IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v36y2012i2p345-385.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ontology and the study of social reality: emergence, organisation, community, power, social relations, corporations, artefacts and money

Author

Listed:
  • Tony Lawson

Abstract

The conception of social reality I have previously defended (and here extend), positing features such as social relations, positions and powers, is thoroughly naturalistic and even consistent with modern interpretations of quantum field theory. It also serves to ground a social science that can be scientific in the sense of natural science. This is the thesis defended here. Central to the argument is an emphasis on a 'strong' form of emergence and the category of 'organisation-in-process'. To bring out various salient features of the position defended, I take the opportunity to compare aspects of it with relevant components of the contribution of John Searle, whose ontological conception appears at once to be both very similar yet also very different. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Tony Lawson, 2012. "Ontology and the study of social reality: emergence, organisation, community, power, social relations, corporations, artefacts and money," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 36(2), pages 345-385.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:36:y:2012:i:2:p:345-385
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/ber050
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nicola Liberati & Dmytro Mykhailov, 2024. "Walking in the shoes of others through brain-to-brain interfaces: a phenomenological approach to the generation of a collective living body," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-7, December.
    2. Prévost, Benoît & Rivaud, Audrey, 2018. "The World Bank’s environmental strategies: Assessing the influence of a biased use of New Institutional Economics on legal issues," Ecosystem Services, Elsevier, vol. 29(PB), pages 370-380.
    3. Feduzi, Alberto & Runde, Jochen, 2014. "Uncovering unknown unknowns: Towards a Baconian approach to management decision-making," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 268-283.
    4. Dávila-Fernández, Marwil J. & Sordi, Serena, 2020. "Structural change in a growing open economy: Attitudes and institutions in Latin America and Asia," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 358-385.
    5. Teodoro Dario Togati, 2012. "How to Explain the Persistence of the Great Recession? A Balanced Stability Approach," Working papers 014, Department of Economics and Statistics (Dipartimento di Scienze Economico-Sociali e Matematico-Statistiche), University of Torino.
    6. Phil Faulkner & Stephen Pratten & Jochen Runde, 2017. "Cambridge Social Ontology: Clarification, Development and Deployment," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 41(5), pages 1265-1277.
    7. Chassagnon, Virgile, 2013. "Contrôle et manipulation au cœur de la firme-monde ?," Revue de la Régulation - Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs, Association Recherche et Régulation, vol. 14.
    8. Nuno Ornelas Martins, 2018. "Justice and the Social Ontology of the Corporation," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 153(1), pages 17-28, November.
    9. Ron Martin & Peter Sunley, 2015. "Towards a Developmental Turn in Evolutionary Economic Geography?," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(5), pages 712-732, May.
    10. Paul Jackson & Jochen Runde & Philip Dobson & Nancy Richter, 2016. "Identifying mechanisms influencing the emergence and success of innovation within national economies: a realist approach," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 49(3), pages 233-256, September.
    11. Agustina Borella, 2012. "Isolation and economic models in critical realism," Economía, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales (IIES). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales. Universidad de Los Andes. Mérida, Venezuela, vol. 37(34), pages 139-152, july-dece.
    12. Paul Lewis, 2017. "The Ostroms and Hayek as Theorists of Complex Adaptive Systems: Commonality and Complementarity," Advances in Austrian Economics, in: The Austrian and Bloomington Schools of Political Economy, volume 22, pages 35-66, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    13. Pilkington, Marc, 2022. "The London Whale Scandal under new Scrutiny," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    14. Diogo Lourenço & Mário Graça Moura, 2016. "The Economic Problem of a Community: ontological reflections inspired by the Socialist Calculation Debate," FEP Working Papers 572, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.
    15. Virgile Chassagnon, 2014. "Toward a Social Ontology of the Firm: Reconstitution, Organizing Entity, Institution, Social Emergence and Power," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 124(2), pages 197-208, October.
    16. Donald Gillies, 2012. "Economics and Research Assessment Systems," Economic Thought, World Economics Association, vol. 1(1), pages 1-2, July.
    17. Tony Lawson, 2014. "Modelación matemática e ideología en la economía académica," Revista de Economía Institucional, Universidad Externado de Colombia - Facultad de Economía, vol. 16(30), pages 25-51, January-J.
    18. Tony Lawson, 2015. "Comparing Conceptions of Social Ontology: Emergent Social Entities and/or Institutional Facts?," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1514, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    19. Marwil J. Dávila-Fernández & Serena Sordi, 2019. "From open economies to attitudes towards change. Growth and institutions in Latin America and Asia," Department of Economics University of Siena 809, Department of Economics, University of Siena.
    20. Telma Barrantes-Fernández & Esteban Cruz-Hidalgo & José Francisco Rangel-Preciado & Francisco Manuel Parejo-Moruno, 2023. "Decommodify the 2030 Agenda: Why and How to Finance What Is Not Profitable?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(5), pages 1-16, February.
    21. Imko Meyenburg, 2022. "A possibilist justification of the ontology of counterfactuals and forecasted states of economies in economic modelling," Working Papers hal-03751205, HAL.
    22. Paul Lewis & Richard E. Wagner, 2017. "New Austrian macro theory: A call for inquiry," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 30(1), pages 1-18, March.
    23. Menšík Josef, 2023. "Tony Lawson on money," Review of Economic Perspectives, Sciendo, vol. 23(4), pages 293-306, December.
    24. Cinzia Daraio, 2017. "A framework for the Assessment of Research and its impacts," DIAG Technical Reports 2017-04, Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Universita' degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza".

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:36:y:2012:i:2:p:345-385. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.