamic Proletariat & the New Middle Class Dynamics in the Context of Gezi Park Protests in Neoliberal Turkey. Master of Science thesis. Middle East Technical University. Ankara, Turkey. September, 2015. Page 11.]

“Ontology as Material Practice

“… according to DCR’s [dialectical critical realism’s] ontology, the existence of the structured world is separate from our consciousness and subjectivity. It refers to an independent object of scientific knowledge. The ontology also claims that certain spheres of existence create social reality and these spheres are ‘real’ and ‘phenomenal’ ones. Real sphere is comprised of the structures and mechanisms. Phenomenal is also the sphere we experience, but real cannot be fully realized within phenomenal.”

[Özgür Yalçın. Islamic Proletariat & the New Middle Class Dynamics in the Context of Gezi Park Protests in Neoliberal Turkey. Master of Science thesis. Middle East Technical University. Ankara, Turkey. September, 2015. Pages 14-15.]

“The point at which anti-foundationalism becomes foundationalism or vice versa could be termed a ‘border area’ between research paradigms – in the case of the governance debate this is between interpretivism … and critical realism …. [W]e see ourselves closer to the ‘border area’ between interpretivism and critical realism …. Where critical realists resist the decentred approach on the grounds that it would commit them to an anti-foundational ontology which they reject …, we believe that the insights of a decentred approach can be separated from some … interpretivist assumptions …. We do not accept, for example, that aggregate concepts such as structures and institutions can only do explanatory work when reduced to the beliefs and practices of individuals. We term our epistemological underpinning, for want of a better phrase, ‘hard’ interpretivist ….” [Mark Goodwin and Jonathan Grix, “Bringing Structures back in: The ‘Governance Narrative,’ the ‘Decentred Approach’ and ‘Asymmetrical Network Governance’ in the Education and Sport Policy Communities.” Public Administration. Volume 89, number 2, 2011. Pages 537–556.]

“Underpinning this research is an epistemological approach termed ‘hard’ interpretivism …. Effectively, such an approach is close to ‘critical realism’ in epistemological terms and is more open to the effects that structures and institutions have on the beliefs and ideas of individual agents. However, such an approach differs from critical realism in its ontological position and in its insistence on a role for actor’s beliefs and ideas …. We have used the description of ‘hard’ interpretivism elsewhere … to differentiate our approach to the analysis of change in British politics and policy delivery from critical realists on the one hand and ‘soft… interpretivists … on the other.” [Lesley Phillpots and Jonathan Grix with Tom Quarmby, “Centralized grassroots sport policy and ‘new governance’: A case study of County Sports Partnerships in the UK – unpacking the paradox.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport. Volume 46, number 3, 2010. Page 265-281.]

“The epistemological approach we adopt in this study is ‘hard’ interpretivism … our intention is to highlight the asymmetrical power relations between grassroots sport policy delivery and the Government. Our case study is in keeping with our epistemological position: it is not intended to be ‘representative’ or statistically significant. We sought to understand the beliefs and opinions of those who worked in or with County Sport Partnerships; however, research on the elite side of the sport policy sector has come to similar conclusions as ours ….” [Jonathan Grix and Lesley Phillpots, “Revisiting the ‘Governance Narrative: ‘Asymmetrical Network Governance’ and the Deviant Case of the Sports Policy Sector.’” Public Policy and Administration. Volume 26, number 1, January 2011. Pages 3-19.]

“Two contrasting epistemological positions are those contained within the perspectives ‘positivism’ and ‘interpretivism.’ These terms can be traced back, and illuminated by reference to, specific traditions in the philosophy of social sciences. Broadly speaking, the former ‘is an epistemological position that advocates the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of social reality and beyond.’ The latter, on the other hand, can be seen as an epistemological position that ‘is predicated upon the view that a strategy is required that respects the differences between people and the objects of the natural sciences and therefore requires the social scientist to grasp the subjective meaning of social action’ ….” [Jonathan Grix, “Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Research.” Politics. Volume 22, number 2, 2002. Pages 175-186.]

“We utilise the case-study method to contextualise the foundation, development, and current situation of one representative urban science project, the Kennispark. We approach the problem from a critical realist perspective: we construct a narrative of reality which we use to test our research problems; we acknowledge that there are limitations to the reality, which can be revealed through case-study work, but a triangulation of evidence allows something meaningful to be said about the nature of ‘reality.’” [Paul Benneworth and Tiago Ratinho, “Reframing the Role of Knowledge Parks and Science Cities in Knowledge-Based Urban Development.” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy. Volume 32, number 5, 2014. Pages 784-808.]

“Whether understood anthropologically or sociologically, scapegoating is a multi-faceted social process. As observed, secular/political forms of scapegoating in Ireland, reproduced through and amplified by a neoliberal mass media …, are inseparable from and are indeed exacerbated by deteriorating material conditions of existence. Sharing critical realist concerns with ontological matters (e.g. real social structures, class as a generative mechanism) and drawing insights from group conflict theory, frame analysis and a political economy critique of the global crisis, we aimed to make sense of what is in many respects utterly senseless and unnecessary for those who dare imagine a more just and equal society.” [Micheal O’Flynn, Lee F. Monaghan, and Martin J. Power, “Scapegoating During a Time of Crisis: A Critique of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.” Sociology. Volume 48, number 5, 2014. Pages 921-937.]

“The study presented here considers plausible futures of nature-based tourism in the Asia-Pacific, expressed through the development of a range of scenarios …. This approach based on plausibility is arguably more theoretically sound than merely pondering possible futures ….

“… The epistemological basis of the study is therefore critical realism, where ‘knowledge is conjectural … [and] plausibility … is the most that can be claimed for scientific endeavour’ ….”

[Warwick Frost, Jennifer Laing, and Sue Beeton, “The Future of Nature-Based Tourism in the Asia-Pacific Region.” Journal of Travel Research. Volume 53, number 6, 2014. Pagse 721-732.]

“Our argument is that MA [meta-analysis] is of limited use in explaining the kind of social or organizational phenomena of interest to readers of Human Relations – and cognate journals. This is not owing to technical, procedural and practical problems in the application of MA, but owing to the flawed meta-theory underpinning MA. Instead, we propose an alternative that we refer to as ‘critical realist synthesis’ (CRS), rooted in an entirely different meta-theory – a term we use to include methodology, ontology, epistemology, aetiology, and concepts of explanation, prediction and theory.…

“The scope of CRS will often be in the form of a question like: ‘how does mechanism M, when enacted by agent A, tend to alter outcome O?.’ This approach will also work for clarification questions, such as ‘what are the properties of mechanism M?’ or ‘why does outcome O often occur in context P?.’ As CRs accept systemic openness, CRS is not only restricted to providing a ‘thick’ explanation of the agentially enacted mechanism, but also of the different contexts in which the mechanism might generate a tendency to O – or qualitatively different versions of O – as well as the unintended consequences of mechanism M’s tendency. This also permits consideration of the ways in which the outcome might react back, in a later time period, on mechanism M and agent A.”

[Matthew J. Brannan, “Critical Essay: Meta-analysis: A critical realist critique and alternative.” Human Relations. Volume 70, number 1, January 2017. Pages 11-39.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar argues that the aim of science is the production of the knowledge of the mechanisms which produce the phenomena in nature that combine to generate the actual flux of phenomena of the world.…

“… [A] realistic critique of the empiricist view is the failure of atomism. Atomism means that the objects of experience are atomic, independent events which are the ultimate, particular elements of the world. The ontology of atomistic events and epistemology of atomistic impressions makes it difficult to assume the validity of knowledge of a general nature.”

[Ahmad H. Jumaꞌh, “Empirical and Realistic Approaches of Research.” Revista Empresarial Inter Metro / Inter Metro Business Journal. Volume 2, number 1, spring 2006. Pages 88-108.]

“It is discovered that ‘mechanism’ has at least nine distinct meanings as the term is used within contemporary social science: (1) the pathway or process by which an effect is produced; (2) an unobservable causal factor; (3) an easy-to-observe causal factor; (4) a context-dependent (bounded) explanation; (5) a universal (or at least highly general) explanation; (6) an explanation that presumes highly contingent phenomena; (7) an explanation built on phenomena that exhibit lawlike regularities; (8) a distinct technique of analysis (based on qualitative, case study, or process-tracing evidence); or (9) a micro-level explanation for a causal phenomenon.…

“In recent years, social scientists have become cognisant of the extent to which implicit understandings of causation condition our understanding of the social world. This realisation has generated an outpouring of work on causation and explanation in the various disciplines of the social sciences. A substantial, though little recognized, research domain has been born.…

“For many writers [Roy Bhaskar referenced among others], the hallmark of causal mechanisms is their unobservability, and hence their hypothetical quality.”

[John Gerring, “Review Article: The Mechanismic Worldview: Thinking Inside the Box.” British Journal of Political Science. Volume 38, number 1, January 2008. Pages 161-179.]

“… I have argued that causal mechanisms are more or less intrinsic to explanation. So it is no surprise that when partisans of causal mechanisms talk about causation they often focus on the task of explanation.… In short, causal mechanisms are an integral part of the project of causality. But they are not the entirety, and they never exist in isolation from other considerations. There is no such thing as a mechanism without a causal effect, for instance.” [John Gerring, “Causal Mechanisms: Yes, But ….” Comparative Political Studies. Volume 43, number 11, 2010. Pages 1499–1526.]

“I use the the words ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ in the same the philosopher of criticalrealism, Roy Bhaskar, uses them. Bhaskar associates ‘structure’ with a logic of causation: ‘the structure of a thing is constituted by its causal powers, which, when exercised, manifest themselves as tendencies,’ he writes …, while ‘agency,’ for him, is ‘intentional transformative praxis’ …. In Bhaskar’s model causes (generated by the causal powers, that is, the structure, of a ‘thing’) produce tendencies as consequences, but the actualization of these tendencies is contingent upon the interaction of an unpredictable world and the thing. Two results follow from this model. Firstly, since subjects have agency, this means that they are irreducible to mere structure …. The causal logic associated with structure is a logic of necessity, since causes have determinate consequences. If, however, within the context of this model, we think of subjects as things with agency, that is as invested, in Bhaskar’s words, with ‘intentional transformative praxis’, then we can see that the necessity implied by the causal logic associated with structure is in dialectical interplay with other causalities that also unfold simultaneously (since the world is an open system), making the resulting activity not a determinate but a contingent manifestation of the tendencies set in motion. ‘When their initial conditions are satisfied,’ Bhaskar writes, law-like formulations that hew to the logic of necessity ‘make a claim about the activity of a tendency, i.e. about the operation of the generative mechanism that would, if undisturbed, result in the tendency’s manifestation, but not about the conditions in which the tendency is exercised, and hence not about whether it will be realized or prevented’ …. What actually occurs in the world is, then, in Bhaskar’s model, produced by the dialectic of necessity and contingency.…

“… my position situates me in a relationship of opposition to the ‘ethical turn’ in contemporary political theory. In addition, it also situates me in a position of opposition to powerful currents in contemporary poststructuralist and postcolonial theory that advocate, variously and to different degrees, for the rejection of metanarrative, for a framework of analysis that has scant place for human agency as a transformative force, and for a politics of hybridity and voluntaristic self-expression in contradistinction to a politics of antagonism.…

“… rather than emphasizing conceptual categories such as liberation, race, or nation, or the specificity of hybridity, a more straightforward way to recuperate agency for the postcolonial subject may be to rethink postcolonial theory not merely statically, in relation to fixed conceptual categories, but to rethink the dynamics of the process of subjectivization itself. Such a rethinking is precisely what this dissertation, which calls for reading dialectically, is about.”

[Sayan Bhattacharyya. Reading Dialectically: The Political Play of Form, Contingency, and Subjectivity in Rabindranath Tagore and C.L.R. James. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, Michigan. 2010. Pages 6-9.]

“Elaborating a little (and perhaps expanding somewhat) what [Roy] Bhaskar intends, the framework of a minimally adequate social science will include (among others) the following features: (1) Social structures are identified and their generative powers investigated in detail …. (2) Empirically identified regularities and tendencies are treated as objects for theoretical investigation in order to discern how they are generated from underlying law and structure, what the generative mechanisms are and, thus, what are their historical boundary conditions. (3) It recognizes that the real is not exhausted by the actual, but includes also the possible.… (4) It contains conceptual resources to articulate the complex interaction of the personal and the structural.… (5) All social phenomena, including the prevalence of beliefs among the members of a social group, are open to social explanation.… (6) It investigates social negativities with sufficient conceptual resources to allow for the possibility that they have structural causes, systemically linked with the ‘positive’ features of the structures.… (7) It investigates negativities, as they are articulated and concretely experienced by those who suffer them themselves.… (8) Connected with the previous condition, many of the categories used in social science theories will be value-impregnated, and so imply relationships to human wants, needs and interests and their satisfaction or frustration.… (9) It is reflexive.” [Hugh Lacey, “Neutrality in the Social Sciences: On Bhaskar’s argument for an essential emancipatory impulse in social science.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 27, issue 2/3, 1997. Pages 213-241.]

