Critical Realism 10

Reflections on the ‘Realist Turn’ in Organizationand Management Studies

Michael ReedCardiff Business School

This paper has three objectives. First, to provide an exposition of the‘realist turn’ in contemporary organization and management studies. Second, toassess the detailed implications of this incipient ‘realist turn’ for the underlyingexplanatory principles and practices that should inform organization andmanagement studies as a social scientific field. Third, to evaluate the potential,longer-term, impact of these explanatory principles and practices in an intellectualcontext where anti-realist ontologies and epistemologies have been dominant. Thiswill entail a critique of contemporary approaches that draw on a socialconstructionist ontology and a postmodernist epistemology. Overall, the paperconcludes that the ‘realist turn’ creates a significant intellectual opportunity and spacein which the historical sociology of dynamic organizational forms and managerialcontrol regimes can be rediscovered and renewed.

INTRODUCTION

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) defines ‘turn’ as ‘to invert or reverse’ and‘to give a new direction to’ or ‘take a new direction’. Organization and manage-ment studies has undergone a series of intellectual inversions, reversions or redi-rections throughout its, relatively short and controversial, history. Over the last twodecades or so, the ‘linguistic or cultural turn’ has been the most prominent of thisprotracted series of intellectual re-orientations or ruptures. Leading advocates ofthe ‘linguistic or cultural turn’ have consistently argued that organization and man-agement studies has been dominated by approaches which naturally assume theexistence of ‘objective’ material and structural realities that define the essence oforganization and organizing. In turn, this fundamental ‘domain assumption’(Gouldner, 1971) provides the basis for assigning ontological and analytical priorityto social structures that evolve according to a developmental logic that is indepen-

Journal of Management Studies 42:8 December 20050022-2380

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Address for reprints: Michael Reed, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Aberconway Building,Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK ([email protected]).

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dent of human intervention. For most of its intellectual and institutional history,advocates of the ‘linguistic or cultural turn’ contend, organizational analysis hastraded on an ontology and epistemology that ‘takes for granted the existence oforganizations as material entities “out there” in the world’ (Westwood and Linstead,2001, p. 4). The taken-for-granted status of organizations, as objective material enti-ties, legitimates a powerful configuration of explanatory principles and practicesthat privileges, putatively autonomous, social structures over the cultural processesand discursive practices through which they are created and sustained.

Post-structuralist and postmodernist perspectives (Hassard, 1993; Hassard andParker, 1993; Kilduff and Mehra, 1997) in organization and management studies,particularly those that draw on a ‘radical social constructionist’ ontology (Tsangand Kwan, 1999), have challenged this realist/objectivist conception of organiza-tion and the explanatory logic that it legitimates. By insisting that organizationsare discursive constructions and cultural forms that have no ontological status or epistemological

significance beyond their textually created and mediated existence, the underlying intellectualthrust of post-structuralist/postmodernist critique and reformulation has beenprofoundly anti-realist in intent and outcome. Again, Westwood and Linsteadarticulate this ‘radical social constructionist’ position and its anti-realist implica-tions in an extremely forceful manner:

Organization exists in the text – there is no structure or boundary or bureau-cratic manifestation that can be meaningfully represented as organization –these too would be discursive constructions. Organization has no autonomous,stable or structural status outside the text that constitutes it . . . The notion of struc-

ture is illusionary, representing only an ideological practice that pretends to standin the place of the flux of shifting and seamless textual relationships. Theachievement of structure is not really attended to in orthodox organizationtheory . . . Structure is a strategy of closure, a practice designed to impose anorder and fixity on natural movement and flow. Structure is the freezing ofmeaning, an imposed constraint on the play of signifiers in the text of organi-zation, a ‘neutralization of meaning by form’. Organization is structure but only when

structure is recognized to be an effect of language, a tropological achievement. (Westwoodand Linstead, 2001, pp. 4–5; emphasis added)

Westwood and Linstead’s insistence that organization and management structuresare no more than discursive constructions is symptomatic of the ‘strong’ (Sayer,2000) or ‘radical’ (Tsang and Kwan, 1999) social constructionist philosophy andprogramme that has dominated organization and management studies over thelast two decades. The philosophy claims that all forms of knowledge, includingscientific knowledge, exclusively determine the content and boundaries of the ‘objectdomains’ to which they relate. This is achieved by imposing an interrelated set ofconceptual categories, epistemological rules and discursive constructions through

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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005

which ‘what can be known’ and ‘how it can be known’ is brought into existenceas a recognizable and legitimate object of study. Epistemology exhausts ontologyto the extent that it determines the nature of our world and the inherent limits ofour ability to understand it by imposing the fundamental categories and conceptsthrough which we come to know it. To reverse Archer (1995, p. 22), ‘epistemology[rather than ontology] acts as both gatekeeper and bouncer for methodology’ inthat it determines and regulates what is to be known and how it can be known.This, essentially nominalist, theory of knowledge (which asserts that the objects ofour knowledge are created by us) has exerted a profound influence in organiza-tion and management studies in recent years.

The programme derived from this philosophy focuses exclusively on the dis-cursive practices and formations through which the linguistically and socially con-structed reality constitutive of ‘organization’ is determined. These discursivepractices and formations will be necessarily subject to both historical and struc-tural variations relating to the changing temporal and spatial contexts in whichthey emerge and develop. Thus, the empiricist and positivist quest for universal,scientific generalizations or principles of organization and management, that hasplayed a dominant role in organization theory’s historical and intellectual devel-opment, is firmly rejected in favour of a much more relativistic and political con-ception of knowledge production and diffusion. Subsequently, the empirical realist

ontological foundations and positivist epistemological scaffolding of orthodoxorganization and management theory (McKelvey, 2003) became the focus for anexcoriating post-structuralist/postmodernist critique (Casey, 2002; Reed, 1996)that would lay waste to much of the intellectual habitus which once held thatorthodoxy together.

