Pragmatics is the study of how people use language to communicate. It looks beyond the literal meaning of utterances and examines the socially constructed nature of communication, focusing on implicit and contextual meanings. It considers how we manage reference, read between the lines and negotiate turn-taking in conversation, for example. It also studies the way we re-contextualise our experiences and the meanings we derive from them, for example, when you tell someone you ‘saw a picture of him on the wall’ but actually mean you saw an image of the person in question.
In short, pragmatism is the theory of how we make sense of our world – and it’s a very important theory for service researchers because it addresses the fundamental question of why people don’t always say what they mean.
The pragmatist perspective originated with a group of Harvard-educated men who met for informal discussions about metaphysics in the 1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among these were proto-positivist Chauncey Wright (1830-1875) and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1835-1915).
These thinkers were influenced by the writings of the French philosopher, Émile Durkheim (1853-1917), who believed that human behaviour is determined by our genes and upbringing. His idea of ‘social facts’ challenged the traditional ideas about human nature and motivation that were popular at the time.
What’s more, pragmatism was seen as a useful approach to philosophy because it avoided metaphysical debates about the nature of truth and reality, focusing instead on understanding how knowledge is produced and applied in real-world contexts. This is why it has long been a popular research paradigm in the fields of sociology, psychology, and management, for example.
This epistemological stance allows pragmatic research to steer clear of naive, subjective interpretations of data, and focus on developing practical understandings of concrete issues in the field (Patton, 2005: 153). It can be combined with qualitative-dominant interpretivist understandings of socially constructed reality, but with an emphasis on interrogating the value of knowledge and its practical consequences.
Using two examples of service research from our doctoral studies, this article explores how the three key principles of pragmatism can support a meaningful approach to researching NGO practices in practice. In particular, it highlights how pragmatism can assist with navigating qualitative applied social research on NGO processes by grounding analytical approaches in the interconnectedness of experiencing, knowing and acting.
Pragmatism’s epistemological stance is particularly useful in NGO research because it supports the development of robust empirical models and assumptions based on observed experience. This can help overcome the pitfalls of qualitative research, which is prone to subjectivity and biases. It can also be used to identify complex themes and issues that may be obscured in formal documentation or rhetoric. This process is known as ‘triangulation’ and is a central feature of pragmatism’s methodology. This is an iterative and adaptive process of observing, collecting and interpreting data to develop meaningful propositions that can be tested in practice. In addition, it enables the development of a heuristic for identifying and navigating complex service market dynamics.