to both societies and individuals through its ‘Transformational Model of Social Activity’(TMSA) (Bhaskar 1989; Pratt 1994). For realists,causal powers and liabilities are attributed to human actors by virtue of their individual nature and as an emergent property of their position in different kinds of social relations,which are themselves reproduced (and/or changed) by human behaviour (Sayer 1992).However, an important difference between critical realism and more deterministic structuralist approaches is the fact that individual actors are considered capable of evaluating, interpreting
and learning from their own previous experiences (and the experiences of others). Realist
explanations are thus very much concerned
with the motivations and behaviour of individual
actors, as well as the social structures
within which they act.