Dave Elder-Vass is a lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University. Previously, he spent three years as a British Academy post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, after completing his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. Before returning to the academic world he was a senior IT executive in a major UK retail business.
Dave's research programme is oriented to bringing ontological clarity to the social sciences. Taking a critical realist perspective, he examines the kinds of entity that operate in the social world and how it might be possible for them to have emergent causal powers. His new book The Causal Power of Social Structures, addresses both the general theory of emergence and its application to the sociological concepts of social structure and human agency. In a series of related publications and conference papers, Dave has discussed the implications of emergence for critical realism, for the theory of structure and agency, and for the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences.
In his current work, Dave is examining how language, discourse, culture and knowledge contribute to constructing our social reality. This research aims to show, through an emergentist ontological analysis, that language, discourse, culture and knowledge are real and causally effective, and hence to provide an ontological foundation for a synthesis of realism and constructionism (this part of the work is represented in several recent conference papers). It will then apply this analysis to evaluate the potential of some specific constructionist arguments, including claims for the social construction of institutions, categories, subjects and reality itself.
Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, United Kingdom
E-mail: d.elder-vass (at) lboro.ac.uk