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2021-03-31-accounts

ANNUAL REPORT 2021

Section I: Objectives and Activities

The organisation is a charitable company limited by guarantee, incorporated on 3 June 1997 and registered as a charity on 28 January 1998. The company was established under a Memorandum of Association which established the objects and powers of the charitable company and is governed by its Articles of Association.

The objects of the charity as expressed in its constitution are to advance the education of the general public and practitioners in the study, research and application of critical realism in philosophy and other disciplines.

The Trustees seek to bring about the objects of the charity in the following ways:

The charity acts as a conduit for the gathering and exchange of information on all areas relating to Critical Realism. As a meta-theory employed across a wide range of intellectual disciplines both by writers, and researchers, the CCR through its trustees remains a first point of contact, across the world. There are innumerable benefits that arise from the personal contacts developed through the programme of seminars held in London, online, and at the annual conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) held at different international locations.

Section II: Structure, Governance and Management

There are five trustees and a further seven members of the CCR board (listed at the end of the report) that direct its activities. In particular the board acts as editorial advisers for the Routledge book series from which the CCR derives its annual income in the form of royalties.

Risk Review

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The Trustees have undertaken a risk assessment for the company encompassing all potential areas of risk and are satisfied that the operating systems and procedures are sufficient to meet those risks.

Management

The trustees meet periodically to manage the charity. Due to the coronavirus pandemic online meetings have replaced face to face activities including management meetings of the CCR board

Public Benefit

The Trustees have had due regard to the guidance published by the Charity Commission on public benefit . The CCR transferred to a CIO in January 2020.

Recruitment and appointment of new trustees

The trustees have the power to appoint new trustees.

New trustees are invited to attend a short training session to familiarise themselves with the charity and the context within which it operations. This session covers:-

Section III: Achievements and Performance

The Centre for Critical Realism has been operating for over twenty years across three main strands:

  1. As an organising body for promoting critical realism particularly through an online presence.

  2. As a consulting body in the diffusion of critical realism and in particular the awarding of grants.

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  1. As a publisher of a book series in conjunction with Routledge.

1. The Centre for Critical Realism organising events and activities relating to Critical Realism

(a) Members of the CCR board took part in the organising, promoting and advising of the 2020 IACR conference which was as held online by the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw, Poland. There was a pre-conference workshop held on 12-13 October 2020, and the main conference was from Wednesday 14 October to Friday16th. The theme of the conference was,”Human person in times of civilization change”

The twenty- fourth IACR annual conference IACR was hosted by Rhodes University and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) from 20 to 24 September 2021. It was titled “(Re) Envisaging Emancipatory Research, Science and Practice” and covered a number of themes:

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(b) Members of the CCR board have been involved in the development and delivery of the following networks:

(i) The Cambridge Social Ontology Group. Workshops are held on Mondays every fortnight during the Michaelmas and Lent terms (See website https://www.csog.econ.cam.ac.uk)

(ii) The Centre for Social Ontology

The Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) is based at Grenoble Ecole de Management, Universite Grenoble since 2018 and is under the directorship of Professor Ismael Al-Amoudi. To date, the CSO has researched the topics of morphogenic society (five volumes with Springer, 201117) and of post human society (four volumes with Routledge, 2017-21). (See website http://socialontology.org/).

(c) Members of the CCR board have an editorial role in the Journal for Critical Realism.

(See Journal of Critical Realism: Vol 20, No 4 tandfonline.com)

This is the Journal of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR), established in 1997 to foster the discussion, propagation and the development of critical realist approaches to understanding and changing the world. It provides a forum for scholars wishing to promote realist emancipatory philosophy, social theory and science on an interdisciplinary

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and international basis, and for those who wish to engage with such approaches

The Journal publishes articles, review essays, review symposia, book reviews, debates and postgraduate interventions that relate in some significant way to critical realist approaches to understanding and changing the world. It is committed to encouraging work within the framework of, or engaging with all phases of the philosophy of critical realism: original and dialectical critical realism and metaRealism.

(d) Members of the CCR board have been involved in expanding an online presence through CriticalRealismNetwork.org.

