Anchored in the paradigm of Pragmatic Constructivism, this conference convenes researchers to explore how people create functioning reality construction through their everyday narrations and actions. Within a supportive and constructive scholarly atmosphere, we aim to foster vibrant research exchanges on the challenges and possibilities of building successful organizational practices, ultimately helping participants advance their work toward high-quality publications.

Pragmatic Constructivism holds the idea that actors continuously engage in activities through which they construct their relationships to the world. A functioning reality construct, or practices, emerges from the complex interconnections between actors and the phenomena they encounter, ranging from physical and social constructs to personal thoughts, emotions, and actions. The actors’ activities manifest as practices.

In this context, human beings organize their practices around the use of language games (Wittgenstein, 1953), in which language and action form an inseparable whole. Guided by their intentional values, actors in local practices construct their relationships with the world through a set of narrations that give direction for actions. However, the success of a narration depends on its ability to create a reality construction that creates intentional results-that is, to function pragmatically. Yet, not all narrations are equally effective. For them to serve as sound foundations for coordinated and purposeful action, they must integrate four dimensions of reality: they should be aligned with the actors’ motivational values, grounded in adequate factual possibilities of the world, and communicated in ways that foster shared understanding and coordination.

For understanding, analysing and guiding how actors construct a successful actor-world relationship integrating the four dimensions of reality, pragmatic constructivism offers several conceptual fundamentals. These include: the notion of practice constructed through actorship, co-authorship and epistemic methods; principles for establishing construct causality; facts as credible claims grounded in evidence, possibilities involving cognitive skills of reflections, and values as constituted through processes of evaluation; principles for ensuring conceptual quality in management and measurement frameworks; and an integrative learning theory of truth involving a learning circle between proactive truth and pragmatic truth.

Accordingly, we invite contributions that explore how (dys)functional practices are constructed, with particular attention to their underlying methods and techniques. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Pragmatic constructivism as a foundation for analysing and developing ethical, sustainable, and human-centric collaboration across cultural and organizational contexts
• Performance management supporting human, organizational, social, and environmental flourishing
• Epistemic methods of performance management and their (dys-)functional effects on organizational, social, and environmental realities
• Language games and language plays fostering creativity, collaboration and the construction of (dys)functional practices in complex and crisis contexts
• Developing accounting and reporting practices for fuller managerial accountability in the construction of sustainability
• Digitalization and AI languages transforming epistemic methods of accounting and reshaping the construction of organizational realities
• Accounting for value construction and its implication for responsible management and governance
• Values as a part of management control and thus as drivers for functioning practices and successful organizational life
• Methodological innovations for studying language games and actor-reality construction, and for exploring “what to do?” language games that challenge conventional management thinking

The conference invites three categories of contributions: i) Full papers and ii) Extended Abstracts.

Submission

• Marco Giuliani: m.giuliani@staff.univpm.it
• Maria Serena Chiucchi: m.s.chiucchi@staff.univpm.it
• Hanne Nørreklit: hannenorreklit@mgmt.au.dk