Critical Realism in Management Research: Bridging Structure and Agency in Organizational Analysis

Abstract

Organizations are shaped by both structural forces and the agency of individuals. Critical Realism (CR) offers a philosophical framework that bridges this structure–agency divide by acknowledging an objective reality of structures and the meaningful actions of agents. This paper examines the foundations of CR and its relevance for organizational analysis. It outlines CR’s ontological realism (an independent reality with deep structures) and epistemological relativism (knowledge is theory-laden yet comparable), along with key concepts like stratified reality, emergent properties, generative mechanisms, and the retroductive research approach. The paper contrasts CR with positivist and interpretivist paradigms, highlighting how CR transcends the limitations of each. A central focus is how CR integrates structure and agency through Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic theory, explaining how organizational structures condition human action and are in turn transformed by that action over time. The paper discusses CR’s contributions to management research, uncovering causal mechanisms, accounting for context and history, and promoting methodological pluralism, and reviews the contributions of major CR theorists. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that critical realism provides management researchers with a robust toolkit to explain organizational phenomena by linking structural constraints and human agency in ways neither positivism nor interpretivism can achieve.