Dialectical Critical Realism Research Articles

From human rights to transformative change: ‘NAME-IT’, a meta-theoretical model of rights-based praxis

Scholarship on social work and human rights is increasingly steering the debate towards praxis and the development of action frameworks. However, these efforts have hitherto not explicitly inquired into how such approaches contribute to transformative change. Addressing this issue, we engage with dialectical critical realism to embed the ongoing discussions in broader theories of change and unravel the transformative potential of human rights discourses. The result is a meta-theoretical model, ‘NAME-IT’, which systematically unpacks how the dialectic between the reality and the promise of human rights can guide social workers towards transformative action. It forwards human rights as a struggle concept and invites practitioners, researchers and educators to name their violations for what they are. This provides guidance to stretch the discourse of human rights beyond the perimeters of neoliberalism and embed it in an agenda fit for critical and radical social work.

Dialectical critical realism, complexity and the psychology of blame

AbstractThis essay considers the question of how to frame social complexity from the point of view of critical realism as it was developed in the direction of dialectics by Roy Bhaskar. One of the main objectives of dialectical critical realism (DCR) was to see dialectics as offering a more open and flexible way of handling social reality. I begin by outlining the main aims of DCR and its general orientation, before outlining some key concepts which afford it greater flexibility in handling complexity. In particular I look at ideas of totality, holistic causality, four planar social being and dispositional identity. I then use these ideas to explore in more detail two particular issues which relate to my own interests in thinking about the place of moral psychology in a dialectical critical realist setting. Here I focus on the complexity in understanding what it means to be responsible for an act in the light of the four planar social being/dispositional identity argument, and on how psychological phenomena animate social and political relations in light of ideas of totality and holistic causation.

On integral theory: an exercise in dialectical critical realism

ABSTRACT This article offers an omissive critique of integral theory. To this objective, the article draws upon dialectical logic to investigate the affinities between integral theory and critical realism. Section 1 identifies new possibilities regarding the role of metatheory in practice by unpacking the metatheoretical coordinates of critical realism and integral theory. After providing a brief history of the origins of critical realism and integral theory, I review the ontological, epistemological, and methodological metatheorems of dialectical critical realism, and I put them to work to provide an omissive critique of integral theory. Then I introduce the notion of strictly non-dialectic because it functions to explain formally how integral theory relates to critical realism. Section 2 isolates the inadequacies at every moment in the passage from the MELD dialectic. Section 3 concludes the article with a discussion of the implications of foregrounding a critical realist ontology for integral theory.

Dialectical critical realism, transformative change and social work

Critical realism, as expounded by Bhaskar, is a philosophy of social science that has been applied in social work scholarship addressing such areas as research methodology, practice interventions and programme evaluation. Most of these applications are based on the early rendition of the philosophy, with little attention given to Bhaskar’s later, more mature, development of dialectical critical realism. This article addresses this gap, describing how dialectic critical realism builds on the early iteration of the philosophy to account for emancipatory change in the social world. The contribution of dialectical critical realism to anti-oppressive social work is then considered through the articulation of six, interlinked steps of transformative change. Finally, the preceding meta-theoretical steps are applied to a fictitious case example involving a young person leaving care. The aim here is to show how the steps can be integrated within social work practice to stimulate positive change, human emancipation and well-being.

Reclaiming songs of wisdom in rural Bangladesh

What kind of music teaching and learning takes place among folk musicians and young ones, aiming to reclaim their oral tradition and educate new master teachers? This question will be answered by drawing on extensive fieldwork at nine song-and-music schools in rural Bangladesh, applying critical realism as a meta-theory. An overall aim is to expand views on what music teaching and learning can be, with potential implications for education beyond rural Bangladesh. The empirical material was collected through a focus group interview with 12 students in an advanced class and in-depth interviews with these students and their three master teachers. The analysis shows that the generational transmission can be seen as based on the ‘four pillars’ of music pedagogy. These are re-described through dialectical critical realism in an abductive process, showing that music pedagogy can open an ontology and dialectic on being and becoming human for the participants. Results are discussed with absence and remembrance as key concepts. The study provides practical and philosophical insights into a music pedagogy about deep learning and resonance: towards transformative praxis.

Critical realism: one of the main theoretical orientations of the social sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

ABSTRACT This paper argues that critical realism is one of the main theoretical orientations of the social sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Critical realism aims to study the transcendental conditions of cognition, and it assumes that reality exists independently of our perceptive abilities. Furthermore, it assumes that reality is ontologically stratified wherein one can distinguish three ontological domains: empirical, actual, and real. In terms of social science, critical realism, therefore, posits that social structures have a real ontological basis independent of researchers’ empirical observations. This paper also emphasizes the role of Roy Bhaskar in the development of the philosophy of critical realism. It is worth noting that he developed his research in the field of social sciences on the basis of the model of dialectical critical realism. This model is not a solution developed within the social sciences, but a philosophical approach that proposes how knowledge about people and social structures can be developed, interpreted and described.

