I’ve just remembered this:
“[Critical realism] presents itself in a way that some social scientists—with next to no real background in philosophy—feel gives them just what they need to shore up their empirical research and metaphysical intuitions. You want to be realist in your philosophy of social science? Sure! You want your preferred level of analysis to also be an ontologically emergent level of reality? No problem! You want to talk about social structures as irreducible in some serious-but-not-really-analyzed fashion? You got it. You want your theory to be critical? I mean, who doesn’t, right? Just call yourself a Critical Realist and cite some Bhaskar. After all, he has repeatedly asserted that his work is a “Copernican Revolution” in the philosophy of science […]”
And:
“The diffusion of CR was slightly hampered by the transformation of Bhaskar from fringe philosopher of science to full-blown guru. Having recruited followers in sociology on the basis of his realism, he began to pull the rug out from under them in the late 1990s, first with the merely absurd Plato, Etc and then with the frankly embarrassing From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul (which closed with a final chapter titled “The Dance of Shiva in the Age of Aquarius”). This work, in retrospect, seems like the culmination of the unpleasant cult of personality that grew up around Bhaskar in CR circles in the 1980s and which he seems to have done little to discourage.”
One section is constructive, providing alternatives to critical realism:
“Sociologists interested in emergence or macro-level explanations have no need to run together that interest with the specific CR position or view. (This was the point of my old article on Archer, Mouzelis, and CR.) There are large and immediately accessible literatures on all of these topics in philosophy, leading naturally to more technical or specialist work. Consider the SEP article on Emergent Properties, for instance, and the one on Supervenience, or the one on Scientific Explanation, or Scientific Realism. Go from there to, say, Jonathan Schaffer’s Is there a Fundamental Level? (for the metaphysics) or Michael Strevens’ Depth for one take on the philosophy of science, or—for something in parts similar to Bhaskar but far more creative and central—read Nancy Cartwright on laws of nature. I feel confident in asserting that different sociologists could ally themselves with quite incompatible positions in these debates and much of our work would go on as before.”