From: Daniel Pineu <danielfrp-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: BHA: Re: Critical Realism and health
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 22:49:54 -0000


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Alex,

Sorry, hard-pressed for time with essays. On your second, point, are you familiar with a paper by Stephen Wainwright, "For Bourdieu in a realist social science"? He explicitly ties his paper to the sociology of helth and illness. Here is the abstract (my added emphasis):

This paper argues for the salience of the work of Pierre Bourdieu - social theorist, anthropologist, sociologist, philosopher and empirical researcher - for realist social science. I argue that although realism generally wins the philosophical battles with its main rivals; it is losing the social research war to positivism, social constructionism and postmodernism. This state of realism in social science is in marked contrast with the emphatic empirical grounding of the dazzling theoretical and philosophical insights that are the great strength of Bourdieu's impressive corpus of social research. Moreover, I suggest Bourdieu's work is best read as a variant of critical realism. This leads to an outline of Bourdieu's attempts to sublate some of the classic dualism's of social research (e.g., the objective-subjective, agency-structure, theory-research and idiographic-nomothetic antinomies). In particular, attention is paid to Bourdieu's analysis of the logic of practice, and his use of the concepts of capital, habitus, field, illusio and symbolic violence. This discussion draws on the recent spate of English translations of books by Bourdieu. The potential fruitfulness of this family of concepts is illustrated with some recent examples of the salience of Bourdieu's work for the sociology of health and illness (especially on health inequalities research). I conclude that Bourdieu successfully fuses philosophy, social theory and social research and so helps to overcome a major shortcoming of the neophyte programme of realist social research. We should therefore be: "For Bourdieu in realist social science". [online at http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/seminars/realist/events/conf2000/papers/Download/wain.pdf ]

Hope it is of any use to you.

Best regards,

Daniel


----- Original Message -----
From: <AlexFiona-AT-macmail.com>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 10:13 PM
Subject: BHA: Critical Realism and health


> Hi everyone,
>
> I am new to this newsgroup but have a long term (well >1997) interest in critical realism in relation to health.
>
> In April, I am moving from UK to Canada (University of Alberta), so two questions:
>
> 1. What is the state of CR in N America? - is there a core nucleus of interested parties similar to IACR who can meet and muse and collaborate?
>
> 2 Can anyone recommend any specific texts or papers that would be useful for a non-philosopher to read to draw links between CR and the exploration of health interventions.  I am familiar with the Pawson and Tilley work and I have come accross a few papers but nothing spectacular. I am looking to develop a modified approach to Pand T  to explore cardiac rehabilitation programs, which are social programs (SPs) in many respects.  However, unlike SPs, as an academic reseacher, there is limited (though some) scope to actually modify services based on findings.  I am attracted to CR as it provides a justification and means to explain outcomes. In my area of research RCTs, coorelation and pre-test post test studies dominate, but little work explaining how outcomes come about.
>
> Cheers
>
> Alex
>
>
> > Dr Alexander Clark
> > Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Glasgow.
> > Tel: 0141 580 4912 Fax: 0141 889 5844
> >
> > Clinical Base:
> > Level 5 N Cardiology
> > Royal Alexandra Hospital
>
>
>  
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>
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