TOWARD A CROSS-CULTURAL VIRTUE ETHICS PARADIGM OF MEANINGFUL WORK: ARISTOTELIANISM AND BUDDHISM (original) (raw)
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Virtue Ethics and Meaningful Work: A Contemporary Buddhist Approach
2019
This study adds to the existing literature on meaningful work by presenting a contemporary virtue-focused Buddhist view. While a virtue-ethics interpretation of Buddhism is now widely accepted and has been applied to several issues, not much has been written about meaningful work using a Buddhist-Aristotelian comparative framework. To develop a Buddhist approach, I draw heavily on the works of Buddhist scholars, particularly in the West who use a virtue framework in interpreting Buddhism. The aims of my essay are dual. The first is to articulate a straightforward application of Buddhism to the contemporary ethical discussion of meaningful work. The second is to discuss the similarities, clarify the differences, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses relative to each other of the Buddhist and the Western virtue theories. In my analysis, I argue that while Buddhism is not an alternative to Western virtue theory, it offers significant contributions to the latter’s approach to mea...
Business Ethics Quarterly, 2012
ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries.
Understanding the Subjective Dimension of Work from a Buddhist Perspective
Humanities Bulletin, 2020
The notion of the subjective dimension of work has its roots in Catholic Social Teaching. This essay offers a Buddhist perspective on this topic. Although there is no distinction between the subjective-objective dimensions of work in traditional Buddhist texts, Buddhist teaching on karma contains implicit affirmation of the subjective dimension of work as the source of the morality of work, and this notion is a useful explanatory framework in understanding right livelihood in contemporary setting. While Buddhist perspective on subjectivity of work is consistent with the view of Catholic Social Teaching, consideration of Buddhism in our conceptualization of the subjective dimension of work will challenge us to revise and expand the concept and practice of meaningful work to integrate the wellbeing of workers, interpersonal relationships, meditative practice (mindfulness) and concern for the environment.
This chapter considers empirical research into meaningful work from the perspective of the virtues. Research conducted over more than half a century has isolated a number of dimensions that animate the experience of meaningful work and a number of desirable consequences that are associated with it including improved job performance and job satisfaction. Research is fragmented however and there is no generally agreed explanatory framework though many potential candidates. A second significant problem in the field is the repeated finding that not all employees experience meaningfulness in jobs whose characteristics suggest that they should and that some employees craft meaning into otherwise mundane work. As a result of this some ethicists have maintained that meaningful work is an inherently subjective notion and therefore that it cannot function as the type of good that can be the subject of ethical claims. A MacIntyrean virtue ethics perspective overcomes this objection, in part because it accounts for the apparent subjectivity in the attributions of meaningfulness in terms of the virtues that agents have developed, or failed to develop. The case for meaningful work is its necessity to the development of the virtues.
Journal of Business Ethics, 2021
This paper argues that the principles of spiritual traditions provide normative ‘standards of goodness’ within which practitioners evaluate meaningful work. Our comparative study of practitioners in the Buddhist and Quaker traditions provide a fine-grained analysis to illuminate, that meaningfulness is deeply connected to particular tradition-specific philosophical and theological ideas. In the Buddhist tradition, meaningfulness is temporal and rooted in Buddhist principles of non-attachment, impermanence and depending-arising, whereas in the Quaker tradition, the Quaker testimonies and theological ideas frame meaningfulness as eternal. Surprisingly, we find that when faced with unethical choices and clashes between organizational normativity and spiritual normativity, Buddhist practitioners acknowledge the temporal character of meaningfulness and compromise their moral values, whereas in contrast, Quaker practitioners morally disengage from meaningless work. Our study highlights ho...
Filipino Virtue Ethics and Meaningful Work
Humanities Bulletin, 2021
A number of paradigms have been proposed to understand the sources of meaningful work, but a non-Western approach has attracted little attention. This study aims to make a theoretical contribution toward an understanding of meaningful work from a virtue-ethics framework that is culturally meaningful and relevant to Filipino realities and their distinct cultural heritage. It develops a paradigm for a Filipino view of meaningful work that could guide both researchers and practitioners in business ethics by defining what is meaningful work, explaining why it is important, and presenting some examples of concrete measures that management can utilize to promote meaningful work in the Philippine workplace.
Journal of Business Ethics
The literature on meaningful work often highlights the role of leaders in creating a sense of meaning in the work or tasks that their staff or followers carry out. However, a fundamental question arises about whether or not leaders are morally responsible for providing meaningful work when perceptions of what is meaningful may differ between leaders and followers. Drawing on Buddhist ethics and interviews with thirty-eight leaders in Vietnam who practise ‘engaged Buddhism’ in their leadership, we explore how leaders understand their roles in creating meaningfulness at work and their perceptions of how employees experience their leadership approach in this respect. On the basis of Buddhist ontology on the sense of meaningfulness, we introduce a number of leadership approaches in cultivating meaning at work that question the argument that leaders are primarily responsible for enabling or satisfying employees’ search for meaning. The study provides an alternative lens through which to ...
Thematic Symposium Editorial: Virtue Ethics Between East and West
Journal of Business Ethics, 2019
Virtue ethics is widely recognized as one of three major approaches in contemporary moral philosophy and arguably the most influential normative theory in business ethics. Despite its rich pedigree in Western and Eastern philosophy, most work in contemporary virtue ethics is part of the Western tradition. The purpose of this Thematic Symposium is to foster dialogue between Western and Eastern conceptions of virtue in business and engage them with questions about the nature, justification, and content of the virtues in each tradition. This Editorial offers a brief introduction to the problem, a summary of Western and Eastern varieties of virtue ethics, an overview of the six articles included in this Thematic Symposium, and a section with five common themes for further exploration and future collaborative research (namely, the centrality of rites and rituals, the normative status of social relationships and organizations, role modeling, the analogy of families and communities to define the business corporation, and the definition of social responsibilities).
Oxford Scholarship Online
Virtue at Work is about good organizations, good managers, and good people, and how these can contribute to good communities. It is aimed at practitioners—principally managers at all levels and in all kinds of organizations. It provides an integrated and philosophically grounded framework which enables a coherent approach to organizations and organizational ethics from the perspective of practitioners in the workplace, of managers in organizations, as well as of organizations themselves. The philosophical grounding comes from the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In line with MacIntyre’s own commitments, the book makes philosophy down to earth and practical. It provides a new way of understanding ethics and organizations which is both realistic and attractive, but also challenging. It also provides tough but realistic suggestions in order to put this approach into practice. Virtue at Work not only applies theory in a readable and compelling manner, but also shows how this ...