“… a critical realist approach to social interaction does not necessitate a singular definition of roles; and, thirdly, that broader theoretical insights provided by critical realism—particularly those concerning codetermination, contradiction, power and temporality—present a robust basis upon which to examine roles and role behaviour systematically.…

“… according to critical realism, the complex and historical totality within which social interaction takes place should mean that no role is subject to one set of expectations.…

“… the manner in which certain actors use their power will differ in various situation-specific interactions ….”

[Darcy Luke and Stephen Bates, “Using Critical Realism to Explain Indeterminacy in Role Behaviour Systematically.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 45, number 3, 2014. Pages 331-351.]

“… so long as it [the left] remains wedded to the familiar consolations of emancipatory critique, the left will continue to concede the strategic initiative precisely to the far-from-dead — indeed, just emerging, really, across the majority world with their burgeoning middle classes — forces of capitalist individualism. This epistemic reorientation is the immanent step of the critical and realist spirit that is now emerging in this moment of global crisis of globalizing power/knowledge systems.” [David Tyfield, “‘What is to be Done?’ Insights and Blind Spots from Cultural Political Economy(s).” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 5, 2015. Pages 530-548.]

“The focus in our paper is the precautionary principle (or precautionary approach), which seems historically and toxicologically implicitly or explicitly one of the main drivers of increasing stringent chemical policymaking in the past decades.…

“… in order to obtain forward with the task of knowing (even if only by approximation) the toxicological reality (obviously we here expound a critical realist perspective) we do believe … that empirical sufficiency can only function properly within the context of full theory-commitment. As the history of hormesis shows, the data do not speak for themselves.”

[Jaap C. Hanekamp and Aalt Bast, “BELLE Article: Response to commentators.” Human & Experimental Toxicology. Volume 26, number 11, November 2007. Pages 875-876.]

“If we read symptoms as signifiers, then we can ask what is being signified and what is its referent? This fits with the critical realist ‘depth ontology,’ with its distinctions among the real (the invisible entity), the actual (an event) and the empirical (the visible sign). In these terms, crises can be seen as stratified. They are generated by real mechanisms, they are actual events or processes, and they have evidential symptoms. This poses the well-known CR [critical realist] retroductive question. Here this is expressed as what must the real world be like for this event to have occurred and/or these symptoms to exist? Thus the challenge is to relate the empirical symptoms, actual crisis and underlying mechanisms as a basis for possible decisive interventions. This is the field of ‘symptomatology.’ It is based on trial-and-error observation and construal that draws on past experience but may also require forgetting as a basis for ‘correct’ intervention.” [Bob Jessop, “The Symptomatology of Crises, Reading Crises and Learning from Them: Some Critical Realist Reflections.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 14, issue 3, 2015. Pages 238-271.]

“This article concedes that there is some validity to … [certain] criticisms of the realist position …: however, it is argued that these problems could be dealt with within a reformulated version of critical realism. This does not interfere with critical realism as a philosophical position – the self-delimited role of critical realist philosophy as ’an underlabourer,’ not as a totalizing system … is fundamentally sound – what it does problematize is the precise implication of working through, or applying, critical realist philosophy in practical research instances. The second part of this article highlights how the working through of critical realism in a relatively traditional area – economic geography – should lead to a reconsideration of received research methodologies. One implication is that rather than shying away from an engagement with issues related to culture and representation, critical realism should be brought to bear on them. However, necessarily, the practice and form of critical realist research will also change in the process. It is only through such a dialogue between practice and conceptualization that critical realism can be applied.” [Andy C. Pratt, “Putting critical realism to work: the practical implications for geographical research.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 19, number 1, 1995. Pages 61-74.]

“I do not think that realist qualitative migration research is of no practical and wider social relevance. Far from this I think that this kind of research can contribute significantly to the modification of socio-political conditions of practical policy making. In other words, realist qualitative migration research can contribute in a highly effective way to what I call ‘politics making.’ Politics making, in the way I use the term, is nothing more than affecting the prevalent socio-political terms which tend to reproduce social relations of domination and exploitation and simultaneously obscure the possibility of knowing them through the employment of distorted representations of social reality. In the case of migration, politics making refers not only to mainstream politics but more to the level of ‘politics form below’ [sic?; politics from below?] and to politics produced by social movements. For example, realist qualitative migration research can inform social movements of immigrants and/or non-immigrants who challenge persistent domineering, exploitative and discriminative structural and cultural arrangements ….” [Theodoros losifldes. Qualitative Methods in Migration Studies: A Critical Realist Perspective. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2011. Page 235.]

“… my intention was to investigate simultaneously structural causalities and individual responses and meanings and thus to avoid purely objectivist or subjectivist explanations. Critical realism provides the framework of integration of these notions, and allows the formulation of critical and emancipatory approaches and strategies in qualitative research, avoiding both positivism and relativism …. Within this framework the multiple meanings of different immigrant groups or individual immigrants about their working, housing or life situation in Athens are not sufficient to explain social reality.” [Theodoros Iosifides, “Qualitative Migration Research: Some New Reflections Six Years Later.” The Qualitative Report. Volume 8, number 3, September 2003. Pages 435-446.]

“The need for utilizing the experiences of local producers in western Lesvos, in order to investigate the social and economic mechanisms which lead to unsustainable use of natural resources, and eventually to desertification problems, justifies the adoption of a qualitative methodological framework. We used this framework in a critical realist manner, that is, researching the interaction between structural features and causal mechanisms (e.g., socio-economic conditions, characteristics of the local economy, rural development policies) with personal and collective interpretations, attitudes, and stances (e.g., environmental protection priorities, ecological awareness) …. The adoption of this theoretical perspective (critical realism) allows the avoidance of both positivist-objectivist explanations, and relativistic approaches and interpretations ….” [Theodoros Iosifides and Theodoros Politidis, “Conducting Qualitative Research on Desertification in Western Lesvos, Greece.” The Qualitative Report. Volume 10, number 1, March 2005. Pages 143-162.]

“… we can roughly divide Albanian immigrants into ‘pioneers’ and latecomers. The former were characterised by great instability as regards the area of residence and in many cases by extremely harsh housing conditions …. Their criteria for choosing the area of residence were related mainly to employment opportunities and to the low cost of housing. After they had become established in an area and their housing conditions improved, the ‘pioneer’ Albanian immigrants contributed to the spatial concentration of Albanian immigrants by attracting others (family members, relatives and friends) to settle in the same area.” [Theodoros Iosifides, Mari Lavrentiadou, Electra Petracou and Antonios Kontis, “Forms of Social Capital and the Incorporation of Albanian Immigrants in Greece.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Volume 33, number 8, November 2007. Pages 1343-1361.]

“… critical realist migrantization research uses the intransitive realm of reality to take into account the possibility that social actors have misinterpreted their situations and social contexts in general …. It also acknowledges the crucial role which a series of such misinterpretations play in the reproduction of unequal and domineering power relations. To give but one example, interpretations which directly connect – through correlative research – migrantized people with ‘criminality’ and unemployment are widespread. Critical realist migrantization research practice takes correlations with criminality into account, but assumes that correlations are neither necessary nor sufficient to give an adequate explanation of the situation. Instead of relying on reified correlations, critical realists prefer to investigate the role of the realities of capitalist relations of production across different spatial scales, which produce social inequalities and result in the processes of criminalization of the underprivileged, including migrantized people. Such an analysis must nevertheless occur in tandem with a discussion of how empirical data can be misinterpreted to mask or distort a truthful understanding of reality.” [Theodoros Iosifides, “Against ‘Migration’: Using Critical Realism as a Framework for Conducting Mixed-Method, Migrantization Research.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 2, February 2017. Pages 128-142.]

“… [The] four-category typology … maintains that [Alasdair] MacIntyre’s specific critique of managerialism is concerned primarily with metatheoretical flaws; it is therefore a critique that bears similarities to critical theory, critical management studies, and critical realist organizational studies.…

“MacIntyre’s first charge against organizational theory is the concealment of the fundamental conflicts and tensions within organizational settings.…

“… criticisms spanned moral, ideological, political, methodological, and epistemological standpoints, drawing voices from conservative, progressive, radical, anti-modern, and postmodern perspectives. Many of these criticisms can be placed in one of two categories: a) critiques of modern industrial work settings; and b) critiques of discourses that legitimate the organization of those settings, taking aim at the ‘forms of control’ located within the labour process itself.…

“Finally, we come to the fourth category of critique which, while overlapping with much of the third, advances a distinct critique of the philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions that underlie managerial ideologies.”

[Andrew Lynn, “MacIntyre, Managerialism, and Metatheory: Organizational Theory as an Ideology of Control.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 16, issue 2, February 2017. Pages 143-162.]

“A missing concept in postmodern feminism is ‘ontological stratification.’ …

“… Without any concept of ontological stratification, the admission that sexual difference has causal powers to enable and constrain, seems akin to nineteenth century arguments that women in higher education would lose their breasts and shrivel their wombs ….

“The intransitive dimension is not flat: reality is stratified. It is the twin ideas of ‘levels’ and ‘emergent properties’ that give critical realism its ‘depth.’ Most frequently cited is [Roy] Bhaskar’s distinction between the actual, the empirical and the real …, although this is just a beginning way of characterising the complexity of ontological stratification.”

[Caroline New, “Sex and Gender: A Critical Realist Approach.” New Formations. Volume 56, issue 1, 2005. Pages 54-70.]

“We can characterise the feminist standpoint then as the imagined upshot of an investigative political programme that aims to build unity on the basis of knowledge of the social world. It uses women’s knowledge of their own and others’ lives to discover the causes of their common experiences and the ways in which desired changes can be brought about. It involves political work to create the conditions for pooling and collectively analysing these various accounts, as well as the political work involved in using them as evidence that change is needed and possible. I see the work done by the NGO [non-governmental organization] gathering in Beijing as part of the process of constructing a feminist standpoint. This work assumed, in the main, that women do have some interests in common, and used accounts of experience as evidence for what these might be. The process was highly contested and conflictful, yet it occurred and continues. It is, as poststructuralists would say, the construction of unity, yet it is also the discovery of real bases for that unity.” [Caroline New, “Realism, Deconstruction and the Feminist Standpoint.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 28, issue 4, December 1998. Pages 349-372.]

“I maintain that sexual difference is real, though it is not merely dichotomous. However, it is no accident that human beings have been able to dichotomize it more or less successfully: sexual differences do have a bipolar distribution, explicable by evolutionary accounts of sexuality. There are real male and female capacities and liabilities, although whether and how these are instantiated in particular cases depends on the entire causal context.

“The trouble with essentialism is not its realism, but its lack of depth and its simplification of causal processes. Essentialism understands some appearances and events as expressions of the essence of the things involved, which are understood as spawning simulacra whatever else is happening.”

[Caroline New, “Man Bad, Woman Good?: Essentialisms and Ecofeminisms.” New Left Review. Series I, number 216, March–April 1996. Pages 79-93.]

“It is our understanding that regional and innovation policies should be based on a complex systems approach whose emergence is acknowledged in the first part of the paper.…

“… [There are] elements of a mode of knowledge that builds on the convergence of ideas in different disciplines and, as a metatheory, guides this research on firms, innovation processes and their support by Structural Funds. Therefore, our complex systems approach integrates the so-called stream of ‘critical realist thinking’ in social sciences, which rejects both methodological positivism and the postmodern interpretivist reductionism ….”

[Jorge Bateira and Leonor Vasconcelos Ferreira, “Questioning EU Cohesion Policy in Portugal: A complex systems approach.” European Urban and Regional Studies. Volume 9, number 4, 2002. Pages 297-314.]

“The tactics, or short-term strategies for reaching … [certain] objectives, are often secretive, complex, and represented in divergent ways in the texts, narratives, and rhetoric of each geopolitical actor.

