The aim of our initial call for papers was to encourage the submission of exemplars of applied work, reflections on the use of critical realism, and metatheoretical developments. We were not disappointed, and we are therefore pleased to present this collection of five articles which advance our understanding of critical realism in practice. The book review in this issue further extends the collection, as it summarizes several examples of applied critical realist work. As one would expect of such a collection, there are a variety of disciplines represented, from business studies, to marketing, psychology, law and education. In this editorial, we provide an overview of the (concrete universal) trends of current applications of critical realism of which these articles are (concrete singular, and therefore unique) instantiations. Finally, we provide a brief introduction to each paper. We expect that the audience for this issue may be broader than, though still include, the usual readership of Journal of Critical Realism. Specifically, we expect to attract early career researchers who are new to critical realist ideas, and people whose primary interest is directed at one of the disciplines represented, rather than critical realism per se. For this reason, at the risk of repetition, we have allowed several of the authors to outline the aspects of critical realism that are relevant to their paper. General trends in critical realist research Currently, much critical realist work takes the form of underlabouring. In this issue, such underlabouring can be seen in the way that the authors argue to strengthen the theory and practice of their discipline. However, as critical realism becomes more accepted, one anticipates that this characteristic of disciplinary underlabouring will become less necessary, perhaps eventually unnecessary. However, in the space created by the work of the underlabourers, there are certain characteristics of critical realist social research that are likely to be permanent. Of these, we have chosen to highlight the following:. a commitment to ontology;. the use of retroduction and judgemental rationality;. the use of the critical realist approach to structure and agency (either in the Bhaskarian form of the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA) or the Archerian form of Morphogenesis/Morphostasis);