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This review article discusses key arguments from Social Imaginary and the Metaphysical Discourse by Christoforos Bouzanis, defending critical realism against criticisms made in the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much debate on whether and how groups of human agents can constitute social structures with causal significance. Both sides in this debate, however, implicitly privilege human individuals over non-human material objects and tend to ignore the possibility that such objects might also play a significant role in social structures. This paper argues that social entities are often composed of both human agents and non-human material objects, and that both may make essential contributions to their causal influence. In such cases the causal influence of social structures should be attributed to the emergent causal powers of what I call socio-technical entities.

Research necessarily entails the close interrelation of concepts and arguments, including solutions to a range of meta-questions, whether acknowledged explicitly or not. Despite this, few detailed accounts currently exist that support researchers to develop their complex conceptual architectures, especially in critical realist spheres. Indeed, many published accounts often omit much of this 'messiness' that sits behind, yet is foundational to, research projects. Those accounts that do seek to portray how/why researchers have made decisions (e.g. about connections between research philosophy, methodology, methods, theory and empirical evidence) tend to focus on one set of meta-questions, or occasionally on the relationships between two sets, at a time. Therefore, this paper presents a flexible framework – supported by specific examples from studies – that we hope will be useful in supporting researchers from all traditions, but especially critical realists, to carefully think through and develop more holistic connections in their conceptual architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridging two traditions of social ontology, this paper examines the possibility that the concept of collective intentionality can help to explain the mechanisms underpinning the causal powers of some social entities. In particular, I argue that a minimal form of collective intentionality is part of the mechanism underpinning the causal power of norm circles: the social entities causally responsible for social norms. There are, however, many different forms of social entity with causal power, and the relationship of collective intentionality to these causal powers varies, depending on the form of the mechanism underpinning the power concerned. Some powers depend on collective intentionality, and others do not.

Tuukka Kaidesoja’s new book is a welcome addition to the literature on critical realism. He shows good judgement in defending Roy Bhaskar’s argument for causal powers while criticising its framing as a transcendental argument. In criticising Bhaskar’s concept of a real-but-not-actual ontological domain, however, he discards an essential element of a realist ontology, even a naturalised one: a recognition of the transfactual aspect of causal power.

At another moment, Wilson links subjective experience and art, juxtaposing the realist theory of art 'which accounts for (aesthetic) experience, subjectivity and the relation between imagination and perception' and the realist theory of science (192). Rather, it is because I take as my starting point the idea that our current approaches to art and the arts, and our cultures that sustain these, are characterised by a TINA compromise form: where the truth in practice - that art is (only) what artists do in the arts, is combined with the falsity in theory - that art is (only) what artists do in the arts. To the extent that my argument enables art to be liberated from the culturally limiting contexts of "aesthetics" or "sciences", I would say I am for aesthetics (and art) in science, just as I am for science in the arts. The "bold" and "ambitious" claim of my realist theory of art is just this - in all instances of art, not just those where the designation "art" is conferred by representatives of "the arts" or the "artworld", art is caring about experience. This is all very reasonable until art is connected back to Wilson's particular view of the aesthetic: 'I have defined aesthetic experience as our emergent experience of being-in-relation with the natural necessity of the world ... and art as the skilled practice of giving shareable form to our aesthetic experience' (192). [Extracted from the article]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00203.x Byline: Dave Elder-Vass (1) Keywords: Actor Network Theory; critical realism; social structure; agency Abstract: Abstract 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. Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Sociology, University of Essex Article History: (Date accepted: May 2008) Article note: email: d.eldervass@ntlworld.com or djelder@essex.ac.uk

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2008.00194.x Byline: Dave Elder-Vass (1) Keywords: Social structure; institutions; structuration; emergence; embodiment Abstract: Abstract This paper begins to develop an emergentist and realist account of normative social institutions. The argument is developed as a response to Lopez and Scott's historical portrait of the debate on social structure as a dialogue between two different concepts of structure: institutional structure and relational structure, integrated more recently through the concept of embodied structure. The paper argues that all these approaches tend to neglect the idea of structure as a whole and suggests that we cannot understand social structures without recognizing the nature of the corresponding wholes, and how they relate to the human individuals that comprise them. Such a perspective makes clear that embodiment alone is inadequate as a means of integrating institutional and relational conceptions of structure. For a fuller resolution, we must set social structure in an emergentist framework, which can reconcile the complementary roles of institutional structure, relational structure, and indeed embodiment, as aspects of the production of social structures as wholes. Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Sociology, University of Essex Article History: (Date accepted: 18 January 2008) Article note: email: d.eldervass@ntlworld.com

Emergentism is found to address its own core problem successfully whereas Luhmann's approach is incapable of resolving questions of causation and reductionism are debated. Arguments suggest that paradigm has a convincing response to the challenges of meaning and self-reference.

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01308_4.x Byline: Dave Elder-Vass (1) Author Affiliation: (1)University of Essex

Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou have written a deeply theoretical book arguing that we should see reconstructive biographical research as a method for constructing causal accounts of social lives and generalizing beyond the particular cases under study. As I have argued elsewhere, Sawyer's approach is incompatible with the sort of relational approach to emergence that is called for by a critical realist ontology (Elder-Vass [3]). Tsiolis and Christodoulou are tempted by Keith Sawyer's argument that the argument from wildly disjunctive multiple realizability can be transferred to the social realm (Sawyer [4]; Sawyer [5]; Sawyer [6]; Sawyer [7]). [Extracted from the article]

Economics has tended to neglect giving, and thus both its important contemporary economic role and its potential contribution to alternative, non-market systems. To remedy this, it will need to draw on the broad debates on the nature of the gift that have developed in and across the other social sciences. This paper addresses several of these by asking how we should define the terms gift and giving. It rejects definitional associations of giving with obligation, reciprocity and the development of social relationships. Such definitions exclude many phenomena commonly understood as giving and underpin misguided attempts to analyse gifts in contemporary late-modern societies in terms derived from anthropological discussions of very different societies. Instead, the paper develops a definition of the gift based on contemporary giving institutions. A more open, contemporary definition of the gift helps to sensitise us to the continuing importance of gift institutions in social and economic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]