Pragmatic is an ethical, humanistic approach to life that embraces truth, justice and equality. It believes that the best way to learn is through experience, and that it’s better to question everything than to accept everything blindly. It also emphasizes that people should be taught to think for themselves and make their own decisions, so that they’re not influenced by the opinions of others. This helps them become more confident in their own beliefs and allows them to form a more independent mindset. Pragmatism is an essential part of democracy, as it teaches individuals to trust their own opinion and avoid conforming to the beliefs of other people.
Pragmatism is a philosophy of inquiry that steers clear of metaphysical debates over the nature of truth and reality and instead seeks to understand social realities through a process of dialectic interpretation. It incorporates elements of phenomenology, hermeneutics and interpretivist theory to produce a broad and multifaceted understanding of the nature of knowledge. This pragmatist perspective is a suitable framework for qualitative research on NGO processes as it seeks to avoid reducing organizational phenomena to a single aspect and recognizes the interconnection of experiences, knowing and acting (Biesta 2010; Morgan 2014a).
One major framework within pragmatics is relevance theory, which is based on Grice’s ideas about implicature. This explains that all utterances contain enough relevant information to make it worth the addressee’s effort to process them. It also demonstrates that different languages have their own specific rules for resolving ambiguity and reference.
Another key concept in pragmatics is the notion of context, which is a crucial factor in determining meaning. In this context, the ‘utterance-bound content’ refers to conventional meanings, while the’referential content’ refers to factors that resolve ambiguity and reference (Korta and Perry 2008; Morgan 2013).
As a result of its emphasis on practice, pragmatism has been used as a lens for researching organizational dynamics in NGO settings. The pragmatist approach is suitable for navigating qualitative applied social research on NGO processes as it provides a framework that allows researchers to surface complex themes and issues hidden in formal documentation and rhetoric (Elkjaer and Simpson 2011; Lorino 2018).
In order to apply a pragmatist methodology, the researcher must consider the consequences of their choices. This means that they need to have a justified belief in the likely consequences of their choice of methodology and the information they collect (Morgan 2014a). This will allow them to identify which theories, data collection techniques and information will lead to the most practical outcomes. In other words, the pragmatist research approach ensures that the researcher’s actions have a positive impact on the real-world issues they are investigating. Taking this into account will help the researcher produce meaningful and actionable insights from their research. This is particularly important when researching in challenging and unpredictable contexts, such as NGO environments.
