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Since the 1950s, the unifying epistemological perspective in American public administration has been logical positivism, most notably as defined and promoted by Herbert Simon. In recent years, logical positivism has been under attack for limiting inappropriately the scope of inquiry within the field, forcing it to ignore important, value‐laden issues critical to government and the public sector. The willingness to address value‐laden issues was at the core of what was to become the field of public administration in the early twentieth‐century. This article examines the philosophical roots of logical positivist movement, its dramatic effects upon public administration, and the subsequent counter attacks on the movement. The article concludes that although logical positivism’s attack on public administration initially weakened the field, as a result practitioners and scholars were eventually to demand increased rigor and higher standards of inquiry for research in the field.

Beginning in the late 1940s, classical Public Administration was challenged by the works of Herbert Simon and the movement he started, logical positivism. Although only writing in the field for a few years, Simon shifted the locus and focus of the field so dramatically, for a time it almost disappeared from view. This article examines Simonʼns legacy, first by exploring its philosophical antecedents and its later epistemological progeny. The article concludes with an assessment of how the field of Public Administration responded to Simonʼns challenge in the late twentieth century and now, early in the twenty first century.

This paper addresses the theory of legal pragmatism from the vantage of evolutionary metaphor. Legal pragmatism tends to incorporate a progress narrative with similarities to both evolutionary biology and classical economics, in which social developments are thought to be determined by competition among techniques and ideas. The difficulty with such competitive views of social change is that they obscure the extent to which successful solutions of the past – now the status quo – may be less adept at meeting new and future problems. Drawing on the evolutionary and economic variant theory of path dependence, it is argued that an assumption that the best, most efficient technique always wins out unduly sanctifies the present and inhibits awareness of unmet challenges. Ultimately, the encouragement of social change and advancement would be more securely located in the legal promotion of individual attempts at originality, rather than an assumption that competition is constantly moving toward perfection.

Spaciousness is defined as “the feeling of openness or room to wander” that has been affected by various physical factors. The purpose of this paper is to assess the spaciousness of space to determine how spacious the space is. Furthermore, the study intends to propose a fuzzy-based model to assess the degree of spaciousness in terms of physical parameters such as area, proportion, the ratio of window area to floor area and color value.

Fuzzy logic is the most appropriate mathematical model to assess uncertainty using nonhomogeneous variables. In contrast to conventional methods, fuzzy logic depends on partial truth theory. MATLAB Fuzzy Logic Toolbox was used as a computational model including a fuzzy inference system (FIS) using linguistic variables called membership functions to define parameters. As a result, fuzzy logic was used in this study to assess the spaciousness degree of design studios in universities in the Iraqi Kurdistan region.

The findings of the presented fuzzy model show the degree to which the input variables affect a space perceived as larger and more spacious. The relationship between parameters has been represented in three-dimensional surface diagrams. The positive relationship of spaciousness with the area, window-to-floor area ratio and color value has been determined. In contrast, the negative relationship between spaciousness and space proportion is described. Moreover, the three-dimensional surface diagram illustrates how the changes in the input values affect the spaciousness degree. Besides, the improvement in the spaciousness degree of the design studio increases the quality learning environment.

This study attempted to assess the degree of spaciousness in design studios. There has been no attempt carried out to combine educational space learning environments and computational methods. This study focused on the assessment of spaciousness using the MATLAB Fuzzy Logic toolbox that has not been integrated so far.

The purpose of this paper is to present pragmatism as a useful way for supervisors to help their research students become effective research writers.

I first provide a brief overview of pragmatism, paying special attention to key figures such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Second, I suggest ways in which pragmatist supervisors might help research students improve as research writers by focusing on a set of issues including developing an andragogical relationship, adopting a pragmatist approach to ethics and discussing writing styles.

Pragmatism is not offered as an approach which must necessarily be adopted by supervisors but, rather, as a useful set of resources for them to use as they try to help doctoral students develop as thesis/research writers.

Pragmatism is rarely, if ever, discussed as a potentially fruitful and valuable way of helping students develop as doctoral writers.

Based on the literature on organizational legitimacy, organizations must adhere to the value-driven standards inherent in the cultures in which they operate. Organizations’ Web sites help increase the public’s awareness and understanding of their values and culture. The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic legitimation efforts of Chinese organizations through their Web content.

To identify the core values and cultures communicated by Chinese organizations, a systematic content analysis was conducted on the Web contents of Chinese Fortune 500 companies (n=500) as listed by the 2010 Chinese Fortune 500 online magazine.

The major findings included the following: over half (i.e. 62.2 percent) of the Chinese Fortune 500 companies communicated their organizational values on their Web sites; this study identified some key value clusters (e.g. such as trustworthiness, propriety, benevolence, or self-regulation) for Chinese organizations’ legitimacy; Confucianism exerted a strong influence on these Chinese organizations’ values; and Chinese organizations relied on cooperation and coordination to achieve harmonic relationships with others.

The current study only focussed on the most profitable and successful Chinese organizations. Future studies could extend this analysis to examine differences between the values communicated by privately owned and non-profit organizations in China. Since the current study adopted a strategic organizational legitimacy framework, future research should use an institutional legitimacy framework by actively assessing the relational networks of Chinese consumers to identify the societal standards that make up organizational legitimacy from the consumer perspective. Focus groups or in-depth interviews with various consumers and employees would help identify these expectations and their corresponding values and provide an in-depth examination of how these standards are created.

