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Organization Studies and the New Pragmatism: Positivism, Anti-positivism, and the Search for Ethics

University of Washington, Graduate School of Business Administration, Seattle, Washington 98195
The Darden School, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia

The central claim of this paper is that organization studies needs to be fundamentally reshaped. Such change is needed to provide room for ethics and to increase the relevance of research. We argue that the new pragmatism provides critical resources for this change. Pragmatism is a particularly helpful tool to use in that it highlights the moral dimensions of organizing (is this useful for our purposes?) while at the same time avoiding entrenched epistemological distinctions that marginalize ethics and make research less useful.

The paper begins by discussing the relative absence of ethics within the mainstream of organization studies, indicates why this relative absence is problematic, and proceeds to show how pragmatism offers a preferable approach. Epistemology—specifically the debate between positivists and anti-positivists—becomes a central issue because the framework of positivism is overtly hostile to ethics (and other nonquantitative approaches to studying organizations), rendering it a marginal subject. While anti-positivism holds promise for overcoming this hostility towards ethics, it retains some of the destructive elements of positivism that create new and equally troubling difficulties. The paper claims, in contrast to the proposals of others (e.g., Zald's 1993 position) that the preferred alternative is not to split the difference, but to move beyond the positivism vs. antipositivism debate and work from an alternative framework. Pragmatism allows researchers to put this debate to the side and, in the process, develop research that is focused on serving human purposes—i.e., both morally rich and useful to organizations and the communities in which they operate.

Key Words: Pragmatism; Ethics; Epistemology

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