Journal of Critical Realism

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Introduction to the special issue: applied critical

realism in the social sciences

Leigh Price & Lee Martin

To cite this article: Leigh Price & Lee Martin (2018) Introduction to the special issue:
applied critical realism in the social sciences, Journal of Critical Realism, 17:2, 89-96, DOI:
10.1080/14767430.2018.1468148

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JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM
2018, VOL. 17, NO. 2, 89–96
https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2018.1468148

EDITORIAL

Introduction to the special issue: applied critical realism in the

social sciences
Leigh Pricea and Lee Martinb
a
Environmental Learning and Research Centre, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa; bCentre for
Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Warwick University, Coventry, UK

The aim of our initial call for papers was to encourage the submission of exemplars of
applied work, reflections on the use of critical realism, and metatheoretical developments.
We were not disappointed, and we are therefore pleased to present this collection of five
articles which advance our understanding of critical realism in practice. The book review in
this issue further extends the collection, as it summarizes several examples of applied criti-
cal realist work. As one would expect of such a collection, there are a variety of disciplines
represented, from business studies, to marketing, psychology, law and education. In this
editorial, we provide an overview of the (concrete universal) trends of current applications
of critical realism of which these articles are (concrete singular, and therefore unique)
instantiations. Finally, we provide a brief introduction to each paper. We expect that the
audience for this issue may be broader than, though still include, the usual readership
of Journal of Critical Realism. Specifically, we expect to attract early career researchers
who are new to critical realist ideas, and people whose primary interest is directed at
one of the disciplines represented, rather than critical realism per se. For this reason, at
the risk of repetition, we have allowed several of the authors to outline the aspects of criti-
cal realism that are relevant to their paper.

General trends in critical realist research

Currently, much critical realist work takes the form of underlabouring. In this issue, such
underlabouring can be seen in the way that the authors argue to strengthen the theory
and practice of their discipline. However, as critical realism becomes more accepted,
one anticipates that this characteristic of disciplinary underlabouring will become less
necessary, perhaps eventually unnecessary. However, in the space created by the work
of the underlabourers, there are certain characteristics of critical realist social research
that are likely to be permanent. Of these, we have chosen to highlight the following:

. a commitment to ontology;
. the use of retroduction and judgemental rationality;
. the use of the critical realist approach to structure and agency (either in the Bhaskarian
form of the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA) or the Archerian form of
Morphogenesis/Morphostasis);

CONTACT Leigh Price [email protected]

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
90 L. PRICE AND L. MARTIN

. the application of interdisciplinarity, based on a laminated, scalar ontology;

. an engagement with hermeneutically based methodologies (such as grounded theory
or qualitative interviews);
. a commitment to reflexivity; and
. the application of moral realism, leading to normative assertions and suggestions for
action.

A commitment to ontology
The authors in this collection are realist about their subject matter. That is, they assume
that ‘something’ has happened, or that ‘something’ is there; and that that ‘something’
has an existentially intransitive reality (Bhaskar, Danermark, and Price 2017, 42). These
authors therefore do not assume that models, which explain the empirical level, are
simply social constructions or ‘in the mind’. Instead, they assume that models refer to
the real multimechanismicity that underlies the empirical and actual layers of reality. In
this collection, for instance, McAvoy and Butler (2018, pp. 160–175) write, ‘In the social
and business world, these mechanisms exist independent of our investigation of them
but they are themselves both transformed and reproduced by humans … An examination
of these mechanisms is essential in applied business research methodology’.
A welcome consequence of this layered ontology is that critical realist writing lacks
angst about the reality of transcendental, transfactual things, such as Bourdieu’s social
capital (see Hu, this issue, 2018) and anthropogenic causes of environmental degra-
dation (see Simmonds and Gazley, this issue, 2018). It therefore allows us to revisit the
ideas of the great transcendental thinkers of our time, such as Karl Marx, the power of
whose theories has been weakened by the mainstream lack of ontology that prevents
us from believing that there is a real referent to their work. Bhaskar ([1986] 2009, 193)
explains that positivism, as Marx said of ‘vulgar economy’, is content to ‘stick to appear-
ances in opposition to the law which regulates, and explains, them’; and that although
the concept of a fact reflects our spontaneous consciousness in science, nevertheless it is
a concept which must be transcended in our reflective consciousness. ‘For the facts are,
as Marx said of the process of circulation, merely “the phenomena of a process [pro-
duction] taking place behind it”’ Critical realists are free to go beyond the facts, to the
transfactual processes behind them.

