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Emergence is central to critical realism, but there has been little attempt to develop a systematic account of this concept within the tradition. Two notable exceptions are seen in the work of Dave Elder‐Vass and Tony Lawson. However, both face problems in responding to reductionist claims and accounting for downward causation. This paper proposes contextual emergence as a robust alternative that overcomes these issues and provides a better justification for critical realism's stratified worldview. Contextual emergence explains that while properties at a lower 'level' offer necessary conditions, for emergence to obtain, there must also be contingent conditions at a higher 'level'. This approach maintains many of critical realism's intuitions about emergence, providing a robust account of ontological stratification and downward causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the gradual evolution of the French Régulation school (FR) for the study of capitalism through the lens of structure and agency. The analysis first segments the school into two epochs, the early Régulation, led by authors Aglietta and Lipietz, and the later Régulation, which saw the rise of Boyer. We find that the gradual progression that occurred within the FR school is linked to its authors' implicit ontic engagement with structure and agency, which, in turn, provides natural linkages to Critical Realism. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate how the comparison between Morphogenetic Régulation and French Régulation (FR) can facilitate a much deeper reading of the structure‐agency debate pertaining to the transformation of capitalism. In so doing, it discusses the value addedness of Morphogenetic Régulation through three specific concepts by stressing their relevance for contemporary studies in international political economy. These concepts are: stratified emergence; causality and the problématique of hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re‐examines a key feature of Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge from a critical realist perspective. It is argued that Durkheim's attempt to establish a social basis for the categories in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life should be understood along ontological rather than epistemological lines. This brings to light new problems with the argument which, however, can be brought fruitfully into contact with the more recent social psychological literature on collective intentionality. This yields insights into future lines of inquiry into social cognition and theories of human conceptualizing capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, critical realists have increasingly engaged with the thought of Charles S. Peirce (1839‐1914), the founder of the American pragmatist tradition. But the engagement has been mostly narrow in focus and at times misinformed. This paper examines points of continuity between Peircean thought and critical realism with respect to causation, ontology, and truth. Its purpose is to lay the groundwork for further and more fruitful engagement between the traditions by bringing attention to some things critical realists may not have known, and to correct some inaccurate things they thought they knew, about Peirce's philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophy of social science (PoS) typologies can help practitioners in the social sciences to reflect upon the often‐tacit assumptions embedded in research. Existing PoS typologies however suffer from various shortcomings, one of them being a tendency to present extreme versions of the assumptions underpinning research. Having considered this and other shortcomings, the present paper advances a flexible PoS typology. Operating with strong and moderated versions of three PoS perspectives – positivism, constructionism and (critical) realism – the typology captures key assumptions underpinning a broad range of contemporary social research. Moreover, it opens up the possibility of contemplating the assumptions embedded in research in a more fruitful way. To render tangible how the typology constitutes an improvement over existing typologies, it is used in reflections on sustainability research on climate negotiations, green growth and housing development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called 'laws'. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well‐supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio‐temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear‐cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles S. Peirce's realism has been neglected by pragmatists and critical realists alike in the current debate over metatheoretical realism in sociology. This paper introduces Peirce's view of what is at stake in the question of realism, specifically regarding causation. Leveraging current interest in Peirce's conception of abduction, I show how realism about causation is implicit therein. I present a genealogy of the concept of real causation Peirce embraces. I explicate Peirce's view of the scientific significance of realism about causation, and why he finds it compelling. Finally, I argue that Peirce would intervene in the current debate by saying that those committed to abductive theorizing and causal explanation are implicitly realist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a widely accepted conception that institutions are norm systems or norm‐guided practices. Opening this conception itself to discussion, the paper initially discusses a group of concepts, such as norm, power, practice, structure, etc., that are related to the definition of institution. Following the discussion, it focuses on the possibility of understanding institutions as spaces. Finally, the paper suggests that institutions mediate ontologically between structure and agency within a framework developed with a critical‐realist approach, and formulates the two sides of this mediation (structure‐institution and institution‐agency) as two spatialities. While the institution as a topos corresponds to a ground on which social structures materialize their causal powers, the institution as a locus manifests itself as a place where agents reproduce and/or transform with their strategic and dispositional actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capability approach (CA) is a framework for understanding, assessing, and promoting the quality of human lives and social justice. It focuses on capabilities – people's freedoms and opportunities to live in valuable ways. Although its proponents readily acknowledge that capabilities can depend on personal, social and environmental factors, little attention has been paid to the ontology of capabilities (what they are and how they are caused and constituted) and the inherent relationality of the approach is often not well followed through in research and practice. This, we suggest, leaves the CA vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation. In this paper we draw on the complementary lenses of critical realism, hermeneutics and complexity theory to develop an explicitly relational ontology of capabilities that explains how capabilities, as potential for ways of being or forms of doing, are generated by both personal agency and material and social structures. We demonstrate how these lenses can illuminate the relational constitution of particular capabilities through reference to a composite case involving a man