ABSTRACT

Economics, psychology, and sociology are commonly regarded as the mother disciplines of management; philosophy is often perceived as a recondite subject remotely related to management. This chapter briefly compares some major philosophical perspectives that have been discussed by management researchers: positivism, postmodernism, critical realism, and pragmatism. Critical realism distinguishes between transitive objects of knowledge and intransitive objects of knowledge. Taking into account the insights of both positivism and postmodernism, critical realism helps US steer a course between the Scylla of crude empiricism and the Charybdis of relativism. Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that began in the US around the 1870s. Pragmatism accepts the importance of such processes as researcher interpretation, discursive framing, and social construction without denying that there is a reality which exists independently of the way it is observed or interpreted. Nevertheless, pragmatism stresses the influence of the inner world of human experience in affecting action.