Realistit ja konstruktionistit

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Ontology in Organization and Management Studies: A Critical Realist Perspective Steve Fleetwood (2005)

Critical realists claim that an entity can (which does not mean it does)exist independently of our knowledge of it. Saying an entity can exist independently of its identification implies that it can exist without someone observing, knowing and constructing it. The term also encompasses cases where actors are knowlegeable but their knowledge is tacit. They may know how to perform a particular work task, but they cannot explain how they
do it.

Although many things are real, they are real in different ways or modes. Confusion often arises from not recognizing, or not specifying, these different modes. It is possible to identify (at least) four modes of reality, or four different ways in which entities may be differentiated: material, ideal, artefactual and social.

Materially Real The term ‘materially real’ refers to material entities such as oceans, the weather, the moon and mountains, which can exist independently of what individuals or communities do, say or think.

Ideally Real The term ‘ideally real’ refers to conceptual entities such as discourse, language, genres, tropes, styles, signs, symbols and semiotized entities, ideas, beliefs, meanings, understandings, explanations, opinions, concepts, representations, models, theories and so on. For brevity, I refer to entities such as these as discourse or discursive entities. Discourse or discursive entities are real because, as noted above, they have causal efficacy.

Artefactually Real The term ‘artefactually real’ refers to entities such as cosmetics and computers. Computers are a synthesis of the physically, ideally and socially real. Because entities are conceptually mediated, we interpret them in various, and often diverse, ways. Violins may be interpreted as musical instruments or as table tennis bats.

Socially Real The term ‘socially real’ refers to practices, states of affairs or entities for short, such as caring for children, becoming unemployed, the market mechanism, or social structures in general, especially the social structures that constitute organizations.

Class structures, patriarchal structures and tacit rules of the workplace do not require the activity of identification (i.e. observing, knowing and constructing) in order to be reproduced and transformed. We do not, for example, have to identify the constraints (or enablements) that gender places upon us, or others, in order for those constraints to be operational. Class structures, patriarchal structures and tacit rules of the workplace do, however, require other forms of activity in order to be reproduced and transformed. The reproduction and transformation of class structures, for example, require that owners of (only) labour power engage in the hiring out of their (quasi) commodity.

Explicit rules of the workplace and laws (i.e. legislation), in contrast, do require the activity of identification in order to be reproduced or transformed because individuals have to recognize them and choose to be constrained (and enabled) by them.

To say ‘entities are socially constructed’ (or some variant) is insufficiently nuanced because it does not differentiate between practical and discursive activities; it often fails to establish who is doing the constructing; and it is incorrect for a range of entities that are reproduced and transformed by agents who often have incorrect, incomplete and, in some cases, no idea of the social entities they necessarily interact with.

My reading of the literature leads me to conclude that, when the ontological commitments of postmodernism are stated unambiguously, they are mistaken.

To suggest that discourse, language or some other conceptual or cognitive activity creates (or whatever verb is implied) socially real entities such as organizational structures is to engage in what I call ontological exaggeration. Simply put, social constructionism exaggerates the consequences of activities such as speaking and thinking to the point where it is hard not to define this as an example of subjective idealism.