MacIntyre on Virtue and Organization

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractThis paper introduces the work of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in the area of virtue and organisation. It aims to provide one point of entry to MacIntyre"s work for readers who have not been introduced to it and makes some novel suggestions about its development for those who have. Following some initial comments on MacIntyre"s approach to social science it traces the development of his ideas on organisation from 1953 to 1980 before outlining the general theory of virtues, goods, practices and institutions which emerged in the publication of his seminal After Virtue in 1981. Finally the paper outlines some of the uses to which these ideas have been put in the organisational literature.

El Management como práctica: una aproximación a la naturaleza del trabajo directivo

“…La visión que MacIntyre tiene de los negocios es más bien pesimista 63 , en gran parte por su simpatía con el marxismo en el pasado. Sin embargo, no deja de ser esperanzadora, pues su objetivo fundamental es ampliar el concepto de razón práctica, que en la configuración moderna de las organizaciones ha sido reducida a mera racionalidad instrumental: "la racionalidad burocrática es la racionalidad de unir medios y fines económica y eficientemente" 64 .…”

Language and Communication at Work

“…Judgments that deal with such puzzles are distinctive in that they aim at probing and assessing a bewildering situation in the light of understandings of what it is to exist harmoniously within a collectivity (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000); for example, within a professional community (Beadle and Moore, 2006), an organization (Holt, 2006;Solomon, 1992;Tsoukas, 2004), or humanity at large (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).…”

“…While previous research has underscored the "everyday morality" of individual judgments (Fox, 2008;Nyberg, 2008;Tsoukas, 2004), or the (lack of) moral consciousness of individual managers (Beadle and Moore, 2006;Jackall, 2010;MacIntyre, 1981MacIntyre, [1985), the main motivation of our research is to explore how judgments constitute an ongoing organizational response to recurrently emerging moral dilemmas. We focus on the organizational work that goes into arriving at moral judgments.…”

“…Literature: the making of moral judgments</H1> <P>There are at least three iii streams of organizational studies, albeit with different inspirations and motives, which share a common interest in unpacking the making of moral judgments. The first stream has generated propositions on when and how moral judgments are possible and desirable (Beadle and Moore, 2006;Holt, 2006;MacIntyre, 1981MacIntyre, [1985; Moore, 2012;Morrell, 2012), engaging with the work of important moral philosophers, such as Aristotle (Morrell and Clark, 2010;Tsoukas, 2004;Tsoukas and Cummings, 1997) and Alasdair MacIntyre. iv The second stream has focused on the equally important and influential work of Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology (Fox, 2008;Garfinkel, 1991;Llewellyn and Spence, 2009) to empirically investigate the situated production of social-cum-moral order.…”

“…From a virtue ethics perspective, emotions are dynamic states of experiencing the world, which provide invaluable "information" in moments of exercising moral judgments (Norman, 1998;Tsoukas, 2004). <PI>On closer examination, this stream of studies eloquently attempts to address a key issue: how could contemporary corporate managers, repeatedly found in empirical studies to act amorally (Beadle and Moore, 2006;MacIntyre, 1981MacIntyre, [1985) and/or without moral sensibility (Jackall, 2010), appreciate moral matters? The proposed answers, while not ignoring such empirical findings, propose a way out of these somewhat pessimistic conclusions by highlighting the underlying tight coupling between managerial concerns (i.e.…”