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Could We Know a Practice-Embodying Institution if We Saw One?

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Abstract

This paper considers the resources MacIntyre provides for undertaking empirical work using his goodsvirtues-practices-institutions framework alongside the attendant challenges of doing such work. It focuses on methods that might be employed in judging the extent to which observed social arrangements may conform to the standards required by a practice-embodying institution. It concludes by presenting the outline of an empirical project exploring at a music facility in the North East of England, The Sage Gateshead.

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References

  1. This paper has benefited greatly from review by Geoff Moore, Carter Crockett, Kelvin Knight and Jeffery Nicholas to whom we are happy to extend thanks.

  2. MacIntyre A After Virtue: a study in moral theory–2nd Edition, London, Duckworth 1981 [1985] p245

  3. Alasdair MacIntyre Ethics and Politics, Selected Essays Volume 2 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2006 p xi

  4. MacIntyre introduces this concept to distinguish between different types of institution in respect of their relationship to practice in Alasdair MacIntyre ‘A Partial Response To My Critics’ in John Horton and Susan Mendus (Eds.) After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre London, Polity 1994 p290

  5. Alasdair MacIntyre op cit p19

  6. A start to such empirical enquiry can be found here and also in Ron Beadle and David Könyöt ‘The Man in the Red Coat: Management in the Circus’ Culture and Organisation 12 no 2, 2006 pp 127–137; Carter Crockett ‘The Cultural Paradigm of Virtue’ Journal of Business Ethics 62 2005 pp 191–208, Geoff Moore and Ron Beadle ‘In Search of Organizational Virtue in Business: Agents, Goods, Practices, Institutions and Environments’ Organization Studies 27 no 3 2006 pp 369–389; James A.H.S. Hine ‘The shadow of MacIntyre’s manager in the Kingdom of Conscience constrained’ Business Ethics: a European Review 16:4 2007, 358–371

  7. See Stephen P Turner ‘MacIntyre in the province of the philosophy of the social sciences’ in Mark Murphy (ed.) Alasdair MacIntyre pp 70–93 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Thomas D D’Andrea Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue: the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre Aldershot, Ashgate 2006 pp165-197; Alasdair MacIntyre ‘Ideology, Social Science and Revolution’ Comparative Politics 5 1973 pp 321–342; Alasdair MacIntyre ‘Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureaucratic Authority’ in Maria J. Falco (ed.) Through the Looking Glass: Epistemology and the Conduct of Enquiry, An Anthology Washington DC, University Press of America 1979 pp 42–58; Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue (op cit) pp 84–102 & p199; Alasdair MacIntyre ‘Individual and social morality in Japan and the United States: Rival Conceptions of the Self’ Philosophy East and West 40 1990 pp 489–497, Alasdair MacIntyre The Tasks of Philosophy, Selected Essays Volume 1 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2006 pp 86–103 and particularly Alasdair MacIntyre The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis–Revised Edition London, Routeledge 1958 [2004] pp 1–38.

  8. MacIntyre does not rule out hypothesis testing as such but the results of such testing fall into the general limits that social science must understand itself as working within, such that their results must take the form of ‘characteristically and for the most part …’ Alasdair MacIntyre The Unconscious (op. cit) p14

  9. Alasdair MacIntyre ‘Can one be unintelligible to oneself?’ in Christopher McKnight and Marcel Stchedroff (Eds.) Philosophy in its Variety: Essays in Memory of Francois Bordet Belfast, Queen’s University of Belfast: Belfast 1987 p 28.

  10. Mark P Achtemeier ‘The truth of tradition: Critical Realism in the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre and T.F. Torrance’ Scottish Journal of Theology 47 no 3 1993 pp 355–374; Ron Beadle and Geoff Moore ‘Macintyre on Virtue and Organization’ Organization Studies 27 no 3 2006 pp 323–340.

  11. Alasdair MacIntyre The Unconscious (op. cit ) p 6

  12. Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue (op. cit.) p 194

  13. We owe this example to MacIntyre who cited it in conversation with Ron Beadle

  14. One strategy for addressing this is offered by Carter Crockett translations of Macintyre’s concepts into modern equivalents, as he outlines in his paper in this Special Issue.

  15. Both Carter Crockett (2005 op. cit) and Geoff Moore ‘Humanizing Business: a modern virtue ethics approach’ Business Ethics Quarterly 15 no 2 2005 pp 237–255 include ‘purpose’ as a central criterion in distinguishing between institutional types

  16. Reported in Ron Beadle ‘The discovery of a Peculiar Good’ Tamara–Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science 2 no 3 2003 pp 60–68; Ron Beadle and David Könyöt (op. cit); Ron Beadle ‘Circus and Non-Circus Lives’ in Yoram Carmeli Between Margins and Society: British Circus in Context Forthcoming–American Universities Press

  17. Whilst the self-understanding of agents cannot be sufficient to determine whether we take some or other social arrangement to constitute a community it would appear to be a necessary condition in any intelligible definition of community

  18. The role played within local communities by those both temporarily and permanently disabled is a central concern of Alasdair MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals London, Duckworth 1999

  19. Alasdair MacIntyre ‘How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia’ in this Special Issue

  20. Alasdair MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals (op.cit) p143

  21. Alasdair MacIntyre ‘Corporate Modernity and Moral Judgment: are they mutually exclusive?’ in Kenneth Sayre and K. Goodpaster (Eds.) Ethics and Problems of the Twenty First Century p132 Notre Dame IN, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1979

  22. Jeffery Nicholas has helpfully suggested to us that this MacIntyre will have been aware that the Sioux nation comprises a large number of smaller communities.

