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We demonstrate in this article how critical realism can be used to explain indeterminacy in role behaviour systematically. In so doing, we both rebut various criticisms of critical realism made recently by Kemp and Holmwood and attempt to illustrate the weaknesses and absences of approaches that concentrate unduly on the collection of expectations of (different groups of) actors concerning roles and the behaviour of incumbents. Within a framework that recognises that structure and agency are ontologically distinct but necessarily empirically related entities, we argue that structures should be seen as sources of indeterminacy within role behaviour for at least four reasons: the co-determination of roles through the intersection of structures; conflicting role expectations caused by contradictions inhering within structures; asymmetries of power within social relations; and asymmetric repetition within structural reproduction/transformation. In light of this discussion of structural sources of indeterminacy, we then go on to demonstrate how critical realism is also able to analyse systematically the agential sources of indeterminacy within role behaviour and expectations through theories of psychobiography and reflexivity. We thus conclude that critical realism contains the conceptual tools required to illuminate the point(s) of intersection between structure, culture and agency which is central to understanding both role behaviour and the plurality of expectations concerning such behaviour.

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When faced with complex public policy challenges, policymakers grapple with a dilemma between assuming direct political control (politicisation) or creating ‘distance’ through arm’s length, often market-orientated governance arrangements (depoliticisation). We contend that both processes co-exist and operate simultaneously though empirically speaking, little is known about how they interact over time to inform policy change. We compare how the Heath and Wilson-Callaghan governments responded to this ‘recurrent dilemma’ in the Nationalised Industries during the 1970s. Drawing on new archival material, our research reveals that a desire to retain political control was repeatedly supplemented by attempts to embed depoliticising, quasi-market disciplinary mechanisms. Our focus on the ‘intercurrence’ of politicisation and depoliticisation, understood as the simultaneous operation of older and newer governance arrangements, reveals the long, complex lineage of privatisation, addng nuance to accounts that present it simplistically as part of a paradigm shift in the 1980s.