This is the wider contemporary intellectual milieu in which the incipient ‘realistturn’ within organization and management studies must be situated and evalu-ated. Thus, this paper will begin with a brief overview of the ‘linguistic and cul-tural turn’ that has been so influential in organization and management studiessince the middle of the 1980s. It will then turn its attention to the relatively recentemergence of critical realist thinking in organization and management studies andwhat it offers by way of a very different set of ontological presuppositions andexplanatory principles to that proffered by ‘radical’ or ‘strong’ social construc-tionism. Critical realism will be regarded as a meta-theoretical paradigm focused on explana-

tions of the underlying ‘generative mechanisms or structures’ that shape corporate agency and the

social relations that it reproduces and transforms. It will be contrasted with ‘scientific orempirical realism’ and the legitimacy that it provides for a positivist epistemology(Donaldson, 1996; McKelvey, 2003). The broader implications of these, criticalrealist-based, presuppositions and principles for the study of organization andmanagement will then be considered in the light of some of the central philo-sophical and theoretical dilemmas that continue to confront the study of organi-zation and management. Finally, it will be suggested that organization and

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management studies displays all the external signs and internal symptoms of enter-ing a new phase of intellectual development and re-orientation. Thus, the ‘realistturn’ has emerged in opposition to the ‘radical’ or ‘strong’ social constructionistprogramme that has underpinned the intellectual development and dominance ofpost-structuralist and postmodernist theory over the last two decades or so.

THE LINGUISTIC/CULTURAL TURN

In many respects, the turn towards language, culture and discourse in contempo-rary social science is highly diffuse, complex and contested (Alvesson and Karre-man, 2000a, 2000b; DuGay and Pryke, 2002; Martin, 2002; Ray and Sayer, 1999;Westwood and Linstead, 2001). The association between ‘the linguistic/culturalturn’ in social science and the development of broad-ranging intellectual move-ments, such as post-structuralism and postmodernism, is also wide open to inter-pretation and debate (Burrell, 1988; Carter and Jackson, 2004; Delanty, 2000;Kellner, 1988; Rosenau, 1992; Seidman and Wagner, 1992; Townley, 2004). Inaddition, the intellectual roots and development of social constructionism, as acoherent conception of and approach to the study of ‘the social’, go back farbeyond the more recent ‘linguistic and cultural turn’ in the social sciences andhumanities (Gergen, 1994; Velody and Williams, 1998). However, it is possible toidentify some of the key features of the ‘linguistic/cultural turn’ in contemporarysocial science and the intellectual support that it derived from movements in philosophical and literary theory that came together under the overlapping epistemological ‘family resemblances’ associated with post-structuralism and postmodernism.

As Gergen (1991, 1994, 2000) has consistently argued, social constructionism isan ‘anti-foundationalist’ and ‘anti-objectivist’ theory of knowledge in which over-riding emphasis is attached to the discursive matrix from which knowledge claimsemerge and are justified. It remains ‘ontologically mute’ because it claims that therealities we deal with are essentially a product of everyday language and theirtranslation and reformulation into ‘expert discourses’ of one kind or another. Assuch, the way we talk about the world and the discursive practices through whichthat talk is enabled becomes our reality and forms the basis for ontological con-structions that remain irredeemably uncertain and ambiguous in relation to theirinherent meaning and implications for action. Thus, for Gergen (1994, p. 8), ‘lan-guage creates an imagined ontology and a structure for rendering intelligible howand why constituents of the ontology are related’. He continues:

Constructionism makes no denial concerning explosions, poverty, death, or theworld out there more generally. Neither does it make any affirmation . . . con-structionism is ontologically mute. Whatever is, simply is. There is no founda-tional description to be made about an ‘out there’ as opposed to an ‘in here’

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about experience or material. Once we attempt to articulate ‘what there is’,however, we enter the world of discourse. At that moment the process of con-struction commences and this effort is inextricably woven into processes of socialinterchange and into history and culture. And when these processes are set inmotion they will generally work towards the reification of language. (Gergen, 1994, p.72; emphasis added)

Gergen specifically contrasts this social constructionist ontology, as necessarilybeing language-dependent and discursively determined, with a critical realistontology in which the real objects of scientific study and explanation are the gen-erative mechanisms or structures that exist and act independently of the patternsof events that they generate. Indeed, he sees critical realism as simply another lan-guage game or expert discourse based on a ‘fundamentalist ontology’. In thisrespect, it is constitutionally incapable of providing a coherent rationale ‘for howthe underlying structures could ever be identified, how one could ascertain which structures were related to which observable outcomes, and how one couldestablish the superiority of one structural account over another’ (Gergen, 1994,p. 75).

As Burkitt (1998) has indicated, social constructionism became caught up in ‘theturn to language’ that enveloped much of the social sciences through the influ-ence of post-structuralism and postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s. Theunderlying intellectual drive and trajectory of the latter was to reduce social analy-sis to the study of the discursive practices and textual forms through which socialphenomena were produced and reproduced as ‘texts’. It also generated a funda-mental opposition to representational epistemologies in which discourses, every-day or expert, are taken to mirror or reflect reality in a direct or unmediatedmanner. In turn, this critique of representationalism was coupled to a critique of,a typically undefined, realist ontology which suggests ‘that language can create an ana-logue or model of structures that generate events in the real world, but which arenot observable on the surface of appearances’ (Burkitt, 1998, p. 124). This oppo-sition to the ‘twin evils’ of representationalism and realism had considerable substantive implications for the study of social phenomena, such as politicaleconomies, work organizations and management structures. The latter were nowto be regarded as the products of discursive practices that linguistically and textually

constitute the social relations reproducing the appropriate definition and usage ofsuch categories and referents. Any ontological distinction, much less separation,between a discursively constituted ‘social reality’ and a social reality that exists andchanges independently of any particular discursive construction or mediation isdenied. But this also left social constructionism with the nagging problem of howto deal with the relationship between the discursive and non-discursive realms, andits implications for social analysis, that would return to haunt it. If the linguisticor discursive boundaries of our understanding pre-determine the limits of our



world for us, if our knowledge of something is co-extensive with ‘that thing initself ’, then how can we even begin to deal with the ‘complex socio-materiality’ ofwhich we are a constituent element?

Nevertheless, critical realism has to respond to Gergen’s critique: how are under-lying generative mechanisms to be identified, related to observable outcomes andassessed in relation to competing explanations of their causal capacities anddynamics? Radical social constructionism simply avoids or bypasses these funda-mental issues by assuming that social reality can be entirely reduced to the accountsthat are given of it through the socio-linguistic practices and textual forms bymeans of which it is determined. Structure is denuded of its ontological signifi-cance and explanatory power by reducing it to a ‘discursive trace’ or ‘virtualizedreality’ briefly and fleetingly glimpsed in streams of symbolically mediated socialinteraction as reflected in Giddens’ social structuration theory (Parker, 2000).

ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT AS TEXT

‘The descent into discourse’ (Harvey, 1996, p. 85) has had fateful consequencesfor organization and management studies. By assuming that language, broadlydefined, constructs being, ‘the descent into discourse’ has legitimated an ontologythat treats social and organizational practices as being co-extensive with the lin-guistic practices and discursive forms through which it is produced. Considered asa ‘text’, the concept of organization is now transformed into a discursive form andmatrix that can, potentially at least, absorb and internalize everything that existswithin its ontological domain without any residual element being omitted. Orga-nization is ontologically reduced to ‘an effect of language, a tropological achieve-ment’ which is to be investigated and analysed as a symbolic order characterizedby a radical heterogeneity of discourses that defines the scope and substance ofwhat can be said and known about it. As a result, it is splintered into an array ofunresolvable differences and fragmented into a universe of diverse and contestedidentities in which any recourse to notions like ‘structure’ – as referring to pre-existing socio-material conditions that constrain agency – is either excluded ortranslated into, that is reduced to, its discursive moment within a discursive fieldthat is exhaustive of social ontology.

Thus, as Ray and Sayer (1999) have suggested, the ‘linguistic/cultural turn’ hasled to a neglect of crucial differences between culture and economy that have beenmarginalized, if not totally collapsed, by theoretical approaches that treat lan-guage, discourse and textuality as ‘the house of being’. The separate, if interre-lated, logics of cultural and economic change have been, ontologically andanalytically, fused into foundational discursive practices and textual forms that lackany connection with social structure. This connection is absent because socialstructure is defined and analysed as a discursively produced textual form that hasno ontological referent or explanatory significance beyond its status as an effect of

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language. Within a social constructionist ontology and a post-structuralist/post-modernist methodology, social structures are treated as the precarious outcomesof discursive practices and rules that determine the ‘power/knowledge networks’through which new ‘mechanisms of exclusion’ are fabricated and deployed (Foucault, 2003, pp. 23–41). They do not, indeed cannot, constitute substantivesocio-material phenomena in their own right because they can only be identifiedand known once they are discursively constituted and represented as ‘social structures’.

These broad-ranging philosophical or meta-theoretical concerns have majorimplications for the way in which ‘domain specific’ theoretical concepts central tothe study of organization and management, such as control, power and identity,are defined, interpreted and deployed. In more recent times, much of the debatein organization and management studies relating to these ‘domain specific’ con-cepts has focussed on Foucault’s work and its implications for substantive researchon the dynamics of surveillance and control.

While Foucault (2003, pp. 23–41) insisted that non-discursive practices andmaterial relations were of strategic importance in understanding the new surveil-lance mechanisms and forms of power emerging in the ‘disciplinary society’, hisfollowers in organization and management studies have often been far less carefulwith their exploitation of his intellectual inheritance. Indeed, the concern with dis-course and difference, text and language, has become so dominant in recent years‘that even to mention the categories of political economy is to appear hopelesslypasse’ (Ray and Sayer, 1999, p. 1). Consequently, the use of categories like ‘culture’and ‘economy’ to refer to mutually interacting but separate institutional orders andlogics that differentially prioritize, respectively, ‘normative rationality’ on the onehand and ‘instrumental rationality’ on the other, has been questioned. Instead, theculture/economy distinction has been ontologically and analytically collapsed sothat the competing pressures and tensions between, for example, patriarchal powerrelations based on gender-specific discourses and class-based power relations basedon unequal access to and control over socio-material resources is sidelined. In turn,explanations of the long-term material consequences of these underlying struc-tural contradictions and their impact on the development of managerial controlstrategies and practices in contemporary capitalist organizations, that were onceso central to the historical sociology of work-based power and control, are mar-ginalized. Instead, there has been a refocusing of analytical and explanatory atten-tion on a constellation of research themes that orbit around the strategic issue ofthe discursive technologies through which organizational identities are recon-structed in modern/post-modern societies and economies (Alvesson and Willmott,2002; Barker, 1999; DuGay, 1996; Jacques, 1996; Knights and McCabe, 2003;Kondo, 1990; McKinlay and Starkey, 1998; Mills et al., 2001; Sewell, 2001;Townley, 1994). Indeed, the overwhelming importance given to discourse andidentity has reached a position where political economy and social structure have



all but disappeared from the explanatory agenda. As a result, ‘too many of thejudgements of social theory are made on the basis of words not deeds’ (Thomp-son, 2003, p. 372).

This work draws extensively on social constructionist assumptions and princi-ples to analyse the changing discursive technologies and regimes through whichcomplex forms of surveillance and control emerged in the course of the twenti-eth century (Strydom, 2000). In ontological and analytical terms, it has been devel-oped from the core ‘domain assumption’ that ‘discourses or sets of statements,constitute objects and subjects . . . language, put together as discourses, arranges andnaturalizes the social world in a specific way and informs social practices. Thesepractices constitute particular forms of subjectivity in which human subjects aremanaged and given a certain form, viewed as self-evident and natural’ (Alvessonand Karreman, 2000a, p. 1128; emphasis added). Thus, the work of the Fou-cauldian ‘governmentalists’ in organization and management studies has beendriven by a desire to provide detailed analyses of the particular discursive prac-tices and forms through which localized political rationalities and power strategiesemerge in specific historical and organizational contexts (Hardy and Clegg, 1999).This work has eschewed a structural conception of power; that is, as a general-ized resource and relation fundamental to the generation and maintenance ofinstitutionalized political domination. Such a view of power is rejected as being‘theoretically unsatisfying and politically naïve’ (Dean, 1999, p. 46). Instead, Fou-cauldian discourse analysts have traded solely on a network-based conception ofpower; that is, as a process of strategic interplay between contending forces thatcan only achieve ‘temporary stabilizations’ through the rules and relations instan-tiated in specific social, spatial and temporal locations (Clegg, 1994; Hardy andClegg, 1999). This conception of power is grounded in a social ontology that insiststhat ‘no assumption of reality can exist as anything more than its representationin language’ (Hardy and Clegg, 1999, p. 381). Consequently, the, admittedlycomplex, relationship between network-based conceptions of power and institu-tionally-based conceptions of power (in which the notion of ‘power structure’ playsa much more central explanatory role) cannot be properly addressed if our under-standing of power relations is limited to their processual properties. We can onlybegin to understand, much less explain, the massive and sustained concentrationof power in, say, the UK retail industry (Blythman, 2004; Lawrence, 2004) and itslonger-term implications for the behaviour of supermarket managers and theircontrol strategies in relation to employees and customers, if we develop an ade-quate analytical and empirical grasp of the underlying dynamics and mechanismsof institutionalized power relations. Power structures have a temporal, spatial andsocial continuity and reach that cannot begin to be grasped by an episodic con-ception of power.

