Critical Realist Grounded Theory (Looker & Kington, 2026) - Weekend Book Review

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Reference

Looker, B., & Kington, A. (2026). The Emergence of Critical Realist Grounded Theory: A Transformative Perspective (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003513735

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🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and to this episode of Weekend Book Review. 📚

There is something quietly unsettling, and perhaps rather exciting, about a book that asks us to reconsider how we come to know what we think we know. I found myself thinking about that as I spent time with The Emergence of Critical Realist Grounded Theory: A Transformative Perspective, by Ben Looker and Alison Kington, published by Routledge on July 23, 2026.

Looker, a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Worcester, works around relationships and social contracts in educational settings, while Kington, also based at the Institute of Education, brings extensive experience in mixed methods research, with particular interest in educational relationships and identities. Their shared connection to the Psychology of Education Research Group gives this book an interesting intellectual home, one where methodology is not simply a technical exercise, but something deeply connected to how we understand people, institutions, and the worlds they inhabit.

🧩 At the heart of the book is Critical Realist Grounded Theory, or CRGT, an attempt to bring classic grounded theory into conversation with critical realism. The ambition is quite substantial. Rather than stopping at patterns that appear in the data, CRGT asks researchers to look beneath those patterns, towards the underlying causal mechanisms that might be shaping what we observe.

What I found particularly intriguing is the book's insistence on both structure and openness. It takes coding, literature reviews, theory development, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative data seriously, while still leaving room for discovery. In that sense, the methodology feels less like a rigid route through a research project and more like an invitation to remain attentive to what the evidence might be trying to tell us.

🔍 And perhaps that is the question I kept returning to while reading: when we move beyond describing what happens and begin searching for why it happens, how much of the reality we thought we understood might quietly change beneath our feet?

🙏 My thanks to Ben Looker and Alison Kington, and to Routledge, for this thoughtful contribution to the methodological conversation.

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