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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.”

A widely accepted belief holds that social economics is logically inconsistent with the pragmatic philosophy. This view has been very clearly and forcibly expressed by Mark A. Lutz at the Third World Congress for Social Economics. Lutz has summarised his conclusions in the following quotation:

This chapter contributes to the discourse of difference by problematizing the sameness/difference trope through the lens of the exceptional. It explores the nature of being exceptional with an expectation that its nature is contingent and variable. At the heart of understanding what constitutes exceptional is its implicit comparison with the average. While exceptional is defined to include both individuals who achieve in extraordinary ways and individuals with a physical or mental impairment, the two definitions are consonant in that both describe individuals who deviate from expected norms. Relying on the insights from pragmatism, this chapter considers community habits exceptional individuals must confront in forming their choices. In this way, it further adheres to the lessons from pragmatism for norm change. The strategies individuals use to alter the effects of being perceived as exceptional contribute to the overall discourse in equality and equal protection and potentially constitute the individual action that formulates change. It examines some approaches to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) derived from civil rights and from economic perspectives and the relevant matrix of choices available to the exceptional to understand the potential for productive change. With this foreground, it examines the choice of exceptional individuals to cover or convey matters of their identity. This chapter pays particular attention to these choices in seeking accommodations under the ADA. Ultimately, this study strives to participate in the conversation seeking to maximize human potential.

SI offers a distinctive theoretical language for practice: a vocabulary and a grammar for identifying the personal troubles and joys of group members and for locating these experiences in shared symbol systems and in associated social arrangements (Weigert, 1995). SI can provide the ideal base for social work and sociological helping work (Forte, 2004a, 2004b). It is a coherent organizing language that can guide practitioner thinking, acting, and feeling especially when professional action is blocked.

This paper aims to present an interpretive case study in education for sustainability (EfS) that applies VanWynsberghe and Herman’s (2015, 2016) adaptive education as pedagogy. Dewey’s theory of behaviour change is applied to educative experiences based on habit disruption and real-world learning, leading to creativity in the formation of new habits. The programme presented inverts dominant conceptions of knowledge to design innovative sustainability pedagogy. Instead knowledge resides alongside experience, cases, intuition, advice, experimentation and dialogue in the individual and collective effort to address daily sustainability challenges.

The paper reports on the outcomes of an interpretive case study (Merriam, 1998) of a higher education programme in sustainability pedagogy. It presents a series of reflections by instructors and participants in discussing the programme’s relationship with the core themes of habit, disruption, creative action and dialogue framed within the five features of adaptive education: stakeholders, real-world learning, off campus, transdisciplinarity and non-traditional rewards.

Through this examination, the authors found that adaptive education offered a pedagogy that simultaneously addressed the need for increased sustainability knowledge, whilst inverting its dominance. As a long-term project, the extent of the programme’s impact will be evident beyond the programme’s completion.

This interpretive case study is analysed through high-level conceptual and theoretical aspects of the pedagogy rather than the particularities of the case. By putting the centrality of knowledge into question, the authors are advocating for a more experimental role for higher education in its teaching and learning. These questions are broadly applicable.

There are research, learning and social benefits to this programme. Adaptive education builds capacity for future leaders and educators of sustainability.

The paper concludes with a discussion for further theorizing and research on adaptive education and EfS in higher education. This research will contribute to broader discussions of the evolving role of education in sustainability.

The purpose of this study is to profile market segments using travelers’ decision-making styles (DMS) as segmentation bases and to identify similarities and differences between traveler segments regarding a series of psychographic and attitudinal characteristics.

Data are gathered from a sample of 426 travelers in Dubai and Shanghai via self-reported surveys. Analyses included factor, k-means cluster, discriminant and MANOVA.

Study findings reveal significant differences among the rational, adaptive and daydreamer decision-makers’ segments in their behavioral and attitudinal characteristics with respect to tourism involvement and destination images.

Findings provide important practical implications for generating effective marketing and positioning strategies based on the identified attitudinal characteristics of the traveler segments for destination marketing organizations.

A stream of recent tourism studies shows a strong relationship between tourism involvement and destination images, yet very little research has tackled the issue of how these critical variables can be affected by individuals’ decision-making styles. This study explores and tests the relationships among DMS, tourism involvement and destination image using a factor-cluster approach.

In the past, critics have dismissed American Pragmatism as intellectually naïve and philosophically passé, but in this chapter we argue that it still has much to offer the field of organization studies. Pragmatism is especially relevant to those organizational scholars who are concerned with understanding the dynamic processes and practices of organizational life. This chapter lays out the historical development of Pragmatism, recognizing the originating contributions of Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead. Although each of these writers developed unique philosophical positions, their ideas are all permeated by four key themes: experience, inquiry, habit and transaction. The interplay between these themes informs a temporal view of social practice in which selves and situations are continuously constructed and reconstructed through experimental and reflexive processes of social engagement. We then use organizational learning theory as an example to illustrate the relevance of these four themes, contrasting the anti-dualistic stance of Pragmatism with the work of Argyris and Schön. Finally we turn to consider Weick's organizing and sensemaking, suggesting that Pragmatism offers three potential foci for further development of these theories, namely continuity of past and future in the present, the transactional nature of social agency and reflexivity in social practices. Similarly we see potential for Pragmatism to productively inform the theorizing of other organizational practices such as identity work, strategy work, emotion work and idea work.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. To clarify what is meant by “pragmatism” as a philosophy for social and environmental accountability (SEA) research, to survey its use within this research field and to explore how a further pursuit of pragmatism may extend this research field.

An extensive review of the SEA literature was conducted in order to determine what aspects of the philosophy of pragmatism have been used within the research. The authors organised the discussion of the literature around the pragmatist ideas of “truth” and “sensemaking”.

SEA research is a heterogeneous space in which various ideas are commonly attributed to the philosophical notion of pragmatism. However, there is a tension in the literature between seeing accounting as a medium for representing social and environmental organisational activities and a pragmatist view of accountings as a way of allowing managers and stakeholder to make sense of these same activities.

A clearer development of the ideas of pragmatism may be used to redirect the focus of SEA research in a number of useful ways. Seeing accounting as a medium of sensemaking between organisations and their stakeholders allows the authors to widen the exploration of accounting not only to the production of reports but also their interpretation by users. The ideas of pragmatism also allow the authors to explore the ways stakeholders might affect change within organisations and how accounting may support this process rather than capture or limit it.

This paper concludes by providing a set of methodological prescriptions for conducting future SEA research in a way that is inspired by pragmatism. It outlines an approach to research that focuses on users and their sensemaking and encourages an exploration of the possible ways accounting may create positive change in organisations.

Overall, this paper refines what it means to follow pragmatism within SEA research. It will promote a clearer understanding of how we, as a research community, may engage with practice in more positive ways in order to facilitate corporate social responsibility.

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.