  23. Once again Carter Crockett’s proposals for translating MacIntyre’s terminology into modern idiom presents one way round these problems but orthodox MacIntyrean critics might well contend that this risks reducing MacIntyre’s framework to just another species of conventional virtue ethics. The merits of this position and of Crockett’s require a fuller debate than is possible here

  24. As have Lee Salter and Lucy Finchett-Maddock in this Special Issue, Ron Beadle and David Könyöt (op. cit.) and Ron Beadle ‘Circus and Non-Circus Lives’ (op. cit)

  25. Geoff Moore ‘Humanizing Business: a modern virtue ethics approach’ (op. cit) Carter Crockett ‘The Cultural Paradigm of Virtue’ (op. cit)

  26. One of the challenges here is that the activity of institutionalisation finds application at different ‘levels’

  27. Alasdair MacIntyre ‘How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia’ in this Special Issue

  28. In discussion of an earlier version of this paper a Marxist critic drew an unflattering analogy between the debates around levels highlighted here — which he termed ‘socialism in one village’ with the debates of the 1920s around ‘socialism one country’

  29. Kelvin Knight Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre London, Polity 2007 p184

  30. In personal correspondence Jeffery Nicholas has suggested that this argument may conflict with the case he makes in this Special Issue that membership of a tradition is a pre-requisite for substantive critique. We would argue however that this apparent inconsistency belies recognisable similarities between tradition-constituted discourses. Whilst we may not be able to contribute to a substantive critique of a particular orchestral performance we should be able to recognise such a debate as tradition-constituted when we encounter it and to characterise the form of debate with reference to the features that we outline here

  31. Alasdair MacIntyre Ethics and Politics (op. cit.) p vi

  32. Alasdair MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals (op. cit) p 156–7

  33. Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue (op.cit) p194; Alasdair MacIntyre ‘A partial response to my critics’ (op. cit) p285

  34. Alasdair MacIntyre in Kelvin Knight The MacIntyre Reader London, Polity (1998) p 247

  35. Alasdair MacIntyre Ethics and Politics (op. cit) p 215

  36. Ibid. p194, p 217

  37. Ibid. p215

  38. Ibid. p216

  39. Ibid. p215

  40. Alasdair MacIntyre ‘What has Ethics to learn from Medical Ethics?’ Philosophic Exchange, 2 Summer 1978 pp 37–47

  41. This follows from one of the distinguishing features of the politics of practice-based communities being the extent to which individuals encounter each other in so many different contexts that compartmentalization is effectively prevented and ‘individuals cannot avoid being judged for what they are’ (Alasdair MacIntyre in Kelvin Knight The MacIntyre Reader (op. cit) p 247; see also MacIntyre’s comments in Ethics and Politics p213 in respect of ‘a certain moral intransigence’ characterising practitioners within the community

  42. Ibid. p 205

  43. Alasdair MacIntyre in Kelvin Knight The MacIntyre Reader (op. cit) p251

  44. Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue (op. cit) p195 and in Kelvin Knight The MacIntyre Reader (op. cit) p 247

  45. In personal correspondence MacIntyre confirmed (27 June 2000) that this idea (in Ron Beadle ‘Virtue Ethics and Employment or The Case of the Cancelled Holiday’ 1998 paper presented to the second conference on HRM and Ethics, Kingston University, UK) might be suggestive and this study will investigate this possibility

  46. Geoff Moore and Ron Beadle ‘In Search of Organisational Virtue in Business: Agents, Goods, Practices and Environments’ (op. cit) p326

  47. ‘Improvement’ is a value-laden term of course and this research will attempt to unpack its meaning for participants. In personal correspondence Carter Crockett reports that research subjects in his ‘interactive joint activity exercise’ have reported that their perspectives on their work environment have changed as a result of engaging with the research process

  48. The Sage Gateshead. Available at http://www.thesagegateshead.org 2007 (Accessed 15 Nov 2006)

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibid. In personal correspondence Carter Crockett has helpfully pointed out that the way in which the institution seeks to balance its local and global ambitions might be one of the issues to which the study should attend.

  51. Ibid.

  52. DEMOS Hitting the Right Notes: Learning and Participation at the Sage Gateshead, Department of Education and Skills 2004

  53. MacIntyre’s frequent references to string quartets as exemplars of practices is not lost on us, e.g. in Kelvin Knight The MacIntyre Reader (op. cit) p234 & p240

  54. Geoff Moore ‘Corporate character: modern virtue ethics and the virtuous corporation’ Business Ethics Quarterly 15 no 4 (2005) pp 659–685

  55. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury Handbook of Action Research: the concise paperback edition, London, Sage 2006

  56. Exemplified by Elliott J Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches London, Sage 2005; David Boje Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research, London, Sage 2001 and Yiannis Gabriel Storytelling in Organizations: facts, fiction and fantasies Oxford, University Press 2000

  57. See footnote 46

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  1. Samantha Coe
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  2. Ron Beadle
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Coe, S., Beadle, R. Could We Know a Practice-Embodying Institution if We Saw One?. Philos. of Manag. 7, 9–19 (2008). https://doi.org/10.5840/pom2008713

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