The corporate killing movement in South Korea: a critical realist analysis of social structure and collective agency

ABSTRACT South Korea has one of the highest occupational injury fatalities among the OECD countries over the past decades. It was in this context that the ‘Corporate Killing’ Movement was initiated in the early 2000s with the aim of radically reframing recurring fatal workplace injuries as a social problem by claiming that ‘a worker’s death is a corporate killing’. By drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism in combination with framing literature, this paper aims to trace the emergence and development of collective agency in the Corporate Killing Movement in Korea, paying particular attention to the implications of the formation of a united front of labour and a labour-civic alliance. We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 key informants from multiple sites of action, including civil society, organized labour, political party, and governments, all of whom have engaged in the Corporate Killing Movement over the past years. Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism, this study identifies structural constraints affecting the collective agency of workers against fatal workplace injuries, and specifies the emancipatory, liberating power of collective agency to transform the very structures in which they were embedded. The research findings are also expected to inform future public health activism of how collective agency in a relatively narrow area of activism can gain momentum through the formation of an alliance with heterogeneous groups of agents. This is achieved by establishing a shared understanding of a common causal mechanism at the structural level that cuts across different issues.

The flesh made word: critical realism, psychoanalysis, and the ontology of love

ABSTRACT This essay considers the two-way relation between critical realism and psychoanalysis. Critical realism vindicates and deepens our understanding of ontology by drawing on the sciences for which it underlabours. From its original through its dialectical and metaReal forms, critical realist ontology develops its relation to psychoanalysis. (1) In its original form, it relates depth ontology to the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious, ideas of mental mechanism and unconscious motivation. (2) Dialectical critical realism develops the general ontology/ particular science relation to psychoanalysis by focusing on complexity and interelationality through concepts such as the compromise formation, entity relationism, dispositional identity and holistic causality. (3) There is further convergence around an ontology of love, where critical realism in its metaReal form may draw on Freud’s later structural metapsychology. This strand in Freudian metapsychology considers love central to the human animal who feels and thinks. These capacities ground the possibility of deep metaphysical (metaReal) experience.

(Re)introducing critical realism as a paradigm to inform qualitative content analysis in causal educational research

This article contributes to the debate on the empirical applications of critical realism (CR) in school effectiveness research. Researchers that endorse this research paradigm privilege intensive, over extensive, research designs, focussing, hence, in ethnographic methods and qualitative interviewing. However, and despite some recent academic proposals, there is little guidance in the literature on how to analyse qualitative data using the lenses of CR to produce causal knowledge about the operation of education policies in society. The current piece elaborates on the tenets of dialectical CR to develop some methodological arguments on how to engage in this type of empirical work. These reflections are then applied to analyse qualitative information retrieved in three ‘failing’ schools from Northern Colombia as an exemplar.

Marx, financial capitalism and the fractured society: Using Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism to frame a transformatory sociological programme of action for resistance and change

This article begins by considering the relevance and limitations of Marx’s writings for understanding post-1970s financial capitalism. Two specific propositions are outlined and developed. The first is that twenty-first-century financial capitalism is conspicuously vulnerable to implosion or collapse, notably via a Habermasian ‘legitimation crisis’. The second traces its progressive ‘fracturing’, with references to neoliberal austerity and post-welfarism and their deepening impact on the disadvantaged and vulnerable and the sick and disabled. The article then turns to Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism, suggesting, and attempting to show, that it lends additional philosophical and theoretical weight (‘deepens’ in Bhaskar’s terms) the reach and range of Marxian analyses. The third part of the article focuses on Bhaskar’s evolving theory of transformative – or emancipatory – action. It is contended that his account grounds and allows for rational and compelling resistance to financial capitalism’s neoliberal status quo. In the concluding section, the affinity between Bhaskar’s (neo-Marxian) theory of transformative action and the present authors’ concept of ‘action sociology’ is outlined. The article concludes with a manifesto for an action sociology oriented to ‘absence’, challenging ‘constraining ills’ and imagining and researching ‘alternate futures’.