The use of retroduction and judgemental rationality

Most of these authors refer to retroduction and McAvoy and Butler use the term 36 times.
Typically, retroduction is referred to in its capacity as ‘a distinctive form of inference … which
posits that events are explained through identifying and hypothesising causal powers and
mechanisms that can produce them’ (Hu, 2018, pp. 118–139). However, Patel and Pilgrim
(this issue, 2018, pp. 176–191) also refer to the potential for retroduction to allow cross-dis-
ciplinary understanding. They write, ‘retroduction provides a common logic for both the
clinical understanding of distress and the judicial understanding of criminality’.
All the authors in this collection also make use of the concept of judgemental ration-
ality. For instance, Hu (pp. 118–139) states that judgemental rationality allows:
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 91

researchers to evaluate and compare the explanatory power of different theoretical expla-
nations and, finally, to select theories which most accurately represent the ‘domain of real’
given our existing knowledge.

Retroduction is discussed again below, under the heading of interdisciplinarity; and judge-
mental rationality is also discussed again under the heading of moral realism.

The use of the critical realist approach to structure and agency

Social structures and their relationship to agency are mentioned by all the authors in this
special issue. For example, Hu (pp. 118–139) writes:
On the basis of this (CR) understanding, the ‘exogenous shocks’ or economic disequilibrium
discussed in the entrepreneur literature can be considered as a social structure produced
by human agency, while also providing conditions for human agency to act upon, which
are all part of the reality of entrepreneurial opportunities.

Simmonds and Gazley (pp. 140–159) make use of Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic/morpho-
static approach to structure and agency. They state that, ‘Together the CR ontology and
the morphogenetic methodology provides the basis for developing marketing systems
theory and addressing questions regarding the nature of systems development, function
and outcomes’.

The use of interdisciplinarity, based on a laminated ontology

Acknowledging that we need to refer to both structure and agency to understand any
social issue automatically commits the researcher to at least two disciplinary matrixes:
one to understand structures and one to understand agents. Bhaskar, Danermark, and
Price (2017, 53) therefore suggest that the interdisciplinary research team ‘should con-
struct a laminated system consisting in a conjunctive multiplicity of levels of laminations
of reality’. McAvoy and Butler provide an example of such a ‘laminated’ matrix, which they
illustrate in their Figure 1. Their matrix considers both: individual agents’ characteristics,
such as risk-taking behaviour and ‘social loafing’ (where an individual works less in a
social context); and structurally related characteristics, such as norms and team goals.
However, they also include reference to ‘time’ and ‘efficacy’ – suggesting perhaps ‘material
interactions with nature’ – and ‘frequent interaction’, which suggests ‘social interactions
between people’. These are reminiscent of Bhaskar’s (2016, 83) model of four-planar
social being, which is an elaboration of the (TMSA) structure/agency model. In another
example, Hu similarly engages with a lamination or matrix (template). He describes how
an important issue is to decide how extensive the template should be. He says, ‘In tem-
plate analysis, too many pre-defined codes can prevent researchers from considering
data that challenges original assumptions, while too few codes may result in the lack of
a clear direction when researchers are overwhelmed by rich data’. Interestingly, Hu
decides to pre-define those codes related to social capital, while he leaves open those
codes related to generative mechanisms (accessing resources) to allow for themes to
emerge. It seems possible that this is an example of the use of retrodiction (RRREI(C)1 or
applied science) for areas of research that are already well theorized and which can there-
fore be pre-defined (Hu’s social capital) but the use of retroduction (DREI(C)2 or pure
92 L. PRICE AND L. MARTIN

