The article discusses the relevance of ontology, the metaphysical study of being, in social sciences through a comparison of three distinct outlooks: Roy Bhaskar's version of critical realism, a pragmatic realist approach the most renowned representatives of which are Rom Harré and Hilary Putnam, and the authors’ own synthesis of the pragmatist John Dewey's and the neopragmatist Richard Rorty's ideas, here called methodological relationalism. The Bhaskarian critical realism is committed to the heavy ontological furniture of metaphysical transcendentalism, resting on essentialist presumptions of causality and social structures, tacitly creating a dualism between individuals and society. Pragmatic realists, for their part, carry much lighter metaphysical baggage than critical realists and, much in a pragmatist vein, accept the idea that social scientists should study society by studying social life—the interwoven activities of individuals. Nevertheless, pragmatic realists only reluctantly, if at all, renounce the subject–object dualism and its ontological implications. Drawing on the ideas of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, the writers outline their own antirepresentationalist, antiessentialist approach to social sciences. The proposed methodological relationalism is a pragmatist approach of Deweyan origin. Based on a Darwinian understanding of human beings as organisms trying to cope with their environment, it emphasises the insight that one can neither step outside one's own action, nor withdraw from the actor's point of view, just as one cannot cognitively step outside language.

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This article focuses mainly on the key results of research on the differences in participation in higher education in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s. The recent discussion surrounding the methods of measuring participation in higher education is also considered. The results show that, in 1980, the odds for children of the well educated participating in higher education was 13 times greater than that of children of fathers with only a basic level of education. Since then, the trend has decreased slowly from 12 in 1985 to 10 in 1995. Despite the various egalitarian policy measures applied by the State, the difference in participation, indicated by the odds ratio 10, is still enormous, and the actual situation for youth with poor family backgrounds has not changed during the past decades. The persistent inequality of educational opportunity in relative terms revealed by the odds ratio, which the authors argue to be the appropriate measure for changes over time, is analysed further by exploring regional differences and the differences between various fields of study. It is shown that the real competition for higher education is among the well off. This is illustrated by a metaphor from bicycle racing: even if the tail-end cyclists reach the main pack, the front-runners widen their gap between the main pack.

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