Concerns with mutual constitution: a critical realist commentary

The case for “analytical dualism” as a means of approaching sociotechnical action is presented as an alternative to accounts which tend to conflate agency, structure, and technology. This is based on the work of Margaret Archer, whose work is in turn located in the traditions of critical realism. Her commitment to analytical dualism, which stresses both the importance of time in analysis and the emergent properties of structure, is argued to give a firmer purchase on the notion of context than the alternatives based on, for example, the work of Giddens and Latour

A REALIST EXAMINATION OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Business analytics has become the latest fad in management practice. Carried out by largely positivist statistical analysis, anecdotal evidence claims great success for these practices. This paper takes a critical realist approach to a philosophical analysis of these practices. Reviewing CR ontology and epistemology, it applies those to the practice of business analytics, showing that where BA success occurs it is because the analysis has encountered relatively unimpeded actions by relatively enduring structures of causal mechanisms. It may fail in those areas undergoing rapid structural change, or where there exists a confusing welter of mechanisms. The danger in this approach from a CR perspective is that other causal mechanisms may intrude, or the structure of the mechanisms may change causing the models built to fail. This paper argues that the practice of BA may be improved by performing retroductive analysis to identify these structures so that anticipatory action can be taken to avoid failure of the models

Legitimising Discourses and the Efforts to Reform the European Union’s Fiscal Governance Arrangements

With a rapid centralisation of fiscal sovereignty now being aired as a possibility following on from the financial and economic crisis, this thesis considers how legitimising discourses are shaping the efforts to reform EU fiscal governance. Norman Fairclough’s ‘moderately constructivist’ three-dimensional framework for CDA is drawn upon. This approach is also combined with insights drawn from the new institutionalist literature base (particularly from its historical and discursive strands of thought), with an additional emphasis being placed on broader understandings of structural forms of power as developed through the writings of Susan Strange. It is found that the emerging debate over EU fiscal governance reform is dominated by a limiting neoliberal legitimising discourse. This research also makes a contribution to our understanding of the ideational and institutional roots of the current impasse in European Integration. Finally, it is concluded that the efforts to reform the EU’s fiscal governance arrangements are likely to bring about, at best, incremental change along a path-dependent line

A socio-material approach to understanding the organization, technology, and society nexus

This thesis suggests that approaches studying the organisation, society and technology nexus have either focused extensively on environment (e.g. Marxist perspectives of organisation and society), or studied organisation and technologies within organisational boundaries (e.g. Gidden’s Structuration or Orlikowski’s Sociomateriality). Secondly, in doing so these approaches have chosen ‘deterministic’ stand points that emphasise a single factor, i.e. economy, technology or human agency as being solely responsible for shaping change in the social world. This thesis proposes that Mutch’s socio-material framework (2013), based on CR, provides a comprehensive toolkit for understanding organisations and technologies in relation to society in three ways: through its separation of social and material, by recognising the importance of technology in this interrelationship, and its call for inclusion of context in such discussions. This thesis suggests that although the Mutch’s socio-material framework identifies the importance of context, it does not capitalise on it completely. In response to this void, this thesis contributes to the existing body of literature in three main ways. Firstly, it proposes and illustrates the utility of economic context and its impact on organisational practices. Secondly, it develops and applies the concept of societal context (through the application of social structures of a class system) to elaborate how organisations and their choice of technologies are embedded in a societal context that has considerable impact on different groups of society and vice versa. Thirdly, this work utilises the concept of affordances to help identify the generative mechanisms that can better explain concurrent events that take place when organisational actors, technology and non-organisational actors interact