Foucauldian discourse analysis also runs the risk of descending into ‘an infiniteregress and reflexive solipsism’ (O’Doherty and Willmott, 2001). This stems from

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its refusal to countenance that there are, within any temporal and/or spatial loca-tion, already existing, real world material conditions and social relations that constrain and shape the discursive construction of organizational reality in anyparticular socio-historical situation. These pre-existing material conditions andsocial relations have an independent ontological status and explanatory claim irre-spective of their recognition and acknowledgement by social actors in the courseof their ‘discursive work’. As Searle (1995, p. 190) has argued, ‘the ontological sub-jectivity of the socially constructed reality requires an ontologically objectivereality out of which it is constructed . . . a socially constructed reality presupposesa non-socially constructed reality’.

THE (CRITICAL) REALIST TURN

The ‘critical realist turn’ in contemporary organization and management studiesis embedded within a wider intellectual movement within the social sciences andhumanities. It has emerged out of a growing dissatisfaction with the inherentexplanatory limitations of postmodern and post-structuralist epistemologies andtheir grounding in a social constructionist ontology. Again, the intellectual rootsof ‘realism’, as a philosophy of science and as a meta-theory specifying the onto-logical presuppositions on which scientific research and explanation must be based,are deeply embedded in historical and philosophical terms (Archer et al., 1998;Danermark et al., 2002; Sayer, 2000). Within the realist tradition, there are anumber of significant differences in relation to various positions taken up on thelogic of scientific explanation and the relationship between postulated theoreticalentities and the phenomena to which they refer (Blaikie, 1993, 2000; Lopez andPotter, 2001; Smith, 1998). Indeed, positivism rests on an naive empirical or sci-entific realism, in which theory-independent sense data are taken as the ultimatefoundation of all scientific knowledge, that is firmly rejected by critical realists(Blaikie, 1993, 2000). Thus, over the last two decades or so, critical realism hasbeen formulated and advocated as a distinctive philosophy of science that offersa radically different conception of the nature of ‘the social’ and of ‘social expla-nation’ to that proffered by positivism and by postmodernism/post-structuralism(Stones, 1996). Gradually, its intellectual influence has been diffused throughoutthe social and historical sciences and within organization and management studiesas a constituent field embedded within the latter (Kimberley et al., 2003).

As a philosophy of science and an overarching meta-theory informing researchand explanation within the social and historical sciences, critical realism advancesa number of interrelated ontological and methodological ‘domain assumptions’that set it apart from both positivism and constructionism. In turn, these claimshave fundamental implications for the reformulation of social and organizationaltheory and for the practice of social and organizational research that flows fromthem. As a philosophy of science, positivism is to be counterposed to critical



realism and postmodernism. Social constructionism provides an ontology that iscompatible with postmodernism/post-structuralism but is incompatible with theatomistic and reductionist ontology underlying positivism and with the structuredtransformational ontology of critical realism.

Three core ontological domain assumptions are central to critical realism as aphilosophy of science. First, that the phenomena to which scientific research andexplanation are directed are the underlying structures and mechanisms thatproduce empirical events rather than, as claimed by positivists, the empirical eventsor regularities in themselves. Thus, critical realists are committed to a stratifiedontology in which deeper structures or mechanisms shape events and regularitiesat a surface level. Second, that these underlying structures or mechanisms are notdirectly accessible to sense experience and have to be theoretically constructed andmodelled through a process of conceptual abstraction and ‘retroduction’ (Blaikie,2000). This sets critical realism apart from the naive empirical realism and mate-rial determinism characteristic of empiricist and positivistic philosophies ofscience. Third, as theoretically reconstructed models and explanations of under-lying structures or mechanisms that contingently generate actual events and outcomes, scientific theories offer provisional descriptions and accounts of phe-nomena that are always open to revision and reformulation. However, contra-postmodernism, this does not entail that, because they are necessarily humanconstructions, scientific theories and the knowledge that they produce cannot besystematically assessed and evaluated. Thus, critical realists insist that it is possible,indeed necessary, to assess competing scientific theories and explanations in rela-tion to the comparative explanatory power of the descriptions and accounts thatthey provide of the underlying structures and mechanisms that generate observ-able patterns of events and outcomes (Bhaskar, 1978; Outhwaite, 1998).

Given these ontological presuppositions, then a number of methodological andtheoretical consequences follow. First, a conception of causality and causal expla-nation that is fundamentally different from that advanced by positivism (Lewis,2000). Second, a ‘retroductive’ research strategy and design that contrasts with the‘deductive’ form characteristic of positivism and the ‘abductive’ form typical ofconstructionism and postmodernism (Blaikie, 2000; Danermark et al., 2002).Third, a recognition that although scientific theory and the explanatory knowl-edge that it facilitates are socially constructed and evaluated, this does not meanthat they can be reduced to the discursive practices and interpretative schemesthrough which they were produced.

Critical realism argues that causality is not synonymous with a relationshipbetween discrete events; it cannot be reduced to the statistical generalizations ofempirically observed invariance of constant conjunctions of events that charac-terize quantitative research methods. Instead, it must be regarded as referring tothe inherent powers or capacities of mechanisms or structures to generate certaintendencies or regularities which may or may not be contingently observed in

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empirical events or outcomes (Sayer, 2000). If the inherent causal powers or capacities of underlying structures or mechanisms are activated in particular circumstances, then they may generate corresponding empirical events and outcomes.

