13 - After Virtue, Managers and Business Ethics

Summary

Over the last four decades, Alasdair MacIntyre’s influence on the field of business ethics has grown significantly as an important minority of his interlocutors, including prominently Beabout and Moore, have argued that good management can be understood as an institutionally reproduced MacIntyrean practice. Conversely, MacIntyre’s relevance to this discipline has been vigorously contested by a second group of scholars led by Knight, who emphasise After Virtue’s critical discussion of the modern manager as one of the contemporary ‘social characters’ whose existence reflects the emotivist parameters of modernity. MacIntyre follows Weber in viewing management as a group whose role it is to seek efficient and effective means to pre-given ends. Understood thus, management is anathema to the reproduction of the virtues, because it obliterates the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. Developing this aspect of his thought, Knight has interpreted MacIntyre as being entirely critical of the pretentions of business ethics. While writers such as Beabout and Moore do not deny the power of this critique of management, they counter that not all managers act in this (historically limited) Weberian manner. Rather than join sides in this debate, I argue that its two poles are best understood as two sides of a lacuna at the heart of MacIntyre’s sociology. I suggest that this gap in MacIntyre’s thought manifests itself most clearly in a breach between his broader theoretical pronouncements on management and his more concrete commentaries on specific business issues, and that this breach is evidence that the concept of character is, like Weber’s ideal type, a utopia that is at once too abstractly static and too descriptive to do the work asked of it. To overcome this gap in his account of our modern emotivist culture, I suggest a more dialectical and dynamic/historical conception of social character, understood in terms of Marx’s concept of determinate abstraction.