A Pragmatist Perspective on Management Scholarship and on Stakeholder Engagement in Particular

Abstract

This chapter outlines key ideas of pragmatism and calls for management and organizational scholarship to look at business, which is rather practical in nature, from a pragmatist perspective. What this means is that research should be initiated, in the first place, with an intention to solve an important real-life problem, should be aimed to have some practical consequences for the reality, and these consequences should be intended to make people’s living better. In this chapter, we also look at the historical development of research in business schools and show how it moved away from key pragmatist ideas toward positivism and, as a result, lost its relevance to practicing managers. We argue that management research not only should, but also can be conducted from a pragmatist perspective. We highlight stakeholder theory as a relevant example of such research. We argue that by examining different aspects of stakeholder engagement based on actual business cases, the case studies covered in this book can potentially offer rich practical materials for management scholars to support their theoretical contributions.