The article analyses the historical roots of intersectional theory and argues that the ambiguities and elisions that mark intersectional analysis are a weakness not a strength. It makes an argument for why Archer's morphogenetic approach provides a more secure basis for analysing the overlapping oppressions that intersectional theory highlights. It avoids conflating experience with structural and cultural conditions and their elaboration, and provides an analytical framework for the development of explanatory accounts of how intersections between gender, race, class and other (...) markers of difference operate in concrete historical circumstances. Equally importantly, critical realism provides rich resources for theorizing agency and in particular corporate agency, which is central to understanding the emergence of social movements, including feminism. The article argues that critical realism provides a basis for maintaining the significance of the normative in analysing social life and, in contrast to poststructuralism, provides a secure philosophical basis for the research programme opened up by a consideration of intersectionality. (shrink)

While the vital contribution of feminist scholarship is acknowledged, it has been criticized for overly relying on the influence of society upon women’s lives. In this paper, I demonstrate the usefulness of also considering the influence of agency upon women’s lives, specifically agential reflexivity. Using the work and life histories of a group of Sri Lankan women, I use Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach to show how investigating reflexivity can provide greater insights into the subtleties associated with women’s agency in relation (...) to how they consciously organize their life journeys and react to oppression, demonstrate resistance and effect emancipation. My research reveals latent aspects of women’s agency within a postcolonial Third World social context, where an enduring patriarchal social system intersects with modernity and subjects women to complex social and occupational circumstances. This paper contributes to the field of women’s studies by showing how the morphogenetic approach can address the problem of conflationary theorizing within feminist scholarship. (shrink)

The theoretical perspectives of intersectionality and poststructuralism have contributed meaningfully to advancing issues of social injustice within the realm of women's health research. However, the question of whether the two approaches are epistemologically commensurate has been at the heart of a polarized debate within third‐ and fourth‐wave feminist literature in recent years. In this paper, we draw on the extant literature to explore existing dilemmas within this debate and critically reflect on points of epistemological tension and congruence between the two (...) perspectives. It will be demonstrated that intersectionality and poststructuralism, especially feminist poststructuralism, represent concordant theoretical perspectives and a synthesized theoretical framework for application in qualitative research into women's health will be proposed. We argue that an intersectional feminist poststructuralist framework contributes to a deepened analysis of women's disparate healthcare experiences, and the social mechanisms, power relations, and discourses that mediate these experiences, while offering avenues for advocacy and political praxis on a multitude of levels. (shrink)

This article compares knowledge claims within critical realism and the situated knowledges approach, and will discuss the implications of adopting these two perspectives in research on inequity in health care. The concept of medical gender bias, as well as two empirical studies on inequity among patients waiting for cataract extractions in Sweden, will be used in order to illustrate the different implications of adopting a critical realist or a situated knowledges perspective. The article suggests that the latter of these two (...) perspectives is compatible with critical realist claims about epistemic relativism, but that it is much harder to combine with the concept of judgmental rationality, at least in so far as this rationality is not treated as being situated itself. The article will also claim that critical realism and the situated knowledges approach emphasize different implications concerning responsibility during processes of knowledge production. Finally, it will suggest that the adoption of a critical realist-based intersectional ontology, in combination with a greater emphasis on the fact that researchers are always situated in various ways, is a fruitful starting point for grounding studies on inequity in health care. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is premised on the call to re-orientate marketing as a contributing social science. It gathers together criticisms of marketing research which identify inconsistencies that prevent our progress. It posits that we are driven to reproduce these inconsistencies because of a closed-system of practice and because of the generative absence of an effective, reflexive and integrative metatheoretical structure. In response to these problems, the paper aims to offer an integrative metatheoretical structure from which to ground our research and intervene (...) in the identified inconsistencies. The paper therefore offers a perspective on the constitution of the world, before addressing the terms and conditions on which the world is to be researched and explained. This conceptual contribution employs tools developed in the critical realist philosophy of social science to address: instances of absence within marketing research; and how these instances are generated and reproduced. It then suggests how these absences can be rectified. (shrink)

In the light of late modern, postmodern and post-critical debates the difficulty of establishing a coherent theoretical framework for both critical pedagogy and youth and community work has been noted by several authors. In this article I will make the claim that critical realism, as a stance within the ontological, epistemological and aetiological paradigms, offers a way to ameliorate a number of tensions in critical pedagogy and youth and community work. Margaret Archer's theories around morphogenesis are particularly useful in re-examining (...) the tensions between essentialist and anti-essentialist views of human nature, identity and community, and structure and agency. In terms of praxis, her method allows us to wish to influence others, without descending into positivity or being satisfied with just uncovering highly individualized accounts of temporary meaning making. She also offers a way of performing critical pedagogy that does not instil a ‘knowing hopelessness’ in people, whereby they are aware of their material conditions, but do not feel enabled to act on their oppression. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Feminist theory continues to struggle with the recurrence of the twin-problem of agency and domination: how can gender be conceptualized as a structure of domination that constitutes and restricts agency, without obscuring the possibilities for change and transformation through agency? To address this problem, I draw on the concept of agency developed by Margaret Archer. By elaborating on her notion of the structural shaping of the situation and combining it with elements of Thomas Wartenberg's work, in this article I outline (...) a concept of domination from a broadly critical realist perspective. I thus demonstrate how gender can be understood as a social structure that is constitutive of relations of domination. This framework draws attention to the limitations of ‘undoing’ gender on an interactionist micro level as well as to the concrete possibilities for agency due to situational contradictions and emergent subjective powers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFeminist theory and critical realism should consolidate their collaboration since they have much in common. Nevertheless, feminist standpoint theory and critical realist ontology remain at odds, as extended debates have shown. I argue that this is because of the importance that feminism places on difference – which brings up the problem of relationality in a material way – and thus makes it hard to integrate into traditional critical realism. Dialectical critical realism contributes greatly to an understanding of relationality but lacks (...) difference’s historicity. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of intersectionality in feminism and feminist new materialism. The discussion shows that the mainstream understanding of both approaches has grave deficiencies and profits from critical realist metatheory. Notwithstanding, CR can learn from the motives and ways that difference is deployed in both strands. (shrink)