Beyond MacIntyre: Grounding the business as practice debate

Alasdair MacIntyre’s distinction between institutions and practices helps illuminate
how powerful institutional forces frame and constrain the practice of organizational
research as well as the output and positioning of scholarly journals. Yet his
conceptual frame is limited, not least because it is unclear whether the activity of
managing is, or is not, a practice. This paper builds on MacIntyre’s ideas by
incorporating Aristotle’s concepts of poíēsis, praxis, téchnē and phrónēsis. Rather
than ask, following MacIntyre, whether management is a practice, this wider network
of concepts provides a richer frame for understanding the nature of managing and the
appropriate role for academia. The paper outlines a phronetic paradigm for
organizational inquiry, and concludes by briefly examining the implications of such a
paradigm for research and learning.