Abstract
Classical pragmatism appears to be experiencing a minor revival in contemporary organization and management studies, inspired by the so-called new third wave of neo pragmatist theorizing associated especially with Rorty (1979) and Putnam (1997). When scholars appeal to an organizational imagination that would seek to illuminate the personal troubles of the employee, the influence of Mills’ (1959) pragmatist-inspired sociological imagination is suggested (Mir and Mir, 2002). Dewey’s (1940) conception of participatory democracy has been revived in the fields of public administration (Evans, 2000) and ethics (Jacobs, 2004). More generally, the Editors of this new volume of essays argue that a growing number of writers concerned with the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life draw inspiration from pragmatist insights. When we assume truth to be a socially accomplished fact, suppose belief to be a habit of action or presume the contingent and open nature of the social and historical conditions that shape the ways we think and act, concepts associated with the classical pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead are called into play. Yet, the Editors of this collection, Kelemen and Rumens, argue that the potential of pragmatist thought for both understanding and changing organizations has still to be fully exploited. Divided into two sections, ‘theory and context’—exploring general concepts and arguments—and ‘applications’—seeking to illuminate particular domains of organizing practice, the contributors to this collection offer varied readings and uses of pragmatist ideas. There are, I will suggest, certain difficulties in the way the Editors situate and contextualize this volume, but the contributors extend the discourse of pragmatism in ways that are often imaginative and illuminating.
Key contributions to the opening ‘theory and context’ section share a common assumption that knowledge should be practical, fallibilist and anti-foundational: a resource for illuminating concrete human difficulties and concerns, evoking the ancient philosophical ideals which James and Dewey learnt from Emerson. Watson’s contribution to the collection outlines a preferred version of organization studies that explores the values, assumptions, rules and practices of organizational life but serves a broader aim of enhancing democratic debate. A pragmatist organization studies would not yield easy solutions but nuanced analyses of social processes that, when directed at the widest audience beyond the academy, have the potential to enable social actors in democratic societies to make informed choices about the social conditions under which they work and the distribution of power in organizations.
Baert’s contribution appeals for a reorientation of the broad field of social research drawing parallels between the approach to truth telling of variants of pragmatism and European phenomenology. From Rorty (1979)—and a reading of Sartre—he derives a neo pragmatist orientation that would seek to enable groups to re-describe, re-conceptualise and re-evaluate their own experience and self-understanding. Parallels between classical pragmatism and Gadamer and Levinas are highlighted, as Baert elaborates a neo-pragmatist ethic of openness to the unfamiliar in scholarship, a responsiveness to the perspective of the other as well as a preparedness to re-evaluate theoretical positions in a self-critical and self-transformative ethic of scholarship.
Jackson, seeking to encourage public debate in a related way, addresses the complicity of economic discourse in the financial crisis after 2008. Economic models supplemented by financial mathematics enabled the design of complex and hazardous financial instruments. For Jackson, these events suggest an urgent need for reframing the entire field in accordance with concepts borrowed from pragmatism, informed by a concern with social interdependency and process. Here, as in Bartle and Shield’s critique of the discourse of government finance, there is a compelling appeal to bring practical effects and experience to the analysis of the domain of economic action.
Contributors to this volume find varied ways to explore the implications of pragmatist concerns with the practical and the everyday. For Dewey (1925/1981), our routine ways of acting are mostly accomplished without reflection. In a curious echo of Foucault’s notion of ‘problematization’, what encourages deliberation and creative thinking are moments of disruption or resistance in the circumstances we confront. In this sense, learning is a collective and everyday occurrence of a kind that management theory—including theories of learning that claim to draw inspiration from Dewey—typically fails to acknowledge. In their chapter, Arjalies, Loreno and Simpson, connecting pragmatist concepts to ethnographic enquiry, bring the everyday relations and processes of learning at a French asset management company into view. For Dewey, the human subject was a problem solving creature, endowed through evolutionary processes with definite mental capacities but always situated in a relational field of forces and social conditions. Brandi and Elkjaer, in turn, locate organizational practices of creativity at an organization in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry in a complex of organizational power relations, seeking to overcome the distinction between individual actors and organizational systems. The potential of pragmatist theory to reframe the everyday processes of organizational learning and creativity is evident in these contributions.
