ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter sets an orientating frame for the subsequent chapters that document the experiences of novice and experienced researchers in their early encounters with critical realism. These are stories of journeys traversing diverse methodological, conceptual, and substantive terrains. However, the origins of each have a common source: an unease felt by the researchers that the methodological approaches and theoretical resources they had been bringing, or planned to bring, to their work had significant practical and explanatory limits. It was the promise of critical realism to address, or even break through, those limits that enticed the authors to work with critical realism. The essential task of this chapter is to provide readers with an outline of that promise via a presentation of the conceptual architecture of critical realism. It takes critical realism as having developed over time in three identifiable but emergent phases: ‘original critical realism’, ‘dialectical critical realism’, and the ‘Philosophy of MetaReality’. Not only will this provide readers with interpretive scaffold from which to meaningfully engage with the chapters that follow, but also a way by which they might begin to think about utilising the vast conceptual resources offered by critical realism in their own work.
