I warm to an author who won't let us get by without inviting us to reflect on the title of his book. Byrne starts with the proposition that knowledge about the social world is constructed in the very process of intervention in that world. He argues that the socio-political context for applying social science is ‘post-democratic’, where political decision-making is largely in the hands of professional experts and citizens play a passive role. We have a government through business elites. He develops by saying we do not have evidence-based policy but policy-based evidence – the selective use of evidence to support policies. This is a slightly more skeptical version of Michael Young's original meritocracy argument – his satirical essay written in 1958, it may be worth recalling, in the first-person by a fictional historical narrator in 2032.

After a rather polemical introduction, his main chapters deal with constructing, evaluating, surveying, legitimating, consulting, modelling and acting – gerunds, as he often tells us. Methodologically he prefers a position of interpreting quantitative and qualitative data together. His ‘critical’ stance makes him rather scathing of post-modern relativism and favour Freire and other broadly Marxist thinking. Post-democratic, post-modern – indeed Byrne is a ‘post’-person. We have post-democracy, post-disciplinary, post-modern, post-structuralism and post-positivism, terms that are not always helpful, expressing as they sometimes do a claim to change-but-continuity (post-positivism, post-democracy) and sometimes change-and discontinuity (post-modernism).

For me, his case for realist constructivism is a convincing position, though of course it is a broad church. It is one that has gradually achieved a more confident expression over the last fifteen years, as part of the widespread development of nuanced forms of realist ontology – though he is unnecessarily dismissive of strong hermeneutic positions as being ‘utterly irrelevant to applied social science’ (p. 24). Paradoxical they may be but not absolutely and entirely irrelevant. The journal International Review of Qualitative Research, for example, is as much interested in questions of application as any of the less hermeneutic journals.

Byrne has advocated over the last decade an integration of critical realism and complexity theory and here is a good starting point for readers fresh to his argument. His book is worth reading for a number of reasons:

• • his demonstration of the inter-relationship of qualitative and quantitative work; and the logically similar account of surveying as having opportunity for both quantitative and qualitative strategies;

• • a strong integration of the literature from the American evaluation field – far from taken for granted in UK social policy texts;

• • his excellent discussions throughout the book on causality – the chapter on modelling would be a good place to start;

• • his efforts to discuss topics that are more usually discussed in a more free-standing way, and to provide a shared undergirding. His discussion of action research is a good example of the latter point;

• • he sets his discussion in literature ranging over a period of 40–50 years, and general ideas sometimes earlier, hence avoiding a temporally contracted view of relevance;

• • for his general cross-referencing of the worlds of university, community development, and civic engagement.

He has an unusual and often interesting way of writing, giving extended quotations from authors and often devoting corresponding extra space to their discussion. It may primarily find a readership in England, despite his easy familiarity with US literature and the endorsement from Charles Ragin, given that in the heart of the book the extended illustrations are largely from the English policy scene. Some of the later chapters are based on extensive accounts of such examples.

He perhaps yields too easily to the temptation to assert originality. Others have spelt out ways in which exploring knowledge about the social world is itself an intervention in that world. More generally, his discussion of the central issue of the nature of applied research might have drawn more widely. For example, Stokes’ enticing discussion of use-inspired basic research nicely summarises the death of the linear model from science to application/technology:

Byrne would perhaps feel he had failed if a reviewer did not say that there are occasional provocations. He makes an effort, he tells us, to annoy as many people as possible, as if admitting mud-slinging justifies it. But I wonder if there are provocations he did not intend. For example, he cannot resist constantly telling us when he believes he is using ‘an important word’ which he obviously does not trust the reader to see unaided. By Chapter 4, I was tired of being told that a particular word mattered a lot. Also he is prone to ask us to ‘note’ or ‘remember’ what he has just said, in case we were asleep on the job. It risks sounding ‘arrogant’ and even ‘self-serving’ – terms he uses of others – as if to draw to our attention ‘I am saying something truly important and make sure you don't miss it’. Though he is, of course, not sounding ‘pig-ignorant’, ‘bone idle’, ‘unctuous’ or ‘downright stupid’ – other over-personal terms he is quite happy to bandy about. A pity – because he has much that is thoughtful and incisive to say, and risks not being heard through the fog of war. The less he is successful in annoying people, the more he will be successful in influencing them.