called Bert and his healthcare team. We outline how our relational ontology of capabilities can demand and support more theoretically coherent and socially just approaches to CA informed practice, research and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of the relations between emotions and personhood, with a view to advancing a critical realist account of the role of emotions in social life. It is argued that the constitution of persons has to be approached from an ontological perspective, and that this raises questions about how sociology has addressed the meaning and role of emotions. Margaret Archer's critical realist perspective on them as commentaries on human concerns is broadly endorsed, but some significant correctives are proposed, especially with respect to the important distinction between primary and secondary emotions. To this end, it is argued that the affect spectrum theory advanced by Warren TenHouten can be fruitfully appended to a critical realist theory of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from "epistemological relativism." We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned, with a particular standpoint. What is more, the social power relations between standpoints organize the production of truth in ways that produce systematic distortions. In this paper, we propose a critical realist social epistemology. We introduce feminist standpoint theory and postcolonial theory as our suggested interventions into critical realism and we use two case studies of existing work to highlight i) the social production of truth and the real, and ii) what is at stake for radicalizing epistemology in critical realism. In so doing, our paper emphasizes the epistemic complexities that continuously shape ontology, a commitment to subaltern voices or experiences, and a thorough interrogation of the relations between positions of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social sciences there is a long standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structurationists like Giddens think of individuals' agency and collective features as two sides of the same coin while emergentists including Archer and Elder‐Vass claim that structurationists are blurring an important ontological distinction——they argue for effective social analysis, we should think of structures and individuals as different things because emergence happens when the properties of the collective are not reducible to the properties of the parts that constitute them. This paper contributes to the agency‐structure debate by showing how production and reproduction of emergent properties of social groups sharing same normative commitments (norm circles) can be empirically studied using two behavioral game theory experiments, adding a previously neglected insight that strategic uncertainty can lead to coordination failures of individual behaviors within norm circles, manifested as unintended outcomes of interdependent actions that are difficult to predict. Here the synchronic relation between the unpredictable collective outcomes of each game round and agential reactions of the participants to them defines emergence——the previous outcomes are diachronic inputs but they appear in the new outcome only through their effects on the individual decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social interaction as the middle phase of the morphogenetic sequence described by Margaret Archer presupposes that interpretative activities go on between individuals and collectivities. Novel meanings emerge in social interaction and spur the processes of structural elaboration. The hermeneutics of actors (or agents) should be part of the morphogenetic explanatory framework. Narratives as a distinctive species of interpretation will then become more susceptible to a mode of analysis based in realism. By adopting Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative figuration (or threefold mimésis) for use in sociology, it is possible to embark on this task at the rudimentary level of intersubjective communication. The stories and anecdotes in which we describe episodes, events, and processes to others articulate and give order to our experience of time. When we are searching for concord in narratives to cope with discordant elements, we are participating in morphogenesis via the transformation of meaning. The complementary nature of Archer's and Ricoeur's conceptualisations provides an alternative to one‐sided social constructionist accounts of narrative [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constitutes an extended response to Athanasia Chalari's paper The 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 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. In doing so we offer a sympathetic critique of Chalari, building on the thought provoking arguments contained within it, whilst also making a contribution to the theorisation of social movements and the 'relational turn' within realist social theory ( Archer, 2010, 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical realism is a philosophy of science, which has made significant contributions to epistemic debates within sociology. And yet, its contributions to ethnographic explanation have yet to be fully elaborated. Drawing on ethnographic data on the health-seeking behavior of HIV-infected South Africans, the paper compares and contrasts critical realism with grounded theory, extended case method and the pragmatist method of abduction. In so doing, it argues that critical realism makes a significant contribution to causal explanation in ethnographic research in three ways: 1) by linking structure to agency; 2) by accounting for the contingent, conjunctural nature of causality; and 3) by using surprising empirical findings to generate new theory. The paper develops the AART (abduction, abstraction, retroduction, testing) research schema and illustrates its strengths by employing a Bourdieusian field analysis as a model for morphogenetic explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many differing ways to be a realist about language. This paper seeks to classify some of these and to examine the implications of each for the study of language. The principle of classification it adopts is that we may distinguish between realisms on the basis of what exactly it is that they take to be real. Examining in turn realisms that ascribe reality to the external world in general, to causal mechanisms, to innate capacities, to linguistic signs, to social structures, to language systems, and to linguistic groups, the paper summarises the case for a particular critical realist ontology of language. In the process, it engages briefly with the work of Saussure, Chomsky, Halliday, and more recent explicitly realist thinkers such as Bhaskar, Pateman, Archer, Sealey and Carter. One implication is that language itself is not a phenomenon that separates us from a causally structured world, but rather a part of that world, a part with an identifiable causal structure of its own that is similar to that of other normative phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes an historical re-evaluation of Louis Althusser's philosophical legacy for modern Marxism. While Althusser self-consciously sought to defend the scientific character of Marxism, many of his closest followers eventually exited the Marxian paradigm for a post-structural post-Marxism. We argue that this development was predominately rooted in a series of philosophical errors that proved fatal