“This situation lends itself to a neorealist analysis ([see Roy] Bhaskar …). This philosophical school in all its variations (critical realism, scientific realism, transcendental realism) seeks to overcome the epistemological problems associated with classical or ‘naive’ realism, an approach that has characterized much work in political geography and international relations …. Neorealism is not structured around ‘crush zones,’ ‘frontiers’ or ‘lines in the dirt’ as objects of inquiry but around the interactions of agency and structure that produce particular spaces as contingent products of certain sets of political relations.”

[Richard Griggs, “Geostrategies for both power and peace in KwaZulu-Natal: a neorealist analysis.” GeoJournal. Volume 39, number 4, August 1996. Pages 387-396.]

“Our notion of a DEP [dominant epistemological paradigm] emerges out of social studies of science perspectives that demonstrate how the scientific process operates in the context of social institutions and organizations and in turn shapes the social construction of diagnosis and illness …. From this perspective, sufficient medical and scientific research will not always unequivocally establish the presence and etiology of disease, nor will disease groups necessarily be satisfied with the prevention and treatment strategies that result. We also employ a critical realist perspective … that acknowledges an underlying empirical reality in which disease exists but emphasizes that in cases in which a disease or its putative cause is controversial, no amount of scientific and medical research will produce a mutually agreeable understanding of that reality.” [Stephen Zavestoski, Phil Brown, Meadow Linder, Sabrina McCormick, and Brian Mayer, “Science, Policy, Activism, and War: Defining the Health of Gulf War Veterans.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. Volume 27, number 2, spring 2002. Pages 171-205.]

“Over the last couple of decades pluralism in information systems research has increased significantly attracting a lot of attention from researchers and decision-makers in the field.…

“… Critical realism is often seen as a middle way between empiricism and positivism on the one hand and anti-naturalism or interpretivism on the other, thus, reinventing a new and more sophisticated version or realist ontology. Critical realism simultaneously confronts the central concerns of both natural and social science regimes. This makes critical realism of particular interest in the study of information systems which bears significant relevance to natural science (due to their technological characteristics) and social science (due to their applications in deeply human contexts such as organizations).”

[M. Zachariadis, S. Scott, and W. Barrett, “Exploring critical realism as the theoretical foundation of mixed-method research: evidence from the economics of IS innovations.” Working papers series. Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. March, 2010. Pages 1-26.]

“In my own use of the life-history method, I draw on both the oral history and sociological traditions.… The sociology enters in the way in which I choose to read them. This involves using a critical realist method of abstraction to ‘unpack’ the many ‘determinations’ which converge in a concrete outcome. My aim is to expose the ‘generative mechanisms’ which lie within social processes, such as those of class and gender.…

“Instead of class imagery, I focus below on class memory, a term which encompasses two aspects of class identity. Like class imagery and class self-placement, class memory can refer to that conscious positioning, in memory, of the self within a network of class relations.… Class memory … is a phenomenological concept which is grounded in the ‘world view’ of the people interviewed. In addition, I also use class memory in another sense, one which captures an important part of a person’s relationship to the means of production and reproduction.”

[Ian Watson, “Class Memory: An Alternative Approach to Class Identity.” Labour History. Number 67, November 1994. Pages 23-41.]

“It is at this point that we need to take into account the recent emergence of a ‘religion-friendly’ version of critical realism that is much more sympathetic to the Platonic-Augustinian divine presupposition and to the ‘for-us-ness’ of our world that underlies the practice of science; I have in mind here not just the recent work of [Roy] Bhaskar himself but also of a number of his close associates (Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas Porpora) who have insisted in Transcendence: Critical Realism and God … that their specifically Christian beliefs are entirely in accord with, and indeed strongly supportive of, their critical realism.” [Brian T. Trainor, “The Divine Undergirding of Human Knowing: Plato and Critical Realism.” Philosophy & Theology. Volume 22, numbers 1-2, 2000. Pages 205-234.]

“Specifically, I will scrutinize Rom Harré’s … attack on the idea that social structures are causally efficacious (and therefore real). Lest I be misunderstood, it needs to be stressed that I have nothing against Harré in particular. The matters I attempt to address call for a detailed examination of our reasoning and Harré’s reasoning is chosen because it nourishes the extremely pervasive idea shared by many social scientists regarding the way our concepts relate to reality. This idea, which I will be arguing against, comes up in critical realist thinking, and it also underlies the way Harré is attacking Critical Realism, appearances notwithstanding. Because the confusion in ontological reasoning is deep-seated and tricky to expose, I confine myself to establishing the latter’s incoherence.” [Leonidas Tsilipakos, “The Poverty of Ontological Reasoning.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 42, number 2, June 2012. Pages 201-219.]

“What we need is a deeper understanding of how different mechanisms interact and the consequences of this interaction. Here we can trace an ontological reasoning which also includes explanatory claims, which are one of the keystones in our model for classification of various futures studies.

“… We agree on the ‘uncertainty factor’, but at the same time we would like to question why being epistemologically cautious has to be linked to a rejection of ontological matters. On the contrary, the philosophy on which we build our reasoning – critical realism – is characterized by epistemological cautiousness and ontological boldness and we believe that it can add something to the field.…

“… In critical realism the concept ‘concrete utopia’ refers to something that could become a reality if theoretical and analytical labouring is combined with concrete action and be emancipatory. Since emancipation is a future-oriented practice partly driven by (scientific) knowledge and assumptions about alternative and preferable futures – futures studies are important. One way of showing this importance is by identifying what ontological claims forecasts are resting on.”

[Ann Bergman, Jan Ch. Karlsson, and Jonas Axelsson, “Truth claims and explanatory claims—An ontological typology of futures studies.” Futures. Volume 42, issue 8, October 2010. Pages 857-865.]

“In … general terms, my book makes the case for an alethic (objective, truth-based and verification-transcendent) conception of realism, as opposed to the epistemic conception which on principle denies the possibility of truths beyond reach of our present-best knowledge, evidence, or powers of observation. This latter viewpoint has dominated much of the debate about quantum mechanics, not only among orthodox theorists but also among those – including, arguably, the EPR [Albert Einstein–Boris Podolsky–Nathan Rosen paper] authors – who have sought to defend a realist interpretation. Indeed, it was just this ambiguity in the EPR paper which gave a hold for the apparently decisive counter-arguments mounted by Bohr and his followers.” [Christopher Norris. Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2000. Google Play edition.]

“Christopher Norris’ Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism (QTFR) was a difficult book for me to put down. When I did put it down, it was to consult my old books on quantum mechanics so as to puzzle further over the points Norris raises. QTFR is a demanding book, not because Norris is unclear but because quantum phenomena themselvesare so mind-boggling and spooky. These qualities make quantum phenomena especially important for realists to address.” [Doug Porpora, “Quantum Reality as Unrealised Possibility.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 3, issue 2, July 2000. Pages 34-39.]

“By locating teachers’ valued functionings within a Critical Realist theory of causation, we can start to see how these can be viewed as the causal mechanisms that generate much of their behaviour, and how various conditions of service constrain what teachers value being and doing. The dialectical process between structural constraints and reflexive deliberation on what to do about these determines whether teachers choose to comply with constraints (thereby not achieving their valued functionings), or whether they choose to contend with them (which often leads to the production of certain ‘deficient’ behaviours).” [Sharon Tao, “Why are teachers absent?: Utilising the Capability Approach and Critical Realism to explain teacher performance in Tanzania.” International Journal of Educational Development. Volume 33, 2013. Pages 2-14.]

“The starting point for using critical realism in futures studies is the work carried out by Andrew Sayer …. The work by Sayer has been used in many social science disciplines as a foundation for critical research, such as in geography and sociology …. In the first section of this paper Sayer’s work is used to think about what critical realism is and how it can help us examine social relationships and social structures. This is demonstrated by looking at how trends in the retail sector (in the UK) have been analysed and used in a recent Delphi survey …. It involves methods to conceptualise, to abstract and to consider types of relationship between social phenomena.” [Alan Southern, “Method in Futures Studies: The Value of Critical Realism.” Presented at Global Conversations – What You and I Can Do for Future Generations. XV World Conference. World Futures Studies Federation. Brisbane, Australia. September 28th–October 3rd, 1997. Pages 1-12. Retrieved on January 16th, 2016.]

“In its contemporary manifestation, the critical realism championed by Roy Bhaskarii and his associates, allows for the object to be reinterpreted through changing conditions. They acknowledge that reality is a given and independent object, but insist that our perception of it is mediated by, and transformed through, the continuing process of social practice. For the critical realist, everything is real.…

“We will see how for critical realists, the body is not opposed to the mind: ideas and fantasies are as real as objects – one really has an idea, even if it does not manifest as an independent presence. However, critical realism is not an argument for making work that ‘looks real.’ It is a position on the nature of objective reality that is seen, not as the work of the individual mind, but socially produced. Sculpture that uses found objects may be described in relation to realism augmented by this socio-critical twist. Found objects are not originally made as art and they are not approximations of the thing in the world, rather, the thing is appropriated, or re-contextualised as the object. In employing the thing itself, found object art bypasses the mimetic processes of conventional representation, and instead works with a destablised, discursive form of representation.”

[Katrina I. R. F. M. Palmer. Reality Flickers: Writing With Found Objects And Imagined Sculpture. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Royal College of Art. London, England. May, 2011. Page 28.]

“Most sociologists would now treat the people, either individual or in collectivities, and their actions either single or collective, as the ultimate driving force of all social processes, with every stage seen as construction, achievement by social actors, and the direction of the process as contingent on what people choose and do. A highly elaborated statement of this perspective is provided by Margaret Archer in the theory of morphogenesis …. I join the same stream of theorizing with my theory of social becoming ….

“… the theory of social becoming which emphasizes the role of agency in permanent self-transformation of society, implies the values of activism, freedom, equal life-chances, democratic constitution of the field of opportunities—as pre-requisites for the creative making of history.”

[Piotr Sztompka, “The Return to Values in Recent Sociological Theory.” Polish Sociological Review. Number 159, 2007. Pages 247-261.]

“Which of the masters could provide the foundation on which a theory of becoming should base itself, with its claim to link agency and history, to merge the streams of agential theory and historical sociology, to produce a synthesis of syntheses? My answer is: Karl Marx. Or more precisely, some themes in Marx’s work which underlie the important trend within later Marxism known as the ‘activist’ interpretation. The most eminent exponents of this trend are Antonio Gramsci and Gyorgy Lukács. They will be treated as intellectual conduits linking Marxian theory with the evolving theory of becoming.” [Piotr Sztompka. Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. 1991. Page 6.]

“The ontological meta-theory of critical realism has influenced and guided this research. Key aspects of critical realism that have informed the ideological assumptions embedded in the research aims and objectives, the design and process, and the analytical lens are explicated ….

“Critical realism is a meta-theory … that is underpinned by general systems theory. It provides a broad way of thinking and understanding that informs empirical research, but allows the construction of specific theories to emerge from the research topic …. The primary emphasis of critical realism is its ontological basis, postulating that reality exists independently of whether it is observed or experienced. According to [Roy] Bhaskar … there is an ontological distinction between three levels, or domains, of reality: the empirical level, the actual, and the real or causal level.”

[Karin Crawford. Continuing Professional Development in Higher Education: Voices from Below. Ed.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Lincoln. Lincoln, England. June, 2009. Pages 21-22.]

“Social scientists, and scholars in related interdisciplinary fields, have critiqued resilience thinking’s oversimplification of social dimensions of coupled social-ecological systems. Resilience scholars have countered with ‘where is the ecology’ in social analyses? My aim is to contribute to current efforts to strengthen inter- and transdisciplinary debate and inquiry between the social-ecological resilience community and the social sciences. I synthesize three social science perspectives, which stress the complex, dynamic, and multiscalar interconnections between the biophysical and social realms in explaining social-environmental change, and which place both the social and ecology centre stage in their analyses: materio-spatial world systems analysis, critical realist political ecology, and actor-network theory. By integrating, in a nondeterministic and nonessentialist manner, the biophysical environment into social inquiries (integrative approaches) or by altogether abolishing the ecology/nature and human/culture divide (hybrid perspectives), these three social-science perspectives are well placed to foster stronger inter- and transdisciplinary ties with social-ecological resilience. Materiospatial world systems analysis is highly compatible with resilience thinking. The emphasis on world systems structures and processes offers the potential to enrich resilience analyses of global environmental change, global governance and stewardship, planetary boundaries, and multiscale resilience. Critical realist political ecology offers avenues for more in-depth interdisciplinary inquiries around local/traditional/indigenous knowledge systems and power. It also challenges resilience scholars to incorporate critical analyses of resilience’s core concepts and practices. Actor-network theory proposes a very different starting point for understanding and assessing social-ecological resilience. Its focus on ‘resilience-in-the-making’ offers unique insights but also pushes the conceptual boundaries of resilience thinking.” [Samantha Stone-Jovicich, “Probing the interfaces between the social sciences and social-ecological resilience: insights from integrative and hybrid perspectives in the social sciences.” Abstract. Open access. Ecology and Society. Volume 20, number 2, article 25, 2015. Online publication. No pagination.]