The research strategy and design through which this form of causal explana-tion is most likely to be realized is ‘retroduction’ rather than ‘induction’ or ‘abduc-tion’. Retroduction is a mode of inference that aims at discovering the underlyingstructures or mechanisms that produce tendencies or regularities under certainconditions through a process of model building, testing and evaluation in whichcomplex and time-consuming procedures are required to unearth them. This leadsto a view of scientific explanation as entailing the identification of underlying andunobservable structures or mechanisms acting in particular social situations andcontexts so as to generate observable tendencies or regularities and their effects(Pawson and Tilley, 1997). Such a conception of scientific research and explana-tion contrasts with the inductive strategy typical of positivistic research design andlogic and the abductive strategy and design typical of constructionism. The formerpresumes an ordered universe of discrete and observable events that can beexplained by statistically supported generalizations about the universal relation-ship between concepts. The latter aims to reconstruct, re-interpret and decon-struct, the tacit meanings and motives through which relationships and actions arediscursively constructed and represented.

Given this generative, rather than successionist, conception of causality andretroductive model of explanation, critical realism also promulgates a distinctiveconception of the nature and status of the knowledge that is produced through sci-entific research. As previously argued, critical realism is committed to a retroduc-tive mode of inference in which putative causal relations are imputed by reasoningbackwards from the phenomena under investigation and asking ‘what, if it existed,would account for this phenomenon?’. In turn, this legitimates a causal-explana-tory methodology in which the objective is to explain, rather than to predict,describe or deconstruct social behaviour, in terms of the causal mechanisms thatconstrain and enable different forms of collective human action. Scientific knowl-edge provides explanations of the underlying structures and mechanisms that mustexist for phenomena to be the way that they are and for the innate powers that theypossess to generate certain kinds of patterns and regularities rather than others. Bydefinition, these explanations will have to identify and account for the highlycomplex ‘compound effects’ of the interactions between, often contradictory andconflicting, powers and influences operating at different levels of analysis and drawnfrom a wide range of structures and mechanisms operating in dynamic situationsand contexts (Danermark et al., 2002; Lawson, 1997). They will necessarily drawon, but cannot be reduced to, the discursive practices and forms – that is, the ‘dis-cursive technologies’ – through which social actors come to understand and inter-pret the underlying structures and mechanisms that produce the events in which



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they are engaged. In this crucial respect, critical realists reject the idea that oursocially constructed understanding and interpretation of reality is exhaustive of thatreality (Trigg, 2001). All theoretical descriptions, explanations and evaluations aregrounded in knowledge generating and diffusion processes that are temporally andspatial located in historical and social settings that makes them fallible, contestedand revisable. But this does not legitimate a postmodernist discursive reductionismin which scientific research, theory generation and explanation are reduced torhetorical or linguistic constructions that have no reference to or anchoring in anindependently existing world.

The implications of these critical realist ‘domain assumptions’ have profoundimplications for the reconstruction of social and organization theory. Indeed, takenas a complete package, they fundamentally redefine both the nature of the ‘explanatory task’

in social and organizational analysis and the contribution that explanatory knowledge can make

to our understanding of and participation in emergent socio-organizational forms.From the point of view of reconstructing social theory, critical realism has made

a crucial impact on, at least, three central issues or dilemmas. This impact hasbeen most evident in relation to the ‘structure/agency’ issue and its implicationsfor the way in which social phenomena are conceptualized and explained (Archer,1995, 2000, 2003; Baert, 1998; Danermark et al., 2002; Layder, 1994, 1997;Parker, 2000). But it has also been manifest in relation to the status of and rela-tionship between, respectively, ‘historical’, ‘structural’ and ‘discursive’ analysis insocial science and the wider implications of this issue for the various ways in whichsocial change might be explained (Archer, 1995; Gregory, 1994; Harvey, 1996;Hudson, 2001; Stones, 1996; Sztompka, 1993).

The ‘structure/agency’ problem or dilemma has a long and often controversialhistory in social theory that stretches over, at least, two centuries of intellectualdebate and ideological conflict (Abrams, 1982; Archer, 1995, 2000; Benton andCraib, 2001; Dawe, 1979; Nash, 2003; Reed, 1998, 2002; Trigg, 2001). Thisdebate has revolved around the key question of ‘how creativity and constraint arerelated through social activity – how can we explain their co-existence?’ (Layder,1994, p. 4). It is so pivotal to the way in which we construct and evaluate theo-retical explanations of social phenomena, such as organization and management,because it frames the ontological terrain on which those explanations are to beformulated and judged. Once that ontological terrain has been identified, resolu-tions of the ‘structure/agency’ problem or dilemma then prioritize how thatterrain is to be conceptually modelled and analytically framed. This is achievedby specifying the structures and/or processes through which its key componentsand the relationship between them are to be accounted for within the terms ofreference established by different explanatory theories. Critical realists have madesignificant interventions in the continuing debate over the ‘structure/agency’problem or dilemma. This is so to the extent that they have consistently resistedcollapsing either element into the other. Even more significantly, they have insisted

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that each element in the ‘structure/agency’ matrix be ontologically and analyti-cally separated out so that the dynamic interaction between them, over time andplace, and its longer-term institutional consequences can be mapped out andexplained. As Lopez and Potter contend:

Critical realists would assert the necessary existence of social structure. Critical real-ists would posit both human beings and social structure as the two prime objectsof knowledge for social science. They would also argue that they are very dif-ferent sorts of ‘thing’ . . . Social structure is, of course, dependent upon humanactivity. Without that it would not exist. However, it does have an independenceas well. As Durkheim argued, it pre-exists us. We are shaped and affected bysocial structures. Social forces act on us. Social structures limit our range of pos-sible choices of action and thought . . . We do not ‘create’ social structure. Wereproduce and transform it. But it too causally effects us. (Lopez and Potter,2001, p. 15; emphasis added)

By rejecting the reduction of structure to agency or vice versa and arguing for anexplanatory focus on the complex interaction between them at the level at whichcollective or corporate agency emerges, critical realists provide the means forexplaining the ‘structuration of structures’ (Clark, 2000) and its fateful conse-quences for actors. In turn, these explanations will have to be based on forms ofsocial research that deftly combine historical, structural and discursive analysis toidentify and explain the specific causal mechanisms that shape the emergence,elaboration and transformation of different organizational forms and practices.The latter will be focused on the formation, reproduction and transformation ofsocial structures and their mobilization by corporate agents with the, differentiallydistributed, resources and skills needed to pursue their collective interests throughengagements in power struggles with others. Approached through this ontologicalframework and analytical lenses, the dynamics, trajectories and outcomes of socialchange are viewed as emerging from ongoing power struggles between multiplecollective agents located in structured settings that alternate between opportunitiesfor agential creativeness and structural constraint:

