Pragmatic is an adjective used to describe someone who thinks and acts realistically. Someone who is pragmatic doesn’t expect a unicorn for her birthday, and instead takes the time to find a real solution that works. Pragmatism is also a philosophy centered around practical applications of ideas.
A more recent incarnation of pragmatism is pragmatics, the study of language use and meaning construction. Pragmatics focuses on the meaning potential of an utterance, and how a speaker’s intentions and context shape how others interpret that utterance.
Whether we are looking at the linguistics of an utterance or the social implications of a political decision, pragmatics considers the consequences and effects of action. It also examines the ways in which people try to make sense of a situation, and how those aims may change over time.
It is a flexible philosophical approach, and so is often seen as a useful philosophy for business. It can be applied in the areas of organizational leadership and ethics, where it can help us to understand how our decisions might have unintended consequences. It can also be applied to a wide range of business practices, such as market research, design and innovation.
The pragmatists of the twentieth century looked at different ways that humans interpret their world, and tried to uncover the truth of what was happening in it. They argued that the process of interpretation – what we believe and know, what we do, how we reflect on those actions, and how our understanding changes over time – could reveal a much clearer picture of the human condition than philosophical approaches that assumed human behaviour existed outside of that interpretation (Dewey 2008).
Many liberatory philosophical projects – such as feminism, ecology, Native American philosophy and Latin American philosophy – look to pragmatism for their home. In methodological terms, pragmatism provides a useful bridge between qualitative and quantitative research by encouraging researchers to base their choice of methods on how well they can carry them from the practice domain to the theory domain and back again (Kelemen and Rumens 2012).
When we apply the principles of pragmatism in our work, we can be more flexible about the way that we do our work, and more open to new ways of thinking and doing things. This is especially important when working in the field of mixed methods research, where we are likely to encounter situations in which our initial assumptions might have to be revised. As we move forward, we will see more and more research teams applying a pragmatic lens to their work, and this will be a good thing for our profession. In doing so, we will be helping to build a more inclusive, more diverse and dynamic research community. We should be proud of this. And, let’s hope that we can all learn to do a little more of our own pragmatic research in the future. This will be the best way for us to make a difference in the world.