Abstract
In this chapter I explore the problematic nature of the morality of management, in particular of business organisations operating under Anglo-American capitalism. MacIntyre’s critique of managers in After Virtue (2007) serves as the starting point but I analyse this critique itself, leading to a more balanced and contemporary view of the morality of management than MacIntyre provided. Paradoxically perhaps, I show that MacIntyre’s own virtues-goods-practice-institution schema provides a way of re-imagining business organisations and management and thereby holds out the possibility of resolving the issue of the morality of management within such organisations. Finally, I draw out implications for management practice.
*A previous version of this chapter was published in Business Ethics Quarterly, 2008, 18(4):483–511. I am grateful to the publishers, the Philosophy Documentation Centre, for permission to reproduce it here. I have made a small number of changes from the original paper.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that, unlike Adolf Eichmann (see Arendt 1963), Speer was not hanged when the allies had him in their power; he was probably the highest ranking Nazi who was not hanged or condemned to death in absentia. The difference between Eichmann and Speer was that, while Eichmann came to be at the very heart of the Nazi machinery of death, Speer confined himself to the management of organisations that were not principally focused on ‘crimes against humanity’. Ten Bos and Willmott (2001, 782) have argued that many of those who participated in Nazi genocide were not themselves ‘inhuman’ monsters but rule-abiding employees who had developed a ‘calculating instinct’ for their private interests. They argue further that ‘bureaucracy is a type of organization that allows, and indeed encourages, its members to develop this “calculating instinct”’ (p. 782).
- 2.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that there are resonances with Goffman’s (1969) work in MacIntyre’s use of theatrical metaphors.
- 3.
Such law-like generalisations in the organisational context would have to be of the form, ‘In organisations, if x, then y’, and not, ‘In organisations, if x, then y, provided conditions a, b, c, etc. hold over the extended period in question’. It is challenging to find any examples of the former formulation for anything other than the most trivial of situations, and equally challenging to specify all of the conditions a, b, c, etc. that would need to hold for y to follow from x in situations that are non-trivial. By contrast, in the natural sciences such statements are manifestly straightforward – as in, ‘If I drop this apple, then it will fall’.
- 4.
The four sources of systematic unpredictability are: the nature of radical conceptual innovation (which is, of course, inherently unpredictable); the unpredictability of certain of his own actions by each agent individually; the unpredictability that arises from the game-theoretic character of social life; and finally the pure contingency of chance.
- 5.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that Merton’s (1940) concept of ‘trained incapacity’ in bureaucratic structures might be applicable here, with managers trained to focus on effectiveness and efficiency and so professionally incapable of dealing with questions of morality.
- 6.
Du Gay, while partially supportive, is on balance highly critical of MacIntyre’s position, but his critique is not central to our concerns here.
- 7.
An example would be my watching (‘consumption’) of a cricket match where I can appreciate a superb cover drive because I played cricket in my youth and (once) hit such a shot. My wife is unable to appreciate cricket in that sense. Our positions are reversed when we watch a live performance of classical music.
- 8.
I acknowledge that in my earlier work, particularly Moore (2002), I confused the issue by stating that business was a practice. It is now clear to me that business generically cannot be a practice, but that business organisations can be usefully re-described as practice-institution combinations. Within this re-description we always need to specify the practice itself – as here with fishing, etc. I am grateful to Ron Beadle for his assistance in helping to clarify this point. It is also quite possible within this schema, however, that a particular mode of institutionalisation is such as effectively to prevent practice-like features within it. However, I have argued elsewhere (Moore 2005b, 679) that all business activities, irrespective of their form of institutionalisation, must contain the vestiges of a practice and the virtues to some degree, for if they did not – that is, if the institution had ‘won’ so completely that the virtues had suffered ‘something near total effacement’ (MacIntyre 2007, 196) – then the institution would have, in effect, ‘killed’ itself from the inside by failing to sustain the practice on which it itself is founded.
- 9.
For a further exploration of what it means to be a craftsperson operating in a practice see Moore (2005a).
- 10.
It should be noted that this second practice of making and sustaining institutions will also require its own institutionalisation. There is not space here to consider the legal, governance, social custom and other elements of this informal institutionalisation, although the role of business and management schools in this might be a profitable area for further consideration.
- 11.
It is quite likely that many institutions will house more than one practice. Universities as institutions, for example, house parts of many practices in all the different subject areas that are represented. It is also possible for practices to extend beyond particular organisations so that the organisation houses only a part of the practice – the practices of physics and medicine, for example, are housed only partly inside universities. For simplicity, however, we assume here a single practice within any particular institution.
- 12.
- 13.
In correspondence between Beadle and MacIntyre (Beadle 2002, 52 and also reported in Moore 2002, 24), MacIntyre confirmed that ‘“Employment” is not for me the name of either a type of practice or a type of institution or organisation, but rather one feature of the lives of certain types of institution or organisation’. Beadle continued, ‘If this is the case for employment then so is it the case for management’.
- 14.
There is not space here to include discussion on the differences between administration, management and leadership. The diagram might helpfully be used to illustrate the gradual and hard-to-distinguish movement from predominantly administration at the left hand side to predominantly leadership at the right. I am, however, using management as a generic term to cover all three.
- 15.
In my early industrial career I had as my line manager a director of operations who had transferred from one part of the group involved in textiles to our part involved in paint manufacture. It emerged at some point that prior to his transfer he had spent a day at a paint company personally making a batch of paint. He, I think, understood something of the need to have a ‘feel’ for the core practice.
- 16.
In effect, the argument is that MacIntyre’s schema, when elaborated and applied in the way it is here, has done Parker’s work for him in re-imagining management.
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Moore, G. (2013). Re-imagining the Morality of Management: A Modern Virtue Ethics Approach. In: Harris, H., Wijesinghe, G., McKenzie, S. (eds) The Heart of the Good Institution. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5473-7_2
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