The solution to the structure/agency problem, then, involves a commitment tothe reality of social structures, conceived as relations between social agents invirtue of their occupancy of social positions. Structures are causally efficacious,in that they both enable actions which would otherwise not be possible (cashingcheques, getting degrees and so on) and constrain actions (bouncing cheques,imposing structural adjustment policies on Third World governments, enforc-ing essay deadlines and so on) . . . It is central to this account of the relationbetween social structures and human agents that they are ontologically distinctfrom each other. (Benton and Craib, 2001, p. 132)



BEYOND THE TEXT

The strategic implications of this, critical realist-inspired, reconstruction of con-temporary social theory for the reformulation of organization theory and refocus-ing of organization analysis can now be considered in more depth and detail. Thisprocess of theoretical reconstruction and analytical reformulation relates to anumber of issues and problems. First, the development of an adequate re-concep-tualization of ‘organization’ and ‘management’ that is appropriate to the explana-tory purposes of critical realism as a philosophy of social science and the forms ofsocial theorizing emerging from the latter. Second, the broad research strategy anddesign, consistent with critical realist presuppositions and principles, that such areformulated organizational analysis would require. Third, the substantive researchagenda that is likely to develop out of this form of organizational analysis and itsimplications for the ways in which the study of organization and management mightbe theoretically and methodologically advanced in the future.

The influence of critical realist thinking and analysis in organization and man-agement studies has grown, admittedly from a relatively small intellectual and insti-tutional base, over the last decade or so (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000; Clark,2000, 2003; Fleetwood and Ackroyd, 2004; Hudson, 2001; Layder, 1993; Mingers,2000; Mutch, 1999; Reed, 1997, 2001; Sibeon, 2004; Whittington, 1989; Will-mott, 2000). Much of this work has been directed to a conceptual reformulationof key notions such as ‘organization’ and ‘management’ that are consistent withthe ontological precepts, analytical principles and explanatory commitmentsemerging from critical realism as a philosophy of science and meta-theoreticalposition within social science. The upshot of this ‘conceptual retooling’ suggeststhat the concept of ‘organization’ is most usefully approached as referring to theintermediate level of social structuring through which more basic or primary levelactivities are co-ordinated and controlled. This is achieved through a range of,often contradictory and conflicting, institutional logics and forms that have to becontextualized in relation to higher, macro-level structures that establish the con-ditions and relations within which work organizations operate (Clark, 2000; Harris,1980; Hudson, 2001; Reed, 1985; Sibeon, 2004). Consequently, the intermediatelevel of social structuring is taken as being of strategic explanatory relevance fororganization and management research undertaken from a critical realist per-spective because:

This ‘generous zone’ (recognized and campaigned for by Marx, Durkheim andWeber) is where collectivization happens, as groups, corporate agents, networks,cultural traditions, institutions, hierarchies, games, alliances, stratificationsystems and struggles over the status quo are initiated, acquire their condition-ing force, are maintained and transformed by agents. It is the zone of the rela-tively deep temporality of events and sequences where structures and agents

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interact, the zone of multiple tendencies and limited predictability, between randomness and inevitably. (Parker, 2000, p. 120)

Thus, as Parker so vividly conveys, this intermediate level or ‘generous zone’ iswhere corporate agency emerges and reproduces and transforms the structuralmechanisms through which social life is co-ordinated and controlled to establish adegree of, always contested, continuity and stability. It is here that the underlyingdynamics of the power and control struggles that shape and reshape the structureof social positions and the differentially distributed pattern of material interestsand social rewards that it reproduces are most clearly articulated and most keenlycontested. It is this intermediate level of analysis, located between large-scale socialprocesses and structures and smaller-scale, micro-level situations and encounters,that provides the explanatory focus for critical realist-inspired research. This is theconceptual space and ontological domain where the key generative mechanismsreshaping contemporary organizations and their managements are to be mostappropriately captured and mapped for explanatory purposes. It is within this criti-cal conceptual and ontological space – between relatively abstract analytical con-structions, such as ‘modes of production’ or ‘social formations’, and empiricallyobservable forms of social behaviour, such as ‘surveillance’ and ‘resistance’ – thatthe explanatory resources made available by critical realism can be most effectivelydeployed. As Hudson (2001, p. 32) maintains, ‘organizations must be seen as theterrain on which their members can mobilize . . . individuals exist as social beingswhose patterns of thought and action are conditioned by the social relationshipsin which they are enmeshed’. This provides the conceptual grounding for an his-torical sociology, political economy and geography of organization and manage-ment that begins from the supposition that:

Production, its organization and its geographies, must be viewed as contingentand, as such, contested. Particular forms and geographies of production orga-nization result from struggles between capital and labour, between companies,and between groups of workers, with states implicated in such struggles bothvia their regulatory role and, on occasion, as participants. Different social classesand groups seek to shape the anatomy of production and spaces and spatialityof capitalism to further their own interests. Within this is a determinate set ofstruggles [but] it is not (pre)determined, as agency and structure combine in andthrough place to generate contingent outcomes. There is a considerable rangeof concrete socio-spatial practices and strategies through which the social rela-tions of production can be realized and reproduced. Consequently, there isalways a variety of potential resultant geographies. (Hudson, 2001, p. 39)

