[4] Lawson's early contributions were on philosophical topics such as uncertainty, knowledge and prediction as well as on substantive analyses of the labour process and the industrial decline of the United Kingdom.

This has involved developing an ontologically informed critique of mainstream economics and elaborating methods more relevant to social analysis.

[4][16] As a result of his argument that economics should concern itself with ontology, Lawson has developed and defended his own theory of the constitution and nature of social reality.

[17][18][19] Indeed, in his early work, Lawson joined Bhaskar and others in referring to the account of social reality defended as "transcendental realism".

[21] In general, Lawson argues, “we human beings for the most part do not create social reality, but rather, on finding it given to us at each moment, each draw upon it in acting in always situated ways, pursuing our particular situated concerns, in conditions clearly not of our own making, with understandings that are always fallible and extremely partial at best, and in so doing thereby contribute, along with the simultaneous actions of all others, to the continuous reproduction and transformation of social reality in a manner that is mostly unintended and poorly understood”.

[25] Recently Lawson has debated the relative advantages of competing conceptions of social ontology with several ontologists such as John Searle, Doug Porpora and Colin Wight.