Learning organisations and Chinese and American pragmatism: A way ahead for the West

In this paper we argue that Chinese pragmatism has much in common with the largely forgotten tradition of American pragmatism which needs to be recovered if the West is to cope well with the growing centrality of China in world economic and political affairs. We use the learning organisation as a vehicle to demonstrate this point of view. Much celebrated in the West, learning organisations have had little practical impact on Western organisations., In East Asia, as a result of Chinese pragmatism, learning organisations are a common and almost universal fact of everyday life in North East Asia (but without the title). We suggest the possibility of re-engaging with the idea of learning organisations in concert with a pragmatic world view.