Given this, critical realist-based, conception of ‘organization’ as a socially struc-tured and contested corporate form from which collective agency emerges and



transforms itself through an unavoidable engagement in dynamic and creativepower struggles (Archer, 2000), then a radically different research agenda is likelyto take shape as compared to that bequeathed by the intellectual inheritance leftby postmodernism. The linguistic/cultural turn has strongly favoured a concep-tion or organization and management as constituting a discursively generated textin which substantive issues crystallizing around issues of subjectivity, identity anddiscipline have been dominant (Alvesson and Willmottt, 2002). Discursively man-ufactured and managed organizational subjectivity and identity emerge as ‘the’key sites for research and analysis. This is so because they most dramatically articu-late and represent an overarching ethos or climate of pervasive cultural com-plexity, uncertainty and ambiguity as the defining qualities of the post-Fordist or‘informational or networked capitalist’ times in which we now live. The explana-tory focus for this work, such as it is, is the discursively mediated processes andpractices through which ‘reconstructed organizational and managerial selves’ arefashioned (Brown, 2001; Knights and Willmott, 1999; Lennie, 1999; Mumby andClair, 1997; Thomas and Linstead, 2002; Watson, 1994; Watson and Harris,1999). There is little or no engagement here with the structurally embedded andhistorically contextualized power struggles between collective actors that generatenew forms of corporate agency and the political potential that the latter embodyand carry for subsequent phases of institutional change and transformation. Thecrucial link between ‘power’, ‘structure’ and ‘change’ is dissipated in a social ontol-ogy that regards different levels and forms of corporate agency or structuration asexplanatory equivalents that can be reduced down to their discursive constitutionand mediation.

‘Classical’ historical and sociological studies of management and organization(Anthony, 1986; Bendix, 1956; Braverman, 1974; Dalton, 1959; Fletcher, 1973;Fox, 1974, 1985; Jackall, 1988; Jacoby, 2004) provided analytically structuredaccounts of the material, structural and political forces and dynamics that shapedand reshaped the realities of managerial work over the course of the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. This work developed a sustained explanatory focus on theintermediate level or ‘generous zone’ in which changing material, structural andsymbolic conditions impacted on emerging forms of managerial work and thedevelopmental trajectories that they followed. It consistently and powerfully drewattention to the intrinsic or relational character of ‘management’ as an historicallydynamic and contingent cluster of practices and structures embedded within widerstructures of power and domination. Researchers operating within this classicaltradition explored the underlying generative mechanisms (although they did notformally refer to them as such) through which the deeper shifts that framed andre-framed the material conditions, moral foundations and political relations typicalof modern managerial work could be more fully understood and explained.Throughout their work, there is an evident intellectual commitment to a logic ofexplanation and a research strategy that focused on the complex interplay between

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social structure and managerial agency over time and place. Whatever, the par-ticular theoretical lens through which these classical studies were undertaken, man-agerial work and organization were always located, analysed and explained withina wider historical problematic and structural arena.

The overriding research task for a critical-realist inspired study of organizationand management is to retrieve and renew this classical explanatory focus on chang-ing organizational forms and discursive technologies – within the material condi-tions and social structures taking shape in contemporary capitalist politicaleconomies. It must imaginatively combine the intensive, historical and analyticalresearch practices (Danermark et al., 2002; Layder, 1993, 1998; Sayer, 2000)typical of applied critical realist methodology in order to develop the ‘retroduc-tive’ research strategies and explanatory logics to which these practices are directed(Blaikie, 2000). This will require substantive theoretical approaches and researchmethodologies geared to the identification and exploration of the painstakingdetail of each historical case in which the complex interaction between the rele-vant corporate agents, structural conditions and situational contingencies remainsthe focus of explanatory concern.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The burden of the argument developed in this paper is that critical realism, contra-Gergen, can provide a coherent ontological rationale and a causal-explanatorymethod for identifying underlying structures or mechanisms. The latter aredeemed to possess causal powers or capacities sufficient to generate observableevents and outcomes that may or may not be actualized in specific historical con-texts and social situations. Whether or not these potential generative causal powersare realized within a particular temporal and spatial location is dependent on arange of structural, historical and operational contingencies that interact in ahighly complex and dynamic manner. The dynamic relationship between the gen-erative potential inherent in social structures and its contingent realization throughcorporate agency, as well as its implications for the construction and applicationof theoretical models geared to a form of causal explanation sensitive to contex-tual complexity, stands at the ontological and analytical core of critical realism(Lewis, 2000; Pawson and Tilley, 1997). In this way, critical realism aspires toprovide an overarching explanatory framework and logic that combines a sus-tained focus on the structural constraints that necessarily shape corporate agencyand the dynamic potentialities for change that their complex interaction generates(Reed, 2003). Thus, any form of substantive social theorizing, research and analy-sis drawing on critical realism will need to combine abstract conceptualization,creative model building and detailed historical interpretation within a philosophi-cal framework that is sensitive to the ‘structure/agency’ dilemma and its criticalimplications for social explanation. Critical realism does not legitimate or license



any particular substantive theoretical perspective or body of social theorizing. Butit is incompatible with approaches based on the assumption that ‘discourse makesthe world’ or that material conditions and social relations have no ontologicalstatus or explanatory relevance unless and until they are discursively constituted(Outhwaite, 1998).

The paper has further argued that critical realism, as a philosophy of scienceand as the body of analytical precepts and methodological principles emergingfrom that philosophy, has profound implications for the study of organization andmanagement. These are also interpreted as standing in stark contrast to the supporting ontological rationale and methodological strategy for a form of organi-zation and management studies legitimated by social constructionism and implemented by post-structuralism/postmodernism. From the viewpoint of criti-cal realism, all forms of organization and management are necessarily structured,in certain ways rather than others, by the social relations that constitute them; thelatter are fundamental to realist-based research and explanation. These organiza-tional and managerial forms are what they are because of the social relationsthrough which they become generated and structured as recognizable and sus-tainable emergent social entities. Critical realists also contend that these structuralentities possess certain emergent and dynamic properties relating to the social rela-tions that produce them, the social practices appropriate to those relationships andthe cultural dispositions of the corporate agents necessary to the maintenance ofthose relations. These properties or powers and the generative capacity – that istheir inherent capacity to sustain and/or transform existing organizational andmanagerial forms – that they entail may or may not be mobilized in any particu-lar temporal and spatial location. This depends on a highly complex series ofinteractions between structural constraints and corporate agency as they workthemselves through in specific socio-historical contexts. The major explanatory task forthe student of organization and management, drawing on the intellectualresources that critical realism makes available, is to construct and deploy theoret-ical models of these complex interactions and the patterns of social relations thatgenerate and sustain over time and place. As Lawson indicates (1997, p. 220), thiswill require a complex interaction between abstract, ideal-type theoretical expla-nation identifying underlying mechanisms and the tendencies they generate andsituated, contextual explanation in which relatively enduring structures or patternsare related to temporally and spatially-specific circumstances and events.

