Pragmatic is a word that describes people who are practical, matter-of-fact, rational, sensible, and no-nonsense. These people are concerned with what works instead of what could or should be. They are the people who make things happen rather than the ones who sit around and think about what might happen. Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that originated in the United States during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, although it has also significantly influenced non-philosophers—notably those involved in law, education, politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism. The pragmatic philosophy is opposed to idealism, a belief that the world is governed by the highest possible principles and ideals.
The classical pragmatists, who were influenced by Dewey, understood knowledge as something that arises from and is shaped by human action. They saw human experience as dialectical and argued that the act of interpreting knowledge and beliefs in the course of doing things leads to new ways of understanding actions and generating more knowledge. They thus understood knowledge as something that emerges in the process of doing and learning, rather than as something pre-determined by a priori propositions.
This approach was an advance from other philosophical approaches that viewed human behaviour and the generation of knowledge as largely the product of genetically determined, invariable forces, like evolution or chemistry. Pragmatism was also an advance in research methodology as it enabled researchers to be more flexible in how they approached the study of complex, dynamic processes in organisations. This led to the development of qualitative methodologies based on the pragmatic approach that are still used today.
One of the key tenets of pragmatism is that an idea or theory only has validity if it produces results that are acceptable to the people using it. This makes it a good framework for testing the limits of what we know and the extent to which we can predict outcomes. It also makes it a useful framework for making decisions about which research methods to use in studying complex, dynamic processes such as organisational change and performance measurement and evaluation.
However, a pragmatic framework can also be flawed by focusing too much on the notion of what is acceptable or not. This is particularly true when applied to issues of ethics and morality, where the pragmatism collapses into relativism.
Despite its flaws, there are many reasons why pragmatism remains a worthy and useful paradigm for studying organisational processes. The discussion of the three methodological principles of pragmatism that underpin the project examples below reveals some of these reasons.