We draw on Alasdair MacIntyre's virtues, practices, and institutions schema to argue that employee participation in governance practices can play an important role in developing virtue. Whereas MacIntyre's schema has been most widely employed to understand how productive practices can cultivate virtue, we focus instead on the way that meaningful deliberation about the common good can provide experiences requiring employees to exercise the virtues. We then apply this theoretical framework to an analysis of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. Our analysis emphasizes (...) the importance of participatory governance over employee ownership. Based on this analysis, we draw several implications for increasing participatory governance in a way that will prevent shareholder maximization from crowding out virtue, even in corporate contexts where productive activity itself does not provide a meaningful, virtue-instilling experience. (shrink)

Research in business ethics has largely ignored questions of equality and dissensus, raised by theorists of radical democracy. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work has been very influential in business ethics, has developed a novel approach to virtue ethics rooted in both Aristotelian practical philosophy and a Marxian appreciation of radical democracy. In this paper, we bring MacIntyre into conversation with Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe and argue the following: first, MacIntyre’s work has significant similarities with Rancière and Mouffe, thus suggesting that (...) MacIntyrean business ethics has the potential to address the concerns of radical democrats; second, the MacIntyrean business ethics literature has not adequately incorporated the aspects of Macntyre’s work addressing concerns regarding equality and dissensus and future work should pay more attention to these concerns. (shrink)

Research in business ethics has largely ignored questions of equality and dissensus, raised by theorists of radical democracy. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work has been very influential in business ethics, has developed a novel approach to virtue ethics rooted in both Aristotelian practical philosophy and a Marxian appreciation of radical democracy. In this paper, we bring MacIntyre into conversation with Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe and argue the following: first, MacIntyre’s work has significant similarities with Rancière and Mouffe, thus suggesting that (...) MacIntyrean business ethics has the potential to address the concerns of radical democrats; second, the MacIntyrean business ethics literature has not adequately incorporated the aspects of Macntyre’s work addressing concerns regarding equality and dissensus and future work should pay more attention to these concerns. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Alain Badiou, ethics can only arise in relation to an evental truth procedure that breaks from the economic logic of a situation. Further, because for Badiou there cannot be economic truths per se – rather, economic matters must be understood in their relation to one or more truths in the domain of love, art, science or politics – a Badiouian business ethics would look entirely distinct from any ethics that simply places limits on certain kinds of (...) economic activity. Although Slavoj Žižek, among others, has suggested that this marks an essential weakness in Badiou's economic/political theory, it may actually be the greatest strength of his position. Within a capitalist system, a Badiouian business ethics would then be a question of mobilizing economic resources in order to serve the ongoing construction of a truth procedure. For a business to be considered ethical on Badiou's terms, it must break – and continue to break – from the dominant logic of capitalism and its merely economic pursuit of profit maximization. (shrink)