The CCR through its own and associated websites continues to provide the many benefits of bringing people together across the world to both discuss ideas and issues and guide research and reading programmes.:

The Critical Realism Network Website has a wide range of resources from blogs to videos. A world map featuring local and regional groups is under construction. The original Critical Realism Network projects hosted over twenty webinars with leading critical realists. There is now a continuation of the Critical Realism Matters series of occasional webinars organised by the Centre for Critical Realism. New webinars are announced on the blog and published (along with all our other videos) on our YouTube channel.

From the description on the website the CRN aims to provide

 a repository of resources related to critical realism, beginning with the key texts outlined in the reading guide, followed by our collection of webinars with outstanding scholars

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 a conceptual tool kit for learning about critical realism and exploring how it is being applied in sociology, social sciences, and the humanities more broadly

 a global hub for news and information for the critical realist community The site is part of the Critical Realism Network, created by the ‘Human Flourishing and Critical Realism in the Social Sciences’ project based in the sociology department of Yale University. Since the end of that project responsibility for maintaining the site has been transferred to the Centre for Critical Realism. It is currently maintained on behalf of the CCR by Mark Carrigan and Dave Elder-Vass who are members of the CCR board.

The Critical Realism Network at Yale University fostered opportunities for interdisciplinary scholarly research and dialogue about the direction of contemporary social theory and research. It hosted a number of working groups, symposiums, regional engagements, and conferences, alongside Philosophy of Social Sciences Summer Seminars for graduate students, postdoctoral participants, and junior faculty. These opportunities provided scholars with the opportunity for sustained engagement and to exchange ideas and insights in collaboration with their colleagues. The establishment of the network was funded by two project grants from the John Templeton Foundation. Further details of these can be found in the History section of the site.

2. The Centre for Critical Realism functioning as a consulting body

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(a) Members of the CCR board have been involved in the promotion and adjudication of the annual Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize.

The Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize is awarded annually for a book or article that constitutes, motivates or exemplifies the best and/or most innovative new writing in or about the tradition of critical realism, including the philosophy of metaReality, in the previous year. The winner is invited to give the annual Cheryl Frank Memorial Lecture at the IACR Annual Conference. The Cheryl Frank Committee consists of one nominee each from the Centre for Critical Realis (CCR), the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR), and The Journal of Critical Realism (JCR).

The Cheryl Frank prize for 2020 was awarded to Tony Lawson for his book ‘ The Nature of Social Reality’ (London: Routledge 2019)

The Cheryl Frank prize for 2021 was awarded to Hubert Buch-Hansen and Peter Nielsen, for their text ‘ Critical Realism: Basics and Beyond ’ (London: Red Globe Press: 2020)

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(b)The board has been collaborating with the executors of Roy Bhaskar's estate, in the administration of a commemoration fund dedicated to his memory.

The Bhaskar Memorial Fund

“A sustainable, diversified global society in which the free flourishing of each is a condition of the free flourishing of all.” This, for Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014), is the core objective (moral alethia) of the human species.

The Bhaskar Memorial Fund seeks to promote this objective by making modest grants to assist scholars working within the framework of critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality. Grants will not normally exceed £500. Preference will be given to those with greater need, e.g. scholars from non-OECD-type countries, or on the lower rungs of the academic ladder, or postgraduate students.The Fund is financed by royalties paid to the Bhaskar Estate. It is administered by a committee comprised of Bhaskar’s literary executors, Hilary Wainwright and Mervyn Hartwig or their nominees; the Treasurer of the Centre for Critical Realism, Sean Vertigan or his nominee; and a nominee of the International Association for Critical Realism.Applications should indicate briefly what purpose

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the grant is intended to serve and how this relates to the philosophy of critical realism. A short CV should be included. Applications will be considered once a year, in July.

In the summer of 2019 two grants were made to two participants attending the IACR conference in Southampton and a grant was made to assist in the publication of a critical realist reader. These totalled £1,800. In the summer of 2020 four grants were made to assist scholars and these totalled £1,600.

There have been three grants made in the summer of 2021. Two allocations to help Phd Scholars in Kenya and the Philippines and a third in the UK and these totaled £1,200.