“I argue that a critical realist PE [political ecology] acknowledges discourse, language and the unequal power that produces it and is produced by it, as well as an appeal to an external reality and an acknowledgement of the importance of evidence and empirical research. Therefore, a critical realist PE is often more suited to communicating with actors outside the academy and thus pursuing political ends in a development context. This is not an absolutist argument, but a pragmatic one and set within the particular social contexts I have outlined. If academics are at all reflective about their own ‘ontological choice’ for a perspective on a useful and engaged PE, it will become obvious that choice is seldom made as a result of sustained academic introspection, and I suspect is often made without a full appreciation of its philosophical basis. Rather, the choice owes much to their history of disciplinary training, curricula and the influence of networks of teachers and colleagues and to the circumstances in which communication takes place at a particular time.” [Piers Blaikie, “Should some political ecology be useful? The Inaugural Lecture for the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group, Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, April 2010.” Geoforum. Volume 43, issue 2, March 2012. Pages 231-239.]

“First, this course of (in)action would confirm some of the worst aspects of the old and discredited developmentalism and environmental management 𔂿 normal professionalism, green imperialism, technocentric and top-down planning and most of the other epithets of disapproval used in this article! Secondly. the tide has moved in too far and sticking means drowning. There is no way that Agenda 21 or any other global environmental initiative can move forward without contested meanings, crises of representation, and questioning of the authority of facts. It is happening now and with the processes of globalization and the teletronic revolution it will continue. Finally, if and when the post-modern tide ever changes, the landscape, both real and semiotic, will have ceased to be recognizable anyway.” [Piers Blaikie, “Post-modernism and global environmental change.” Global Environmental Change. Volume 6, number 2, June 1996. Pages 81-85.]

“… philosophically, [Piers] Blaikie was clearly experimenting with forms of skeptical, or critical realism because he sought to achieve some level of scientific progress in a world where knowledge claims reflect current and historic power relations …. Under the discussion of critical realism by [Roy] Bhaskar …, our understanding of ‘externally real’ items such as soil erosion, rainfall, or tree growth, is often likened to ‘peeling the layers of an onion’ because it distinguishes between ‘actual’ observations (day-to-day experiences), ‘empirical’ measurements (scientific research) and the insights these give about ‘real’ structures (underlying causes). Blaikie was effectively implementing this in his search for ‘closure’ and his triangulation of multiple information sources.” [Tim Forsyth, “Political ecology and the epistemology of social justice.” Geoforum. Volume 39, issue 2, March 2008. Pages 756-764.]

“The analytical framework provided by the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) was used to critically analyse factors shaping behaviour and decision-making related to family planning among the Fertit people in WBeG [Western Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan]. According to TPB, three major antecedent domains influence a person’s intention to perform a behavior: 1) attitude towards and belief that performing the behaviour will lead to the desired outcomes; 2) social norms related to the behavior; and 3) one’s perceived control over or perceived ability to perform the specified behaviour. The TPB contends that a positive attitude and positive outcome expectations alone are not enough to shape decisions and behaviour; the two domains, the prevalent social norms and one’s beliefs about own ability and capacity to act, also operate concomitantly to affect individuals’ decisions and actions. The TPB is a mid-range theory which has been widely used and is well suited to describe the antecedents of particular behavioural intentions. Recognizing that in many situations individuals and groups defy what appear to be strong social norms [17], and that norms both shape actions of agents and are at the same time themselves being constantly shaped by these actions, we draw on the critical realist explanatory tradition to go one step further to discuss and explain norm congruence, norm defiance and, thereby, norm maintenance or transformation. To do so, we draw on [Margaret S.] Archer …, who argues for an analysis which approaches structure and agency through ‘analytical dualism,’ wherein ‘the structural, cultural and agential components are analyzed separately, with a focus on their logical relations and the conditions and possibilities that these allow’. The analytical emphasis is thus twofold: explaining how the social structures shape the actions and interactions of individuals, and how at the same time the social interactions between agents also shape the social structures and social relations, both maintaining or reproducing and transforming them.” [Sumit Kane, Maryse Kok, Matilda Rial, Anthony Matere, Marjolein Dieleman, and Jacqueline E. W. Broerse, “Social norms and family planning decisions in South Sudan.” BMC Public Health. Volume 16, November 2016. Open access. Pages 1-12.]

“… the adoption of hybrid science techniques allowed the investigation of environmental degradation involving aspects of biophysical change and human experience. The studies form part of a realist political ecology because they have identified part of the political basis upon which environmental change has been constructed, but have not proceeded to reduce the environmental change, or the explanation of environmental change, to these political factors. Instead, these studies have attempted to understand the ‘environment’ as a complexly and stratified reality which is articulated by both ‘social’ and ‘natural’ processes. Moreover they also show that knowledge is unevenly distributed, thus the potential importance of local knowledge.” [Tim Forsyth, “Critical Realism and Political Ecology.” After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. José López and Garry Potter, editors. New York: The Athlone Press. 2001. Pages 146-154.]

“This article proposes a more holistic and critical realist framework, which enables us to take seriously our real dependence upon the physical world, as well as the real causal effects of ideology …. This allows analysing how current trade policies reflect and perpetuate broader economic, political and socio-cultural structures that at present can be described as embedded in neoliberal capitalist global hegemony …, which exacerbates environmental degradation and social injustice …. Conventional neo-classical analysis does not reflect upon its own location within this broader terrain but rather focuses on how trade can be made more efficient, or more open.” [Lucy Ford, “EU Trade Governance and Policy: A Critical Perspective.” Journal of Contemporary European Research. Volume 9, number 4, 2013. Pages 578-596.]

“Our interest is in whether it is still possible to provide a philosophical and practical defence of the careful application of analytical statistics in a way that is acceptable to sceptical critical realists, and indeed, to social theorists generally. Two possible routes seem open to provide this defence. First, deconstruct the sceptical case and second, with reference to the first, construct a positive argument for the use of analytical statistics.…

“In this paper we began by describing the position of those critical realists who are sceptical about multi-variate statistics …. Some underlying assumptions of this sceptical argument were shown to be problematic. Then a positive case in favour of using analytical statistics as part of a mixed-methods methodology was developed.”

[Wendy Olsen and Jamie Morgan, “A Critical Epistemology of Analytical Statistics: Addressing the Sceptical Realist.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 25, issue 3, September 2005. Pages 255-284.]

“In this paper I attempt to apply several lessons from critical realism to statistical analysis, and in particular to cross-sectional survey analysis methodology. My findings, including a novel re-interpretation of the two main variants of factor analysis, can be applied to market research, voting surveys, evaluations of all kinds using questionnaires, interview-based survey data, creation of tabular data from documents or court cases or patient records, etc.” [Wendy Olsen, “Stereotypical and Traditional Views About the Gender Division of Labour in Indian Labour Markets.” Alethia (subsequently renamed and reestablished as Journal of Critical Realism). Volume 4, issue 1, July 2001. Pages 11-17.]

“… any investigation can only take place at the intersection or vertex of agential and structural objects, and thus indicators that researchers use have to reflect this close relationship between the two.

“If this is accepted, then critical realism has significant implications for a resolution of the quantitative/qualitative divide. Any strategies and methods that are used can only be chosen if they conform to this overarching frame, so that accounts which focus on either structures or agents to the exclusion of the other cannot account for the totality of the social experience, and it is the interaction between the two which needs to be the focus of the research. I have already suggested that quantitative approaches and qualitative approaches are different symbolic systems, with different logical forms, for describing the properties of objects; however, if each is focused on different properties of social objects, then it is possible to reconcile them.”

[David Scott, “Resolving the quantitative–qualitative dilemma: a critical realist approach.” International Journal of Research & Method in Education. Volume 30, number 1, April 2007. Pages 3-17.]

“The human’s quest is to maximize her or his humanity, be it how one experiences oneself as a meaning-making agent and within the social arena …. In the case of the former, the self as a meaning-making agent is an existentialist …. In the case of the latter, responding to predicates and social circumstance outside of oneself, such as society and resulting ideologies, the self is removed from the existential or authentic self by virtue of the experiences that one inevitably has in life. If true that the individual can hold onto both positions, an authentic meaning-making existential self and social navigator, then it appears that the function of being is wholly about living in the social world, while not being fooled by its temptations and condemnations.…

“… Viewing love through the lens of Critical Realism …, the actual existence and experience of love for the individual exists in what [Roy] Bhaskar … identified as three realms of reality. The three realms are actual (occurrences and outcomes that occur in the world), real (underlying relations, structures, and movements that have the capacity to produce variations in the actual realm), and empirical …. Thus, love is influenced by both human agency along with structural and social factors/forces ….”

[Tamiko L. Lemberger-Truelove, “Humanizing the Racialized Self.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology. Volume 56, number 1, 2016. Pages 53-76.]

“Our argument calls for a revised ontology of organisational routines; an ontology that is sensitive to the stratified structure of social reality, whereby emergent units, including collectively-recognised status functions, are not mere epiphenomena of their component units ….

“… To purport such a revised ontology we turn to the philosophy of science of critical realism …. By propounding a revised ontology of organisational routines we set out to shed new light on the generative mechanisms that organisational routines are equivalent to.

“… By interweaving theory with data iteratively we arrived at a revised ontology of organisational routines that sheds light on the notion of routines as generative systems in general and the symbolic role of artefacts in particular.”

[Federico Iannacci and Kyriakos S. Hatzaras, “Unpacking ostensive and performative aspects of organisational routines in the context of monitoring systems: A critical realist approach.” Information and Organization. Volume 22, Issue 1, January 2012. Pages 1–22.]

“Structurationist interpretations run the danger of becoming reified as the understanding of ostensive and performative among routines researchers. [Federico] Iannacci and [Kyriakos S.] Hatzaras’ recent critical realist analysis of ostensive is a much-needed break from this.” [Alex Wright, “Organizational routines as embodied performatives: A communication as constitutive of organization perspective.” Organization. Volume 23, number 2, 2016. Pages 147-163.]

“I will argue for a recovery of the real through a dialectical, mutually self-correcting relationship between the real world, the knower and her/this cultural assumptions, each helping to determine the content and meaning of the other two. Even though I don’t present a comprehensive realist theory of science in this essay, I do try to show the desirability and the possibility of a robust (though fallible and non-foundational) contextual realism which admits the role of culture and social interests in our perceptions, but never loses sight of the discipline the real world imposes on our cultural conventions and interests.…

“I will contend that anti-realism and relativism are two sides of one basic philosophical fallacy which, following Roy Bhaskar, I call the ‘epistemic fallacy,’ or, following Philip Kitcher, IRA or ‘Inaccessibility of Reality Argument.’ …

“The realism that I’ll defend aspires to capture the robust realism of most natural scientists.”

[Meera Nanda, “Restoring the Real: Rethinking Social Constructivist Theories of Science.” Socialist Register. Volume 33, 1997. Pages 302-352.]

“I believe a critical realism that can account for the cultural biases is perfectly viable. I have written a detailed defence of a critical contextual realism in the recently published issue of Socialist Register …. Basically, I am arguing for a gradual and relentless revision of our conceptual categories in the light of new evidence obtained from controlled experiments, which are simply not as question begging and circular as social constructivist make them out to be – for the results of the experiments are justified in the lights of other theories with independent empirical support.” [Meera Nanda, “Reclaiming Modern Science for Third World Progressive Social Movements.” Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 33, number 16, April 1998. Pages 915-922.]

“How … do they [social constructionists] justify reducing the real world to a fig leaf when it comes to scientific knowledge? The answer lies in what the British realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’: the failure to distinguish between an objective reality and the ways in which we represent or describe it. Here, the ‘real’ world does not act as a check on our knowledge.…

“I have offered a detailed philosophical defense of contextual realism elsewhere, and I can say only this much about it here. I believe that it is perfectly possible to defend a realism that can distinguish truth from superstition, and justify preferring the former not simply in terms of coherence (or ‘solidarity’ as [Richard] Rorty calls it) with a particular community of knowers (i.e. western scientists), but in terms of how accurately it maps onto, and—yes—corresponds to some part of what there is in the world. The contextual realism I defend argues that, contrary to postmodernist assumptions, such a mapping between our theories and the world does not require us to secure an Archimedean point, or a God’s eye view, which is outside of all social practices, language and cultural categories. Indeed, postmodernists have sent us on a fool’s errand by making such impossible demands of scientific knowledge.”

