The virtue of participatory governance: a MacIntyrean alternative to shareholder maximization

Abstract

We draw on Alasdair MacIntyre's virtues, practices, and institutions schema to argue that employee participation in governance practices can play an important role in developing virtue. Whereas MacIntyre's schema has been most widely employed to understand how productive practices can cultivate virtue, we focus instead on the way that meaningful deliberation about the common good can provide experiences requiring employees to exercise the virtues. We then apply this theoretical framework to an analysis of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of participatory governance over employee ownership. Based on this analysis, we draw several implications for increasing participatory governance in a way that will prevent shareholder maximization from crowding out virtue, even in corporate contexts where productive activity itself does not provide a meaningful, virtue‐instilling experience.

Virtuous Structures

“…Likewise, Breen (2007Breen ( , 2012 introduces the idea of ''phronetic production'' in which the work organization comprises ''complex and coherent'' tasks (Breen 2012, p. 621), allowing employees to have ''an overview of the entire work'' (p. 612) and in which '' […] there is no categorical distinction between those who lead and those who follow'' (p. 621). In addition, Bernacchio and Couch (2015) argue that structures should enable participatory governance so as to enable organizational members to align the goals of the organization to overarching goods of the community. And, starting from a more Aristotelian notion of virtues, Schwartz (2011) argues that organizational structures should be less formalized so as to nurture ''practical wisdom.''…”

“…As some authors put it: organizations may contribute to ''the good of a community'' they are part of (cf. Achterbergh and Vriens 2010;Breen 2012;Moore 2012;Bernacchio and Couch 2015;Sison and Fontrodona 2012). Achterbergh and Vriens (2010) and Sison and Fontrodona (2012), for instance, explicitly discuss this contribution in terms of the organization contribution to the flourishing of organizational members.…”

Moral Education at Work: On the Scope of MacIntyre’s Concept of a Practice

“…Beadle 2013; Beadle and Könyöt 2006;Moore 2012b;Robson 2015;Bernacchio and Couch 2015) have already demonstrated its usefulness. Much of this work is narrative-focused and so allows for the kinds of discussions about goods and ends which are necessary to practices, and therefore for the relationships required by a narrative that is genuinely shaped by goods internal to that practice.…”

Introduction‐virtue and virtuousness: when will the twain ever meet?

“…First, the accusation of ‘armchair philosophy’ that positive social science has made of virtue ethics is hard to reconcile with the growing body of empirical work that is being undertaken within virtue ethics traditions (e.g. Dawson , Bull & Adam and both Bernacchio and Couch and Robson , in this issue). This work rests on methodological commitments to narrative analysis of data that is quite at odds with the correlational and experimental methods of positive social science, but represents an undeniable retort to the proposition that investigation of ethics can only be undertaken with positivist commitments.…”