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MacIntyre: From Transliteration to Translation

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Abstract

Despite the profound potential of MacIntyre’s revolutionary virtue paradigm, management scholars have struggled to make sense of one of the most contentious and insightful philosophers of our time. This conceptual paper attempts to move past the transliteration of MacIntyre in favour of a translation of his contribution in a manner than retains something closer to its full meaning, while helpfully guiding empirical efforts to apply this emerging paradigm to modern organisations. This translation entails a dismissal of MacIntyre’s hypercritical bias in order to accommodate an expansion of his ideas into the language and logic of management theory and practice. Schein’s methodological roadmap for deciphering culture is offered, as is theory-building using comparative case research, as offering two particularly promising directions for future empirical studies that seek to use the theory of virtue in order to reconceptualise and study the modern organisation.

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References

  1. Firstly, the author owes a debt of gratitude to the growing group of scholars who are trying to interpret MacIntyre for use in developing a helpful, albeit alternative, understanding of contemporary management. The insightful comments and penetrating insights they have offered this manuscript have been a gift well beyond what I deserve, and I am very grateful. The author is also indebted to the five companies and their founders who saw fit to offer inspiration and insight with openness and candour as required for the study mentioned here and used to refine the concepts and instruments introduced here. The author would like to thank the foundational and persistent guide in Alistair Anderson throughout the years that these concepts have developed.

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  18. Kelvin Knight has helpfully suggested a clarification here, as MacIntyre has used the terminology of ‘translation’ extensively in his own writing, yet this article is using the same term in a somewhat different way. MacIntyre (in Whose Justice, Which Rationality? London, Duckworth 1988 and elsewhere) has used the term to discuss the ways in which various traditions have found it necessary to translate their respective languages in order to find a common understanding. In contrast, this paper uses the word translate to refer to the bridging of vernacular and logic between divergent disciplines or sectors (moral philosophy and management) within the same tradition.

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  35. Ibid. p.57

  36. Ibid. p.55

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  47. I am grateful for the helpful reminder from Ron Beadle that, in a telling development of MacIntyre’s thought, MacIntyre dismisses Aristotle’s metaphysical biology in After Virtue, but then proceeds (in Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues London, Duckworth 1999) to change his mind and accept a portion of that which he had previously rejected in Aristotle’s writing, demonstrating a healthy openmindedness and the subjective nature which such translation requires.

  48. Ron Beadle ‘The Misappropriation of MacIntyre’ (op. cit)

  49. Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue (op. cit) p 30

  50. Ibid p 194

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  55. Ibid

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  57. Ibid p 195

  58. Ibid p 263

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  72. Adapted from Edgar Schein (op. cit) p 3

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  75. Ibid. p 4

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  81. Edgar Schein ‘Coming to a New Awareness of Organisational Culture’ (op. cit) p 13

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  84. Samantha Coe and Ron Beadle (op. cit)

  85. Ibid.

  86. 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 pp.283-304. Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press 1994 see pp 284–286

  87. Alasdair MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals (op cit) p 143

  88. Kathleen Eisenhardt ‘Building Theories from Case Study Research’ Academy of Management Review 14 no 4 1989 pp 532–550

  89. Kathleen Eisenhardt & Melissa Graebner ‘Theory Building from Cases: Opportunities and Challenges’ Academy of Management Journal 50 no 1 2007 pp 25–32, see pp 25, 27

  90. Robert Yin Case Study Research: Design and Methods 2nd Edn. London, Sage 2003

  91. Kathleen Eisenhardt & Melissa Graebner ‘Theory Building from Cases: Opportunities and Challenges’ (op.cit) p.27.

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  93. Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue p 111

  94. Crockett, Carter ‘Grounding the Theory of Virtue’ Unpublished Doctoral Thesis op. cit.

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Crockett, C. MacIntyre: From Transliteration to Translation. Philos. of Manag. 7, 45–66 (2008). https://doi.org/10.5840/pom2008716

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