Pragmatics is a study of language use that focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions, how these relate to the context of their utterance and the strategies they employ to determine what those intentions are. It is concerned with the notion of meaning as a socially shared practice and its contextual and situational determination, rather than with conventional concepts of semantics (which deal with the signification conventionally or literally attached to words) or with grammar (which deals with the structure of sentences). It includes various pragmatic theories such as speech act theory, conversational implicature and the theory of metaphor, among others.
A growing third alternative to analytic philosophy and Continental approaches, pragmatism was first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and his Harvard colleague William James (1842-1910), who also developed a philosophic approach to ethics. Their work reflects an emerging concern with human experience, arguing that people interpret their beliefs and actions and that this process could be more fruitful than philosophical models that assumed behaviour and action existed independent of interpretation.
As a research methodology, pragmatism offers a powerful framework to investigate the complexities of organizational processes that are not easily decribed in terms of ‘what is’ or ‘what should be’. In particular, pragmatism has a strong emphasis on the need to engage with research participants in a meaningful way. This requires a close engagement with a range of methods to capture the diverse ways in which individual experiences of organizational change are constructed and understood.
It is this methodological commitment that makes pragmatism an excellent paradigm for researching organizational change. The research process is flexible and responsive to the needs of different participants and stakeholders. The resulting insights are richer than those that are based on an exclusively theoretical construct.
While pragmatism offers a promising research perspective, it is not without challenges. One challenge is that experimental studies of pragmatic phenomena often yield conflicting results. In some cases, this is due to methodological differences between investigators. In other cases, it is a result of the inherent uncertainty of experimental design and data collection. As this uncertainty is increasingly recognized as a major problem within psychology, calls are being made for more stringent replication policies and the development of statistical tools to address the issue.
Another challenge is that pragmatism does not lend itself well to a straightforward empirical approach to language analysis. The pragmatist view holds that all utterances have a’referential content’ and a ‘locutionary content’. The former is determined by the conventional meanings of words and the context in which they are used, while the latter is determined by the ‘pragmatically-determined’ truth conditions of the utterance, including factors that resolve ambiguity and reference.
These issues are exacerbated by the fact that participants in experiments on pragmatics have explicit and implicit goals in mind, which influence how they interpret utterances. For example, studies have shown that a person’s understanding of irony is influenced by their prior knowledge about how people usually respond to linguistic irony, even before they hear the utterance in question.