[Meera Nanda, “Against social de(con)struction of science: Cautionary tales from the Third World.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 48, issue 10, March 1997. Pages 1-20.]

“The Inaccessibility of Reality Argument.

“Those who adopt the traditional conception of knowledge and who claim that some people know something are committed to supposing that some current beliefs correspond to the way the world is. But how can this correspondence ever be checked? It is conceded that there is no transparent process through which the nature of reality is revealed to us. We are never in a position to step outside our conceptions and check that they match the world. Hence the idea that there is any such match is simply an article of faith.”

[Philip Kitcher, “Knowledge, Society, and History.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Volume 23, number 2, June 1993. Pages 155-177.]

“… the belief in the ontological reality of non-observable processes is both venerable and respectable, being as central, for example, to [Émile] Durkheim’s sociology at the start of the [twentieth] century as it is to [Roy] Bhaskar’s critical realism at the end.” [Noel Castree, “Birds, Mice and Geography: Marxisms and Dialectics.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Volume 21, number 2, 1996. Pages 342-362.]

“I mentioned a qualified naturalism because [Roy] Bhaskar acknowledges three differences between the social and the natural sciences. As opposed to natural structures, social structures do not exist independently of the activities they affect, nor do they exist independently of people’s conceptions. They are also subject to change to a far greater extent than natural structures. It would also be an error to interpret Bhaskar’s naturalist outlook as a carte blanche for reductionism, as if the social realm can be interpreted in natural science terms. Like Durkheim and Boutroux, critical realists tend to assume that, while laws applicable to more simple domains of reality also affect more complex ones, the latter cannot be reduced to aggregates of the former. Every domain has a complexity of its own that cannot be captured simply by laws of a lesser order.” [Patrick Baert. Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2005. Page 96.]

“The idea of ontological unity was quickly abandoned [with the demise of the Vienna Circle], but falsificationists and critical realists further developed the search for methodological unity. While recognizing essential differences between the social and the natural sciences, both [Karl] Popper and [Roy] Bhaskar have searched for what these fields of inquiry methodologically have in common ….” [Patrick Baert, “Towards a Pragmatist-Inspired Philosophy of Social Science.” Acta Sociologica. Volume 48, number 3, September 2005. Pages 191-203.]

“Patrick Baert has written an ambitious and provocative book [Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism]. He tells us that he had two objectives. The first is ‘to advance a new approach to [philosophy of the social sciences] that is indebted to American pragmatism.’ In brief, once ‘foundationalism’ and ‘naturalism’ are rejected, we can acknowledge for social science a diversity of ‘cognitive interests,’ including ‘self-knowledge’, and a pluralism of ‘method.’ To my knowledge, this is an entirely novel proposal, both in making self-knowledge an important goal of research in the social sciences, and in seeking to ground this in pragmatism.” [Peter Manicas in Jamie Morgan, Peter Manicas, and Patrick Baert, “Debate: A social theory dialogue between Peter Manicas and Patrick Baert.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 7, issue 2, 2008. Pages 235-275.]

“This understanding of science [‘invariantly true’ statements] is what I, following Roy Bhaskar and Rom Harré, will call empiricism. It takes the empirical world, the world of experienced occurrences, to be the object of scientific investigation and eschews any appeal to underlying causes and natural necessities as unscientific ‘metaphysics.’ …

“… the empiricism which is at the root of the debate about power is primarily an ontological doctrine about the nature of causality and the aim of scientific explanation.… [T]hrough behavioralism, political scientists have accepted this without questioning the ontology of empiricism. Realist philosophy of science involves a critique of this ontology.”

[Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Beyond the Three Faces of Power: A Realist Critique.” Polity. Volume 20, number 1, autumn 1987. Pages 4-31.]

“… on the realist view, it is not necessary to subscribe to a mystical notion of the spirit in order to reject an equally reified understanding of social structures, which do historically precede particular human subjects, but are not given by God.

“History is possible, on the realist view, because, while human subjectivity is constituted by given forms of social life, it is not reducible to them. This is simply another way of asserting the Enlightenment claim that human beings as such have certain species characteristics, certain needs (e.g., biological, sexual) and certain powers (e.g., productive, linguistic, psychological, reflexive). These characteristics are not transcendental in the sense of existing always and forever. They are historically evolved, and we know about them through the inquiries of modern biology, psychology, anthropology, and so on. These characteristics are not essences, and they do not constitute the ‘foundation’ of history if by this we mean a necessary inclination toward a particular end, understood in either deontological or historicist terms. They are simply the emergent properties of humans that are the preconditions of human social practice.”

[Jeffrey C. Isaac, “On the Subject of Political Theory.” Political Theory. Volume 15, number 4, November 1987. Pages 639-645.]

“Every process of becoming involves the determinate absenting of the old in favour of the determination of the new, and this is at the core of the dialectical sense of natural necessity that has come to constitute Bhaskar’s newly developed theory of being.” [Alan Norrie. Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 15.]

“I will … sketch a ‘difficult’ relationship between legal and ethical justice in the area of international justice …. This links up with my interest in the relation between an ideal, displaced ethics and the nature of law in modernity, showing some affinity with Jacques Derrida’s view of justice as deconstruction, while drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist account of dialectic. The result is a conception of guilt or responsibility that delivers a sense of justice, albeit in a difficult form.” [Alan Norrie, “Justice on the Slaughter-Bench: The Problem of War Guilt in Arendt and Jaspers.” New Criminal Law Review: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal. Volume 11, number 2, spring 2008. Pages 187-231.]

“The book under review is Alan Norrie’s first monograph in ten years. For the first time in Norrie’s career, it is not a critical text on criminal justice, but a work of philosophy. It is the result of some 30 years of engagement with the ‘critical realism’ of Roy Bhaskar, and of a year’s sabbatical leave in which Norrie wrestled with Bhaskar’s Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. Without doubt, this is the best introduction to Bhaskar’s mature thought, and a significant intellectual contribution in its own right.” [Bill Bowring, “Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice.” Journal of Law and Society. Volume 37, number 3, September 2010. Pages 531-537.]

“It is important … to distinguish between trivial and genuine relativism. Trivial relativism is a thesis about diversity. It is consistent with realism. What is meant here by diversity is that there exist, for example, different knowledge-claims about the same state of affairs, or that there are different systems of meanings (or, more broadly, language), different methodologies world-views, paradigms, criteria of justification, schemes of classification, etc. What we claim to know, then, might be relative to a socio-linguistic framework or paradigm. Our epistemic values, and what we mean by certain expressions, might be similarly relative. In these cases, realism is not threatened – if such variations are related to framework, paradigm, society, culture, time, place, personal conviction, etc., then this is a fact, an absolute and fully objective (social) fact.…

“…the requirements for genuine relativism are as follows:

“… Presumably [Roy] Bhaskar intends his version of ‘epistemic relativism’ to be of the trivial kind ….”

[Fiona J. Hibberd, “Relativism versus realism – all but a specious dichotomy.” History of the Human Sciences. Volume 14, number 3, August 2001. Pages 102-107.]

“A critique of the scientific method does not necessarily have to discard causality altogether, however. Rather, one may argue for a different kind of causality …. I want to suggest here an approach based on critical realism, which, in my view, seeks to reconcile some of the concerns of interpretist, post-positivist approaches with a realist ontology, but is critical of positivism as a philosophy.” [Benedikt Korf, “Cargo Cult Science, Armchair Empiricism and the Idea of Violent Conflict.” Third World Quarterly. Volume 27, number 3, 2006. Pages 459-476.]

“We argue, that minimally, a reliance on methodologies that can accommodate process and complex open systems analysis, will be required to pursue the much needed research into the particularities of the social and political processes that shape the complexity of real interests embedded in strategical power relationships which influence the State in its unfolding roles in relating to the society, to enable a Caribbean creole development.…

“For our part we have found the philosophical and methodological perspectives couched under Critical realism, which have been introduced by Roy Bhaskar to be enabling of this way of conceiving of the world.”

[Patricia Northover and Michaeline A. Crichlow, “Beyond Survival: Rethinking Strategies for ‘Sustainable Economic Growth’ in the Caribbean.” Social and Economic Studies. Volume 54, number 3, September 2005. Pages 247-274.]

“We contrast Unity Temple by Frank Lloyd Wright—a building that challenged the accepted practices of ecclesiastical design in the architectural profession—with the most prominent churches during the same period. We find two distinct legitimation processes—institutional evangelism where creators express their identity and generate novel practices versus adaptive emulation where adopters focus on prestigious others and emulate their established practices. We reveal that actors engaged in institutional evangelism and adaptive emulation, employing institutional work and leveraging ideas, materials and identities to effect, transform, and maintain institutions. Our comparative cases show the key role of materiality, particularly collective identity markers, in institutional work and institutional processes.…

“Critical realism guides our methods. It is an ontology that sees structures and the mechanisms through which they are generated as being fundamental to the constitution of our natural and social reality …. We use our data to illuminate processes and generative mechanisms of how and why change occurs by examining sequences of events to reveal linkages among context and action …. By integrating our empirical findings and theoretical insights into a comprehensive narrative, we shed light on institutional work.”

[Candace Jones and Felipe G. Massa, “From Novel Practice to Consecrated Exemplar: Unity Temple as a Case of Institutional Evangelizing.” Organization Studies. Volume 34, number 8, 2013. Pages 1099-1136.]

“This paper explores potential new directions for a sociology linked more to Asian social theory and to new forms of knowledge emerging from ecology and the new social movements than to its older foundations in Western philosophy and conceptions of society. It suggests that there is a route beyond the trajectory of modernist and postmodernist social thinking and it calls into question the anthropocentric, Cartesian and dualistic assumptions of most conventional sociology. It does so by exploring the possible relationships between sociology and the existential issues thrown up by Asian philosophical and religious traditions, and in particular Buddhism, and the in many ways parallel arguments of Deep Ecology.….

“… As the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar attempts to demonstrate as an alternative to the rationalist aridity of much mainstream Anglo-Saxon philosophy, the roles of self-realisation and spirituality in life are not marginal but lie at the centre of peoples’ existential engagement with the indeterminacies at the heart of life, the elusiveness of existence and the role of ‘chance’ in shaping actual individual biographies and social change ….”

[John Clammer, “Sociology and Beyond: Towards A Deep Sociology.” Asian Journal of Social Science. Volume 37, number 3, 2009. Pages 332-346.]

“If attachment is the root of suffering and power is the expression of attachment and the overcoming of attachment (rooted itself is a false conception of the self and the per manence of external ‘reality’) is the cure, then we see in Buddhism both a radical critique of power and a model for social practice vastly different from that promoted by Western social and political theory … excepting perhaps those on the libertarian or religious fringes usually excluded from academic discussion or attention, yet which prove on closer examination to be the basis of many social movements from the ‘New Age’ through liberation theologies to deep ecology.” [John Clammer, “Beyond Power: Alternative Conceptions of Being and the (Asian) Reconstitution of Social Theory.” Asian Journal of Social Science. Volume 33, number 1, 2005. Pages 62-76.]

“On the one hand, he [Theodor Adorno] shows that Critical Realists are right to be concerned about objectivity, since truth can be traced to the needs of subjects who are also part of the objective world. Because truth involves such needs, however, it is best understood as normative rather than simply in terms of scientific activity. This means that, on the other hand, post-positivists have been right to concern themselves with the normative implications of epistemological matters. However, because, for Adorno, truth is to be explained in terms of the indebtedness of subjectivity to objectivity, the emphasis on intersubjectivity sustained by the epistemic understanding of truth is problematic, as Critical Realists recognise.” [Matthew Fluck, “Truth, Values and the Value of Truth in Critical International Relations Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Volume 39, number 2, 2010. Pages 259-278.]

“The thesis considers whether the work of Critical Realists in IR [international relations], who have advocated the scientific pursuit of objective truth, might offer a solution. However, whilst they rightly reintroduce the subject-object relationship to critical IR, Critical Realists lapse into a scientism as a result of which they reject legitimate post-positivist claims about the inherent normativity and practicality of truth. The thesis introduces Theodor Adorno’s materialist theory of truth as a way of combining post-positivists’ normative concerns with the realists’ emphasis on the subject-object relationship. On this view, truth is a matter of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity because it is matter of the needs and practices of partly objective human subjects. It is, therefore, both objective and normative.” [Matthew Fluck. The hardest service: conceptions of truth in critical international thought. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University. Aberystwyth, Wales. October, 2010. Page 4.]

