Realism for Social Sciences: A Translational Approach to Methodology

Masaaki Katsuragi is associate professor at the Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, teaching Economic Philosophy and Methodology, specifically following a realist tradition established in the last three decades in Cambridge UK. At first, he made research into Japanese service industries in the graduate school of economics at Kyoto University and obtained a grant as JSPS research fellow at Kyoto Institute of Economic Research (KIER). The turning point came in 1999 when he attended the Cambridge Realist Workshop for the first time as a visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Later he became a graduate student at the Judge Business School, Cambridge. Since then, he is a member of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group.

Yoshiyuki Takeuchi is an Associate Professor of Applied Statistics and Econometrics at the Graduate School of Economics and the Center for Mathematical Modeling and Data Science, Osaka University. He was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Fukushima University from 1989 to 1992. His research interests focus on data science, including statistics. In addition, he has been working on the history of statistical thought, in particular the migration of mathematical statistics into Japan, and the anthropology of business administration. He is the author of “On a Statistical Method to Detect Discontinuity in the Distribution Function of Reported Earnings” (Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 64(1), 2004). He is co-editor of Enterprise as an Instrument of Civilization (2016) and Translating and Incorporating American Management Thought into Japan (2022).