Feminist Standpoints and Critical Realism. The Contested Materiality of Difference in Intersectionality and New Materialism

ABSTRACTFeminist theory and critical realism should consolidate their collaboration since they have much in common. Nevertheless, feminist standpoint theory and critical realist ontology remain at odds, as extended debates have shown. I argue that this is because of the importance that feminism places on difference – which brings up the problem of relationality in a material way – and thus makes it hard to integrate into traditional critical realism. Dialectical critical realism contributes greatly to an understanding of relationality but lacks difference’s historicity. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of intersectionality in feminism and feminist new materialism. The discussion shows that the mainstream understanding of both approaches has grave deficiencies and profits from critical realist metatheory. Notwithstanding, CR can learn from the motives and ways that difference is deployed in both strands.

Modelling Dialectical Processes in Environmental Learning: An Elaboration of Roy Bhaskar’s Onto-axiological Chain

ABSTRACTThis paper describes a critical realist intensive case study, which develops and tests a ‘dialectic process model of transformative learning’. The model is inspired by Bhaskar's (1993) onto-axiological chain (or MELD Schema) as outlined in his formulation of dialectical critical realism. The study describes transformative environmental learning processes focusing on food security in two primary schools in rural South Africa. The model elaborates on the four links in the onto-axiological chain by describing four knowledge interests across the two cases: knowledge of ‘what is and what is not’, knowledge of ‘what could be’, knowledge of ‘what should be’, and knowledge of ‘what can be’. The model also highlights the emergent nature of epistemic relations in transformative learning processes. The paper discusses the model in relation to a transformative, open-ended and context specific approach to Environmental Education (EE)/ESD. The paper illustrates that Bhaskar’s MELD is a robust schema for investigating learning-led change in EE and suggests its relevance in other research contexts concerned with societal transformation.

Environmental Ethics: Anthropocentrism and Non-anthropocentrism Revised in the Light of Critical Realism

ABSTRACTSome eco-philosophers argue that our responsibilities to the natural world are only indirect, that the responsibility to preserve nature or resources, for example, is best understood with respect to the responsibilities that we owe to other humans. Anthropocentric ethics holds that only human beings have moral value. Thus, although we may be said to have responsibilities regarding the natural world, we do not have direct responsibilities to the natural world. As a reaction to anthropocentrism, other eco-philosophers disagree, however, saying that we have direct responsibilities to natural objects other than human beings. Non-anthropocentric ethics grants moral standing to such natural objects as animals, plants and landscapes. Non-anthropocentrism requires an extension and revision of standard ethical principles. My main point in this article is twofold. First, I want to show that there is a serious flaw in anthropocentrism; my argument is that most anthropocentric approaches are based on either a particular scientific and reductionist worldview or a constructivist worldview, neither of which is adequate. Hence the anthropocentrism that follows from these worldviews is inadequate too. Secondly, I claim that most non-anthropocentric approaches are also inadequate in the sense that they are based on anthropocentrism at arm’s length or a disguised anthropocentrism; that is, they are equally scientistic and reductionist, even if by different means. By tracing Bhaskar’s philosophy from basic critical realism to dialectical critical realism and metaReality, relying specifically on Seo MinGyu’s interpretation, I will develop an alternative critical realist non-anthropism and anti-reductionism. By then engaging with Terrence Deacon’s contrasting dynamic systems perspective, which I take to be in line with Bhaskar’s thought, I want to show what is wrong with existing anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric approaches.

Dialectic Critical Realism: Grounded Values and Reflexivity in Social Science Research

Critical realism emerged from the philosophical writings of Roy Bhaskar, and has evolved into a philosophy of social science research using the model of “dialectical critical realism” (DCR) which begins with the researcher’s assumptions that the structures being researched have a real, ontological grounding which is independent of the researcher. This approach has proved fruitful in British and European social science research, but has had less influence in North America. We outline DCR’s four-level model for understanding society and its changing social structures through “the pulse of freedom”. DCR has been used by Marxists, Muslims, Catholics and secular scholars who engage fruitfully in morphogenic dialogues leading to a critical realist understanding of society and social research, which transcends positivist and social constructionist models. Examples of DCR’s application in the fields of childhood research, child abuse, education, and research on organisations are outlined to illustrate the working of this new research paradigm. We are enthusiastic in our advocacy of DCR as a model of qualitative research, and for constructing models of positive social change, and are particularly impressed by the substantive and theoretical expositions of DCR by Priscilla Anderson, Matthew Wilkinson and Margaret Archer, whose work we document and review.

The Crisis in Indigenous School Attendance in Australia: Towards a MetaRealist Solution

In this article we endeavour to address the problem of the low levels of Indigenous school attendance in Australia through strategies based on dialectical critical realism and metaRealism. We employ the concepts of the dialectic of the 7 Es, the concrete universal, four-planar social being, the self, active perception and dialectical universality (empathy) to show how Indigenous education and an approach to school attendance can be developed that leads to a transformation of the underlying relations between educators and Indigenous communities, families and children. In specific terms we endeavour to show how school connectedness can be given an emancipatory orientation.