3. The Centre for Critical Realism as a publisher of a book series in conjunction with Routledge.

The CCR continues to encourage both new and established academics with the publication of texts through the Routledge series. For new academics this affords an opportunity become established and for longstanding academics this generates submissions for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The number of titles in the series in now well over one hundred and offers critical realist insights into a wide range of academic disciplines ranging from sociology, philosophy and politics to a broad range of empirical studies ranging from management and organisational studies through to education and women's international human rights. The website is maintained by the Taylor and Francis Group and the blurb on its website reads:

Critical Realism is a broad movement within philosophy and social science. It is a movement that began in British philosophy and sociology following the founding work of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and others. Critical Realism emerged from the desire to realise an adequate realist philosophy of science, social science, and of critique. Against empiricism, positivism and various idealisms (interpretivism, radical social constructionism), Critical Realism argues for the necessity of ontology. The pursuit of ontology is the attempt to understand and say something about ‘the things themselves’ and not simply about our beliefs, experiences, or our current knowledge and understanding of those things. Critical Realism also argues against the implicit ontology of the empiricists and idealists of events and regularities, reducing reality to thought, language, belief, custom, or experience. Instead Critical Realism advocates a structural realist and

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causal powers approach to natural and social ontology, with a focus upon social relations and process of social transformation.

Important movements within Critical Realism include the morphogenetic approach developed by Margaret Archer; Critical Realist economics developed by Tony Lawson; as well as dialectical Critical Realism (embracing being, becoming and absence) and the philosophy of metaReality (emphasising priority of the non-dual) developed by Roy Bhaskar.

For over thirty years, Routledge has been closely associated with Critical Realism and, in particular, the work of Roy Bhaskar, publishing well over fifty works in, or informed by, Critical Realism (in series including Critical Realism: Interventions; Ontological Explorations ; New Studies in Critical Realism and Education ). These have all now been brought together under one series dedicated to Critical Realism.

The Centre for Critical Realism is the advisory editorial board for the series

The following are the most recent titles from 2019 /20:

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Critical Realism, Feminism, and Gender: A Reader Edited by Michiel van Ingen,

Steph Grohmann, Lena Gunnarsson , 2020

Ethical Consumption: Practices and Identities: A Realist Approach, by Yana Manyukhina, 2019

The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art by Nick Wilson 2019

The following are forthcoming titles in March 2022

The Morphogenesis of the Norwegian Educational System: Emergence and Development from a Critical Realist Perspective Edited by Margaret S. Archer, Unn-Doris K. Bæck, Tone Skinningsrud

Explaining Morality: Critical Realism and Moral Questions by Steve Ash

The Centre for Critical Realism is the advisory editorial board for the series.

In total there are currently over 125 titles in the Routledge online catalogue

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Section IV: Financial Review

The charity made net payments for the year of £1,878 (2020: net receipts £2,600). Due to the minimal amount of activity carried on by the company, the Trustees are dedicated to ensuring that it can operate within the income it can generate each year. The Trustees do not feel that significant funds are required for the ongoing activities of the charity and consider that the current level of reserves is more than adequate to enable it to continue its current activities for three to six months in the unlikely event of a drop in income. The charity had cash funds at the year end of £11,870 (2020: £9,352).

The CCR derives its income from a royalties contract with Routledge of Taylor and Francis an Informa business. The royalties are paid each half year (March and September) into the centre’s HSBC Bank Account at the Angel Branch, Lion House, 25 Islington High Street, London N1 9LJ. The Bhaskar Memorial Fund derives its income from a similar royalties contract with Routledge, as well as an annual sum from Verso and occasionally royalties from Sage.

Up until December 2020 the financial accounts were audited by the Solihull office of Prime Accountants, Corner Oak, 1 Homer Road, Solihull, B91 3QG. We are grateful to the accountants and Mike Jellicoe in particular for assisting in the transfer of the CCR to a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) in December 2019.

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Section V: The Centre for Critical Realism Board

The five trustees comprise:

Professor Margaret Archer (Warwick), Professor Tony Lawson (Cambridge), Professor Alan Norrie (Warwick), Dr Sean Vertigan (University College London), Professor Nick Wilson (King’s College London).

In addition the following are members of the editorial board

Dr Mark Carrigan

Dr David Elder-Vass

Professor Philip Gorski

Dr Lee Martin

Dr Leigh Price

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