Kemp refuses to distinguish philosophical dualism from the sociological analytical dualism of the M/M approach where two entities can be interdependent but are not inseperable. This makes him a Central Conflationist

Critical Realism allows for serious internal debates as between the two authors here. Archer defends Culture as objective intelligibilia composed of abstract ideas;for Elder-Vass it consists of norm circles of those pressing others to ideational accord.

Realist evaluators argue that evaluations need to ask not just what works but also what works for whom under what conditions. They argue interventions need to be evaluated in terms of the mechanisms they trigger and how these interact with context to generate different outcomes in different settings or populations. Hypotheses should be worded as context–mechanism–outcome configurations (CMOCs). Many realist evaluators argue that randomised trials are not a proper scientific design, do not encompass sufficient variation in contexts to test CMOCs and are inappropriately positivist in orientation. They argue that it is better to test CMOCs using observational designs which do not use randomisation. We welcome the focus on CMOCs but disagree with the view that trials cannot be used for realist evaluation. Trials are an appropriate scientific design when it is impossible for experimenters to control all the factors which have an influence on the result of an experiment. Trials can include sufficient variety of contexts to test CMOCs. Trials need not embody a positivist approach to the science of complex health interventions if they are oriented towards testing hypotheses, draw on theory which engages with deeper mechanisms of causation and use distinctly social science approaches such as qualitative research.

This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

In this chapter we suggest that a fundamental shortcoming of the meaningful work scholarship is the neglect or misrepresentation of employee agency. Indeed, when employee groups, teams and communities are mentioned in the literature, they are associated with the formal work organisation – not informal self-organised groups, teams and communities among workers. This position turns a blind eye to the politics of working life and the multi-layered consequences of the interplay between structure and agency. Addressing this issue, this chapter argues that employers seldom provide workers with meaningful wage labour for its own sake; to the extent meaningful work exists, workers mainly capture it with the help of informal self-organisation and trade unions. Therefore, in this chapter we stress the importance of employee agency in the politics of working life for attaining meaningful wage labour.

Neoliberalism is often framed as the victorious doctrine against Soviet communism: its nemesis and antidote. When we examine how Soviet and neoliberal economics understand the nature of political economic reality, however, British neoliberalism and Soviet communism turn out to be exact mirror images. In this introduction, Innes sets out the book’s argument, and the philosophy of science perspective on which it is based. Why do Soviet and neoliberal orthodoxies have such affinities? Both are based on closed-system reasoning about the political economy; both assert that there are predetermined laws of the economy that each doctrine alone can apprehend, and both schemes require the operation of a universal and consistent rationality: socialist versus utilitarian. The ‘critical realist’ perspective in the philosophy of science focuses on how we apprehend reality, and what we can reasonably claim to know about it, and the introduction explains how this lens allows us to see why a ‘governing science’ built on closed system reasoning is doomed to produce a rising tide of unanticipated social and institutional consequences in societies that are evolving, open, and hence uncertain systems.

The study explores the materiality of clock towers to understand how temporal order was constructed and changed in the late Ottoman Empire. It takes a microhistorical perspective with a critical realist lens. Specifically, it focuses on the 24 clock towers constructed between 1876 and 1909 outside Istanbul, remaining within the national borders of Turkey. In addition, the study has developed case studies of three “exceptional typical” clock towers at Kastamonu, Çorum, and Izmir. Results indicate that these clock towers were symbols of continuous and hybridized changes in the temporal construction of Ottoman societies. The study illustrates how alternative time conceptions can exist, combine, and transform autonomously, constituting a polychronous context. In addition to the Ottoman state, the local elite was central in negotiating and contesting the diffusion of modernity into their realms. The study contributes to understanding the politics of time from a non-industrialized and non-Western historical context.

This chapter provides a rationale for the book and the research that it presents. It documents the near complete absence of prior research into teacher or teaching quality in the global South and justifies specifically why teacher expertise research may be the most useful vehicle through which it can be studied. It argues that the contextually appropriate, feasible and sustainable pedagogic practices of expert teachers in any context can, if implemented more widely across the educational system, bring about significant increases in the quality of teaching and learning. The chapter offers a definition of ‘global South’ specific to the aims and contexts of the book and compares this with alternative ways of conceptualising the South. My background, as author of this book, is then presented, followed by an overview of the book that includes brief summary descriptions of the chapters that follow. The chapter finishes with a discussion of paradigmatic concerns that sets out the author’s own position as a multiple- methods, critical realist researcher who rejects the paradigm dichotomy between positivist and interpretivist approaches, instead preferring to view generalising and particularising tendencies in research through a continuum along which researchers are able to move flexibly, appropriate to the questions or problems of interest under investigation.

This chapter introduces the notion of value as a normative concept, as the price that something ought to exchange at. This does not mean that there is only one price that is its value for everyone, as objectivist theories of value assume: each of us forms our own opinion of the value of a thing. However, there are social forces that tend to produce convergence in our valuations. Value is thus normative, as it is influenced by assessment of what is a just price, and these assessments themselves depend on social norms about valuation. Building critically on the economics of conventions school and recent sociological work on valuation as a process, the chapter explains these normative assessments in terms of what it calls lay theories of value: norms about the fair price of commodities. It then discusses how valuation contributes to price determination, as one of multiple mechanisms in open economic systems. The second section of the chapter introduces the critical realist view of causation that enables us to make sense of this role for theories of value.

A conceptual foundation for a process approach in psychology is provided, including the characteristics of a ‘process’ and a process ontology (or metaphysics) and its philosophical roots. We describe how this approach contrasts substantialism and a substance ontology. Here, we introduce what our envisioned process-approach implies for realism, where we discuss the stance that the construal of reality is constructed. With this, we position ourselves as critical realists.

A conceptual foundation for a process approach in psychology is provided, including the characteristics of a ‘process’ and a process ontology (or metaphysics) and its philosophical roots. We describe how this approach contrasts substantialism and a substance ontology. Here, we introduce what our envisioned process-approach implies for realism, where we discuss the stance that the construal of reality is constructed. With this, we position ourselves as critical realists.

This essay offers a three-part periodization of the Latin American novel in dialogue with 1960s dependency theory, arguably Latin America’s most important contribution to a wider Marxist tradition. Against the backdrop of a widespread turn toward textualist modes of analysis in the field of literary studies since the 1980s, this essay argues that dependency theory and the novel offer parallel means through which to analyze the structured nature of Latin American “difference” as arising from within – and not outside or beyond – the order of capital. Moving from nineteenth-century Brazilian realism to 1960s “Boom” narrative to contemporary Mexican noir, and drawing from pioneering critics such as Roberto Schwarz, Jean Franco, and Hernán Vidal, the essay argues that both dependency theory and the novel remain vital to excavating a history of the present.