There is a concern in many of the essays to explore the ethico-political potential of classical pragmatism. Several of the contributors to this volume draw inspiration from the ethical position that James (1916) borrowed from Emerson. Moral choice involves determining what character to become but, in so doing, we should be willing to have our perspectives widened and changed by attending to those of others. For Taylor and Bell, James (1916) encourages an exploration of the ethical choices of organizational actors and the practical consequences of their chosen convictions—organizational life as it is lived when guided by an ethical ideal. Other contributors borrow from James in the search for alternative practices of organizing. In place of modern ‘emotion management’, with all its simplifying classifications and regulatory procedures, Slegers argues for an affectively responsive leadership that would attend to the emotions of organizational participants in all their variety and diversity. Here, and in the contribution of Harter, an ethic of doubt is brought to the practice of leadership. ‘Leading’ for Harter, after Eric Voegelin’s reading of James, requires a receptiveness to alternative viewpoints and facts, an ‘opposable mind’ and the fashioning of organizational spaces and conditions in which debate can flourish among organizational participants.
Such readings inflect James’ ethics with a distinctive, democratic character in a way that some might question. It is with Dewey (1940) that classical pragmatism is generally understood to have taken an explicitly participatory democratic turn. Democracy in this sense was a way of life, irreducible to any formal political procedure. Effective freedom required the active and intelligent participation of citizens in the collective direction of the social institutions which affected their existence. Participants required a willingness and capacity to engage with others in open-ended critical inquiry in a practice of collective democratic problem solving. For Shields, Whetsell and Hanks, informed by Dewey’s ethical sensibility, it is a regard for the lived experience of the citizen that should now inform the ethics of public administration. For Jacobs, guided by a conviction that the self is enlarged under participatory arrangements and the abuses and excesses of those who aspire to manage opened to scrutiny and control, Dewey’s relevance lies in the invitation to continue to explore how employees might practice participatory democracy at work in our own era.
As Hofting and Lindholt argue, Dewey was not the political naïf—indifferent to power and the political—that some imagined (e.g. Mills, 1966). Freedom ultimately was an effective capacity to act, dependent on an array of supporting and enabling conditions: from the moral, social and intellectual competences of democratic actors to their material security. Dewey did not elaborate on the conditions of freedom: it was for citizens, in their own particular historical circumstances, to engage in democratic experiments and to learn from their experiences. Yet, what remains undeveloped in this analysis, according to Hofting and Lindholt, is the transformative power that can accrue from association with others: the interweaving of different wants and desires that becomes possible when power is genuinely shared among participants in the way that Follett (1924) imagined. Such an ideal, their case evidence of the ‘democratic’ dialogue of a Norwegian regional development coalition suggests, is unlikely to be attainable without the widest efforts to equalize power relations among participants—a conclusion with which Dewey and Follett would doubtless have agreed. While Hofting and Lindholt’s ethnographic account is somewhat compressed and depersonalized their point is well made.
There is much of value in these essays and the contributors do well to remind us of the rich potential of the ‘practical’ concerns of pragmatist thought. I do not share the conviction, argued by Evans in this volume, that there is a debilitating relativism and political ineffectiveness at the heart of pragmatist thought that must undermine any contribution to the political goals of critical management studies. For all the practical ambition of pragmatism, he argues, it is unlikely to be of benefit to a political left in need of greater coherence in its struggles with the forces of the right. This appears to be an invitation to return to the endless and circular problem of the conditions of knowledge. Aside from the intellectual difficulties, to this writer, it is unclear how the search for more philosophically authoritative modes of argument would help to resolve the practical organizational problems and weaknesses of the contemporary political left. As critics, we would seem to be better served by seeking to offer political actors instruments of analysis: continuing the critical investigation of the truths we live by in contemporary organizations, seeking to illuminate the concerns and anxieties of organizational actors and experimenting with the possibility of going beyond prevailing power relations—in the way suggested by the editors and many of the contributions to this collection. James, Dewey and Mead may be helpful also as examples of scholarly efforts to harmonize word and deed, to live a critical life—as critics seek to find ways to make themselves heard in the public domain. There is little attention given to the latter theme in the collection. And I also felt that there was a weakness in the attention to historical context. There is a long history of interconnections between pragmatist thought and organization studies which is left underexplored. Leaving aside the American context (see Adler et al., 2007), there is a history of the reception of Mead and symbolic interactionism in Britain that requires detailed attention (e.g. Silverman, 1970). Equally, a pragmatist-inspired organization studies would, as I see it, give more attention to the experience and history of movements of organizational democracy than is given in this volume. To take but one example, the transformative conception of power elaborated by Hofting and Lindholt bears a striking resemblance to ideas associated with both socialist feminists in the 1970s (Rowbotham et al., 1979) and contemporary social movements. There is, nonetheless, much to recommend this new collection.