Excellence: capturing Aristotelian notions of meaning and purpose

Abstract

In this paper we argue that conventional models for excellence are too narrow, too internally focused, too instrumental and too functionalist to achieve excellence in dealing with broad emerging socio-economic concerns. We try to show that Aristotle's theory of virtue has useful contemporary relevance and can be developed and used to understand a fuller notion of business excellence.We develop a qualitative research instrument to discover and illustrate excellence and to establish its modern nature. Our application of virtue demonstrated that purpose was key to achieving excellence. We find that virtue theory can be a useful and practical guide to producing excellence.