Searching for realism, structure and agency in Actor Network Theory

Superficially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) and critical realism (CR) are radically opposed research traditions. Written from a realist perspective, this paper asks whether there might be a basis for finding common ground between these two traditions. It looks in turn at the questions of realism, structure, and agency, analysing the differences between the two perspectives and seeking to identify what each might learn from the other. Overall, the paper argues that there is a great deal that realists can learn from actor network theory; yet ANT remains stunted by its lack of a depth ontology. It fails to recognize the significance of mechanisms, and of their dependence on emergence, and thus lacks both dimensions of the depth that is characteristic of critical realism's ontology. This prevents ANT from recognizing the role and powers of social structure; but on the other hand, realists would do well to heed ANT's call for us to trace the connections through which structures are constantly made and remade. A lack of ontological depth also underpins ANT's practice of treating human and non-human actors symmetrically, yet this remains a valuable provocation to sociologists who neglect non-human entities entirely.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

A tale of two ontologies: an immanent critique of critical realism

In this article is it argued that critical realism has two mutually exclusive definitions of ontology. Ontology is defined as both a fallible interpretation of reality and as a definitive definition of a reality beyond our knowledge claims. A slippage in meaning occurs from the former to the latter, as critical realists try to justify the claim that their ontology ought to supply the terms of reference for all scientific research. Rather than defend an alternative ontology, it is argued that ontology needs to be defined in terms of fallible interpretations of social reality. This necessitates the revision and replacement of ontological theories in the course of an on‐going critical dialogue about reality, and precludes the use of one fixed ontology to supply the terms of reference for the sciences. ²     

Disability studies after the ontological turn: a return to the material world and material bodies without a return to essentialism

Over recent decades, poststructuralist theories have allowed critical disability scholars to challenge essentialist understandings of the human species and to contest discourses which divide humans into ‘normal’/‘impaired’ subjects with respect to a wide – and ever expanding – range of corporeal and cognitive traits. For critics, however, these theories are deeply flawed. By focusing primarily on language, poststructuralism shifts our critical attention away from the often harsh material realities of life for disabled people. This has led some to turn to critical realism and to effectively re-essentialise impairment. In this article, I wish to consider an alternative approach. I suggest that the recent ‘ontological turn’ in social theory has seen the emergence of new-materialist approaches – including Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of assemblage and methodology of assemblage analysis – which allow us to consider disability as a material phenomenon without a return to essentialism.     

Critical realism in empirical research: employing techniques from grounded theory methodology

Whilst critical realism (CR) is becoming recognised as a significant meta-theory for the social sciences, there is little guidance on how to produce research which is consistent with its ontological and epistemological assumptions. This article contributes to an emerging discussion about how CR can be applied, drawing on an example of a qualitative study that has sought to understand and explain the causes of unmet need amongst a group of rural labourers in Tunisia . Using this study as an illustration, I show how techniques from grounded theory methodology can be usefully harnessed in the data collection, coding and analysis stages of a research project that adopts a CR philosophical and methodological framework. I illustrate how an ‘abductive’ variant of grounded theory allowed drawing on pre-existing theoretical knowledge throughout the research stages; whilst open and axial coding techniques could be harnessed for identifying and postulating CR causal mechanisms. This article should be of interest to students and researchers involved with grounded theory and applied critical realism.     

Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins: Culture,Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New World

In this article, I undertake a critical analysis of the writings that contributed to set up the foundation for eclipsing Amerindian social dynamics and their complexity. Starting from a presentation of Jesuit Jos de Acosta's classifications of the indigenous sociopolitical forms, I show that both the evolutionist and discontinuist perspective still in vogue among some Americanists and the positivist approach of some borderlands historians tend to perpetuate a conquest culture (the material and symbolic power relation of domination) while concealing indigenous social dynamics and adaptation strategies. I end the article by presenting some of the perspectives and concepts developed by a new historical anthropology that seek to re-politicize the production of social and cultural differences otherwise considered as natural.     

Discourse or Dialogue? Habermas, the Bakhtin Circle, and the question of concrete utterances

This article argues that the Bakhtin Circle presents a more realistic theory of concrete dialogue than the theory of discourse elaborated by Habermas. The Bakhtin Circle places speech within the ??concrete whole utterance?? and by this phrase they mean that the study of everyday language should be analyzed through the mediations of historical social systems such as capitalism. These mediations are also characterized by a determinate set of contradictions??the capital-labor contradiction in capitalism, for example??that are reproduced in unique ways in more concrete forms of life (the state, education, religion, culture, and so on). Utterances always dialectically refract these processes and as such are internal concrete moments, or concrete social forms, of them. Moreover, new and unrepeatable dialogic events arise in these concrete social forms in order to overcome and understand the constant dialectical flux of social life. But this theory of dialogue is different from that expounded by Habermas, who tends to explore speech acts by reproducing a dualism between repeatable and universal ??abstract?? discursive processes (commonly known as the ideal speech situation) and empirical uses of discourse. These critical points against Habermas are developed by focusing on six main areas: sentences and utterances; the lifeworld and background language; active versus passive understandings of language; validity claims; obligation and relevance in language; and dialectical universalism.     

If it didn't exist we'd have to invent it … Further reflections on the ontological status of the state

In this brief response to Bob Jessop's probing yet sympathetic critique, I clarify further the ‘as if realist’ political ontology of the state. I suggest that critical realism's appeal to the ontological stratification of social reality and to the logic of retroduction are the principal stumbling blocks for ‘as if realists’, that the appeal to state power(s) as distinct from the state as real cannot circumvent the ‘as if realist’ ontological objection to the state as real since both remain conceptual abstractions, but that there is a natural affinity between the strategic‐relational approach developed by Jessop and others and the ‘as if realist’ ontology of the state that I here elucidate.     

