Critical Realism

Conceptual Overview

Critical realism occupies the intellectual space between positivism (with an ontology of observable events) and postmodernism/poststructuralism (often with a strong social constructionist ontology). It rejects the former's preoccupation with (often inappropriate) quantification and measurement, and the latter's tendency to downplay extradiscursive phenomena. Critical realism should not be confused with positivism and related discourses such as empiricism, scientism, science, scientific objectivity, structuralism, foundationalism, or modernism.

For critical realists, something is real if it is causally efficacious. Computer systems, social relations, and organizations are causally efficacious, and therefore real, whereas unicorns are not. The discourse of unicorns is, however, real because it might, for example, encourage people to try and photograph them. Some real things do, and others do not, exist independently of human beings knowing, observing, or socially constructing them in discourse. Gendered social structures and implicit social rules, for example, do not have to be identified in order to exist, whereas laws and explicit social rules do.

It is possible to identify at least four modes in which things are real—albeit with some overlap: material, artifactual, ideal, and social, exemplified by planets, computers, discourses, and organizations, respectively. To see the implications for organization studies, consider how antirealists can run into problems with socially real phenomena like organizations and social structures. Overplaying the ubiquity of ideally real phenomena such as language or discourse, while underplaying the existence materially, artifactually, and socially, real phenomena invite a procrustean attempt to locate everything within the mode of the ideal. While Robert Westwood and Steve Linstead accept that organization is a structure, they reduce structure to an effect of language.

Critical realists have tried to develop a social ontology, that is, a set of abstract statements about the way the social world is, from which a set of methodological and epistemological commitments follow. The following sketches the ontological, epistemological, and methodological position of many critical realists.

The social world is layered consisting of actual and observable events, and the social structures (and institutions, mechanisms, resources, rules, conventions, procedures, etc.) that govern these events. Social structures and the events they govern are different things. The social world is transformational in the sense that social structures are only reproduced and transformed by purposeful human agents. An organization can be conceived of as a set of social structures continually reproduced and transformed by the agents (e.g., workers and managers) who necessarily draw upon these structures in order to act. Social structures and human agents are different kinds of thing. This distinction, referred to as a dualism (not a duality), allows critical realists to retain the analytically powerful “agency and structure” approach, without privileging one, or collapsing one into the other.

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