ABSTRACT
It would take several volumes to tell this history. Here, we give a brief history of pragmatic ethics, beginning with American pragmatism, followed by European pragmatism, and ending with a summary of pragmatist ethics. In this brief history, I seek to highlight how American and European pragmatisms shone brilliantly as a revolutionary counterpoint to logical positivism until they were overrun by logical positivism in the 1950s and then overrun again and again as the postmodernist turn eclipsed pragmatism in the 1960s, followed by the linguistic turn in the 1970s and, soon after, the discourse turn. However, with the work of Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Cornell West, Richard Bernstein, and many others, pragmatism has made a dramatic comeback. Since organization studies followed these same turns, we are now experiencing new institutional theory and qualitative methods of storytelling, including the rebirth of pragmatism. What this chapter contributes to storytelling in organizations is pragmatic ethics alternatives to instrumentalist ethics (“whatever works”).
