Institutions and moral agency: the case of Scottish banking

Angus Robson,Ron Beadle

doi:10.1017/s1744137419000092

Abstract

AbstractIt has been an enduring concern of institutional economics and critical realism to understand how individuals are able to exercise agency in the context of social structures, and to maintain appropriate connections, separations and balances between these two levels of causal power. This paper explores the contribution of Alasdair MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian philosophy to the topic. Empirical data are provided from the career narratives of senior Scottish bankers recalled in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/8. The method of the study is interpretive, using themes drawn from MacIntyre's writings. These bankers faced moral choices as tensions developed between their own professional standards and the new corporate goals of the banks. We discuss MacIntyre's understanding of individual moral agency as a narrative quest in the context of different types of institution with different and often conflicting ideas about what constitutes good or right action. Habituation and deliberation are important in enabling action, but fully developed moral agency also depends on individuals being able to make choices in the space opened up by tensions within and between institutions.

Highlights

There has been an enduring interest in the relationship between agency and structure in social theory, which has been characterised in recent years by an effort to achieve an appropriate balance between the constraints placed upon individuals by social structures, and the freedom of individuals to act within and to shape their social context (Archer, 2002; Elder-Vass, 2007; Giddens, 2014; Hodgson, 2007; MacIntyre, 1999b)
Building on previous discussions of the comparative approaches of Geoff Hodgson and Margaret Archer (Fleetwood, 2008; Fuller, 2013), here we explore Alasdair MacIntyre’s contribution to the topic through an empirical study of the career histories of senior Scottish bankers, and we situate this relative to approaches in critical realism and institutional economics, represented by Archer (2003) and Hodgson (2004)
We formulate a version of the question of agency as follows: How do individuals exercise moral agency in the context of institutions? We seek to answer the question by discussing a particular context, provided by empirical evidence from a group of banking leaders in Scotland, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/8

Summary

Introduction

There has been an enduring interest in the relationship between agency and structure in social theory, which has been characterised in recent years by an effort to achieve an appropriate balance between the constraints placed upon individuals by social structures, and the freedom of individuals to act within and to shape their social context (Archer, 2002; Elder-Vass, 2007; Giddens, 2014; Hodgson, 2007; MacIntyre, 1999b). We formulate a version of the question of agency as follows: How do individuals exercise moral agency in the context of institutions? We seek to answer the question by discussing a particular context, provided by empirical evidence from a group of banking leaders in Scotland, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/8. We set out the empirical evidence, showing our participants’ accounts of transition in the Scottish banking sector between the 1980s and the 2000s, together with a snapshot of each individual career narrative. We interpret these accounts from the perspective of MacIntyre’s understanding of the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.

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