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Roy was lecturer in economics, Pembroke College, Oxford, 1967–1973, Research officer, Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics, 1970–1971, Research fellow in philosophy, Linacre College, Oxford, 1971-73, Lecturer in philosophy, University of Edinburgh, 1973–1982. By 1982 Roy was already recognized as the originator and leader of a new school of philosophy, critical realism. His books were soon to have a widespread international and interdisciplinary impact.
Since 1982 he has taught and lectured on philosophy and adjacent subjects, especially sociology, in universities and institutes of higher education throughout the world. In the early 1980s he had helped to inaugurate an annual series of international conferences on critical realism, called “Realism and the Human Sciences”. From the mid 1980s he was increasingly concerning himself with the establishment of critical realism and its development. And eventually in 1994 he resigned from full-time teaching to concentrate on setting up the Centre for Critical Realism (CCR), a registered UK charity, which subsequently generated an open-membership body, the International Association of Critical Realism (IACR). The CCR also has its own book series, “Critical Realism: Interventions,” which is published by Routledge, which also publishes two other series focused on critical realism, including a new one, entitled “New Studies in Social Ontology”, which Roy also edits. The Centre also has its own journal: the peer-reviewed Journal of Critical Realism.
A founding trustee and chair of the Centre for Critical Realism, from February 2000 he has been its Patron. Since September 2000, he has been engaged in worldwide lecture and workshop tours. He was invited by the government of India to give the Radhakrishnan Lectures on Comparative Religion and Spirituality in Kolkata (Calcutta) in 2002, where he was introducing the next step of unfolding of his approach called Philosophy of meta-Reality. Accordingly, in August 2002 he set up the Meta-Reality Foundation.
In September 2003 Roy took up a fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS), from where his work assumed a more concrete and sociological form, while retaining its transformist and emancipatory commitment. In August 2004 he accepted an appointment as Adjunct Professor in the Philosophy of Peace at the Centre for Peace Studies, University of Tromsø, Norway. He is at present very concerned with concrete issues of interdisciplinary research, in the general field of applied social science. In April 2005 he became Guest Professor in Philosophy and Sociology in the Department of Health at Örebro University.
A concern with education has long been central to the vision of critical realism; and there is now growing worldwide explicit critical realist activity on education in the more specific sense. In this context Roy has accepted an appointment as World Scholar at the University of London Institute of Education, where he is concerned, since 2007, to establish a new international centre for advanced critical realist studies in and for education.
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