Critical realism

My research was underpinned by the philosophical assumptions of critical realism. While the position was not used dogmatically, I drew on the ideas and principles associated with the critical realist work of Sayer (1992, 2000) and Danemark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen, and Karlsson (2002) as well as Laydcr (1989). Critical realists presuppose an ontology in which the world is seen to be differentiated and make a distinction between three domains of: ‘the real’, ‘the actual’ and ‘the empirical’. The empirical is constituted only by that which is experienced by individuals; the actual is constituted by events which may or may not be experienced; while the real is constituted by those mechanisms or causal powers that generate the scries of events that constitute the actual and experiences (Collier 1994; Danemark et al. 2002; Sayer 2000). This entails the view that the world has depth and that the real cannot be reduced simply to experience, including the experience of the subject. Social science informed by this philosophy is concerned with mechanisms, with understanding what gives rise to the messy outcomes at the level of direct experience in the everyday world of the empirical:

Thus, early feminism inspired by the direct sharing of accounts of women’s experiences began to theorise about the structures of women’s oppression within society, and the nature of the mechanisms which operated so powerfully to produce inequality at all levels.

(Clegg 2006, p. 316)

According to critical realists, all entities possess an intrinsic structure which endows it with dispositions and capacities to act, behave or ‘work’ in certain ways. It is the socially produced, lattice-work of relations between individuals and groups that constitutes the structure of the social world and which is understood to be the enabling conditions for human action (e.g. social rules and noms) (Matthews 2009). Structures arc not ‘things’ with a material existence but arc real in the sense that they possess causal powers: ‘Their existence lies behind and affects manifest phenomena’ (Matthews 2009, p. 352). That said, social structures arc not thought to impact on individuals in a straightforward deterministic manner. Rather, concrete outcomes arc understood to be conditioned by the uniqueness of geographical and historical context (Sayer 2000).

Rejecting crude realism, the crux of critical realism is that social phenomena, be it actions, texts and institutions, exist regardless of interpretations of them; the social world is both socially constructed and real. In critical realism, emphasis is therefore placed on the constitutive role of meaning and language (Sayer 1992). Realists agree with other philosophical positions (e.g. social constructionism) therefore that the naming of phenomena is of central importance but differ in their commitment to a belief in the material reality underlying discursive accounts of social phenomena.

For critical realists, although a social practice is concept dependent and socially constituted, the social world is not identical to the concepts on which it is dependent; we must assess the objectivity of different social constructions. Objectivity refers to how practically adequate different accounts arc. Thus, despite the discourse-dependence of our knowledge, we can distinguish between successful and unsuccessful references and produce reliable knowledge that can be effective in informing and explaining (Sayer 2000). This approach brings to the fore normative issues and the need for social scientists to not only understand and explain the social world scientifically but to think about it normatively. Critical realists therefore accept ‘cpistcmic relativism’ in the sense that our beliefs are produced, transient and fallible but do not subscribe to ‘judgmental relativism’ which claims that all beliefs arc equally valid and there are no rational grounds for preferring one to the other:

We can (and do!) rationally judge between competing theories on the basis of their intrinsic merits as explanations of reality ... what critical realism does is to establish the basis of the possibility of this.

(Lopez and Potter 2001, p. 9)

It has been argued that critical realism bears many similarities to research grounded in its foremost philosophical ‘rival’, namely, (weak) ‘social constructionism’ which also acknowledges the existence of a real world independent of ‘constructions’ (Fopp 2008a). Critical realism goes beyond social constructionism, however, by bringing to the fore that which is often tacit and underdeveloped within the latter (Fopp 2008b). Like social constructionism, critical realism acknowledges that social scientific knowledge is historically and culturally situated but it offers the possibility of being able to judge between competing theories on the basis of their merits as explanations about the social world (Lopez and Potter, 2001). Indeed, many academics, myself included, have not been able to avoid measuring dominant analyses of ASB against alternatives (Nixon and Parr 2006). Critical realism is driven by the central claim that it is unwise and erroneous to abandon the search for truth in social science which in turn enables authoritative claims to be made about how we might initiate change (Layder 1998).

Given critical realism’s alternative and distinctive view of causation, in which context and individual agency is intrinsically involved in causal processes, the analytical importance of the former should be accorded analytical importance in understanding social phenomena (Sayer, 1992). Certain research designs, such as ease study research, better lend themselves to analyses that are sensitive to contextual and causal circumstances. As such, in critical realist research less weight is placed on ‘extensive’ research (Danermark et al. 2002; Sayer 1992), typically associated with quantitative methods and concerned with the discovery of common properties and general patterns within a population as a whole, a concern with ‘breadth’ rather than ‘depth’. Critical realists claim that other ‘languages’ are needed to understand the nature of social objects and the way they behave (Crinson 2001; Sayer 1992). Emphasis is therefore placed on ‘intensive’ research which emphasises causal explanation in a specific or a limited number of case studies, be it a person, organisation, cultural group, an event, process or a whole community (Sayer 2000). This more detailed and focused approach is necessary to understand the specific causal connections and dynamics associated with the phenomena under study (Matthews 2009). Qualitative methods arc associated with this type of research strategy on the basis that they help to clarify complex relationships and processes that arc unlikely to be captured by predetermined response categories or standardised quantitative measures.