Confessions:On Critical Realism and other things

It may seem strange for someone like me to acknowledge the influence of an epistemological current like Critical Realism. Broadly speaking, I have over the last 10-15 years embraced in my research a position that in philosophy is known as Idealism. I have been idealist in the Kantian sense of having explained much of contemporary institutions by recourse to the complex array of symbol systems, representing techniques and formal code languages (software systems) by means of which organizational and social life is instrumented, structured and controlled. In social research, idealism has often taken the form of what is referred to as Constructivism. My recent study on information and its institutional implications has come as the offspring of such an orienation that I wouldn't be unhappy to describe as Neo-Kantian. Ernst Casirrer and Nelson Goodman have had a deep influence on me and so had too Claude Levi Strauss, Gregory Bateson and much later Nicklas Luhmann.

Despite widespread misconceptions, Critical Realism stands, at least in some respects, closer to Idealism than to Positivism. Both Critical Realism and Idealism recognize the social character of knowledge (a key issue) and reject the positivist understanding of the world as an atomistic series of actions or events. A Roy Bhaskar persuasively claims knowledge and the social institutions to which knowldge is associated are not just arrays of entities or processes standing to an adjacent relationship to one another. Rather, they are complex constructions that exhibit ontological depth. They are concatenated into structures that work as the generative matrices of the social practices of knowing. Only a smal portion of this "real reality" may be manifested in particular settings and is thus given to experience and perception (observation). The rest has to be inferred and reconstructed in the "laboratory" of theory.

This is in fact a point that I have been at pains to make in my later writings, most notably my "Farewell to Constructivism" and "Reopening the Black Box of Technology" and my new book (to appear in December 2006) "The Consequences of Information" (see my website http://personal/lse.ac.uk/kallinik/ for details). In studying the forms though which technology is implicated in the making of social practices and human agency I have become increasingly disillusioned from the way these issues have been dealt with across a variety of disciplines and research circles. Too much voluntarism, I thought, too many agreeable explanations that flatter our humanity, but little real concern with all those constraints that large and complex technological systems with a long life span impose on to us. Most crucially without ever carring of studying how human agency is not a transcedental (socially exogenous) force but rather something that is forged, inter alia, by the variety of technological artefacts that inhabit and in a sense make our life. Humans are as much causes as they are outcomes of social processes. Critical Realism, as I understand it, seems to hold a promise in this respect.

A Professional Quarrel

Dr Jannis Kallinikos

A Professional Quarrel

In 2006 the journal Information Technology and People, 19/1 published a special issue on Complexity and IT design and evolution edited by E. Jacucci, O. Hanseth and Lyytinen, K. I became involved in the special issue both as an Associate Editor, reviewer and finally also as author of an article. One of the drafts I reviewed has been a paper by Hind Benbya and Bill McKelvey. My report was quite critical but also generous in the sense of suggesting publication after some revisions. My critique was that despite its complexity science vocabulary (and McKelvey is a well known complexity theorist) the paper was predicated on a rather static and ultimately simple view of reality, was rationalistic in its orientation and did not do justice to the variety of ways by which information systems feed recursively back to reality. In these comments of mine I used much of Bateson's and Luhmann's ideas. In their response to the editors, the authors claimed that all my accusations were to them a source of pride and I was no more than a vague constructivist and postmodernist (they mixed the two together indiscriminately). I felt that they were using too many labels in their response avoiding the substantive issues. After consulting with the guest editors and the chief editors of the journal I suggested to them that if they really believed what they were writing then we should have a public debate on the matters of disagreement. They agreed on that. The rules were the following: I would write a two pages comment on their paper and perspective and they would subsequently respond to my comments. I dedicated a few days to compose my critique of their paper but when Benbya and McKelvey read my piece they withdrew without supplying any convincing answer. It really felt like a badly spent time. The guest editors did intervene and wrote a critical response to Benbya and McKelvey but this did not change the state of the art. My commentary did remain unpublished, for it didn't really make sense to publish it without Benbya and McKelvey's originally agreed contribution. I thought I would give it a chance to be read by visitors to my blog. Here is then my criticism of their paper which can be read in combination with their paper that appeared in Information Technology and People, 19/1 and also my own paper included in the special issue.
Read my comments on Benbya and McKelvey

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Dr.K