Abstract
What is the social setting of the manager as office executive? MacIntyre’s essay on moral agency and the “Case of J” provides insights about the setting of the manager. Part of the particularity of the modern manager is the (misguided) belief that one can act in a manner that is devoid of particularity, disengaged from concrete social practices and specific traditions. What character traits are needed to succeed as an office executive? Are these virtues? Raising these questions brings into focus MacIntyre’s schema of practices-institutions-goods-and-virtues. Contemporary management literature increasingly has recognized that “soft skills” are needed for managerial success. Reflecting on such traits while asking whether the so-called soft skills are virtues brings into focus the setting of the manager as office executive.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This lecture was published as the 11th essay in A. MacIntyre (2006a) Ethics and Politics, Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 186–204. All references are to this published version. It originally appeared in MacIntyre (1999b).
H. Arendt (1992) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin). This is not the first time that MacIntyre had drawn on the Eichmann case. In 1966 (just a few years after Eichmann’s trial and Arendt’s description in her book), MacIntyre published his Short History of Ethics.
MacIntyre voiced then a criticism of “specialists such as Eichmann.” He wrote, “Whether the cargo was sheep or Jews, whether points X and Y were farm and butcher’s slaughterhouse or ghetto and gas chamber was no concern.” A. MacIntyre (1966) A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan).
C. Taylor (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press).
C. Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press).
D. Blagg and S. Young (2001) “What Makes a Good Leader?” Harvard Business School Bulletin (available at: <http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2001/february/leader.html>, accessed 5 May 2013.).
H. Fayol (1916) C. Storrs (trans.) (1949) General and Jndustrial Management (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons).
For examples of management textbooks reproduced in multiple editions that borrow their basic framework from Fayol, see S. Robbins and M. Coulter (2011) Management (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall); R. Daft (2011) Management (Mason, OH: Southwestern).
R. Daft (2011) Management (Mason, OH: Southwestern).
H. Mintzberg (1973) The Nature of Managerial Work (New York: Harper & Row), 93–94.
H. Mintzberg (2009) Managing (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers).
For examples, see S. Covey (1989) Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Management: Traits of Successful Business Leaders (New York: Free Press).
L. Segil (2002) Ten Essential Traits for Managers (Somerset, NJ: Wiley).
G. Kaupins (2006) “The Characteristics and Traits of Successful Managers and Supervisors,” Academy of Business and Public Administration Proceedings, Dallas, TX, April.
D. Amaral-Phillips (2001) “Traits of Successful Managers” (available at: <http://www2.ca.uky.edu/afsdairy-files/extension/nutrition/Traits_of_Successful_Managers.pdf>, accessed on May 5, 2013.).
In particular, the concern with (and debate about) soft skills was sparked by Daniel Goleman’s 1995 best seller, Emotional Intelligence. Originally written to persuade educators about the effectiveness and importance of school-based social and emotional learning programs, Goleman discovered that he had a larger audience in business managers quite interested in what he had to say about the importance of “soft skills” for success. So, he followed up his best seller on emotional intelligence with a book titled Working with Emotional Intelligence that he aimed at an audience of managers. In that book, he tells his readers about a “new yardstick” being used by organizations in hiring and promotion decisions. He claims that there is research that distills “with unprecedented precision which qualities mark a star performer.” D. Goleman (2000) Working with Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam), 3.
In his popular best seller, Covey describes the qualities needed to be “highly effective” both in terms of “habits” and in terms of “character traits”: S. Covey (1989) Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press) especially 21–22, 217, and 219.
MacIntyre’s definition of a social practice is widely discussed: “By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended’” (After Virtue 187). This definition is stipulative; he claims it “does not completely agree with current ordinary usage” including his “own previous use” of the word (187). MacIntyre’s definition has become widely quoted and debated in the scholarly literature. See D. Miller (1994) “Virtues, Practices, and Justice” in J. Horton and S. Mendus (eds) After MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
R. Keat (2000) Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
In order to explain his stipulative definition, MacIntyre begins by listing examples and then ruling some out while including others. Tic-tac-toe is not a practice; presumably it is not complicated enough. Football, architecture, and farming are practices, but MacIntyre rules out activities that are merely parts of those practices: throwing a football with skill, brick-laying and turnip-planting. In response, scholars in a range of disciplines and professions have debated various activities. See D. Sellman (2000) “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Professional Practice of Nursing,” Nursing Philosophy 1, 26–33.
N. Noddings (2003) “Is Teaching a Practice?,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37, 2, 241–251.
J. Dunne (2003) “Arguing for Teaching as a Practice: A Reply to Alasdair MacIntyre,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 37, 2, 353–369.
E. B. Lambeth (1990) “Waiting for a New St. Benedict: Alasdair MacIntyre and the Theory and Practice of Journalism,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 5, 2, 75–87.
K. Balstad Brewer (1997); R. Beadle (2008a) “Why Business Cannot Be a Practice,” Analyse und Kritik, 30, 1, 227–241.
Beadle is responding especially to G. Moore (2001) “On the Implications of the Practice-Institution Distinction: MacIntyre and the Application of Modern Virtue Ethics to Business,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 12, 1, 483–511.
