ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the theories of ontological emergence advanced by two proponents of critical realism: Roy Bhaskar and Dave Elder-Vass. In the social sciences, discussions of emergence mainly focus on social phenomena as they emerge from individuals. Social phenomena are commonly taken to be exemplified by universities, states, traffic jams, wealth distributions, declarations of war, firms’ firing of employees and norms. Bhaskar develops his views on causal powers, emergence and social ontology in his first two books that established the critical realist movement in the social sciences. In these works, he construes the notion of emergence in synchronic terms, that is, he takes emergent phenomena to co-occur with the more basic phenomena from which they emerge. Elder-Vass has published extensively on the topic of emergence while offering the most concentrated discussion of the issue in his book The Causal Power of Social Structures Emergence, Structure and Agency.