science) for areas of research where there is a lack of theory (Hu’s generative mechanisms,
such as accessing resources, whose codes he therefore leaves ‘open’). McAvoy and Butler
mention the value of using both retroduction and retrodiction in research, seemingly
without having read Bhaskar’s (2016, 46) advocacy for the same. Bhaskar formalized the
use of both retroduction and retrodiction in his ‘theorem of the (contingent) co-incidence
of the retroductive and retrodictive moments in research’, which he called the RRRIREI(C).3
The trend towards using laminations to deal with emergent levels of reality is also
evident in the volume of applied research edited by Price and Lotz-Sistka (2016) –
reviewed by Skinningsrud at the end of this issue – in which several of the contributors
make use of Bhaskar’s (2010, 9–10) conception of the seven laminations of scale in apply-
ing critical realism (namely Togo, Burt and Munnik) and Bhaskar’s four-planar social being
(namely Schudel, Munnik and Mukute).

An engagement with hermeneutically based methodologies

Although critical realism achieves metatheoretical unity by admitting the value of the
empirical moment of positivism, the hermeneutical moment of the interpretivist meth-
odologies and the linguistic moment of postmodernism, nevertheless, in the social
sciences, hermeneutically based methodologies are the starting point of critical
realist research. This is because, unlike in the natural sciences, language provides an
‘inside’ or ‘interior’ to social life (Bhaskar 2016, 57). We can only investigate this interior
by engaging with it hermeneutically. The consequence of this starting point is that
critical realist social research is characteristically associated with methodologies that
are typically considered to be qualitative or focussed on meaning. Critical realists are
further justified in the use of qualitative methods because, ‘in CR the rejection of posi-
tivist preoccupations with prediction and quantitative measurement necessitates a
preference for qualitative methods in understanding social events’ (Ackroyd and Fleet-
wood in Hu, pp. 118–139).
Engaging in hermeneutics may be achieved through a literature review that looks at
other researchers’ views (see Isaksen, 2018), and it may involve questionnaires and inter-
views that consider what the research participants think. For instance, Hu uses grounded
theory to guide his hermeneutical investigation. McAvoy and Butler use interviews to
investigate their participants’ understandings and experiences. Isaksen provides a par-
ticularly engaged example of the necessity to start social research with hermeneutics
in his rendition of his literature review as an immanent critique. The psychologists
described in the paper by Patel and Pilgrim rely largely on interviews with their
clients to decide the likelihood of the presence of torture. However, this initial engage-
ment with hermeneutics does not preclude the use of quantitative, non-hermeneutic
measurements and statistics, which allow researchers to explore the exterior of social
life. For instance, McAvoy and Butler also use ‘observation’ to inform their conclusions,
which includes measuring the time taken to achieve certain goals and the efficacy of
the intervention under investigation; and Patel and Pilgrim consider the political
context in which the torture would have happened, and other proven torture cases,
which potentially suggest a possible pattern of offending present in the victim’s
country of origin.
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 93

Reflexivity: the unity of theory and practice

Reflexivity – the identification and resolution of theory/practice inconsistencies – is
another commonality among the papers in this collection. For instance, Isaksen uses Bhas-
kar’s concept of immanent critique to search for and resolve contradictions. McAvoy and
Butler identify theory/practice inconsistencies in terms of: what was (theoretically)
expected, but not (practically) observed; what was expected but observed in a way that
was not exactly what was expected; and what was observed but not expected (see
their Figure 2). Patel and Pilgrim (pp. 176–191) describe their use of reflexivity as follows:
The psychological assessor incrementally builds up a biographical vignette that contains the
alleged torture and provides a sense of the client and their life. They press for more infor-
mation, identify gaps and any seeming contradictions, knowing that such contradictions
will undermine the account in the eyes of the judge.