“Adaptation pathways are increasingly being used as a foresight tool to help guide the implementation of climate change adaptation and deliberate transformation. This paper applies a pathways lens as a hindsight tool to provide new understanding about past change and adaptation relevant for improving future adaptation pathways approaches. Four case studies of past adaptations to change are examined: Solomon Islands communities, Canadian forest-dependent communities, a Transylvanian village, and responses to climate adaptation policies in Australia.…

“In these case studies researchers generally took epistemological positions that acknowledge the subjective experience of the participants whilst also recognising a degree of causality between responses to change and the way certain actions or outcomes are reinforced. This position is perhaps most similar to critical realism that acknowledges human agents as active mediators of social structures, existence of an observable reality (e.g. physical objects) but that processes of change are socially constructed and interpreted through discourse …. Such positions view social structures as realities that can be modified and sustained by agents (people) who reflexively acknowledge and deliberate the relevance or importance of those structures and culture to either maintain or transform them ….”

[Ioan Fazey, Russell M. Wise, Christopher Lyona, Claudia Cámpeanu, Peter Moug, and Tammy E. Davies, “Past and future adaptation pathways.” Climate and Development. Volume 8, issue 1, 2016. Pages 26-44.]

“Critical realism (CR) sees the world as an open system with emergent properties; … but there are two things that a critical realist needs to consider. First, what the world is all about, and second how we can know about it. When we are unaware about the facts, also termed as the epistemological fallacy, CR suggests investigating issues in depth before could we form our opinion about them.…

“Basically CR is a philosophical orientation to inquiry from ‘realist’ ontology perspective, meaning, there is something more that can be known over and above the knowing process.”

[Chaitanya Niphadkar. Building Organizational Leadership: Leadership through Learning and Effective Organizational Development Interventions. Chennai, India: Notion Press. 2016. Pages 176-177.]

“Logistics as open systems of natural and social structures

“The CR [critical realist] position views the social world as open systems … in which extrinsic and intrinsic conditions of closure are not met. Intrinsic conditions for closure are met when the objects’ causal powers and liabilities are constant, while extrinsic conditions for closure are met when external contingent elements are kept constant …. The interpretation of logistics as open systems below relies on the CR view structure and agency ….

“The CR claims that social activity is embedded in material circumstances not reducible to symbols, meanings and conceptions …. This is more evident in logistics than in other disciplines, due to the physical orientation as explained above.”

[Jesper Aastrup and Árni Halldórsson, “Epistemological role of case studies in logistics: A critical realist perspective.” International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management. Volume 38, number 10, 2008. Pages 746-763.]

“Arguing for morals and ethics as primary criteria (or perhaps the ‘everything goes’ view) in logistics is less likely to be taken seriously than the alternatives (trustworthiness and craftsmanship). The latter represent a relatively less dramatic change compared to the conventional view. This is related to the second reason that these criteria are somewhat inspired by the correspondence idea of quality, and thus some form of realism. Even though this may not be possible in any absolute sense, it is our personal belief that some correspondence with ‘reality’ is meaningful. This is due to our personal presumptions, which may be termed neo-realistic ….” [Árni Halldórsson and Jesper Aastrup, “Quality criteria for qualitative inquiries in logistics.” European Journal of Operational Research. Volume 144, issue 2, 2003. Pages 321-332.]

“The critical realist explanation of the diffusion of international norms of sexual non-discrimination advanced in this article consists of three interrelated components: structural-agential interaction, contentious discursive interaction, and power relations. From a critical realist perspective we can see that particular state actions are the outcome or result of a historical sequence of reciprocal structure-agency interaction involving changes in both international and domestic conditions. At any particular point in time, structural-agential interaction regarding systemic norms of sexual non-discrimination results either in the elaboration of state legislation and public policy or in the preservation of existing domestic legal and policy practices.” [Lynn Savery, “Women’s Human Rights and Changing State Practices.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 4, issue 1, April 2005. Pages 89-111.]

“Our new theory employs the lens of critical realism because in our view, common constructivist perspectives such as structuration theory or actor network theory have limited our understanding of technology as a mediator of organizational change. Using a critical realist perspective, our theory explains the process of change as a three-stage cycle in which the ostensive, performative, and material aspects of organizational elements interact differently in each stage.…

“… [Margaret S.] Archer’s … critical realist theory of social change involves cycles of three phases, which we use in our theory of technology-mediated organizational change, namely, (1) structural conditioning, the preexisting structural properties that are the consequence of past actions, followed by (2) social interaction, during which agents engage with, and are constrained and enabled by, the preexisting structural conditions, followed by (3) structural elaboration/reproduction, the modification of previous structural properties and the introduction of new ones or the reenforcing of existing structures. While social interaction is continuous, at any moment the emergent structure depends on past activities, not on the actions of current agents. Agents in turn are shaped and reshaped as they engage with the structures they confront, but did not create ….”

[Olga Volkoff, Diane M. Strong, and Michael B. Elmes, “Technological embeddedness and organizational change.” Organization Science. Volume 18, number 5, September–October 2007. Pages 832-848.]

“Despite my disagreement with [Roy] Bhaskar on this point [the repudiation of Hume’s ‘law,’ i.e., that one cannot move from facts to values], I do discern an emancipatory impulse in the social sciences, and more generally in the sciences. Ironically, I discern it as part of valuing neutrality-in-application. This value is actually not highly manifested in scientific practices.… Neutrality, where products of scientific activity are available in principle to serve more or less even-handedly projects of interest to all actually competing, viable value outlooks, is only approachable if scientific institutions as a whole support research conducted under a multiplicity of strategies.” [Hugh Lacey, “Explanatory Critique and Emancipatory Movements.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 1, November 2002. Pages 7-31.]

“The notion of universalizability becomes central to the development of [Roy] Bhaskar’s dialectic of human emancipation …. This dialectic of universalizability derives from our objective common being as human beings, and from the critical realist commitment to moral realism and ethical naturalism—in brief, to the derivation of values from facts. [Branwen Gruffydd Jones, “The Massive Presence of the Past and the Outside: Presences, Absences and Possibilities for Emancipation in the Current Global Condition.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 1, issue 2, May 2003. Pages 35-60.]

“The realist theory of social ontology provides the basis for exposing the multidimensional qualities of racial oppression, encompassing both discursive and structural aspects. This framework is consistent with the arguments developed by Critical Race Theory regarding the relationship between race and property – in critical realist terms, the social relations which structure societal interaction with nature and configure the distribution of social power.” [Branwen Gruffydd Jones, “Race in the Ontology of International Order.” Political Studies. Volume 56, 2008. Pages 907-927.]

“I have indicated that in the construction of a knowledge of the text, it is necessary to employ at least two conceptions of causality, or two forms of explanation. The most rigorous form of the ‘new realism,’ the transcendental deduction employed by [Roy] Bhaskar, indicates much the same conclusion. Bhaskar’s method is to take an existing practice—experimental science in the case of the natural sciences, social practices in the case of the social—and to deduce what the world must be like in order for it to be possible. In the case of the social sciences, he comes to the conclusion that the social world of enduring structures is different from the natural world because its structures do not exist independently of the activities they govern or the way in which they are conceptualized; at the same time, when we examine these activities and conceptualizations, we are dealing with a radically different phenomenon from social structure.” [Ian Craib, “Criticism and Ideology: Theory and Experience.” Contemporary Literature. Volume 22, number 4, autumn 1981. Pages 489-509.]

“In contrast to the empirical realist tradition often associated with [David] Hume, [Roy] Bhaskar and [Tony] Lawson define realism as acknowledging the causal tendencies, mechanisms and powers that underlie the everyday apparent world. This is the first way in which transcendental realism differs from empirical realism. Second, it contends that three different levels of reality exist – the empirical, the actual and the real – which are out of phase with each other. No tendency, mechanism or power corresponds directly with each empirical event or sequence of events, rather ‘non-isomorphism means that events are co-determined by several influences. Objects can have powers even if these powers aren’t used and tendencies can be seen as potentialities that aren’t always realised in a specific outcome.” [Daniel Robert Gay. Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism: Reflexivity and Development Economics. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). Department of Economics, University of Stirling. Stirling, Scotland. January, 2007. Page 37.]

“… social structures are ‘meaningful objects’ and their study requires hermeneutics – understanding of the agents’ self-understanding of their activities.…

“To situate the hermeneutics of causal powers within the existing democratic public sphere, we can ask what kind of rhetorical move is made when a social scientist is presenting an argument using the language of causal powers. Let me emphasise again that the question is about hermeneutics, not ontology. I am not suggesting that causal powers are only a rhetorical strategy. Rather, I am studying the invocation of causal powers as a rhetorical strategy to understand the nature of the dialogues that constitute the hermeneutics of causal powers.”

[Amit Ron, “The Hermeneutics of the Causal Powers of Meaningful Objects.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 9, issue 2, 2010. Pages 155-171.]

“I hope … to have made the case for not offering an initial definition of ‘religious education.’ I wish to avoid getting too much ‘on my plate’ that is of a specific, local, nature. I intend, in the opening stages of the book, to tackle ‘hermeneutics,’ ‘education’ and ‘religion’ in much broader terms and explore how they are mutually enlightening.” [David Aldridge. A Hermeneutics of Religious Education. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2015. Page 11.]

“[Roy] Bhaskar’s interest in spiritual questions has been accompanied by a ‘spiritual turn’ in critical realism, where other critical realist colleagues have subsequently felt encouraged to address questions in theology and the philosophy of religion …. Although [Andrew] Wright has engaged recently with the spiritual turn …, he has explicitly distanced himself from elements of Bhasksar’s metaReality, particularly Bhaskar’s claim that metaReality is ‘ontologically inclusive,’ rather than (as Wright argues) an ontologically exclusive account that is incommensurable with (for example) the claims of Trinitarian Christianity ….” [David Aldridge. A Hermeneutics of Religious Education. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2015. Page 65.]

“… relatively early on in his thinking, [Roy] Bhaskar observes that, ‘a hermeneutical circle … is a condition of any act of enquiry, whether in natural or social science, and that another … is a condition of any dialogue or intersubjective communication at all. In these senses hermeneutics is indeed, as for example [Hans-Georg] Gadamer has claimed, universal’ ….” [David Aldridge. A Hermeneutics of Religious Education. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2015. Page 68.]

“Drawing on the specific language of [Hans-Georg] Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and more explicitly on R. G. Collingwood’s discussion of the ‘logical priority of the question,’ the … of the article will advance the argument that all education involves or implies the question at an ontological level. This claim is more radical than simply the argument that appropriate questioning facilitates learning, or that the enquiry-based model best facilitates learning. Rather it holds that every educational event has as part of its essential nature the character of a question.” [David Aldridge, “The Logical Priority of the Question: R. G. Collingwood, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Enquiry-Based Learning.” Journal of Philosophy of Education. Volume 47, number 1, 2013. Pages 71-85.]

“More than 30 years ago David Farrell Krell pointed to the important contribution a phenomenology of memory could make to our understanding of the educational endeavour, drawing attention to the shared fate of memory and education at least since Plato. Krell is careful to point out the limitations of modern empirical research into the relation of memory and education, and the psychological conceptions of ‘memory as mechanism’ and ‘memory as repertory.’” [David Aldridge, “Three Epiphanic Fragments: Education and the essay in memory.” Educational Philosophy and Theory. Volume 46, number 5, 2014. Pages 512-526.]

“What we attempt to demonstrate in this paper is that the conventional paradigm is useful in eliciting the researcher’s understandings about her own work and the structure of those understandings that are not apparent in everyday life. From this perspective our work is hermeneutic. We are concerned with the significance of human understandings and their interpretation.” [David Aldridge and Gudrun Aldridge, “A personal construct methodology for validating subjectivity in qualitative research.” The Arts in Psychotherapy. Volume 23, number 3, 1996. Pages 225-236.]

“The methodological vantage point from which this article was written may be characterized as a reflexive version of critical realism. …

“… [There is] a naturalistic ontology in which the relationship between nature, human society, human knowledge in general and scientific knowledge can be seen as a system of Chinese boxes. Human society, even at its most metropolitan, is but part of nature—not an alternative to it. Similarly, human knowledge is a subset of human society, although it is a constitutive subset. While nature without humans is possible, human society without human knowledge is not.”

