In the light of recent writings of Richard Pring, and in relation to the application of empirical research methods in education, this paper offers a corrective to a neo-realist viewpoint and develops a critical realist perspective. The argument is made that the deployment of empirical research methods needs to be underpinned by a meta-theory embracing epistemological and ontological elements; t...

Rom Harré criticizes critical realism for ascribing causal powers to social structures, arguing that it is human individuals, and not social structures, that possess causal powers, and that a false conception of structural causation undermines the emancipatory potential of critical realism. I argue that an interpretation of the category of process as the spatio-temporalization of the category o...

In his article "Mahfouz between Lukácsian and Brechtian Approaches to Realism" David F. DiMeo compares the interpretations of realism by the leading Arabic author of socially committed fiction to the theories of Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács. The early works of novelist Najib Mahfouz feature a Lukácsian approach, embracing critical realism to present a totalizing view of the social system, a...

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By and large, modern societies take it for granted that nature, or ‘the environment’, is apart from society. However, this separation promotes the view that the environment should be managed for profit or pleasure, or that it exists in exotic or wild places experienced only as a fantasy world. As a result, environmental problems are seen to arise ‘out there’ instead of inside our heads, which c...

ions are a crucial part of the retroductive analysis because they allow us to strip out and separate the constitutive structures and necessary (internal) properties of the objects we are studying from the contingent (external) ones that affect the events we observe (Sayer 1992; Tsoukas 1989). Within this process, mixed-methods played a key role in identifying generative mechanisms (revealing wh...

This paper is a response to Ray Pawson’s critique of critical realism, the philosophy of science elaborated by Roy Bhaskar. I argue that Pawson misinterprets critical realism’s positions on both natural and social science. His charges concerning its totalising ontology, its arrogant epistemology, and its naive methodology are largely unfounded, such that the differences between critical realism...

Committed critical realist commentators on the economics discipline have not discussed, as far as I am aware, the regulation approach as an exemplar of critical realism (e.g., Baert 1996; Lawson 1989, 1995, 1997; Pratten 1997; Fleetwood 1999; Nielsen 2000). In some cases this neglect is due to a concern to develop a meta-theoretical critique of orthodox economics and/or to uncover critical real...