Jan Ch Karlsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 267668 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jan Ch Karlsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jan Ch |
| FAMILY NAME | Karlsson |
| SIGNATURE | KARLSSON J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Karlstad University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5473-7417 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 286 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Ray Pawson, How to think like a realist. A methodology for social science. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 2024
Towards a Sociology of Meaningful Work
In the last decade, research on the nature, impact and prospect of meaningful work has flourished. Despite an upsurge in scholarly and practitioner interest, the research field is characterized by a lack of consensus over how meaningful work should be defined and whether its ingredients are exclusively subjective perceptions or solely triggered by objective job characteristics. The disconnection between objective and subjective dimensions of mean…
Critical methodological pluralism – intensive and extensive research design and interdisciplinarity
The concepts intensive and extensive have been used to denote different methodological approaches in social science. The way in which the intensive and extensive procedures relate to qualitative and quantitative methods can be described thus: the intensive empirical procedure contains substantial elements of data collecting and analyses of a qualitative kind. An intensive empirical approach is characterized by focusing on a particular case or jus…
Generalization, scientific inference, and models for explanatory social science
This chapter presents methodological guidelines for a social science based on critical realism. It describes several alternative models for an explanatory social science and focuses on a demonstration of how the different forms of generalizations. The ways in which generalizations are applied and prioritized have significant epistemological and ontological implications. Frames of interpretation and theories are more or less reasonable; they diffe…
Science and reality
This chapter focuses on similarities and differences between the natural and social sciences, and, eventually, arrive at a set of methodological principles for social science analyses. It discusses the most central issue in science: the relation between science and reality and explores the similarities and dissimilarities between the objects of the natural and social sciences. The chapter explains the critical realist understanding of science and…
Theory in the methodology of social science
This chapter aims to clarifying what a theory is, from the perspective of critical realism. It explores the components of theories – concepts and describes different ways of relating theories to data in research practice. The chapter discusses the critical realist view, it is essential to distinguish between the different theoretical languages that exist within social sciences. Social scientific skill in essence is a matter of analysing, developi…
Conceptual abstraction and causality
This chapter analyses the question of how concept formation should be constructed as an efficient social science research tool. Conceptual abstraction by means of structural analysis is the core function of social science conceptualization and from this follows realist causal analysis. Abstraction is necessary, because the domain of the actual – the events in the world – makes up such a tremendously diversified and heterogeneous dimension of real…
Conclusion
This chapter focuses on the following features: the idea of causality and mechanisms, the assumption that reality is stratified, the issue of closed and opens systems, the transitive and the intransitive dimensions of reality, and discusses the hermeneutic conditions of social science. It addresses the question of what the term “critical” in critical realism signifies. By and large, however, the several elements have been brought together in repo…
Social structures and human agency
This chapter presents the importance analytically making a difference between social structures and human action, and to study the interaction between them. Social structures must exist for human actions to be possible and actions must exist for social structures to be possible. In the fact paradigm, the analysis is reduced to objective social structures quite regardless of people’s agency, while the action paradigm reduces the analysis to indivi…
Social science and practice
This chapter discusses the relevance of theoretically motivated research for social practice. It argues that knowledge of structures, mechanisms, and tendencies is highly constructive for good planning. The chapter suggests that in order to make better use of social scientific knowledge than what seems to be the case, there must be a change in the division of labor between scientists and practitioners. It draws on attention to the fact that in so…
Refining Archer’s account of Agency and organization
Margaret Archer defines Corporate Agency as involving both formulating goals and actively organizing in order to reach them. Primary Agency does not show either of these characteristics. In this article, I further refine this classification according to a typology of agential properties – that is, I create a ‘property space’ – based on the two properties of ‘stated aims’ and ‘active co-ordination’, which results in a four-fold table of properties…
Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences
Fully revised, with an updated bibliography and new, relevant illustrative examples based on work inspired by critical realism, this new edition of Explaining Society constitutes an up-to-date resource connecting methodology, theory, and empirical research. Including discussions of more recent scholarship in the field which connects critical realism with interdisciplinary research, this second edition also clarifies concepts – such as retroductio…
Methods for Social Theory: Analytical Tools for Theorizing and Writing
This book constitutes a practical guide to the important skills of both theorizing and writing in social scientific scholarship, focusing on the importance of identifying relations between concepts that are useful for explaining social entities and of producing a text that convincingly advances the theory that has been constructed. Taking as its point of departure the distinction between the research process and the reporting process – between cl…
Arbeiderkollektivet i dag - replikasjon og teoretisk utvikling
Lysgaards teori om arbeiderkollektivet er fortsatt en innflytelsesrik klassiker i skandinavisk arbeidslivsforskning. Studien ble gjennomført i en masse- og papirfabrikk på 1950-tallet, og vi har returnert til fabrikken for å finne ut hva som har skjedd med arbeiderkollektivet. Gjennom observasjoner på arbeidsplassen og intervjuer med arbeidere, ingeniører og sjefer, i tillegg til at vi har hatt tilgang til data fra 1950- og 1980-tallet, kan vi ka…
Methods for Social Theory: Analytical Tools for Theorizing and Writing
On the Track of the Worker Collectivity: Its Various Adventures Over the Past 60 Years
In the 1950s, the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard investigated social relations at a pulp and paper mill, the result of which was his theory of the “worker collectivity.” This is an informal defense organization among subordinate employees against a company’s work organization and goals. Our research group returned to the same plant, which until 2012 was still a pulp and paper mill, with two questions in mind: Was the worker collectivity st…
People can not Only Open Closed Systems, They can Also Close Open Systems
It is a contradictory argument to say on the one hand that social systems are always open and that there is nothing between closed and open systems, and on the other that there are pseudo-closed systems. Further, Petter Næss has shown that multivariate regression analysis can be used to help uncover mechanisms, something that should be impossible if social systems were always open. He has in addition found that the meaningful activity of urban pl…
Three observations on work in the future
Under the clean surface: Working as a Hotel Attendant
This is a reflexive ethnographic study of cleaners at a Finnish hotel. There were grounds in the cleaners' working conditions for resistance and organisational misbehaviour to arise, but almost no collective actions or protests were performed. The needed common identity and problem definition was lacking because of two important impediments: each hotel cleaner had to perform her work alone and there were few other opportunities to meet and discus…
Truth claims and explanatory claims—An ontological typology of futures studies
Flexibility and Stability in Working Life
Flexibility is an ambiguous concept. This book contributes to expounding the importance of clearer concepts in the debates on economic systems, labour markets and work organization. The authors place
Explaining Society: An Introduction to Critical Realism in the Social Sciences
This book will be immensely valuable for students and researchers in social science, sociology and philosophy in that it connects methodology, theory and empirical research. It provides an innovative picture of what society and social science is, along with the methods used to study and explain social phenomena
Finns svenskheten? En granskning av teorier om svenskt folklynne, svensk folkkaraktär och svensk mentalitet
Does Swedishness exist? A scrutiny of theories about the Swedish national character and mentalityThree prominent analyses of Swedishness are discussed: Do these analyses make it possible to say that Swedishness exists and, in that case, what characteristics it has? Two problems appear when reading these works. The first I call ’the search light problem’, dealing with what to look for when searching for Swedishness, i.e. a theory that defines the …
Explaining Society: An Introduction to Critical Realism in the Social Sciences
This book will be immensely valuable for students and researchers in social science, sociology and philosophy in that it connects methodology, theory and empirical research. It provides an innovative picture of what society and social science is, along with the methods used to study and explain social phenomena
Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences
Fully revised, with an updated bibliography and new, relevant illustrative examples based on work inspired by critical realism, this new edition of Explaining Society constitutes an up-to-date resource connecting methodology, theory, and empirical research. Including discussions of more recent scholarship in the field which connects critical realism with interdisciplinary research, this second edition also clarifies concepts – such as retroductio…
Towards a Sociology of Meaningful Work
In the last decade, research on the nature, impact and prospect of meaningful work has flourished. Despite an upsurge in scholarly and practitioner interest, the research field is characterized by a lack of consensus over how meaningful work should be defined and whether its ingredients are exclusively subjective perceptions or solely triggered by objective job characteristics. The disconnection between objective and subjective dimensions of mean…