The Systems Theory Concept of Disability: one is not born a disabled person, one is observed to be one

The article aims at the theoretical development of the concept of disability, with particular reference to its integration with social systems theory. The concept of disability is discussed by suggesting that the predominant models within disability research cannot communicate with each other because they represent different observation points, all of them describing disability from within a specific system. It is the thesis of this article that the distinction between individual and society, which constitute the basis of the well-known scheme of observed differences between impairment, disability and 'handicap', is a distinction based on nai¨ve realism and obscures the problems within disability research. In line with a long tradition within sociology, social system theory rejects the belief that our concepts are representations of reality: the categories and concepts we use are distinctions that are system specific. It is through those distinctions that the phenomenon is observed. This implies that observations are not absolute but relative to the observer's perspective.     

The embodied mind: Contrasting visions

This article presents a critical examination and discussion of 2 arguments in support of the embodied mind position as developed within the philosophical literature of the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm. Employing the dialectical Materialist approach of Evald Ilyenkov (1997), closely allied to the cultural‐historical and activity theory traditions, the article argues that neither Lakoffs cases of reasoning from “typical examples” nor Thelen and Smith's (1994) example of dynamic cognition undermine a Materialist perspective on cognition as a process of knowing the objective properties of an independently existing reality.     

Searching for analytical concepts in the research process: Learning from children1

This paper addresses some methodological and theoretical issues of the role that concepts and conceptualization play in the process of analysing qualitative data. Studying children as research subjects, and reflecting upon their movement and relational dynamics in day‐care institutions in Norway, led to a critical consideration of the process of conceptualization and the concepts themselves. It is argued that reflexivity and a dialectical relationship between empirical data, theory and relevant literature are vital components in this process. This is illustrated and discussed in relation to two main approaches of analysing empirical data: a top–down approach, where established theoretical concepts are applied; and a bottom–up approach, where theoretical concepts grounded in empirical data are generated. Two concepts from ethnographic research in day‐care centres are introduced to illustrate both approaches and to illustrate the effort of avoiding adult‐centricism.     

Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics,nature, and the world-historical method

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature.     

Charles Tilly,German Historicism,and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.” The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time” and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.     

Not Just a Matter of Criminal Justice: States,Institutions, and North American Drug Policy

This article proposes a theoretical approach to illicit-drug policy that emphasizes politics and institutions, as an alternative to dominant perspectives emphasizing social control. After revealing conceptual links between drug-control policies and those of social provision, I describe a typology of drug policies based on the division of labor among the institutions responsible for implementing the legislated agenda. I then develop a theoretical argument that approaches drug policy as social policy, employing concepts of institutional reach and policy linkages. In the concluding section I use this approach to compare drug policies in the United States and Canada after 1980.     

Citing history

ABSTRACT

Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of ‘wish images’ and ‘dialectical images,’ their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women’s Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march’s route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to ‘improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.’     

Language,structure and agency: What can realist social theory offer to sociolinguistics?

The sociolinguistic enterprise raises fundamental questions about the nature of the relationships between social phenomena (such as social class or gender) and linguistic variation, while within social theory a persistent concern is the nature of the relationship between structure and agency. Sociolinguistics can draw on social theory for analysis of the relationship between speaker and system, the role of language in the creation, maintenance and change of social institutions, and the role of human agency in sociolinguistic phenomena. This article summarises the key tenets of a sociological realism, based on the recent work of Margaret Archer (in particular her exploration of analytical dualism) and of Derek Layder (specifically his theory of ‘social domains’). It relates these ideas to sociolinguistics, arguing that language can be seen to have a different significance, depending on which domain is the focus of the researcher's interest. The article considers the distinctiveness of this approach, contrasting it with structuralist and social constructionist accounts and with structuration. It concludes by identifying some methodological implications, suggesting that sociological realism offers a productive theoretical framework for sociolinguistics in dealing with questions of language, structure and agency.     

Youth research on video self‐productions reflections on a social‐aesthetic approach

This article advances my thoughts on a social‐aesthetic approach within the field of youth and social research. These reflections are not primarily grounded in traditional approaches of visual sociology and anthropology but emerged from the context of media‐educational youth research in Germany. The main assumption of this article is that qualitative youth and social research in particular, which has audio‐visual self‐productions as the object, should—in view of the increasing influence media has on our perception and the way how the reality is experienced—be open to concepts of subject‐related self‐presentations. First I make an attempt to formulate a social‐aesthetic theory which focuses on the media‐ethnographical exploration of symbolic milieus. Next, I introduce projects run by media‐educational youth researchers in Germany, emphasizing the question of conceptions and methods when working with adolescent video self‐productions. The final section reflects upon the quality, the validity and the hermeneutics of self‐produced videos.     

Le genre des politiques sociales. L'apport théorique des « gender studies » à l'analyse des politiques sociales

In English-speaking countries and Scandinavia, where feminist and gender studies have developed over the past thirty years, the issue of sex and then of gender has led to a very fertile renewal of social policy analysis, in particular in the field of comparative welfare state studies. By insisting on the cultural, social, normative and historical construction of welfare states and social policies, this approach sheds light on the societal paradigms that define how social policies are drawn up and their impact in terms of gender. It enables us to undertake a critical, original examination of the concepts, theories and analytical tools traditionally used in comparative welfare state litterature. This article presents an inventory of the theoretical advances made in writings on this topic.