In these respects, critical realism generates a highly distinctive research agendaand strategy for contemporary organization and management studies. This is thecase insofar as it requires the organizational analyst to provide analytically struc-tured historical accounts of specific ‘transition processes and their outcomes’.These explanatory narratives attempt to link recurring cycles of pre-existing structural conditioning, emergent social interaction and structural elaboration ortransformation in relation to specific sequences of organizational restructuring

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embedded in particular historical and institutional contexts (Clark, 2000, pp.267–87; 2003). Thus, realist-based research on organization and managementmust begin with an in-depth and intensive historical and structural analysis of pre-existing institutional forms. The latter indelibly shape and frame the emergenceand trajectory of innovative managerial strategies and practices as they developin response to the challenges and threats that pre-existing structures present. Itmust then move on to explore, longitudinally and comparatively, the impact ofthese emergent managerial strategies and practices on subsequent phases of insti-tutional and organizational restructuring.

Considered in these terms, organizational research and analysis that draws oncritical realism necessarily entails the development and application of explanatorymodels and research methods that focus on the interpenetrating and mutuallyinfluencing levels of analysis and social domains through which new organizationalforms are generated and sustained (Reed, 1997; Sibeon, 2004). Only in this waycan the underlying generative mechanisms that shape organizational restructuringbe accessed and articulated. It is this deeper level of social and organizationalreality, not readily available to direct observation or description, the level of thegenerative mechanisms or structures that produce, reproduce and transform par-ticular organizational forms and managerial processes, that remains central to thekind of explanatory knowledge that realist-based researchers seek. By linking localchanges in organizational forms and control regimes to deeper structural changeswithin the political economy of contemporary capitalism, realist-based researchand analysis provides the opportunity to understand and explain the complexinterplay between managerial agency and structural constraint over time andplace.

As Thompson et al. (2000) have intimated, this also offers the chance of devel-oping a coherent and viable theoretical alternative to the idealization of sub-jectivity and individualization of identity characteristic of post-structuralistmethodology and post-modernist theory. Such a realist-based, theoretical alterna-tive would give much greater emphasis to the material and structural constraintsembedded in current forms of ‘globalized’ and ‘informationalized’ capital accu-mulation as they impact on dynamic managerial strategies and practices directedto maximizing the performance and productivity of a, still indeterminate, labourprocess. It would also give a central explanatory role to institutional and organi-zational discourses but within a fundamentally different methodological rationaleand explanatory logic to that advanced by post-structuralism and postmodernism.Within the latter, identity formation is viewed as, essentially, an existential processshaped by cultural mechanisms and discursive practices geared to securingemployee commitment within increasingly uncertain employment conditions.Identity construction and management become ‘a locus and target of organiza-tional control as the economic and cultural elements of work become dedifferen-tiated’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002, p. 623). However, realist-based research and



analysis on the discursive reconstruction of organizational identities and its controlimplications would be focused upon what Fairclough (2001, p. 124) calls the ‘ordersof discourse that emerge from the social structuring of semiotic difference’ andtheir strategic political role in generating and sustaining political dominance. Thisform of discourse analysis, Fairclough (2001, p. 124) continues, oscillates between‘a focus on structure and a focus on action – between a focus on shifts in the socialstructuring of semiotic diversity (orders of discourse), and a focus on the produc-tive semiotic work which goes on a particular texts and interactions’. Once again,the underlying explanatory thrust of realist-based forms of organizational dis-course analysis would be directed to the emergence of innovative discursive ordersand technologies, such as ‘enterprise culture’ or ‘new managerialism’ or ‘newpublic management’. Any explanation of the relative success that they might haveachieved in displacing pre-existing discursive regimes, such as ‘corporatist managerialism’, would have to link their subsequent ‘discursive careers’ to theunderlying structures and strategies through which they were generated and subsequently sustained as ideologically and politically viable alternatives to thedominant discourse (Fairclough et al., 2002). The realization of the inherent causalpowers and capacities of new orders of discourse, that is, their ability to colonizean ever widening range of institutional fields and organizational locales, must beaccounted for in relation to their role in effectively facilitating the formation anddeployment of new forms of corporate agency that challenge the status quo.In turn, from a realist viewpoint, this must be related to the collective capacity of the newly created forms of corporate agency to transform themselves in thecourse of their material, political and cultural struggles. They are likely to achievethis by inducing the elaboration of new power structures and the new resourcesand positions that they will entail (Archer, 2000). When this begins to happen, thenan increasing number of people are more likely to invest in and support the newforms of corporate agency that have been created through creative discursive innovation as it responds to the problems and challenges presented by structuralchange.

By recognizing the emergent properties of institutional and organizational dis-courses, explanatory models derived from critical realist ontology and methodol-ogy place the researcher in a much better position to understand the indirect andmediated link between the objective and subjective dimensions of social life. This‘sophisticated realism’ (Stones, 1996, p. 232) offers us the chance to see the socio-organizational world of discourses, structures, relations and networks as real butinherently variable and messy. Once particular discourses become the objectiveelements of social structure, through institutionalization across time and space,then they are ontologically prior to agency and constrain its capacity to changethe underlying conditions of action. But these very same discursive structures arealways potentially open to further modification and transformation through sub-sequent phases of practical intervention in the course of social events.

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If, as Gergen insists, social constructionism is ‘ontologically mute’, then criticalrealism is ‘epistemologically open or permissive’ (Sayer, 2000, p. 32). But this doesnot mean that substantive theoretical frameworks and research designs that mobi-lize the analytical and explanatory resources made available by critical realism cansimply ignore the ontological constraints that necessarily frame and limit organi-zational change. Any attempt to understand and explain organizational changethat draws on critical realism must focus, contra-Gergen and Giddens, on the real,as well as the virtual, structures and scripts that set the trajectories along whichsuch change is likely to be enacted. Drawing on intellectual resources such as theseshould place us in a better position to develop theories of institutional, organiza-tional and managerial restructuring that are offered as ‘trial presentations of theworld not subject to decisive verification’ with their particular explanatorystrengths and weaknesses (Bendix, 1974, p. xivii).

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