Routledge Advances in Management and Business Studies
1 total work
American Pragmatism in Organization and Management
by Nick Rumens and Mihaela Kelemen
Emerging during the late nineteenth century in the scholarly writings of US commentators such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, American pragmatism shaped many intellectual currents within a range of disciplines including politics, education, administrative science, and religion. Despite attracting attention and critical acclaim for practical consequences for improving the human condition, American pragmatism struggled to maintain its influence beyond the first three decades of the twentieth century. While scholarly interest in American pragmatism has steadily grown since its revival during the 1970s, it is only relatively recently that organization studies scholars have drawn upon American pragmatist philosophy for shedding new light on aspects of contemporary organizational life.
This book is one of the first to provide a comprehensive account of how strands of American pragmatist philosophy can enrich our understanding of organizations and the lives of the people who inhabit them. By introducing the reader to the origins of the American pragmatism movement, its key themes and leading figures, this book explores American pragmatism's potential for advancing organizational research and knowledge within areas such as gender, leadership, ambiguity in management practice, and management learning. Assessing the separate contributions of Peirce, James and Dewey, this book argues that organization studies scholars stand to gain much from embracing a pragmatist concept of science as a social practice accountable to those whose lives it aims to improve. This raises important ethical and methodological concerns about researching organizations which are also addressed in this book. Relevant at a time when managerialist perspectives, practices, and ideas are colonizing many areas of organizational life, this book provides a timely and scholarly account of the contemporary vitality of American pragmatism for organization studies researchers.