[Villy Søgaard, “Contingent Eclecticism.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Volume 42, issue 1, March 2012. Pages 20-39.]

“… [The] framework, which integrates cybernetics and semiotics, is called Cybersemiotics.…

“Inspired by critical realism and [Pierre] Bourdieu’s methodology I believe that we only know the surface of reality, and that it is the task of the sciences to dig deeper and look wider than where our common sense knowledge has developed to at the present stage.…

“… I have connected my view of [Charles Saunders] Peirce’s pragmaticism and second order cybernetics and showed how it establishes an alternative to radical constructivism. I am drawing on [Roy] Bhaskar’s … Critical Realism, where he is also inspired by Peirce as well as [Karl] Marx.”

[Søren Brier, “Cybersemiotics: A New Foundation for Transdisciplinary Theory of Information, Cognition, Meaning, Communication and Consciousness.” Signs. Volume 5, 2011. Pages 75-111.]

“I admit a weak realism—as [Charles Saunders] Peirce—where there are individual structures, forces and willpower in reality (Secondness) that act as constraints to our perception, but whose true nature and complexity (the dynamical object of Peirce) we can only hope to reach in an infinite distant future. This hope and intention form the regulative idea for science.” [Søren Brier, “Cybersemiotics: A Reconceptualization of the Foundation for Information Science Publication Information.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science. Volume 18, number 5, September 2001. Pages 421-427.]

“My interest in establishing a new framework is to create a third culture, transcending the incommensurability between C.P. Snow’s two cultures; science-technology versus humanistic and social science. This stance is again based on an internal and critical realism, a view beyond pragmatism, but within C.S. Peirce’s pragmaticism.” [Søren Brier, “The necessity of trans-scientific frameworks for doing interdisciplinary research – Developed from a conference paper for paradigms lost and paradigms gained: negotiating interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, Calgary, May 2001.” Kybernetes. Volume 35, number 3/4, 2006. Pages 403-425.]

“This book aims to formulate a new transdisciplinary framework based on [Charles Sanders] Peirce’s semiotics, second-order cybernetics, [Niklas] Luhmann’s systems theory, cognitive semantics, and language game theory. I apply concepts found in second-order cybernetics and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce to solve various transdisciplinary conceptual problems at the heart of cognitive science, since cybernetics was among the original contributors to modern information and communication science. I will refer to this transdisciplinary framework as ‘Cybersemiotics.’” [Søren Brier. Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press. 2008. Kindle edition.]

“[Charles Sanders] Peirce’s semiotics has in common with Critical Rationalism and Critical Realism that it understands that humans create knowledge together in an integrated mixture of language and praxis. But it is not a pure constructivism as it recognises the importance of empirical testing of theories. It further recognizes our own roots through evolution in the self-same reality we are investigating and this fact does have considerable influence on forming our scientific knowledge. It is a kind of double realism, which Peircean pragmaticism presents since it believes in a (from the observer, partly independent) reality and at the same time that the embodied observer is a product of this same reality, which thus anchors the result of scientific investigations in a realist evolutionary framework. Our ability to carry out scientific measurement and inferential theory construction is based on the basic cognitive abilities the species has developed in the phenotypic body through millions of years of evolutionary selection!” [Søren Brier, “Cybersemiotics: An Evolutionary World View Going Beyond Entropy and Information into the Question of Meaning.” Entropy. Volume 12, 2010. Pages 1902-1920.]

“… the researcher, in their research, necessarily colludes with the micropolitics of some participants and conflicts with that of others. As feminist methodology has stressed …, research relationships are also power relationships. To know the world, in critical realist perspectives, is always a practical intervention, in that we only know the world insofar as we engage with it, and we engage with it with particular, situated intentions.

“In other words, research structure and processes involve both practical organisation of social relationships (‘directive intellectual activity’) and abstract verbal statements about what is involved (‘theoretical intellectual activity’): researchers meet with some participants and not with others, in some contexts and not others, meet with them individually or in groups, in natural or ‘artificial’ situations, say some things to them and not others, ask certain questions and not others, use closed or open questions, react in certain ways, intervene in this way or that, close the process at one point or another, organise their material in one direction or another, provide more or less access to their results and give more or less scope for feedback, do different things with their findings in pursuit of particular agendas, and so on.”

[Laurence Cox. Building counter culture: the radical praxis of social movement milieux. Helsinki, Finland: Into-ebooks. 2011. Pages 132-133.]

“The flicking of a light switch, for example, is the cause of the lamp lighting in the sense that flicking ‘tips the balance of events, producing the known outcome.’ Yet clearly, a whole slew of other things like filaments, glass, plastic, metal, wire, electricity supply and so on are also causally implicated here. These other things are enabling or distal causes.…

“… I will … abstract from (distal) evolutionary-biological and psycho-neurological causal mechanisms, and focus on (proximate) social-psychological causal mechanisms.…

“By invoking distal causality here we avoid the temptation to imply, metaphorically, that the natural, practical and social world ‘reaches into the mind and throws a mental switch,’ thereby proximately causing an intention. If, however, structures and concerns are distal causes, what is the proximate cause of an agents’ intention? The proximate cause is what ‘tips the balance,’ namely the reflexive deliberation. In the process of reflexive deliberation, agents reflect upon the distal causes just noted, and subsequently arrive at an intention.”

[Steve Fleetwood, “Structure, institution, agency, habit, and reflexive deliberation.” Journal of Institutional Economics. Volume 4, number 2, August 2008. Pages 183-203.]

“The framework of critical realism, developed by Roy Bhaskar …, despite some limitations, provides a stepping stone for comprehending these contradictions within science.… The framework can be used to explain the existence of ‘constrained’ plurality in science. The very fact that objects of nature have certain innate properties (independent of human intervention) puts severe constraints on the number of acceptable explanations of natural phenomena. In this way, critical realism coalesces the transitive and intransitive aspects of science and in so doing avoids the pitfalls of the crass relativism patent in some of the more extreme readings of the social construction of science.” [Abha Sur, “Persistent Patriarchy: Theories of Race and Gender in Science.” Economic and Political Weekly. Volume 43, number 43, October 2008. Pages 73-78.]

“In understanding the process of science, I have implicitly followed the framework of ‘critical realism’ developed by Roy Bhaskar. Critical realism recognizes and reconciles ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive‘ aspects of science. According to Bhaskar, the production of knowledge is a social activity ….

“The constraints of material reality and metaphysics, the circumstances in which science is organized, the personalities of the dominant scientists, and the particular modes employed in research together mold the nature of science and scientific communities. The Raman-Born controversy illustrates the transitive process of science, where knowledge about the intransitive object (i.e., the interaction of light with crystal lattices as represented in the optical spectra) is necessarily socially produced. The structures of the optical spectra are not the points of contention; rather, it is the meanings ascribed to them that are at stake. Furthermore, the substantive contents as well as the stylistic and rhetorical forms of the controversy, when examined in their social context, demonstrate the essential unity of the rational and the irrational in the workings of science.”

[Abha Sur, “Aesthetics, Authority, and Control in an Indian Laboratory: The Raman-Born Controversy on Lattice Dynamics.” Isis. Volume 90, number 1, March 1999. Pages 25-49.]

“Starting with a distinction of two types of discourse analysis – the analysis of a discourse and discursive analysis – the article discusses an analytical genealogy of truth and knowledge production, that can fulfill both empirical and archival requirements. The model’s main purpose lies in understanding diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making in doctor-patient interactions.… In discussing the genealogical model in light of the discourse of Norbert Wiley and Margaret Archer, it will be made clear that the model, combined with a deeper understanding of the history of ideas, and a combination of archival and empirical attitude in research, is an effective tool for sociologists of knowledge and medicine.

“Norbert Wiley and Margaret Archer each included a dimension of the constitution of self into their respective analysis of the process of symbolically mediated action.…

“… When we apply this model—whether upon entering an archive as historians, engaging in ethnographic observation, or intervening as consultants—, the analytical clarity that this model provides, can help us figure out why certain problems or conflicts have emerged.”

[Alexander I. Stingl, “Truth, Knowledge, Narratives of Selves: An Account of the Volatility of Truth, the Power of Semantic Agency, and Time in Narratives of the Self.” The American Sociologist. Volume 42, number 2/3, September 2011. Pages 207-219.]

“If meaning is a central element for human being, at a variety of levels, and critical realism stresses that it is, it is still necessary not to overstate the case. Critical realism emphasises what, borrowing loosely from Freud, we can call ‘the reality principle.’ Knowledge (epistemology) is of course itself a part of the world, a subset of ontology, but, at the point where we must distinguish the two, epistemology is in an important way dependent on the broader category in which it is constellationally embedded, which it reflects and reflects upon, and with which it works.” [Alan Norrie, “Who Is ‘The Prince’?: Hegel and Marx in Jameson and Bhaskar.” Dialectical Materialism. Volume 20, number 2, 2012. Pages 75-104.]

“… the social use and development of the various means of communication—the ‘communication framework’—provides the conditions under which meaning is produced and understood.

“I use the term ‘communication framework’ rather than ‘communication structure’ because the latter more properly refers to the social use and development of a single means of communication (say, printing), in the context of all the others. In contrast, the communication framework includes a society’s entire ensemble of communication structures, and forms a partial totality consisting of these unequally weighted substructures. Moreover, the communication framework plays the central role in organizing the cultural domain and establishing certain metaphors’ dominance. The communication framework has this role because it consists of the production and dissemination of meaning, and image schemas are constitutive to meaning itself.” [Tobin Nellhaus, “From Embodiment to Agency: Cognitive Science, Critical Realism, and Communication Frameworks.” Journal of Critical Realism. Volume 3, issue 1, August 2004. Pages 103-132.]

“The field of political science has moved increasingly over the last two decades toward mechanism-based explanations of complex phenomena. This shift is related to the development of variants of scientific realism in the philosophy of science, but it has been hampered by limited understanding among political scientists of how mechanism-based explanations differ from explanations built upon earlier philosophies of science. As Peter Hall has persuasively argued …, our ontological theories of how politics works, which increasingly embrace complexity, have outrun our epistemological notions of how to study politics, which still cling to the vestiges of forms of positivism that lost favor among philosophers decades ago.” [Andrew Bennett, “The mother of all isms: Causal mechanisms and structured pluralism in International Relations theory.” European Journal of International Relations. Volume 19, number 3, 2013. Pages 459-481.]

“We have seen the limitations of the various analytical paradigms and moral discourses variously associated with the concept of social exclusion. They variously involve incomplete descriptions of the causes or features of exclusion and either imply prescriptive notions of inclusion, or remain focused on the ideological deconstruction of policies without proffering substantive recommendations. By analysing the failings of these paradigms in terms of social science methodology I have claimed that a critical realist approach to social inclusion and exclusion can be developed retaining empirical, interpretative and critical relevance.” [Dermot O’Reilly, “Social Inclusion: A Philosophical Anthropology.” Politics. Volume 25, number 2, 2005. Pages 80-88.]

“…[The] core, interactive aspect of the critical realist approach [is seen] in terms of a dialectical relationship between structure and agency, reflecting the dialectical policy network model utilised in this study. Thus, layered structures represent a nested hierarchy of action settings … that are strategically selective, in that they favour certain strategies and actors over others. They also reflect at any point in time the embodiment of past actions, which were themselves constrained or enabled by strategically-selective structures. Outcomes and structures evolve through the intended and unintended consequences of strategic agency. Importantly, critical realism’s ontology parallels new institutionalism insofar as it allows for the possibility of non-directly observable, informal institutions or structures shaping the nature of power relationships ….

“Thus, it can be seen that a critical realist philosophy has underpinned the previous discussions of policy network analysis and Garner’s application of this tool to animal research policy. It has generated a number of outstanding research questions that need to be addressed in order to furnish a more comprehensive understanding of this policy area. Those questions are both empirical and theoretical in nature, in the sense that they pertain to the need both to describe processes and outcomes in animal research policy, and also to examine phenomena and dynamics that, within the policy network conceptual framework, are said to affect evolving policy outcomes. One of the tasks that is crucial to understanding the evolution of the animal research policy network is to describe and compare the resources of relevant actors in this policy area, and thus infer deeper social, economic and political structures that cannot be directly perceived. Such deeper structures are key aspects of both the dialectical network model and the critical realist epistemology that pays attention to ‘the structural constraints within which individual[s] operate … the most important [of which] are generally the impact of differential allocation of resources. … ’”

[Dan Lyons. The Politics of Animal Experimentation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC. 2013. Pages 104-105.]

