PPI Seminar: Exploring a pragmatist perspective on P&P research

Exploring a pragmatist perspective on practice and process research: Inquiring into organizational designing

Abstract: In this presentation, I share my ongoing experience with exploring a pragmatist perspective on practice and process research. Within the context of my PhD research, I explore organization design as a pragmatist inquiry process (Dewey, 1938; Lorino, 2018). For this, I collaborated with a leading service design agency, that is moving into organization design, and explore the process of how their practice changes. For my research approach, I build on the earlier work by myself and Philippe Lorino (Wegener & Lorino, 2021) in which we proposed "pragmatist withness inquiry," a methodology for combining pragmatism and "process as withness" (Fachin and Langley, 2018; Shotter, 2006). Building on Shotter’s work (2006; 2009) about "withness" helps in understanding the struggles of living forward (Weick, 1999) experienced by practitioners and researchers alike. We embed withness within pragmatist inquiry (Farjoun, Ansell, and Boin, 2015; Lorino et al., 2011; Martela, 2015), building on the existing links between a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry in the work of James, Dewey, and Mead (Shotter, 2016). After highlighting the research approach, I share my experience of applying pragmatist withness inquiry in my fieldwork focused on the process of how design practice changes in moving from service to organization design. Rather than just highlighting the advantages of such an appraoch, I want to share with the audience the particular challenges of engaging in such ontological practice and process research. The goal is then to have a discussion of how ontological practice and process research can be combined, the potential of pragmatism in such research, and explore together how such approaches can inform future research.

With

Frithjof Wegener is a last year PhD-Candidate at the Department of Design, Organization, and Strategy of the Industrial Design Faculty, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Previously he has worked at the KIN Research Centre of the VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Frithjof’s background is interdisciplinary, with a BSc in Natural- and Social Sciences with a Major in Business Studies from the University of Amsterdam, a MSc (Cum Laude) in Management of Innovation from the Rotterdam School of Management and his current engagement with design at the TU Delft. Frithjof works across the boundaries of design and organization studies, with an interest in pragmatism, process research and issues of designing organizations and organizing design. He is particularly interested in organizing interorganizational design and innovation that addresses challenges around sustainability and other "grand challenges". Next to that, he is interested in the methodological challenges of "stronger" process research and pragmatism.