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I began this book because I wanted to write a text that reflected my own practice both as a social researcher and as someone who most years teaches two MA modules entitled ‘Philosophy of Social Research’and ‘Quantitative Research Methods’. In neither of these roles was I happy with the ‘prevailing orthodoxies’ that defined the nature of quantitative social research. Whenever I had come across a heresy I seemed to have signed up to it–to Tukey’s programme of exploratory data analysis, to critical realist ontology and the consequent understanding of cause as complex and contingent, to complexity theory and its descriptions of complex evolutionary systems, to a commitment to social research as critical practice rather than neutral observation. It seemed time to synthesize all of these things and this book is the result.

Frankly, I think it is an opportune time for some loud heretical ranting. At a time when people are …