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Introduction
In the first chapter of my thesis, Ontological Social Policy Analysis, I lay out my own ontological assumptions and my prefered analytical modelling of those assumptions. In simpler terms, I explain how I view social reality. This view is one amongst many in the social sciences, and it is therefore necessary for me to justify my position. The justification is laid out in the first chapter of my thesis and was eventually published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. The published paper is available through the following link:
Jack Newman – Morphogenetic Theory and the Constructivist Institutionalist Challenge
My doctoral thesis is available here: Jack Newman thesis – Ontological Social Policy Analysis
Positivism, Constructivism, and Realism in Social Analysis
It is often said that there are two main starting points for social analysis: foundationalism and anti-foundationalism (Hay, 2002). The former assumes that there is an objective reality external from human experience, allowing us to build explanatory knowledge about that reality. The latter assumes that it is impossible to have a non-human perspective, and that we must therefore make do with understanding the meaning of our experience. The former tends to lead to positivism, a general approach to social analysis that draws a sharp distinction between our experience of the external (held to be reliable and measurable) and our experience of the internal (largely ignored). The latter tends to lead to constructivism, a varied group of approaches that insist that all experience is the unreliable (though meaningful) product of social construction.
In various different historical forms, these two approaches have long dominated social analysis. The disagreement between them is responsible for the all-too-common separation of quantitative research (mostly foundationalist and positivist) and qualitative research (mostly anti-foundationalist and constructivist). While many are still content to carry out research on one particular side of this divide, there has also been a long history of bridge building. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) is perhaps one of the earliest and certainly one of the most significant authors who have attempted to overcome the divide. Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ represents the framework of attitudes and dispositions through which we experience the world (similar to constructivism), but our habitus is itself the product of our social positioning, which assumes an external causal reality (a foundationalist position). Therefore, Bourdieu develops a constructivist approach from a foundationalist starting point.
Another form of ‘constructivist foundationalism’ is the increasingly influential perspective of critical realism. Roy Bhaskar, a founding proponent of critical realism, developed a realist theory of science (1975), which can be comfortably labelled ‘foundationalist’, and a critical theory of social science (1979), which can be tentatively labelled ‘constructivist’. Together, they form the basis of critical realism. At the centre of Bhaskar’s argument is a distinction between knowledge (‘the transitive’) and that which knowledge is about (‘the intransitive’). The two are tied together by a ‘layered’ conception of reality. In one sense, reality consists of three layers: ‘the empirical’ (the experience of events), ‘the actual’ (all experiences and events), and ‘the real’ (the underlying causal mechanisms that give rise to experiences and events). Reality is also held to consist of an unknown number of emergent layers, from elementary particles, through atoms, cells, organs, living things, societies, eco-systems, to the collective entirety of existence (NB: there are many layers and nuances missed out here!). It is through this philosophy of layers that critical realism offers the potential to bridge the divide(s) identified above.
A number of different approaches have sought to develop critical realism into a framework for social analysis, notably the morphogenetic approach (Archer, 1995) and the strategic-relational approach (Jessop, 1996). The latter has provided the foundation for two further approaches, cultural political economy (Jessop and Sum, 2013) and constructivist institutionalism (Hay, 2016 – though Hay moved away from critical realism in his development of this approach). There are of course other critical realist approaches to social analysis, and indeed many other attempts to bridge the positivist-constructivist divide, but my own research engages with the four approaches named in this paragraph. My recently published paper outlines the basics of the morphogenetic and constructivist institutionalist approaches, and engages in a critical dialogue that ultimately defends the former:
Jack Newman – Morphogenetic Theory and the Constructivist Institutionalist Challenge
References
Archer, M. (1995). Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bhaskar, R. (1975). A realist theory of science. London, UK: Verso.
Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of naturalism. London, UK: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hay, C. (2002). Political analysis. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Hay, C. (2016). Good in a crisis: The ontological institutionalism of social constructivism. New Political Economy, 21, 520–535.
Jessop, B. (1996). Interpretive sociology and the dialectic of structure and agency. Theory, Culture and Society, 13, 119–128.
Jessop, B. and Sum, N. (2012). Towards Cultural Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Newman, J. (2019). Morphogenetic Theory and the Constructivist Institutionalist Challenge. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 49(1), 106-126.
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Dr Jack Newman - Research Blog 