Pragmatism and Organization Studies

Philippe Lorino is Distinguished Professor of Management Control and Organization Theory at ESSEC Business School (Paris) and an adviser to the French Nuclear Safety Authority. He has previously served as a senior civil servant in the French Government, in charge of industrial policies, and as a director in the finance department of an international computer company, in charge of designing new cost and performance management systems. He draws from pragmatist authors (philosophy, semiotics and social science) to study organizations as continuous processes of organizing, more precisely collective inquiries aimed at understanding and transforming collective activity, mediated by management techniques and tools.

• 1: Historical Perspective: The Pragmatist Adventure, from Anti-Cartesianism to Anti-Taylorism 2: Semiotic Mediation at the Heart of Organizing: Questioning the Representation/Reality Dichotomy 3: Habits: The Actional View of Organizations 4: Inquiry: The Process of Thinking, Acting, and Mediating 5: Transaction: Beyond the Individual /Collective Dualism, the Dialogical Approach to Sociality 6: Community of Inquiry: Transactional Inquiry and Common Concern 7: Abduction 8: Value and Valuation 9: Pragmatism, a Process Perspective on Organizations 10: The Pragmatist Influence on Managerial Ideas and Practices: The Strange History of Lean Management Conclusion: A Summer Morning in Montevideo - A Few Lines of Temporary, Exploratory, and Practical Conclusion