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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]

Abstract: John Searle's theory of social reality is among the most influential accounts in the history of philosophy. His theory also implicates concepts and issues of foundational interest to sociologists, including social structure, institutional differentiation and the relationship between linguistic performativity and institutional reality. Despite this overlap with sociological theory, and despite some sustained attention from sociologists (e.g., Lukes, ), no formal theoretical model of Searle's work exists within sociology. This paper reviews the core concepts of Searle's theory before concisely describing and then formally modelling their propositional structure. Though the overlap of Searle's approach with classical and contemporary sociological theory is discussed throughout, the paper concludes with a specific argument about his proper assimilation into sociological theory vis‐à‐vis Durkheim, Bourdieu and Giddens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that trust is an important aspect of social reality, one that realist social theory has paid little attention to but which clearly resonates with a realist social ontology. Furthermore, the emergence of an interest in trust in specific subject fields such as organization theory indicates the growing significance of issues of trust as market liberalism has developed. As such, the emergence of an interest in trust provides support for Archer's characterisation of late modernity in The Reflexive Imperative (2012) as a period of heterogeneity and greater incongruity. Commenting on this provides an opportunity to discuss the issue of habit in relation to trust and also the importance of the analysis of integration as a means to explain problems of trust. The commentary draws on examples from finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]