MacIntyre’s Critique of Management

Abstract

What MacIntyre says of management has always been highly critical. This account of his critique focusses on After Virtue. It first discusses the book’s subversion of managerial claims to expertise by attacking their justification in claims of social scientific certainty, before moving on to his critique of managers’ characteristic manipulation of their subordinates. Such manipulation, he argued, demonstrates that the emotive usage of moral terms has become detached from their meaning within a once coherent scheme of teleological ethics. The reformation of such a scheme must resist the modern fragmentation of morality and compartmentalization of life, and such resistance must begin from ordinary moral agents’ resistance to their disempowerment and demoralization through their systemic subordination to institutionalized management.