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not be reduced to the world of human beings but considered as the humanism of the
world, as the value of humans within the world process. Within an institutional
context, the perspective of the philosophy of action, according to Gonçalves [7],
considers the community as a key ontological manifestation of the world which has a
decisive role in the development of the instance of being-in-the-world. A community
may be understood from different perspectives, ranging from the psychological level
to the sociological one. The deep soil of an institution, however, is its ontological
grounding, in particular and especially that of its community. When the presence of
human beings is referred, it is not the individuals themselves, nor the sum of all
individuals, that are being referred to but rather the community itself whose statute
largely overpasses the simple sociological horizon. The maximum degree of
possibilities of being-in-the-world has in a community, thus interpreted, its
fundamental interpreter and protagonist.
At organisational level, the practices and processes are supported by social
relations which may be characterised as social structures. Archer and Bhaskar [1]
develop extensively the notion of social structures, posing the question as to how they
should be conceptualised. These authors argue that individuals and persons surely
exist, though social structures do not exist in the sense of either of these. Roy
Bhaskar, the father of critical realism theory, argues that without the concept of social
structure, or something like it, we cannot make sense of persons, since «all the
predicates which apply to individuals and mark them uniquely as persons are social.
We can predicate a shape, size and colour of a person just as we can of a stone or a
tree... but the moment we say that the person is a tribesman or a revolutionary, cashed
a check, or wrote a sonnet, we are presupposing a social order, a banking system and
a literary form.» [1]. Bhaskar insists that the problem is that we need the idea of a
social structure, but that a social structure does not exist in the same way as a
magnetic field. «... society is incarnate in the practices and products of its members. It
does not exist apart from the practices of the individuals; it is not witnessable; only its
activities and products are.» [1](italics in the original). Structures are both medium
and product, enabling and constraining.
Since social structures do not exist independently of activities, they are not simply
reproduced but are, as Bhaskar notes, reproduced and transformed. This author
explains that it is because society is incarnate in the practices of its members, that it is
easy to lapse into methodological individualism, in which society disappears and only
individuals exist. Of course, «society has not disappeared, since these individuals are
persons and their acts are situated, not simply in a ‘natural’ world but in a world
constituted by past and ongoing human activity, a humanised natural and social
world.» [1](italics in the original).
The argument of these authors follows that because social structures are incarnate
in the practices of persons, this means that they do not exist independently of the
conceptions of the persons whose activities constitute (reproduce, transform) them. It
is because persons have beliefs, interests, goals, and practical knowledge acquired in
their epigenesis as members of a society that they do what they do and thus sustain
(and transform) the structures. Bhaskar further elucidates this point: «... changes in
activity do change society. This suggests that social science is potentially liberating.
For Marx, social science was revolutionary... one must conclude that the modern
social sciences have been, unwittingly or not, defenders of the status quo. As Veblen
put it, rather than ‘disturb the habitual convictions and preconceptions’ on which
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