Truth claims and explanatory claims—An ontological typology of futures studies
Under the clean surface: Working as a Hotel Attendant
This is a reflexive ethnographic study of cleaners at a Finnish hotel. There were grounds in the cleaners' working conditions for resistance and organisational misbehaviour to arise, but almost no collective actions or protests were performed. The needed common identity and problem definition was lacking because of two important impediments: each hotel cleaner had to perform her work alone and there were few other opportunities to meet and discus…
Refining Archer’s account of Agency and organization
Margaret Archer defines Corporate Agency as involving both formulating goals and actively organizing in order to reach them. Primary Agency does not show either of these characteristics. In this article, I further refine this classification according to a typology of agential properties – that is, I create a ‘property space’ – based on the two properties of ‘stated aims’ and ‘active co-ordination’, which results in a four-fold table of properties…
People can not Only Open Closed Systems, They can Also Close Open Systems
It is a contradictory argument to say on the one hand that social systems are always open and that there is nothing between closed and open systems, and on the other that there are pseudo-closed systems. Further, Petter Næss has shown that multivariate regression analysis can be used to help uncover mechanisms, something that should be impossible if social systems were always open. He has in addition found that the meaningful activity of urban pl…
Three observations on work in the future
Finns svenskheten? En granskning av teorier om svenskt folklynne, svensk folkkaraktär och svensk mentalitet
Does Swedishness exist? A scrutiny of theories about the Swedish national character and mentalityThree prominent analyses of Swedishness are discussed: Do these analyses make it possible to say that Swedishness exists and, in that case, what characteristics it has? Two problems appear when reading these works. The first I call ’the search light problem’, dealing with what to look for when searching for Swedishness, i.e. a theory that defines the …
Explaining Society: An Introduction to Critical Realism in the Social Sciences
This book will be immensely valuable for students and researchers in social science, sociology and philosophy in that it connects methodology, theory and empirical research. It provides an innovative picture of what society and social science is, along with the methods used to study and explain social phenomena
Flexibility and Stability in Working Life
Flexibility is an ambiguous concept. This book contributes to expounding the importance of clearer concepts in the debates on economic systems, labour markets and work organization. The authors place
Truth claims and explanatory claims—An ontological typology of futures studies
People can not Only Open Closed Systems, They can Also Close Open Systems
It is a contradictory argument to say on the one hand that social systems are always open and that there is nothing between closed and open systems, and on the other that there are pseudo-closed systems. Further, Petter Næss has shown that multivariate regression analysis can be used to help uncover mechanisms, something that should be impossible if social systems were always open. He has in addition found that the meaningful activity of urban pl…
Three observations on work in the future
Under the clean surface: Working as a Hotel Attendant
This is a reflexive ethnographic study of cleaners at a Finnish hotel. There were grounds in the cleaners' working conditions for resistance and organisational misbehaviour to arise, but almost no collective actions or protests were performed. The needed common identity and problem definition was lacking because of two important impediments: each hotel cleaner had to perform her work alone and there were few other opportunities to meet and discus…
On the Track of the Worker Collectivity: Its Various Adventures Over the Past 60 Years
In the 1950s, the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard investigated social relations at a pulp and paper mill, the result of which was his theory of the “worker collectivity.” This is an informal defense organization among subordinate employees against a company’s work organization and goals. Our research group returned to the same plant, which until 2012 was still a pulp and paper mill, with two questions in mind: Was the worker collectivity st…
Methods for Social Theory: Analytical Tools for Theorizing and Writing
This book constitutes a practical guide to the important skills of both theorizing and writing in social scientific scholarship, focusing on the importance of identifying relations between concepts that are useful for explaining social entities and of producing a text that convincingly advances the theory that has been constructed. Taking as its point of departure the distinction between the research process and the reporting process – between cl…
Arbeiderkollektivet i dag - replikasjon og teoretisk utvikling
Lysgaards teori om arbeiderkollektivet er fortsatt en innflytelsesrik klassiker i skandinavisk arbeidslivsforskning. Studien ble gjennomført i en masse- og papirfabrikk på 1950-tallet, og vi har returnert til fabrikken for å finne ut hva som har skjedd med arbeiderkollektivet. Gjennom observasjoner på arbeidsplassen og intervjuer med arbeidere, ingeniører og sjefer, i tillegg til at vi har hatt tilgang til data fra 1950- og 1980-tallet, kan vi ka…
Methods for Social Theory: Analytical Tools for Theorizing and Writing
Critical methodological pluralism – intensive and extensive research design and interdisciplinarity
