Title: 'COPE'ing with institutional pressures: a reintroduction of pragmatism to the study of organisations

Authors: Thomas G. Pittz; David M. Boje; Melissa L. Intindola; Stephanie Nicholson

Addresses: Sykes College of Business, University of Tampa, USA ' New Mexico State University, USA ' Western Michigan University, USA ' Food-Fit, Inc., USA

Abstract: Recent organisational scholarship has begun to rekindle an interest in the study of pragmatism and our goal in this manuscript is to demonstrate that pragmatist thought has important implications for organisational studies that have been overlooked due to contention over nuances of the theory. As such, we propose a synthesis of pragmatism through the COPE typology (Boje, 2014) that represents our view of the four main tenants of pragmatism: critical, ontological, positivistic and epistemic. Further, we utilise COPE by applying it to the question of organisational heterogeneity within institutional theory. In doing so, this manuscript makes important contributions to the study of pragmatism and institutional theory while providing new insights to predict how internal organisational processes are developed and how organisations respond to environmental pressures.

Keywords: pragmatism; institutional theory; strategic decision making; organisational change.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMCP.2017.084040

International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, 2017 Vol.10 No.2, pp.113 - 129

Received: 03 Nov 2015
Accepted: 28 Oct 2016
Published online: 08 May 2017 *

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