Relationships of virtue: rethinking the goods of civil association

Abstract

This paper focuses, not on the existing conditions of institutional association, but on hoped-for conditions that would have to be met for professional relationships within higher education to aspire to what Aristotle referred to as ‘virtuous friendship’. Such relationships, it is argued, constitute the social content of hope in that they look to new perspectives on institutional renewal and professional regeneration. They provide a context of mutuality and reciprocity within which individuals can begin to realise, through the acquisition of ‘functional capabilities’, their particular capacities. The question then arises as to the conditions necessary for generating and sustaining such relationships within the increasingly differentiated and stratified institutional settings of the higher education sector and across an academic workforce that has become fractionalised and atomised around increasingly complex divisions of academic labour. It is that question which this paper seeks to address. ‘Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended’ (Hall, 1995, p. 27)