Josh Whitford (Columbia University, New York)

“Pragmatism, practice, and the boundaries of organization”

Abstract

The article uses a longitudinal qualitative analysis of key transitions in the relationship between Fiat Auto and a major supplier to challenge conventional approaches to the study of activities at the boundary between organizations. It shows, in particular, that scholars focused on the importance of “modular” product designs, on the spread of “learning by monitoring,” or that documents the role that social embedding plays in inter-organizational relationships have cast the debate as a sort of “horse race” between contending theoretical perspectives. This has led them to depict agents, to the extent they depicts them at all, in mechanistic terms and, as a result, to obscure important contextual variation in patterns of organizational behavior. The article therefore proposes an alternative approach that incorporates a Deweyan pragmatist model of human action into  contemporary practice theory (i.e. into the “practice turn in organizational sociology). The result — a “pragmatist and practice” approach to organizational analysis — allows us to demonstrate that it is mistaken to presume that any of the contending theories might be right in general and that some form of “methodological situationalism” is needed. And it enables us to show how scholarship investigating the shifting boundaries of organization can better understand when and how the artifacts, techniques and relations at the center of much contemporary theorizing are invoked — and thus have causal force — in organizational practice.