Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins (...) Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle's, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution. (shrink)

In this article I draw upon the social ontologies developed by John Searle, Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and Tony Lawson in order to distinguish between power and leadership. To do so, I distinguish the different organizing principles behind natural phenomena, collective phenomena and institutional phenomena, and argue that an understanding of those different organizing principles is essential to a clearer conceptualization of power and leadership. Natural power and cultural power, as I argue, depend upon the organizing principles of natural phenomena, (...) and differ depending on whether those organizing principles have been transformed by humans, in which case it becomes cultural power, or not, in which case it simply is natural power. Leadership emerges with the ability of making other humans share mental states through collective intentionality. Institutional power, in contrast, is connected to the creation of a deontology of rights and obligations that provide what Searle calls desire-independent reasons for action. (shrink)

This article builds upon previous discussion of social and technical determinisms as implicit positions in the biofuel debate. To ensure these debates are balanced, it has been suggested that they should be designed to contain a variety of deterministic positions. Whilst it is agreed that determinism does not feature strongly in contemporary academic literatures, it is found that they have generally been superseded by an absence of any substantive conceptualisation of how the social shaping of technology may be related to, (...) or occur alongside, an objective or autonomous reality. The problem of determinism emerges at an ontological level and must be resolved in situ. A critical realist approach to technology is presented which may provide a more appropriate framework for debate. In dialogue with previous discussion, the distribution of responsibility is revisited with reference to the role of scientists and engineers. (shrink)

Traditional, positivist assessment approaches generally fail to capture the nuances of learners’ clinical competence in medical programmes. This has led to the implementation of an alternate assessment approach known as ‘programmatic assessment’, which embraces subjectivity of human judgement in holistic decision making in clinical settings. Faculty and staff have found the introduction of programmatic assessment to be challenging because it is a major, complex change to the traditional way of carrying out assessment. Extending our previous work, where we used critical (...) realism to explore students’ experiences of programmatic assessment, we here unpack the underlying conditions and mechanisms triggered by programmatic assessment’s implementation. We applied Bhaskar’s concept of ontological stratification, retroduction and Archer’s theoretical accounts of morphogenesis/stasis to theorize the interplay between the socio-cultural entities that constrain and enable desired changes in assessment practices, and those that condition students and staff to accept or reject the new ‘non-traditional’ assessment processes. (shrink)