Jane Addams’s Pragmatist Method Extended: Care Work Between Abstract Rules and Situated Practice

Abstract

Although Jane Addams has long been recognized as a pioneer in North American pragmatism, efforts to develop her thought into a distinct research program have been limited. This article develops Addams’s work as a method of sociological inquiry by focusing on her notions of “perplexity,” “moral adjustment,” and “sympathetic understanding.” Emphasizing the essential role of language in moral conflicts and reconstruction, the article incorporates Charles Wright Mills’s concept of “vocabularies of motives.” Together, these notions offer a framework for exploring the moral dilemmas that care workers experience when responding to the imposition of standardization of their working practices. A case study demonstrates how care workers, while coping creatively with the effects of a service reform, develop motive vocabularies in defense of their professional ethics. Such situated creativity on “the shop floor” of social services remains relatively under-explored and under-theorized.

Toward a Values‐Informed Approach to Complexity in Health Care: Hermeneutic Review

“…We sought to present this theory not as fixed predictive statements but as a set of heuristics or rules of thumb-that is, points of departure for reflection and situated moral reasoning ("thinking through" or "working through" real-world challenges). 34,35 In the language of some complexity theorists, these might be termed "simple rules." 1,36 Our research question was as follows: "How should we conceptualize, theorize, and address the different ways in which conflicting stakeholder values add to a project's complexity and thwart the change effort?…”

“…Rather, we aimed to produce a “theory in the wild,” which we define as a theory grounded in local, real‐world action and oriented to generating learning through action —for addressing value complexity in complex change efforts involving multistakeholder partnerships. We sought to present this theory not as fixed predictive statements but as a set of heuristics or rules of thumb —that is, points of departure for reflection and situated moral reasoning (“thinking through” or “working through” real‐world challenges) 34,35 . In the language of some complexity theorists, these might be termed “simple rules.” 1,36 …”