ABSTRACT
There are four reasons why Critical Realists do not, in principle, have good cause to be strong defenders of ‘routine action’.
First, social life in an open system is always at the mercy of contingencies so, by definition, people’s responses cannot be entirely ‘routinized’. Second, the coexistence and interplay of plural generative mechanisms often shapes the empirical situations encountered by subjects in unpredictable ways, thus requiring creative responses from them. Third, Realism’s stratified social ontology includes a stratum of emergent personal properties and powers, which include the human capacity for innovative action.
