The development of pragmatist thought (Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead) in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States deeply impacted political science, semiotics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, education, law. Later intellectual trends (analytical philosophy, structuralism, cognitivism) focusing on rational representations or archetypical models somehow sidelined Pragmatism for three decades. In the world of organizations, they often conveyed the Cartesian dream of rational control, which became the mainstream view in management and organization research. In response to the growing uncertainty and complexity of situations, social sciences have experienced a “pragmatist turn.” Many streams of organization research have criticized the view of organizations as information-processing structures, controlled through rational representations. They share some key theoretical principles: the processual view of organizing as “becoming”; the emphasis on the key role of action; the agential power of objects; the exploratory and inquiring nature of organizing. These are precisely the key theses of pragmatists, who formulated a radical critique of the dualisms which hinder organization studies (thought/action, decision/execution, reality/representation, individual/collective, micro/macro) and developed key concepts applicable to organization studies (inquiry, semiotic mediation, habit, abduction, trans-action, valuation). This book aims to make the pragmatist intellectual framework more accessible to organization and management scholars. It presents some fundamental pragmatist concepts, and their potential application to the study of organizations, drawing conclusions concerning managerial practices, in particular the critique of the Taylorian tradition and the promotion of continuous improvement. To enhance accessibility, each theme is illustrated by real cases experienced by the author.

This paper explores the methodological implications of non-representational approaches to organizational complexity. Representational theories focus on the syntactic complexity of systems, whereas organizing processes are predominantly characterized by semantic and pragmatic forms of complexity. After underlining the contribution of non-representational approaches to the study of organizations, the paper warns against the risk of confining the critique of representational frameworks to paradoxical dichotomies such as intuition versus reflexive thought, or theorizing versus experimenting. To counter this difficulty, we suggest the use of a triadic theory of interpretation, and more particularly the concepts of semiotic mediation, inquiry and dialogism. Semiotic mediation dynamically links situated experience and generic classes of meanings. Inquiry articulates logical thinking, narrative thinking and experimenting. Dialogism conceptualizes the production of meaning through the situated interactions of actors. A methodological approach based on these concepts, the ‘dialogical mediated inquiry’ (DMI), is proposed and tested with a case study about work safety in the construction industry. This interpretive view requires the researcher to complicate the inquiry process rather than the mirroring models of reality. In DMI, the inquiry process is complicated by establishing pluralist communities of inquiry in which different perspectives challenge each other. The paper ends with a discussion of the specific contribution of this approach compared with other qualitative methods, and its present limitations.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report the outcome of an interdisciplinary discussion on the concepts of profit and profitability and various ways in which we could potentially problematize these concepts. It is our hope that a much greater attention or reconsideration of the problematization of profit and related accounting numbers will be fostered in part by the exchanges we include here.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts an interdisciplinary discussion approach and brings into conversation ideas and views of several scholars on problematizing profit and profitability in various contexts and explores potential implications of such problematization.FindingsProfit and profitability measures make invisible the collective endeavour of people who work hard (backstage) to achieve a desired profit level for a division and/or an organization. Profit tends to preclude the social process of debate around contradictions among the ends and means of collective activity. An inherent message that we can discern from our contributors is the typical failure of managers to appreciate the value of critical theory and interpretive research for them. Practitioners and positivist researchers seem to be so influenced by neo-liberal economic ideas that organizations are distrusted and at times reviled in their attachment to profit.Research limitations/implicationsProblematizing opens-up the potential for interesting and significant theoretical insights. A much greater pragmatic and theoretical reconsideration of profit and profitability will be fostered by the exchanges we include here.Originality/valueIn setting out a future research agenda, this paper fosters theoretical and methodological pluralism in the research community focussing on problematizing profit and profitability in various settings. The discussion perspectives offered in this paper provides not only a basis for further research in this critical area of discourse and regulation on the role and status of profit and profitability but also emancipatory potential for practitioners (to be reflective of their practices and their undesired consequences of such practices) whose overarching focus is on these accounting numbers.

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