in a period of retreat for European socialism. There has always been, however, a second post-Althusserian legacy associated with the critical realist conception of Marxism initiated by Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar found part of his inspiration in Althusser's successful posing of the question of Marx's science and this paper sets out to excavate the proper links between Althusser and Bhaskar in order to deepen the relationship between critical realism and scientific Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I aim to critically evaluate the epistemological position of social network analysis. My main point is that while the two main schools of social network analysis – formalism and relationalism – claim to be different because of their respective comprehensions of the ontology of social networks, epistemologically they both rely on network actors' commonsensical comprehension of social ties to conduct social network analysis. Following critical realists' insights into the depth ontology of the social world, I argue that social network analysts must break from their and network actors' commonsensical comprehension of social ties in order to illustrate the objective principles of social networks. I suggest that one strategy for doing so is to treat the current networks of social actors under investigation as a product of historically shaped and state‐mediated contests among social actors to define hierarchical features of their social relations. I present my study of the history of social networks in Indian politics during the early postcolonial period (1947–64) in support of my points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with two meta‐theoretical approaches to social analysis, 'morphogenetic theory' and 'constructivist institutionalism', and specifically explores how the former fares under the critical scrutiny of the latter. The key proponent of constructivist institutionalism, Colin Hay, has offered two detailed critiques of morphogenesis that criticise its position on the foundational sociological issues of structure‐agency and material‐ideational. Although Hay's critiques are largely rejected in an overall defence of the morphogenetic approach, the process of engagement is seen to be particularly useful for morphogenetic theory because it allows a number of important clarifications to be made and it also opens up space for theoretical development. In the course of this debate, accessible introductions are given to both theories, and the similarities and differences between them are outlined, providing clarity to both. Therefore, although this article ultimately operates as a defence of morphogenetic theory, especially in the form proposed by Margaret Archer and Douglas Porpora, it finds a great deal of fruitful discussion in the constructivist institutionalist challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lack of clarity about underlying philosophical commitments leads to lack of clarity at other levels of analysis. Here I show that the literature on so-called 'causal mechanisms' is rife with conceptual problems, stemming from insufficient rigor with respect to the metaphysics of causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate in this article how critical realism can be used to explain indeterminacy in role behaviour systematically. In so doing, we both rebut various criticisms of critical realism made recently by Kemp and Holmwood and attempt to illustrate the weaknesses and absences of approaches that concentrate unduly on the collection of expectations of (different groups of) actors concerning roles and the behaviour of incumbents. Within a framework that recognises that structure and agency are ontologically distinct but necessarily empirically related entities, we argue that structures should be seen as sources of indeterminacy within role behaviour for at least four reasons: the co-determination of roles through the intersection of structures; conflicting role expectations caused by contradictions inhering within structures; asymmetries of power within social relations; and asymmetric repetition within structural reproduction/transformation. In light of this discussion of structural sources of indeterminacy, we then go on to demonstrate how critical realism is also able to analyse systematically the agential sources of indeterminacy within role behaviour and expectations through theories of psychobiography and reflexivity. We thus conclude that critical realism contains the conceptual tools required to illuminate the point(s) of intersection between structure, culture and agency which is central to understanding both role behaviour and the plurality of expectations concerning such behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the fact that culture-inclusive psychology has been eluded or relatively ignored by mainstream psychology, the movement of indigenous psychology is destined to develop a new model of man that incorporates both causal psychology and intentional psychology as suggested by Vygotsky (1927). Following the principle of cultural psychology: 'one mind, many mentalities' (Shweder et al., 1998), the Mandala Model of Self (Hwang, 2011a,b) and Face and Favor Model (Hwang, 1987, 2012) were constructed to represent the universal mechanisms of self and social interaction that can be applied to any culture; both models can be used as conceptual frameworks for analyzing mentalities of people in any given culture. Taking research works from Foundations of Chinese Psychology: Confucian Social Relation as exemplars (Hwang, 2012), this article illustrates how to construct culture-inclusive theories of Confucianism by multiple philosophical paradigms. The mechanism of culture-inclusive theory can be applied to explain qualitative research findings on lifeworld events of people in a particular society. It can also be utilized to predict results of quantitative research conducted to verify theoretical propositions in the scientific microworld by empirical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three approaches for conducting psychological research across cultures proposed by Berry (1989), namely, the imported etic, emic and derived etic approach are critically examined for developing culture-inclusive theories in psychology, in order to deal with the enigma left by Wilhelm Wundt. Those three approaches have been restricted to a certain extent by the pan-cultural dimensional approach which may result in the Orientalism of psychology in understanding people of non-Western cultures. This article is designated to provide the philosophical ground for an alternative cultural system approach to construct culture-inclusive theories in psychology. Following the principle of cultural psychology: 'one mind, many mentalities' (Shweder et al., 1998), the alternative strategy contains two steps: First, based on Bhaskar's (1975, 1978) critical realism, all universal mechanisms should seek to represent the operation of the human mind. Second, based on Archer's (1995) analytical dualism, the mechanisms of the universal mind may be used as frameworks for analyzing any cultural tradition. The culture-inclusive theories thus obtained represent the synchronic morphostasis of a cultural system, which may be used as theoretical frameworks for conducting either qualitative or quantitative empirical research in studying the diachronic morphogenesis of socio-cultural interaction in a particular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]