Simmonds and Gazley (pp. 140–159) describe reflexivity in this way:

CR provides the basis to reflexively evaluate and critique assumptions and our current trajec-
tories by providing us with an understanding of being and its structure, its processual and
multiply determined nature.

The presence of reflexivity in critical realist social science is closely related to the need to
use hermeneutic methods. Both hermeneutics and reflexivity are possible because
humans – which includes the human mind – are part of reality (totality, all-that-is). As
Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 255 explained, ‘It is totality too that closes the hermeneutical and
epistemological circles and explains why texts or reality respectively, insofar as they
appear as such, are always bound to appear at least potentially intelligible to us’.

Moral realism
Another emerging trend in the critical realist literature is an engagement with moral
realism. It is a welcome advance over the lack of normativity, and consequent lack of
agency, inherent in anti-naturalist (postmodern, hermeneutical, phenomenological)
approaches. While not all critical realists agree with moral realism, or even have the
same understanding of what moral realism entails, nevertheless, one way or another,
questions of moral realism are currently topical in critical realism circles (e.g. Elder-Vass
2010; Porpora 2016). In this collection of applied critical realist articles, moral realism is
not mentioned but is nevertheless present in the way that the authors either offer, or
plan to offer, alternative ways of being based on the outcomes of their research. An
example of this commitment to deriving an ‘ought’ from ‘what is’ can to be found in
the work of Simmonds and Gazley (pp. 140–159) who write:
(R)esearch may challenge the belief that technical and managerial approaches will simply
solve the environmental crisis, a perspective which currently resides in the ‘limited opportu-
nities available, desired or permitted’ by the business community (Seghezzo 2009). As
Bhaskar notes, ‘that what is, is only one possible world and that, moreover, always presup-
poses the possibility of other worlds’ (2010, 23).

Patel and Pilgrim also provide a powerful example of the use of moral realism, in terms of
the legal and psychological assessment of torture victims. They argue for a critical realist
94 L. PRICE AND L. MARTIN

version of moral realism that avoids the relativist excesses of postmodernism and the
reductive instrumentalism of positivism. In their context, the ethical question of
whether a person who claims to have been tortured should be given asylum depends
to an extent on whether it can be ascertained that they have in fact been tortured.
Instead of using the a reductive, positivist ‘tick-box’ approach to the assessment of evi-
dence, they argue that psychologists and lawyers should use retroduction to focus on
the discovery of structures and mechanism of the torture, as suggested by the evidence.
Their aim is to improve the ability of these professionals to use the evidence to avoid false
negative and false positive assessments. The paper by Patel and Pilgrim illustrates against
the claim that critical realist moral realism is a kind of instrumentalism, based on positiv-
ism, in which the facts speak for themselves. Far from it, they suggest a kind of moral
realism that takes into account the values of the agents (in this case their values of pro-
fessional integrity, honesty and the desire to achieve justice) and combines these with jud-
gemental rationality and a depth understanding of reality to arrive at non-reductive, realist
ethical positions. Their version of judgemental rationality, which requires that those doing
the thinking be themselves ethical, is in keeping with the version advocated by Bhaskar
([1986] 2009, 17) who states that, ‘judgemental rationality in cognition depends not
only upon the recognition of ontological realism and epistemic relativity, but upon
meta-epistemic reflexivity and ethical (moral, social and political) responsibility on the
part of the cognitive agents concerned’.

