Reflections on the ‘Realist Turn’ in Organization and Management Studies

abstract  This paper has three objectives. First, to provide an exposition of the ‘realist turn’ in contemporary organization and management studies. Second, to assess the detailed implications of this incipient ‘realist turn’ for the underlying explanatory principles and practices that should inform organization and management studies as a social scientific field. Third, to evaluate the potential, longer‐term, impact of these explanatory principles and practices in an intellectual context where anti‐realist ontologies and epistemologies have been dominant. This will entail a critique of contemporary approaches that draw on a social constructionist ontology and a postmodernist epistemology. Overall, the paper concludes that the ‘realist turn’ creates a significant intellectual opportunity and space in which the historical sociology of dynamic organizational forms and managerial control regimes can be rediscovered and renewed.