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This chapter examines how people weigh and discuss opportunities for collective action to improve community health. Drawing from research on civic and social movement engagement, it focuses specifically on how cultural logics of pragmatism, activism, and cynicism are invoked in such debates.

Qualitative data come from four focus group discussions of strategies for reducing tobacco use in Atlanta’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities. Participants included 36 self-identified community members.

Pragmatic logics were used most often in evaluating the tobacco control strategies, with activist logics second and cynicism a distant third. This echoes prior research, but our participants used these logics in unexpected ways: they combined pragmatism and activism, downplaying the former’s emphasis on individual self-interest and the latter’s emphasis on contentious confrontation. In addition, use of the logics varied by focus group and strategy, but not with individual speaker’s identities.

Though limited by a narrow demographic focus and small convenience sample, our study suggests that public support for community health initiatives will likely depend on how they are framed and on the interactional dynamics and shared identities of the groups they are presented to.

Logics of pragmatism, activism, and cynicism inform debate over community health initiatives, as with other forms of civic action. However, use of these logics is not uniform but varies with the groups and issues at hand. Our study participants’ mutual LGBT identification gave them a sense of shared community and a familiarity with the politicization of personal life that led them to combine pragmatist and activist logics in novel ways.

A reinvigorated social theory based on the social philosophy of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, William James, and others has begun to make significant contributions to the study of human societies. The so-called “Pragmatic Turn” in philosophy and social theory, associated especially with Richard Rorty and Hans Joas, has drawn our attention to the role of habit and creativity in social action. This chapter reviews some of these trends, but argues that the modern revival of neopragmatism sidesteps many of the core insights of the classical pragmatists. Relating the issue to Michael Burawoy's call for “public sociology,” and drawing on the pragmatism of C. Wright Mills, a critical public pragmatism would seek to provide the preconditions for democracy via the cultivation of a public that valued what Dewey called “creative intelligence,” and what Mills called “the sociological imagination.”

This study aims to understand the construction process of an organizational identity in a hybrid organization.

The author developed a single case study based on in-depth interviews, non-participant observations and document analysis in a credit cooperative.

After periods of changes in organizational identity (from idealism to pragmatism), the formation of a paradoxical organizational identity was observed in which the core value became a central polarity between idealism and pragmatism; after periods when members engaged in actions that promoted resistance or change, they framed past events in a story of stable dynamics between idealism and pragmatism; and pro-distinctiveness and -similarity forces in relation to other organizations were reconciled in a quest for optimal distinctiveness that simultaneously enabled the development of uniqueness and adequacy.

This is the first study to adopt a paradox perspective to analyze the identity of a cooperative.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.

Post-Enlightenment liberalism faces a paradox: The liberal principle of legitimacy demands states justify their constitutional order in terms citizens can accept, but there is no uncontroversial comprehensive conception of justice on which to form the requisite consensus. Rawls resolves the paradox by embracing a pragmatism that abandons the concept of truth in the political forum to secure consensus and legitimacy. Philosophers have challenged the idea of justice without truth as incoherent, and social critics have attacked it as naïve. This chapter defends Rawls’s pragmatism against such critics and argues that the future of liberal constitutionalism may depend on its success.

This chapter presents selected elements of Richard Rorty's philosophy, with special emphasis on his role in re-introducing women to philosophy. It pleads for a greater attention to new pragmatist thinking in organization theory.

Professor Dewey's pragmatism always strikes me as fundamentally ambiguous, oscillating between a conception of knowledge as “technique,” essentially a biological function, and some vague mystical conception of it in terms of “shared life” or “shared experience.”(Knight, 1936, p. 230)

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.

Over the past few decades, several theories and models have evolved to guide health education practice. Some of these models are participatory and democratic; nevertheless, much health education practice is based on achieving goals established by “health authorities,” which are called here the didactic model. The purpose of this paper is to consider that model and contrast it with a Deweyan model, based on the pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey.

First provides a historical perspective on the didactic and Deweyan models stressing their implications for health education. The didactic approach is contrasted with a dialectical approach implied by the Deweyan model. Then briefly discusses pragmatism and cognition noting the importance of emotions in the learning process and consider the implications of various philosophical perspectives for understanding human behavior. The final two sections discuss the goals of health education and the role of the health educator based on the essentials of pragmatism—in which health education is value‐laden and lifestyle specific

Concludes by advocating for a greater emphasis on a Deweyan philosophy in public health education practice and research.

Over the past several decades, theoretical frameworks for health education have evolved and a wide variety of educational, social‐psychological and program planning frameworks have been proposed and utilized to guide practice, but none specifically follow the philosophy of John Dewey. This paper is original in that it outlines the Deweyan philosophy and relates it to health education. If that philosophy were to guide health education practice and research, it would improve our service to the community as well as our understanding about why people make the choices they do.

Knowledge management continues to evolve as a discipline, yet even basic features that define a discipline have to be established. Developing a shared understanding of core concepts, such as the meaning of “knowledge”, has been elusive in this field. In the absence of reaching a universal definition, surrogates for knowledge are adopted because of their expediency or apparent face validity. To date, most knowledge management approaches err on the extremes of being seemingly practical or, on the other hand, being theoretically appealing, but few of these approaches are genuinely pragmatic. At one end, there are mechanistic, information‐based approaches that are actionable, but are often based on flawed philosophical grounds in that they fail to connect beliefs with action through knowledge. At the other extreme are approaches that are philosophically meritorious, but which are viewed by practitioners as being impractical because they are too fuzzy and their methods too unstructured. This paper proposes an approach to knowledge management that is based on firm philosophical grounding, but is also anchored to action via the tenets of pragmatism. This new framework for practicing knowledge management is based on the foundational premises of philosophical pragmatism established by America's greatest philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, over a century ago. Pragmatic knowledge aligns beliefs about the potential for effective action with the lessons of past experience. This paper will outline the conceptual underpinnings of such a pragmatic approach to managing knowledge.