Macintyre and the Manager

Alasdair MacIntyre is generally regarded as the most interesting, influential, and provocative figure in moral philosophy today. He is a strong critic of the cruder forms of liberalism which he takes to be responsible for confusion of contemporary moral and political culture. MacIntyre focuses upon three `characters', each of which he takes to be emblematic of our age: the Aesthete, the Therapist and the Manager. A `character' is a fusion of a specific role with a specific personality type in such a way that it emphasizes and celebrates the moral ideas of a particular culture. MacIntyre takes modern `characters' to reflect the doctrine of emotivism which holds that moral discussions are no more than attempts by one party to alter the preferences and feelings of another party so that they accord with their own. Emotivism removes the possibility of treating people as ends, as rational beings; moral debate, from this perspective, is fundamentally manipulative. The Aesthete treats other people as a means to achieve his/her own ends—the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of boredom; the Therapist is concerned with the technique of the treatment of individuals, not the values of the goals they pursue; and the Manager—the focus of this article—is exclusively concerned with the pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness, leaving the task of fixing purpose and evaluating goals to others. All three `characters' eschew moral debate regarding questions of ends as beyond systematic rational assessment. It is this notion of `character' that is the starting point for this article. If MacIntyre is correct and the Manager is one of the key `characters' of our times, there ought to be more debate amongst those of us concerned with organizations. The purpose of this article is to outline MacIntyre's argument, to indicate some of the support it commands in the literature of organizational behaviour and to pass comment upon both the ideas and the literature.