Theorizing health inequalities: The untapped potential of dialectical critical realism

We here extend our previous contributions to a neo-Marxist sociology of health inequalities via an engagement with Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism (DCR). We argue that Bhaskar’s re-grounding of the philosophies of Marx and Engels has the potential to re-invigorate sociology’s input into: (a) explanations of health inequalities and (b) interventions to reduce health inequalities. We also show that DCR provides rationale and opportunity for an action sociology beyond current professional, policy, critical and public sociologies. We briefly summarize current sociological models of health inequalities before protesting their lack of theoretical ambition. We then proffer a professional-cum-critical theory that emphasizes the continuing causal efficacy of social class in general, and of Britain’s ‘governing oligarchy’ in particular, for any credible sociological account of health inequalities. Bhaskar’s basic and dialectical critical realism are then introduced and the frame supplied by the latter commended for a deepening of the neo-Marxist theories of health inequalities being developed by us among others. The article concludes by drawing on this same frame to insist on a logical and moral commitment to an action sociology beyond any institutional constraints faced by practitioners of the discipline.

On the Dialectics of Global Governance in the Twenty-first Century: A Polanyian Double Movement?

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi's double movement has been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on. The double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible historical development following its own inner laws or schemes of development. Going beyond a thesis–antithesis–synthesis pattern, I maintain that conceptions and schemes drawn from dialectics, and especially dialectical critical realism, can provide better geo-historical hypotheses for explaining past changes and for building scenarios about possible future changes. I analyse political economy contradictions and tendencies, and focus on normative rationality, to assess substantial claims about rational tendential directionality of world history. I argue that democratic global Keynesianism would enable processes of decommodification and new syntheses concerning the market/social nexus. A learning process towards qualitatively higher levels of reflexivity can help develop global transformative agency. Existing contradictions can be resolved by means of rational collective actions and building more adequate common institutions. These collective actions are likely to involve new forms of political agency such as world political parties.

Integral Theory and the Search for Earthly Emancipation

This article responds to two recent pieces by Timothy Rutzou in an effort to push forward a fruitful dialogue between critical realism (CR) and integral theory (IT). The intention is not a philosophical defence of integral theory; there are far more capable people to attempt a philosophical defence (or surrender). Rather the aim here is to help push forward the development of dialectical critical realism (DCR). Rutzou’s critique centres on four themes: (1) in what way is critical realism a metatheory, (2) integral theory often commits the epistemic fallacy, (3) integral theory is explicitly committed to ontological monovalence and (4) integral theory is ‘a quasi-scientific-religious holistic worldview’. I largely accept Rutzou’s metatheoretical comment and criticisms. I will briefly expand on each of these issues and then suggest that none of Rutzou’s criticisms are fatal to a constructive engagement between integral theory and critical realism. It is a bit awkward to be defending the importance of transpersonal psychology with a theorist who is currently working on rethinking the question of ‘miracles’. Rutzou does accept my claim that integral theory offers to dialectical critical realism (1) psychological theories of human development, (2) cultural anthropology and (3) transpersonal psychology. Thus I am a bit perplexed with the tone of criticism. His tone suggests that the criticisms lodged against IT are fatal. Yet his conclusion is that engagement between IT and CR should take place. Rutzou should clarify his position and explain why the criticisms are not fatal.

Critical Realism, Dialectics, and Qualitative Research Methods

AbstractCritical realism has been an important advance in social science methodology because it develops a qualitative theory of causality which avoids some of the pitfalls of empiricist theories of causality. But while there has been ample work exploring the relationship between critical realism and qualitative research methods there has been noticeably less work exploring the relationship between dialectical critical realism and qualitative research methods. This seems strange especially since the founder of the philosophy of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, employs and develops a range of dialectical concepts in his later work in order to extend the main tenets of critical realism. The aim of this paper is to draw on Bhaskar's later work, as well as Marxism, to reorient a critical realist methodology towards a dialectical approach for qualitative research. In particular, the paper demonstrates how dialectical critical realism can begin to provide answers to three common criticisms made against original critical realist methodology: that the qualitative theory of causal powers and structures developed by critical realists is problematic; that critical realist methodology contains values which prove damaging to empirical research; and that critical realists often have difficulties in researching everyday qualitative dilemmas that people face in their daily lives.

The Place of Totality in Dialectical Critical Realism

Originally presented to Roy Bhaskar’s postgraduate seminar at the Institute of Education, London, in 2012, this article situates and delineates the concept of totality and the cluster of related concepts in dialectical critical realism.