Kindle Notes & Highlights
The conclusion we have reached, therefore, is a rather nuanced one. Not everything is a practice; some activities are excluded because they do not have internal goods which serve the common good (concentration camps, for example). Some activities clearly are practices even if, sometimes, they stand in need of moral criticism (chess, medicine, architecture, for example). And some activities may have been practices in the past, or could have the potential to be practices in the future, but institutional corruption and acquisitiveness is such that there is barely any evidence of practice-like
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This seems to be both a reasonable description of what accounting (including social accounting) is all about, and makes a reasonable case for the excellence of the products and services which accounting provides.
Replacing the chess player with an accounting graduate, the desire for candy with a desire for wealth, we can paraphrase MacIntyre, stating that…so long as it is the money alone which provides the graduate with a good reason for practicing accounting, the graduate has no reason not to cheat and every reason to cheat, provided he or she can do so successfully.
It is also the case here, as we have discussed previously, that it is particularly other practitioners who are able to appreciate those standards of excellence—the beautiful code in this case. Users of the code may appreciate the functionality of the program that results, but it is unlikely that they will be able to appreciate the way in which this is achieved.
In this, there is the sense of the narrative quest and the logic of the unity of a life which we came across in Chapter 5—in other words, how this practice fits within a particular practitioner’s sense of who she is, and how this practice should be ordered with other practices to realize her overall telos.
Asking managers to locate their organization as it is currently onto this framework, and then to project forward to where it might be heading, encourages some organizational analysis which might then lead to a consideration of whether it wishes to be where it is and where it is going, and potentially to put in place some of the design parameters which were introduced in Chapter 7 in such a way as to crowd in virtue.
We need to feel the harsh realities of organizational life, and not just in shareholder-owned and listed companies with all the pressures created by the financial markets as was the case here, but in organizations of all types. But are there more positive examples and what might we learn from these?
Several suffered dislocation to their careers and loss of income as a result, but did so by choosing to seek alternative employment in other financial services organizations.
In this they exercised what we called in Chapter 6 ‘exit’ rather than ‘voice’, but in doing so they were promoting the practice of traditional banking as they saw it, and prioritizing internal over external goods in their own lives.
Virtue is about living, breathing people, where they have come from and who they are, and the commitments they have both to other individuals and to particular practices and institutions, and how to work from there to maintain the good of one’s own life.
All of this indicates that, while constrained, moral agency is possible.
We explored this in detail in Chapter 5, of course, so there is no need to rehearse this here. But it is clear that both objectively in the purpose of the activities in which they were engaged and, perhaps even more obviously, in relation to the subjective dimension of their work, these practitioners were striving to find meaning in their lives through their work.
The concern with the pressures imposed by financial markets is obviously, in MacIntyre’s terminology, that it forces an overemphasis on external goods to the detriment of the internal goods of the practice, such that corporations in that position may tend to get the balance wrong.
But what this points to is the essential role of external goods in enabling practices to flourish. While we might want to criticize some organizations, particularly some business organizations, for prioritizing external over internal goods, the opposite position—inadequate external goods—simply means that the practice is starved of resources, and its practitioners will therefore find the pursuit of excellence difficult if not impossible.
While the answers to such questions come, to some extent, with experience, the point is again one we have come across before; that in addition to technical skills, practitioners require the virtues, and they do so partly because there are always choices to be made.
And this also reinforces the point that there is an inescapable moral dimension to practices.
And, as we have seen in relation to several of the practices we have already covered in this chapter, entering the practice entails a particular range of commitments, some of which may be realized by practitioners only over time as nurses immerse themselves in their practice.
While we tend to think of the virtues as being developed outside of organizations and transferred in, as it were, this is suggesting, as with surgeons, that the opposite move is also possible; that we can come to possess and exercise virtues in and through organizations, and then transfer them to other parts of our lives.
We recognized in Chapter 6 that managers, however senior, should never leave the core practice of the organization behind them, not least because it is the practice which they are managing, and in a sense these examples reinforce and extend this point.
The approach argued for here does not conceive of ethics-as-strategy, indeed quite the reverse, even though working through the implications of this way of approaching organizational ethics might very well have strategic implications.
