MacIntyre on Work as a Practice

This chapter offers an overview of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of work conceived as a practice. A social practice, on MacIntyre’s view, is a cooperative human activity whereby agents pursue goods that are internal to that form of activity and where their intellectual and moral capacities can be cultivated. Since practices are always embedded in specific institutional structures, this institutional context may be favourable, or unfavourable, to the practice of the virtues in a way that does not necessarily depend on the good (or bad) moral dispositions of the agents involved. The virtues are therefore fostered by certain types of social institution and endangered by others. The chapter explains MacIntyre’s account of social practices and analyses the relevance of this account for two central questions in contemporary philosophical approaches to work and labour: the issue of meaningful work, and debates around workplace governance.