The concepts intensive and extensive have been used to denote different methodological approaches in social science. The way in which the intensive and extensive procedures relate to qualitative and quantitative methods can be described thus: the intensive empirical procedure contains substantial elements of data collecting and analyses of a qualitative kind. An intensive empirical approach is characterized by focusing on a particular case or jus…
Generalization, scientific inference, and models for explanatory social science
This chapter presents methodological guidelines for a social science based on critical realism. It describes several alternative models for an explanatory social science and focuses on a demonstration of how the different forms of generalizations. The ways in which generalizations are applied and prioritized have significant epistemological and ontological implications. Frames of interpretation and theories are more or less reasonable; they diffe…
Science and reality
This chapter focuses on similarities and differences between the natural and social sciences, and, eventually, arrive at a set of methodological principles for social science analyses. It discusses the most central issue in science: the relation between science and reality and explores the similarities and dissimilarities between the objects of the natural and social sciences. The chapter explains the critical realist understanding of science and…
Theory in the methodology of social science
This chapter aims to clarifying what a theory is, from the perspective of critical realism. It explores the components of theories – concepts and describes different ways of relating theories to data in research practice. The chapter discusses the critical realist view, it is essential to distinguish between the different theoretical languages that exist within social sciences. Social scientific skill in essence is a matter of analysing, developi…
Conceptual abstraction and causality
This chapter analyses the question of how concept formation should be constructed as an efficient social science research tool. Conceptual abstraction by means of structural analysis is the core function of social science conceptualization and from this follows realist causal analysis. Abstraction is necessary, because the domain of the actual – the events in the world – makes up such a tremendously diversified and heterogeneous dimension of real…
Conclusion
This chapter focuses on the following features: the idea of causality and mechanisms, the assumption that reality is stratified, the issue of closed and opens systems, the transitive and the intransitive dimensions of reality, and discusses the hermeneutic conditions of social science. It addresses the question of what the term “critical” in critical realism signifies. By and large, however, the several elements have been brought together in repo…
Social structures and human agency
This chapter presents the importance analytically making a difference between social structures and human action, and to study the interaction between them. Social structures must exist for human actions to be possible and actions must exist for social structures to be possible. In the fact paradigm, the analysis is reduced to objective social structures quite regardless of people’s agency, while the action paradigm reduces the analysis to indivi…
Social science and practice
This chapter discusses the relevance of theoretically motivated research for social practice. It argues that knowledge of structures, mechanisms, and tendencies is highly constructive for good planning. The chapter suggests that in order to make better use of social scientific knowledge than what seems to be the case, there must be a change in the division of labor between scientists and practitioners. It draws on attention to the fact that in so…
Refining Archer’s account of Agency and organization
Margaret Archer defines Corporate Agency as involving both formulating goals and actively organizing in order to reach them. Primary Agency does not show either of these characteristics. In this article, I further refine this classification according to a typology of agential properties – that is, I create a ‘property space’ – based on the two properties of ‘stated aims’ and ‘active co-ordination’, which results in a four-fold table of properties…
Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences
Fully revised, with an updated bibliography and new, relevant illustrative examples based on work inspired by critical realism, this new edition of Explaining Society constitutes an up-to-date resource connecting methodology, theory, and empirical research. Including discussions of more recent scholarship in the field which connects critical realism with interdisciplinary research, this second edition also clarifies concepts – such as retroductio…
Towards a Sociology of Meaningful Work
In the last decade, research on the nature, impact and prospect of meaningful work has flourished. Despite an upsurge in scholarly and practitioner interest, the research field is characterized by a lack of consensus over how meaningful work should be defined and whether its ingredients are exclusively subjective perceptions or solely triggered by objective job characteristics. The disconnection between objective and subjective dimensions of mean…
Ray Pawson, How to think like a realist. A methodology for social science. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 2024
Sociology (16 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (7 works) · Critical Realism in Sociology (7 works) · Engineering (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Social science (6 works)