On a spectrum that runs from realism to postmodernism Foucault stands somewhere in the middle. Critical realism is driven by the need to offer some explanatory power for how we understand the world around us, while remaining aware of the limitations of such an exercise. Ontologically bold in recognising the need to offer an explanation, critical realism is epistemically cautious in how it regards the status of this explanation. Caution comes from the premise that the real world is independent of the knowledge we have of it and that the world itself and the knowledge we have of it are not one and the same thing. Consequently, all knowledge is necessarily fallible. The object of knowledge is intransitive, the knowledge we have of it is transitive. This transitive domain is subject to the kind of power-knowledge relations discussed by Foucault. This does not, however, affect the status of the knowledge-independent intransitive realm. As Bhaskar writes: ‘The intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them; they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us’ (Bhaskar 1978: 22).