RR 2008/03 Dictionary of Critical Realism

摘要

For many researchers and teachers in social science, the jury is still out with critical realism. This is largely because of the perceived, or alleged, or actual, lack of empirical evidence or proof that it is an approach, even a methodology, which really works. It claims to offer a unique way of understanding human, organizational and institutional behaviour but, perhaps because it is often associated with postmodernist critiques (rejecting grand narratives, feeding on illusion and bricolage and the aporia of texts), perhaps because it comes across as a hybrid (neither positivistic nor hermeneutic, neither objectivist nor subjectivist, neither rational theory based nor constructivistic), people seem to get worried - as they do with grounded theory - that they and other people might not fully understand it, and so why use it? Links between critical realism and critical theory (the Frankfurt School, its post-Marxist critique, and its politicizing explanation of discourse) seem to work against the universal acceptance of critical theory.