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     

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.     

Critical realism and the dialectic

A prominent strand within both sociological and social theory has been concerned to develop a 'systems approach' with which to explore social life. One of the most original contributions to a systems approach has arisen within critical realism. In particular critical realism demonstrates that it is possible to abstract the causal powers of different objects of analysis to examine their interaction within concrete and contingent 'open systems'. The recent dialectical turn of critical realism develops this systems approach in a much more rigorous manner. However, in this paper I argue that the (dialectical) critical realist mode of abstraction ultimately fails to embed concepts and categories internally within the specific ideological and historical forms of social relations. Or rather, critical realists do not seek to develop concepts that reflect the self-movement of a historical and contradictory essence. This self-movement is what I prefer to call a 'system'. Consequently critical realists are led to separate method from system in theory construction and such a separation leads to a problematic dualist mode of theorizing. I make these observations from a Hegelian-Marxist position.     

Sociology and the case for realism

It is argued that in the present era of ecological threat we need a critical sociology, which requires a realist ontology. Using Beck's Risk society as an example, I maintain that to the extent that postmodernist sociology rejects realism, its critical and substantive potential is compromised. The second half of the article argues that realism must extend also to moral positions, which are assessed in terms of knowledge of the natural and social world. Through various examples it shows that while postmodernist thinkers reject meta-narratives and universal truth, they are inevitably moral realist in practice when talking politics. Contra Bauman, sociology cannot dispense with the project of emancipation. The moral realist discourse of human needs permits us to move from statements about the world to recommendations for action.     

ANOMIE, SOLIDARITY, AND CONFLICT: French Sociology and the Limits of Dialogue

What explains the splintering of the sociological imagination? Why do so many rival schools contend for influence? Is there a chance for consensus? Donald N. Levine seeks to answer these questions in his intriguing recent study of the sociological tradition. He contends that sociology has been divided from the start along national lines, yet continues to progress towards harmony thanks to the “dialogical’ commitments of the various national traditions. I argue that Levine misjudges the character and depth of past and present rifts, and that he overestimates the likelihood of future disciplinary unity.     

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.     

Characteristics Associated with Housing Loss Among Youth in a Rapid Rehousing Program

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - Housing First programs, such as rapid rehousing, are a well-established approach to addressing homelessness among adults, yet there remains a lack of...     

Cosmopolitics: towards a new articulation of politics,science and critique

This paper explores how Ulrich Beck's world‐risk‐society theory (WRST) and Bruno Latour's Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) can be combined to advance a theory of cosmopolitics. On the one hand, WRST helps to examine ‘cosmopolitan politics’, how actors try to inject cosmopolitanism into existing political practices and institutions anchored in the logic of nationalism. On the other hand, ANT sheds light on ‘cosmological politics’, how scientists participate in the construction of reality as a reference point for political struggles. By combining the WRST and ANT perspectives, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of cosmopolitics that takes into account both political and ontological dimensions. The proposed synthesis of WRST and ANT also calls for a renewal of critical theory by making social scientists aware of their performative involvement in cosmopolitics. This renewal prompts social scientists to explore how they can pragmatically support certain ideals of cosmopolitics through continuous dialogues with their objects of study, actors who inhabit different nations and different cosmoses.     

Towards a political ontology of state power: a comment on Colin Hay's article

This article offers some critical realist, strategic‐relational comments on Colin Hay's proposal to treat the state as an ‘as‐if‐real’ concept. The critique first develops an alternative account of ontology, which is more suited to analyses of the state and state power; it then distinguishes the ‘intransitive’ properties of the real world as an object of investigation from the ‘transitive’ features of its scientific investigation and thereby provides a clearer understanding of what is at stake in ‘as‐if‐realism’; and it ends with the suggestion that a concern with the modalities of state power rather than with the state per se offers a more fruitful approach to the genuine issues raised in Hay's article and in his earlier strategic‐relational contributions to political analysis.     

Interprofessional Learning: Reasons,Judgement, and Action

This article uses the theoretical and methodological tools of cultural historical activity theory and critical realism to examine three case studies of the introduction and expansion of sustainable agricultural practices in southern Africa. The article addresses relevant issues in the field of agricultural extension, which lacks a theoretical “bridge” between top-down knowledge transfer and bottom-up participatory approaches to learning. Further, the article considers the learning environments necessary for sustainable agriculture. Such environments provided research participants with encounters with “postnormal” scientific practices that recognise and engage plural ways of knowing. Our research explored why farmers learn and practise sustainable agriculture, how they learn and practise it, the contradictions they are facing, and how these contradictions can be overcome in a context of change-oriented learning.     