This study suggested two key implications. First, Chinese organizations believe that the values (e.g. harmony, truth-seeking, or unity) held by employees have formed the foundation of organizational behavior or image. Second, individual and cultural values have guiding roles in the standards that constituents establish for organizations. Global communication practitioners must counsel managers conducting business with Chinese organizations to recognize the cultural influence on how Chinese companies conduct business.

This study represents a pioneering study in a series of studies focussed on conceptualizing organizational legitimacy in Chinese cultures.

This article aims to explain the role of philosophical anchors and research paradigms in business research, and how they can be extrapolated in the transformative era of automation, digitalization, hyperconnectivity, obligations, globalization and sustainability (ADHOGS) in the midst of disruption, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (DVUCA).

This article entails a general review based on the 3Es of exposure, expertise and experience, delving into the ontological, epistemological, methodological, axiological and rhetorical aspects of the major research paradigms—i.e. positivism, post-positivism, constructivism, interpretivism and pragmatism—and their interplay with the emergent trends shaping business research.

This article underscores the multifaceted nature of business research in the modern day, with an increasing need for blending, or shifting between, research paradigms to address the complex issues arising from automation, digitalization, hyperconnectivity, obligations, globalization and sustainability (ADHOGS). This article also highlights the nuanced interplay between research paradigms and theoretical perspectives, demonstrating the rich, diverse potential of business research inquiries.

While this article provides a broad overview of the interplay between research paradigms and emerging trends, future research could explore each of these interplays in greater detail, conducting empirical studies or utilizing specific case studies.

Researchers and practitioners should be open to adopting, combining or switching between different paradigms according to the demands of their research questions, context and trends shaping the business landscape, thereby underscoring the need for methodological flexibility and reflexivity in business research.

The shift toward embracing digital transformations and integrating sustainability in business research holds significant implications, driving socially responsible and sustainable business practices at the micro-level, and by extension, industrial revolution and sustainable development at the macro-level.

This article offers a holistic and contextualized view of the philosophy of science and research paradigms for business research, bridging the gap between philosophical foundations and contemporary research trends.

This paper develops and provides insights on how researchers can use ANTi-History with a focus on one of its constitutive facets, relationalism. The purpose of this paper is to, first, develop a central facet of ANTi-History called relationalism and to outline how researchers interested in doing organizational history can use ANTi-History insights to undertake relational histories.

The authors propose four phases of the historic turn literature and situate ANTi-History and relationalism as an outcome of the fourth phase. The facet of relationalism is then explained and explored through five types of relations that the authors suggest act as sites of oscillation, where the past becomes (an immutable) history.

A central implication of the paper involves disrupting conceptualizations of the past and history as fixed. Instead, history is explained as a relational outcome of its constitutive social and political relationships.

The paper theoretically develops ANTi-History and relationalism while providing practical implications and tools for researchers to use it. Researchers are introduced to the notion of the site of oscillation. They are encouraged to focus their attention on five sites of oscillation: past-history, actor-network, human-nonhuman, researcher-traces of the past, and historical inscription-reading formation. These sites of oscillation are places where politics is at play and history is shaped or transformed.

A devastating racial logic remains at play in the moment of a “post-civil rights” Black presidency. Barack Obama's ascent has amplified a national mythology of racial progress in the US multiculturalist age. This mythology has fundamentally undermined both the credibility and critical traction of existing scholarly-activist languages of racism, antiracism, white supremacy, and institutionalized racial dominance. Thus, the discourse of national-racial vindication that animates Obama's ascendance can and must be radically opposed with creative historical narrations. These narrations must attempt to explain how and why systems of racial dominance and state-condoned, state-sanctioned racist violence remain central to the shaping of our present tense. The chapter approaches this problematic by examining how the historical social logics of racial chattel slavery cannot be historically compartmentalized and temporally isolated into a discrete “past,” because they are genocidal in their structuring and are thus central to the constitution of our existing social and cultural systems. The apparatus of the North American racial chattel institution must be theorized in its present tense articulations because its logics of power, domination, and violence have never really left us. The essay offers a schematic elaboration of this reconceptualization of racial genocide focusing on how the slavery's abolition in the latter-19th century provides the political, cultural, and legal basis for slavery's “reform” into the apparatuses of policing, criminalization, widespread and state-sanctioned antiblack bodily violence, and ultimately massive imprisonment. This examination allows for an elaboration of how slavery's genocidal social logics permeate the present tense social formation, particularly at the site of massive racial criminalization and imprisonment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore an approach to epistemology which allows a portion of library and information science (LIS) to coherently explain its social and intellectual contributions, and to overcome some of the problems of epistemology that LIS encounters.

Literature based conceptual analysis of the problems of epistemology in LIS and the productive approach of Deweyan Pragmatism.

LIS’ problems with epistemology come from a variety of sources: epistemology itself, the combining of librarianship with information science, and the search for a common grounding of the information professions, their tools and their institutions. No such theoretical foundation is possible, but Deweyan Pragmatism offers a sensible, practical explanation for the historical development and practices of librarianship.

Pragmatism has been deployed in portions of LIS, but the full implications and the “fit” of Dewey’s ideas for librarianship and its epistemology are productive explorations.