9 Philosophy of Management Volume 7 Number 1 2008 Could We Know a Practice-Embodying Institution if We Saw One? Could We Know a Practice-Embodying Institution if We Saw One? 1 Samantha Coe & Ron Beadle This paper considers the resources MacIntyre provides for undertaking empirical work using his goods- virtues-practices-institutions framework alongside the attendant challenges of doing such work. It focuses on methods that might be employed in judging the extent to which observed social arrangements may conform to the standards required by a practice-embodying institution. It concludes by presenting the outline of an empirical project exploring at a music facility in the North East of England, The Sage Gateshead. Introduction What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which are already upon us. 2 It is important that the construction of such an alternative cannot begin from any kind of philosophical or theoretical statement. Where then does it begin? Only in the struggles, conflicts, and work of practice and in the attempt to find in and through dialogue with others who are engaged in such struggles, conflicts, and work an adequate local and particular institutional expression of our shared directedness towards our common goods. 3 Amongst the consistent elements of MacIntyre’s work has been the vision of a particular kind of community within which the virtues can flourish. Supporting this is a complex social theory in which engagement in tradition-constituted practices is either supported or undermined by institutional arrangements and the ideologies that inform them. MacIntyre demonstrates how virtues are developed by participation in community based projects, practice-embodying institutions 4 and practice-based communities with each institutional context supplying more extensive support. This paper intends to provoke debate and to provide resources for responding to MacIntyre’s call (in this Special Issue and elsewhere) for empirical work from which we can learn how to create and protect such communities. It begins with a discussion of the challenges of doing empirical work with MacIntyre’s goods-virtues-practices-institutions framework while paying appropriate regard to his long established views on methodology. Second, it discusses the particular challenges of doing empirical work around the question of identifying a practice-embodying institution. It concludes with an outline of a research project at The Sage Gateshead. Doing Empirics with MacIntyre From the earliest statement of the goods-virtues-practices-institutions framework in After Virtue to his paper in this special issue MacIntyre has called for empirical work to examine these ideas. 5 1 This paper has benefited greatly from review by Geoff Moore, Carter Crockett, Kelvin Knight and Jeffery Nicholas to whom we are happy to extend thanks. 2 MacIntyre A After Virtue: a study in moral theory – 2 nd Edition, London, Duckworth 1981 [1985] p245 3 Alasdair MacIntyre Ethics and Politics, Selected Essays Volume 2 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2006 p xi 4 MacIntyre introduces this concept to distinguish between different types of institution in respect of their relationship to practice in Alasdair MacIntyre ‘A Partial Response To My Critics’ in John Horton and Susan Mendus (Eds.) After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre London, Polity 1994 p290 5 Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue 2 nd Edition London, Duckworth 1981 [1985] p19