The riddle of things: Activity theory and actor‐network theory as approaches to studying innovations

This article compares cultural‐historical activity theory (AT) and actor‐network theory (ANT) as approaches to studying technical innovations. The concept of nature and society production in the ANT and the concept of activity in the AT have much in common as attempts to transcend the dualism between subject and object, nature and society. The symmetrical (ANT) and the dialectical (AT) interpretations of the concept of mediation are compared. It is suggested that the historically developed, artifact‐mediated structure of human activity is instrumental in studying interaction and coevolution of social and material entities. Three limitations of the concept of generalized symmetry, or symmetrical mediation, become evident when the concept is used in empirical studies of innovation: First, it does not supply any criteria for defining the nature and scope of actors in a heterogeneous network. Second, it leads to an asymmetrical, Machiavellian analysis of innovation in which the contribution of designers, users, and nonhuman entities remains marginal. Third, it does not provide any explanation for the intentionality and competence of humans. It is suggested that these problems can be solved if the innovation network is studied as a network of activity systems. Nonhuman entities are included in the analysis as historically developed arrays of tools and raw materials of the activity systems. This approach is elaborated by analyzing an unsuccessful innovation process, the production of ethanol from wood through the use of cellulose‐degrading enzymes. It is suggested that instead of applying the symmetrical semiotic language proposed by ANT in the analysis, a dialogue that utilizes the historically developed resources and languages of different thought communities is needed.     

Between sociology and the business school: critical studies of work,employment and organization in the UK

This is a paper about what happens when a form of knowledge moves to another part of the university. The author, identifying himself as an ‘ex‐sociologist’, investigates the relationship between the sociology of work, employment and organization and various ‘critical’ traditions within the business school. I argue that the contemporary divide between sociologies of work and employment, and Critical Management Studies (CMS) within the business school rests in part on developments in UK sociology in the 1960s and 70s. This means that divergent understandings of the role of sociology and its relevant theoretical resources provided the deep structure for the current tension between CMS on the one hand and research on work and employment on the other. The movement of sociologists and industrial relations academics to the business school provided the preconditions for two very different critical traditions. The paper concludes with thoughts on what it means to be an outsider inside an institution, and on the future prospects for Burawoy's ‘critical’ or ‘public’ sociologies in UK business schools.     

Object Familiarity Enhances Infants’ Use of Phonetic Detail in Novel Words

Infants greatly refine their ability to discriminate language sounds by 12 months, yet 14‐month‐olds appear to confuse similar‐sounding novel words. Two explanations could account for this phenomenon: infants initially have incomplete phoneme representations, suggesting developmental discontinuity; or word‐learning demands interfere with use of established phonetic detail. These hypotheses were tested at 14 months by pairing a novel word with an object preexposed to half the infants and novel to the other half. If demands are key, only preexposed infants should efficiently use phonetic detail; there is no need to concurrently learn object details with the word. If representations lack detail, object familiarity should not matter. Only infants preexposed to the object noticed a change in its label, thus challenging the discontinuity position and demonstrating the impact of object familiarity on early word learning.     

An Ontological Turn for Childhood Studies?

The so‐called ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences has brought with it yet another layer of theoretical concerns, except that this time the interest is in ontology rather than epistemology. New materialist thinking which has emerged in recent years promises to rethink the task of social theory in ways that circumvent modernist dualisms. In this paper, I explore what this might entail for childhood studies. What might such an ontological shift which emphasises among others relationality, connectedness and materiality mean for the further development of childhood studies? How would a decentring of children and the field's overpowering concerns for studying children's perspectives/voices/standpoints help rethink childhood studies and its remit? How, in short, would a shift from the child as an independent unit of analysis and of childhood as a categorical identity to a new ontology of emerging phenomena which implicate children, adults and non‐human forces affect the field's direction in the future?     

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.     

Intercultural Education in the United States of America and Europe: some parallels and convergences in research and policy

This article considers intercultural education in the United States and Europe from the perspective of both policy initiatives and research traditions. It considers the relevance of the categories of nation and nationalism in both contexts. It notes the educational structures which serve to disadvantage most those already most disadvantaged. It concludes by examining the possible convergence of postmodernist critiques and black studies. In this respect it emphasises what policy makers and researchers into intercultural education in each context can learn from each other.     

Social explanation and socialization: on Bourdieu and the structure, disposition, practice scheme

The standard narrative of the sociology of education accounts for the perpetuation of relative differentials in class access to education by a structure‐disposition‐practice scheme in which the central explanatory weight is carried by properties of socialized agents. The dominant scheme of this kind is now that inspired by Bourdieu. In this context, it is, therefore, appropriate to interrogate the competence of socialization in sociological explanations of social events and processes. The argument adopts a position of scientific and critical realism, and it is suggested that a realist sociology might find in Bourdieu's approach, notwithstanding specific theoretical and conceptual weaknesses, a framework strong enough to sustain the multilevel explanations of inequality/difference necessary in the sociology of education.     

IMAX in canadian cinema: geographic transformation and discourses of nationhood

... the last post-industrial resource, acceleration exceeds accumulation . . . Paul Virilio (1987, 180)

The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is ... an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, and image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time . . . Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!

Andre Bazin (1967, 21)

It's the ultimate in screen realism, and yet in many ways it's much better than being there.

Julian Temple, director of Rolling Stones At the Max (1991) (Gentry 1992,40).