It has been claimed that ‘virtuous structures’ can foster moral agency in organisations. We investigate this in the context of employee involvement in corporate philanthropy, an activity whose moral status has been disputed. Employing Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of moral agency, we analyse the results of eight focus groups with employees engaged in corporate philanthropy in an employee-owned retailer, the John Lewis Partnership. Within this organisational context, Employee–Partners’ moral agency was evidenced in narrative accounts of their engagement in philanthropic activities and (...) in their disputes about the moral status of corporate philanthropy. (shrink)

Neoliberalism, in various ways, is radically new. It is nevertheless constructed from the conditions of liberal modernity, the inadequacies of which are crucial to neoliberal success. Liberalism in practice restricts moral agency through an impoverished, structurally-reinforced conception of practical reasoning, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, and this is important to understanding neoliberal durability. This article argues that a bureaucratic culture that fails to evaluate or critically question the ends it pursues is both symptomatic of liberal inadequacies and a key factor in (...) neoliberal success. Beyond its purely explanatory power, there is a political relevance to MacIntyre’s Aristotelian-inspired politics of local community. It is from those practices and communal movements that embody alternative conceptions of the good, that those interested in resisting neoliberalism can learn how it becomes possible to successfully challenge aspects of the contemporary social order. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes the modern morality for having emotivist features and in his cent- ral book After Virtue he points out that David Hume is the main personality who provides these emotivist contents to the modern morality. According to MacIntyre, Hume’s and the modern emotivist moral philosophy include fundamental contrasts generally with the classical moral tradition particularly with Aristotle’s moral philosophy. However, MacIntyre underlines these contrasts in After Virtue, he in his other texts out of After Virtue, distinguishably brings Hume (...) and Aristotle together as they both have similar standpoints about how to understand morality. Therefore, MacIntyre’s interpretation on Hume needs to be examined with a perspective poin- ting these two different and seemingly mutually exclusive aspects. Putting together these two perspectives, this article aims to construct a holistic comprehension about MacIntyre’s placing Hume in the modern emotivism. (shrink)

What can be learned from a small scale study of managerial work in a highly marginal and under-researched working community? This article uses the ‘goods–virtues–practices–institutions’ framework to examine the managerial work of owner–directors of traditional circuses. Inspired by MacIntyre’s arguments for the necessity of a narrative understanding of the virtues, interviews explored how British and Irish circus directors accounted for their working lives. A purposive sample was used to select subjects who had owned and managed traditional touring circuses for at (...) least 15 years, a period in which the economic and reputational fortunes of traditional circuses have suffered badly. This sample enabled the research to examine the self-understanding of people who had, at least on the face of it, exhibited the virtue of constancy. The research contributes to our understanding of the role of the virtues in organizations by presenting evidence of an intimate relationship between the virtue of constancy and a ‘calling’ work orientation. This enhances our understanding of the virtues that are required if management is exercised as a domain-related practice. (shrink)

The banking sector has been under public scrutiny since the credit crisis of 2007/8, and a range of diagnoses and cures have been offered, particularly in terms of regulatory and financial structures. In the public media, much comment has been made about ethics in the sector, but this has provoked surprisingly little response from academic researchers. This thesis explores the crisis in banking as a moral one, taking Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of virtue ethics as a framework for understanding the careers (...) of Scottish banking leaders. The method used for the study is narrative, and depends both on MacIntyre’s philosophy of tradition-constituted enquiry, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Conversations were held with ten leaders of Scottish banking whose careers typically span between 25 and 40 years, and the record of those conversations forms the primary data set for the research. The resulting narratives are frank, rich descriptions of deeply felt changes in a particular mode of working life. This was a way of life characterised up until the 1980s by a well-defined status within local communities, professional expertise and a well-ordered tradition. The deregulation of banking and subsequent structural and technological changes to retail banking services eroded that professional tradition, and replaced it with new modes of work dominated by institutional priorities of sales, profit and growth, rather than by an ethic of professional expertise and customer service. The thesis finds that there are structural barriers to the recovery of a professional ethic in banking. It offers new perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly in the application of his idea of traditions to mainstream economic activity. It also explores common ground between Gadamer and MacIntyre, proposing ways in which both philosophers can enhance our pursuit of qualitative empirical research. (shrink)

‘Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity’ begins with a consideration of how lives might go wrong through a series of failures in relation to desire. In probing the relationship between an agent’s desires and her beliefs, MacIntyre introduces a woman who has not considered “that she might run away and join the circus”, and as we learn a few lines later, this possibility evades her because she wrongly believes that she could not become a trapeze artist. Incautious readers may regard (...) this as a flippant illustration; but that would be an error. Trapeze is an example of the type of practice in which, on MacIntyre’s account, participation both requires and develops virtues, and the circus provides a context for the type of virtuous local political community to which MacIntyre gives his allegiance. This paper uses the example of circus to illustrate the relationship between self-understanding and social order that underscores MacIntyre’s diagnoses of developments in mainstream moral and self-understanding. ‘Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity’ provides a largely sociological account as to why the distinctive and incoherent Morality of modernity persists, and moreover must persist, if the illusions of the conventional social order are to be maintained. MacIntyre’s allusions to such contexts as the circus manifest the same intimate relationship between self-understanding and social order, but in contrast to modernity, provide a context for coherence. (shrink)