Overview of the articles

In terms of where these articles fall in relation to the research cycle, the article by Isaksen
provides an example of a literature review, the papers by Hu, and Simmonds and Gazley
are particularly relevant to the writing of a methodology chapter, and McAvoy and Butler
provide an example of how to approach the literature review, the methodology section
and the results section. The paper by Patel and Pilgrim is an example of the use of critical
realist ontology and epistemology in a professional context, rather than a formal
research context. From their example, we see that critical realism reduces the distance
between scientists and non-scientists since the approach that they use, based on retro-
duction and judgemental rationality, is identical to that used by the scientists working
within formal academia. In this way, we can say that critical realism de-mystifies, or
democratizes, science.
In terms of the content of the articles, Isaksen uses his research – which aims to identify
effective ways to teach critical realism – to argue that immanent critique can provide an
excellent way to better understand the relevant literature, to formulate justifiable opinions
about it, and to guide research questions. Simmonds and Gazley identify tensions and
limitations within current marketing systems theory and literature and put forward critical
realism as a more comprehensive basis for the development of marketing systems theory.
In so doing, they delineate the features of a critical realist approach to the study of market-
ing systems; one which they feel is more likely to overcome the problem of the external-
ities of ‘marketization’ that result in degraded ecosystems and alienating values in our
individual and collective identities. McAvoy and Butler use their research on the structures
and mechanisms that are assumed to improve the efficacy of team work to demonstrate
how a critical realist ‘causal framework’ method can be used by business researchers to
 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REALISM 95

guide analysis. Hu considers how critical realist methodological principles can be used to
develop a qualitative case study research design to guide empirical work in entrepreneur-
ship, exploring specifically how social capital in China, referred to as guanxi, provides
opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. Patel and Pilgrim look at the challenges of pro-
viding psychological assessments of people seeking asylum in the wake of their reported
torture, and resolve these challenges using critical realism.

Conclusion
In this editorial, we have outlined the major trends in critical realist applied work and illus-
trated them with examples. While these examples are concrete singulars, and are therefore
necessarily unique, they nevertheless contain many of the concrete universal character-
istics of critical realist work. These trends in critical realist applied work are reminiscent
of Bhaskar’s critical realist ‘toolkit’. In discussing his toolkit, he urges the social scientist
to: be a realist; be a scientist (use retroduction); be interdisciplinary; employ hermeneutics;
make use of the TMSA; and think in terms of scale (Bhaskar in Bhaskar, Danermark, and
Price 2017, 42–3). To this we have added the use of moral realism, which is nevertheless
assumed in Bhaskar’s toolkit, since we know that his reason for developing critical realism
in the first place was to address the problems in the world (Bhaskar and Hartwig 2010, 21)
and because he describes the idea that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ as one of
the ‘big shibboleths’ of orthodox or mainstream philosophy (Bhaskar 2016, 6). We there-
fore hope that this special issue on Applied Critical Realism in the Social Sciences will
provide at least some of the much called for guidance for researchers who want to put
critical realism to work to improve the world.

Notes
1. RRREI(C) stands for: resolve it into it component parts using significant components of the
problem (based on already existing theory that suggests what is important); redescribe it in
terms of the available relevant theories; on the basis of these descriptions, retrodict back to
antecedent states of affairs that are responsible for the issue under investigation; identify a
detailed picture of the causal genesis of the event; possibly correct the overall picture in
the light of the fuller explanation (Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 133–4).
2. DREI(C) stands for: describe a level of reality; retroductively think of plausible mechanisms that
explain why reality is this way; eliminate rival theories by using judgemental rationality to
decide which theory best explains the largest amount of the empirical evidence; identify
the level of reality (be sure that it exists, perhaps by developing new technologies to literally
see it, or through experiments, but where these are not possible, through other exploratory
tests, such as putting the theory to use in some way to test its efficacy); correct the theory
should contradictions arise through the process of identification (Bhaskar [1993] 2008, 131).
3. RRRIREI(C) stands for: resolution, abductive redescription, retroduction, inference to best expla-
nation, retrodiction, elimination, identification of antecedents and correction. It is a mixture of
the DREI(C) and the RRREI(C) (Bhaskar 2016, 83).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
96 L. PRICE AND L. MARTIN

Notes on contributors
Dr. Leigh Price’s research focusses on questions of interdisciplinarity, environmental/social justice,
education, gender inequality and indigenous knowledge. She is a Senior Research Associate of
the Environmental Learning and Research Centre, Rhodes University, supported by the South
African Research Chairs Initiative.
Dr. Lee Martin’s research utilises critical realist philosophy to explore the nature of creativity and its
role in sustainable development. He is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Cultural and Media
Policy Studies at the University of Warwick.

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