MacIntyre is not primarily interested in questions about whether or not some activity is (or is not) a practice. Even in his comments about teaching not being a practice, MacIntyre’s central point is that teachers should see their task as helping to initiate their students into a discipline. “The teacher should think of her or himself as a mathematician, a reader of poetry, a historian or whatever, engaged in communicating craft and knowledge to apprentices” (A. MacIntyre and J. Dunne [2002] “Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36, 1, 1–19).
In After Virtue, he states explicitly that he wants to steer away from such debates: “the question of the precise range of practices is not at this stage of the first importance” (188). MacIntyre does not provide a history of the notion of a practice, and it is not always clear how MacIntyre’s stipulative definition both draws from and departs from the way other thinkers, especially Aristotle and Karl Marx, used this notion. Kelvin Knight provides a very helpful account of MacIntyre’s understanding of practices and institutions in K. Knight (2007) Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre (Cambridge: Polity), especially pp. 156–160. MacIntyre does not invoke Karl Marx often in After Virtue. While MacIntyre does make mention of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach on p. 84, he does not do so when he explains what he means by a practice. The case was different in MacIntyre’s earlier writings. For example, Marxism and Christianity includes a chapter titled, “From Philosophy to Practice: Marx.” So, it is sensible that one might turn to Marx to deepen one’s understanding of MacIntyre’s notion of practice. Karl Marx, writing in a bold and compact style, began his short essay on Feurerbach with this critique: “The main deficiency, up to now, in all materialism — including that of Feuerbach — is that the external object, reality and sensibility are conceived only in the form of the object and of our contemplation of it, rather than as sensuous human activity and as practice — as something non-subjective” (K. Marx, “Eleven Theses on Feuerbach.” Thesis 1. Translated by Carl Manchester. Available at http://www.carlmanchester.net/marx/index.html.) Marx goes on to object that Feuerbach and others have not gone far enough to emphasize concrete social practices. “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question.” Marx complains that when thinking is “isolated from practice,” then the pursuit of truth devolves into controversies and debates that are “purely scholastic” (Karl Marx, “Eleven Theses on Feuerbach.” Thesis 2). Marx famously concludes, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways. What is crucial, however, is to change it” Karl Marx, “Eleven Theses on Feuerbach.” Thesis 11). MacIntyre learned from Marx to engage in philosophy while being attentive to concrete social practices. Just as Marx was critical of his contemporaries for engaging in philosophizing that resulted in pointless academic abstractions, MacIntyre’s turn to social practices and a concrete social context is part of his criticism of a tendency in professional philosophy toward disengaged abstractions. Of course, Marx draws this concern with praxis in part from Aristotle, so it should not be surprising that there is an Aristotelian backdrop to MacIntyre’s notion of practice. However, when we turn to the texts of Aristotle, we notice that he used the term praxis in a way that is significantly narrower than MacIntyre’s notion of a practice. Aristotle, within his account of intellectual virtues, distinguished between three kinds of knowing: theoria, praxis, and techne. See especially Book VI, Chapter 2 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle, theoria is thinking aimed at the activity of contemplating eternal truths, especially the enquiries of natural philosophy, mathematics, and philosophical wisdom; praxis is thinking aimed at practical activity, especially life in a political community and the practical wisdom needed to make good decisions; and techne is thinking aimed at productive activity, such as architecture, medicine, rhetoric, or poetics. It might at first appear that MacIntyre uses the term “practice” as an equivalent for Aristotle’s notion of praxis. After all, MacIntyre states that one of the practices he has in mind is “politics in the Aristotelian sense” (188). However, MacIntyre’s notion of a practice is actually much wider than Aristotle’s notion of praxis. MacIntyre lists “the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology” as practices; Aristotle would consider each of these inquiries to be a theoria, not a praxis. Also, MacIntyre considers games (football, chess), artistic pursuits (painting and music), productive activities (farming, architecture, medicine), while Aristotle would consider each of these to be a techne, not a praxis. MacIntyre lists communal activities, such as the making and sustaining of a family or a social community, as practices, but questions abound with regard to these. Isn’t “making” a family in some sense a productive activity on Aristotle’s schema? Isn’t family life and political life integrally tied into metaphysical biology in the Aristotelian schema? Leaving these questions to the side for now, my point is that MacIntyre’s notion of a “practice” is Aristotelian in the sense that it rests on an Aristotelian distinction between internal and external goods, but MacIntyre explains and employs that distinction in a way that is slightly different from Aristotle.
A. Clark and J. Treanor (2008) “Greenspan — I Was Wrong about the Economy. Sort of,” The Guardian. Available at: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/ business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan>), accessed on July 11, 2012.
R. Solomon (1993) “Corporate Roles, Personal Virtues: An Aristotelean Approach to Business Ethics,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 2, 337. See also R. Solomon (1992).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Gregory R. Beabout
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Beabout, G.R. (2013). The Setting: Institutional Social Structures, Success, and Excellence. In: The Character of the Manager. Humanism in Business Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304063_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304063_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45436-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30406-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Business & Management CollectionBusiness and Management (R0)