“Although there might be ‘strong essentialists’ who believe that everything has an essence, a set of properties which make each thing that thing and nothing else, it is also possible to be a moderate essentialist, arguing as above that while some things – for example, water or capitalist enterprises – have essences, others – such as conversations or gender – do not. It is dogmatic and illogical to insist that because examples of context-dependent and positional phenomena such as gender and identity are impressive that we must insist on a restrictive ontology which makes everything of this kind and refuse any claim that some things do have essences. Conversely, it would be equally dogmatic and illogical to argue that because objects like water or bureaucracies have essences, everything does. Moderate essentialism and criticisms of cases of misplaced essentialism are therefore quite compatible.” [Andrew Sayer, “Essentialism, social constructionism, and beyond.” The Sociological Review. Volume 45, issue 3, August 1997. Pages 453-487.]

“In this paper the work of Martha Nussbaum … is used as a framework for using ‘moderate essentialism’ in the study of housing ….

“Drawing on the ‘‘capabilities’’ approach, this paper examines what housing should enable people to be capable of. The capabilities approach is synonymous with the work of Amartya Sen … and others, and is here particularly explored through the work of Martha Nussbaum …. The paper especially draws on Nussbaum’s argument that there may be ‘essential’ functions (capabilities) that humans value and require to live a ‘well lived’ human life ….

“[Andrew] Sayer argues ‘things’ that are socially constructed, such as institutions or language, can still have features that are essential to them. Moderate essentialism only requires the identification of what is ‘essential’ at that point in time for that object to exist as such. Identifying essential components does not have to presuppose a natural order or the hand of God at play.”

[Carol McNaughton Nicholls, “Housing, Homelessness and Capabilities.” Housing, Theory and Society. Volume 27, issue 1, January 2010. Pages 23-41.]

“How is a theory of resistance to discursive power possible without a concept of essentialism? This article has argued that it is not. It has shown not only that the theoretical devices used by post-Foundational writers to achieve such a goal contain essentialist notions of both the self and of discourse, but also that any theorization that denied this would be out of step with depictions of humans as reflexive agents capable of resistance and action. Essentialism provides a theoretical basis, not only to discuss how the powers of discourse construct social identity, but equally how the powers of a reflexive agent can resist these. An important subsequent question asks, how can we use essentialism without incurring the consequences of reductionism evident in neo-colonial or patriarchal texts? The article proposes the use of the emergent and stratified ontology found in critical realism.” [Joe O’Mahoney, “Embracing essentialism: A realist critique of resistance to discursive power.” Organization. Volume 19, number 6, 2011. Pages 723-741.]

“First, the theory of non-linear dynamics allows us to describe and classify the complex behavior of these kinds of systems. Second, the theory of chaos allows us to see an order and universality that underlie these complexities.…

“In exploring these issues, I will steer a course midway between those positivists who would use chaos theory to revivify an exhausted scientism and those postmodernists who reject quantification ‘on principle.’ My middle course is grounded in the philosophical work of the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar ….

“… Bhaskar’s ‘critical naturalism’ is especially sensitive to the differences between the world of nature and the social realm.”

[Aleksandar Halmi, “Chaos and non-linear dynamics: New methodological approaches in the social sciences and social work practice.” International Social Work. Volume 46, number 1, January 2003. Pages 83-101.]

“Sociology and capabilities, as two compatible, intertwining, normative modes of understanding the lived experience of mental distress have combined to provide a multilayered interpretation of participants’ descriptions of the material internal experience of distress, how these experiences affect and are affected by direct interactions in the social world, the multiple ways in which agency is used in this context to negotiate social structures, and the influence of underpinning social structures, powers and mechanisms shaping the dominant social order, virtually beyond perception. Together these laminates, which combine a material base to existence with almost imperceptible shaping through social structures, give tendencies to social justice outcomes, and must in the end be integrated using a critical realist analysis so providing a least reductive model of the determinants that shape social justice for people with mental distress. This is the theoretical foundation of a critical capabilities model of mental distress.” [Richard Brunner. Surviving, thriving and being outside: applying the capabilities approach to reconceptualise the social justice experiences of people with mental distress. Ph.D. thesis (U.S. English, dissertation). University of Glasgow. Glasgow, Scotland. April, 2015. Page 297.]

“We aim to contribute to the development of the emerging theory of network management by integrating notions from the Industrial Network Approach, strategic management, and the Dynamic Capabilities View.…

“… our core proposition [is] that strategic nets having different goals and based on different value systems – in which the nature of knowledge has an important role – require different capabilities. In this sense, our theory development approach follows the contingency perspective embraced by proponents of critical realism ….”

[Kristian Möller and Senja Svahn, “Managing Strategic Nets: A Capability Perspective.” Marketing Theory. Volume 3, number 2, June 2003. Pages 209-234.]

“… I shall … suggest how we might begin to develop a philosophical anthropology in which an argument about the desirability and possibility of eudaimonia might be grounded today. Development will be effected with the help of [Roy] Bhaskar’s philosophy of the experimental natural sciences. The return to Bhaskar’s work on the natural sciences is prompted by the centrality which this work allocates to the distinction between potential and actual powers; a distinction which, unfortunately, Bhaskar fails to take up in relation to the question of human powers in his philosophy of the social sciences. The reconfiguration of Bhaskar’s philosophy of natural science takes as its theoretical raw materials his treatment of the concept of lawfulness, his use of the distinctions between open and closed systems and, as noted earlier, between powers and their actualisation.” [Kathryn Dean, “Agency and Dialectics: What Critical Realism Can Learn From Althusser’s Marxism.” Realism, Philosophy and Social Science. Kathryn Dean, Jonathan Joseph, John Michael Roberts, and Colin Wight, editors. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2006. Page 131.]

“Roy Bhaskar has critiqued what he describes as the ‘epistemic fallacy,’ the notion that ontological issues can be reduced to, or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge (epistemology) ….

“We can … conclude by defending anthropology as an empirical science, and following Bhaskar, suggest that it is concrete (in the sense of [Edmund] Husserl), hermeneutical (in the sense of [Wilhelm] Dilthey) and historical (in the sense of [Karl] Marx), and that social phenomena can therefore be understood through interpretive understanding, causal analysis and historical reason ….”

[Brian Morris, “In Defence of Realism and Truth: Critical reflections on the anthropological followers of Heidegger.” Critique of Anthropology. Volume 17, number 3, September 1997. Pages 313-340.]

“… [An] activist research stance has entailed a theoretical paradigm shift, a departure away from postmodern or poststructuralist conceptions of language toward more critical realist orientations. Although helpful in calling attention to power dynamics and disrupting singular conceptions of ‘truth,’ some aspects of postmodernism, such as its dogmatic skepticism about objectivity and privileging of indeterminacy, have been ill suited for projects of transformation.…

“… the caution for activist-oriented research is to retain a sense of humility and self-criticism, what realists refer to as a fallibalistic attention to precision and error, so as not to bend the stick too far back in the other direction of reifying certainty and standardizing new, albeit equally dogmatic, educational orthodoxies.”

[Lalitha Vasudevan and Gerald Campano, “The Social Production of Adolescent Risk and the Promise of Adolescent Literacies.” Review of Research in Education. Volume 33, number 1, March 2009. Pages 310-353.]

“Critical theories are dialectical and realistic and axiological. That critical thinking is still very important and influential today can, for example, be seen in the prominence that Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectical Critical Realism has gained in recent years ….

“Why is a Critical Internet Theory needed, and not just Critical Internet Research? If a theory is understood as a logically interconnected set of systematic hypotheses that describe worldly phenomena and the latter’s foundation, structure, causes, effects and dynamics, and empiricism as the observation and collection of data for constructing systematic and reflected knowledge, then one arrives at two levels of science.… The task of Critical Internet Theory is to discuss how the fundamental concepts that characterize modern society and its negation can be applied to the relationship of Internet and society so that they function as critical categories.”

[Christian Fuchs, “Information and Communication Technologies and Society: A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of the Internet.” European Journal of Communication. Volume 24, number 1, March 2009. Pages 69-87.]

“This article re-connects with structure–agency debates to explore the development of the social work assistant role.…

“… Re-connecting with the structure–agency debate and, in particular, adopting a framework rooted in the main tenets of critical realism provides the basis for such an analysis.…

“The more precise application of this framework to the development of the social work assistant role suggests that it unfolds along the following lines. The stimulus for the morphogenetic cycle is a set of government policies designed to ‘modernize’ the public services.”

[Ian Kessler, Stephen Bach, and Paul Heron, “Understanding assistant roles in social care.” Work, Employment & Society. Volume 20, number 4, December 2006. Pages 667-685.]

“This case study argues that a narrative approach to social work practice encompasses critical realist perspectives by recognising that materiality and institutional power have extra-discursive factors in the context of service users’ lives. In adopting an anti-oppressive approach, the social worker addresses questions about the relationship between our physical and social environments, what we do and say about them, and how we live within them ….

“Adopting a critical realist perspective, a social worker might conclude that this woman is being oppressed by her material conditions. The woman would certainly agree that she is being oppressed, but she thinks that ‘being a wife’ is informing her decisions to act as she does. Narrative social work would involve both the social worker and the service user in treating each other’s narrative as of equal value. The assumptions that underwrite both narratives, one about caring as a woman and one about oppression, could then be engaged in further conversations.”

[Karen Dawn Roscoe, Alexander M. Carson, and Lolo Madoc-Jones, “Narrative social work: conversations between theory and practice.” Journal of Social Work Practice. Volume 25, issue 1, March 2011. Pages 47-61.]

“… a critical realist perspective allows us to rethink positivist and conventionalist assumptions about the fact/value relation.…

“… Toward a Sociology of Social Work …

“Some sociologists, organizational theorists, and philosophers have argued that the further one is removed from the everyday world of practice the further one gets from what is real, what is, what can be experienced, and what is possible in human activity …. We would add to this that the more one accepts or imposes an artificial distinction between fact and value (i.e., is and ought), the more one is removed not only from the actual world of practice but also from the things that matter most to people ….”

[Jeffrey Longhofer and Jerry Floersch, “The Coming Crisis in Social Work: Some Thoughts on Social Work and Science.” Research on Social Work Practice. Volume 22, number 5, 2012. Pages 499-519.]

“What counts as good, legitimate, valid research should be judged on the basis of criteria internal to the specific project and its subject matter, that is, a logic of reconstruction – not in terms of compliance with a set of pre-established rules of scientific method in the singular, which remain entirely external to the specific subject matters and research questions at hand, that is, a logic of subsumtion. Indeed, when it comes to questions of research design, it would be unfair to judge a project applying advanced statistics on the basis of hermeneutic criteria.” [Benjamin Herborth, “Theorising theorising: Critical Realism and the quest for certainty.” Review of International Studies. Volume 38, issue 01, January 2012. Pages 235-251.]

“The critical realist approach to institutional dynamics in East Asia advanced here seeks to provide a conceptualization of social emergence in the international system so as to study regional institutions and their emergence from a truly novel perspective. Introducing the concept of emergence to IR [international relations] theory contributes to reflections on what regional institutions actually are, in other words, to tackling the crucial question of ‘whether they have an ontological status apart from the activity of those producing them’ …. This includes thinking about the relationship between a collective and its individuals: Emergence implies that despite social phenomena being created by the collective actions of individuals, they are not merely reducible to those actions …. The controversy surrounding emergence is actually based on this very hallmark, ‘for viewing macro phenomena as both dependent on and autonomous from their micro bases seems metaphysically problematic: inconsistent or illegitimate or unacceptably mysterious’ …. This book advances the debate by offering up a strong form of emergence that is based on critical realist ontology, and that stresses causal emergence and the relational organization of emergent phenomena.” [Maren Wagner. Social Emergence in International Relations: Institutional Dynamics in East Asia. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature. 2016. Pages 11-12.]

“This article aims to stimulate debate among scholars of work and employment on the feasibility and desirability of a left-radical organic public sociology of work in which the researcher is overtly partisan and active on the side of the marginalized and labour.…

“We … discuss how the concept of the organic intellectual finds contemporary expression in the established methodological tradition of action research, especially its emancipatory-oriented variant, participatory action research (PAR). By drawing on PAR’s practices and critical realism’s materialist epistemology, partisan organic scholars can ensure their research is rigorous, valid and representative through being reflexive, accountable to agents and relevant to their struggles.”

[Paul Brook and Ralph Darlington, “Partisan, scholarly and active: arguments for an organic public sociology of work.” Work, Employment & Society. Volume 27, number 2, April 2013. Pages 232-243.]