Critical realism

Critical accounting research constitutes a very diverse body of scholarship which is underpinned by a broad range of philosophical schools of thought. One of the most recent streams of research to emerge and attract increasing attention is that informed by critical realism. As a philosophical point of departure for the social sciences, the most distinctive features of critical realism arguably reside in its ontology. Endogenous structures represent the values, beliefs and norms which have been internalised by individual human beings and thus exercise a deep-seated influence on their subjective identities and relative propensity for either routine actions or reflexive agency. Consistent with the ontological foundations of critical realism, the outcomes of the interplay between endogenous and exogenous structures follow a non-deterministic pattern that is rarely within the full grasp of the people who are implicated in processes of structural reproduction and transformation.