A Critical Realist Pathway to Relevant and Ethical Research

Previous research has drawn on critical realism to highlight diverse forms and types of knowledge. Scholars have also sought to assess the practical relevance and ethical dimensions of knowledge being produced across the world. This chapter offers a critical realist perspective on relevant and ethical research within the field of management. In particular, it seeks to persuade management researchers who are concerned about the research–practice gap that by adopting a critical realist perspective towards knowledge, they may be better able to recognize and explain problems of relevance to organizations and that the adoption of critical realism brings with it an explicit ethical dimension that is currently denied by positivism, and is at most implicit in interpretivism.