This article uses the philosophy of critical realism to overcome the problem that most contemporary guidelines for interdisciplinary research fail to provide would-be researchers with adequate advice. It arrives at five important steps in the interdisciplinary research process: an initial planning phase; a disciplinary phase; a teamwork phase characterized by cross-disciplinary understanding; and a transdisciplinary, creative phase that involves epistemic emergence, and that results in the integration of knowledge. The fifth phase is the result of the integrative fourth phase; it (...) provides a holistic interdisciplinary understanding of the involved structures and mechanisms of the issue at hand. To make interventions derived from interdisciplinary research useful, they must be disseminated in such way as to include a return to reality, that is, there must be a movement from epistemology to ontology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis is a lightly edited transcript of a plenary talk given at the Beyond Positivism conference, Montreal, August 8–10 2017. The talk followed others by Christopher Winship and Frédéric Van...

ABSTRACTWhile the business research community has moved from describing critical realism as simply a compromise philosophy between positivists and interpretivists to its acceptance in its own right, it still lacks a choice of methods or processes for the business researcher to utilize. This paper presents a proposed method that can be used by business researchers who follow the critical realist paradigm. It explores the suitability of a critical realist approach to applied business and the importance of combining the ontological and (...) epistemological elements described. The relevance of the search for causal mechanisms is shown and it is argued that this search benefits from the use of retroduction and retrodiction. A ‘causal framework’ is proposed as an optional artefact in the critical realist business researcher’s ‘toolkit’ and a three step process is described, which uses causal frameworks to guide analysis. (shrink)

The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities with emergent (...) causal powers, distinct from those of human individuals. Yet these powers also depend on the contributions of human individuals, and this book examines the mechanisms through which interactions between human individuals generate the causal powers of some types of social structures. The Causal Power of Social Structures makes particularly important contributions to the theory of human agency and to our understanding of normative institutions. (shrink)

There is a lack of research explicitly demonstrating the potential of applying critical realism in qualitative empirical Management and Organization Studies. If scholars are to obtain the exp...

In recent years methodological debates in the social sciences have increasingly focused on issues relating to epistemology. Realism and Sociology makes an original contribution to the debate, charting a middle ground between postmodernism and positivism.

ABSTRACTIt is well acknowledged that the categorization of people with specific political, social and economic characteristics as ‘migrants’ – migrantization – is facilitated by mainstream, positivist versions of science and is associated with the production and/or reproduction of power relations. To date, this important critique has been advanced by academics influenced by interpretivism/poststructuralism who tend to relativize the discussion, and who are unable to provide a space for quantitative research. The main objective of this paper is to offer an alternative (...) approach to avoiding positivism and relativism in ‘migration studies’, based on critical realism, which I term ‘migrantization research’. Critical realist migrantization research is multi-methodological and provides an interdisciplinary framework for conducting mixed-method social research on ‘migration’. It aims to discover, uncover or indicate how various causal powers – of structural, discursive/cultural and agential character – interact and produce certain outcomes. It presupposes that both measurable and non-measurable dimensions of the social world are relevant. (shrink)