ABSTRACT
My primary purpose with this book is to argue that there is much to be gained from an ontological turn in social theorising, that there are significant advantages to making a concern with ontology more explicit and systematic than is the custom. A secondary goal, closely bound up with the first, and one with which I shall be expressly occupied in the current chapter, is to argue for a particular ontological conception. It is through demonstrating the sustainability as well as usefulness of this particular conception, one sometimes systematised as critical realism,1 that I seek simultaneously to achieve my primary goal.
