REVIEWS
“Michel Anteby’s spare but well-chosen words offer an up-close and personal look at the inner workings of what many call the West Point of American capitalism. Theory and reflexivity intermingle as the quotidian manners and mores, rituals and routines absorbed by junior faculty members at the school are put forth and sharply interrogated. Manufacturing Morals is a deft reimagining of organizational silence as sometimes a message, a provocation, a comfort, or an excuse.”
— John Van Maanen, MIT
“In this first-rate organizational ethnography, Michel Anteby describes the ethos of a premier institution and how it shapes the worldviews and moral rules-in-use of its faculty, staff, and students.”
— Robert Jackall, author of Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
“Manufacturing Morals demolishes conventional notions about business and morality as separate spheres. With Michel Anteby as our expert guide we are taken into an extraordinary journey of how Harvard Business School constructs its complex moral world. With exquisite style, subtle arguments, and fascinating observations, Anteby lays out a new theory of organizational morality. A crucial contribution to the sociology of organizations and culture.”
— Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy
“Delivering a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the Harvard Business School, Michel Anteby powerfully reveals how this consequential institution does its work. His elegant writing carefully uncovers how the organizational culture combines a logic of profit maximization with moral concerns. This book is a must read for business students and faculty and for social scientists interested in higher education, evaluation, and the making of the American upper and upper middle classes.”
— Michèle Lamont, author of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment
"Anteby's Manufacturing Morals is the first [book] I’ve seen that describes HBS from a professor’s point of view. Anteby, an associate professor of organizational behavior, turns his experience of being hired by and teaching at HBS into an ethnographic study that explores how the 'way we do things around here' is communicated to the faculty—a highly skilled and highly independent workforce. In doing so, he’s written a book that works on several levels."
— Strategy + Business
“If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a faculty member at Harvard Business School, Manufacturing Morals is the place to start….It’s notoriously difficult to study elites, but Anteby intrepidly pulls the veil.”
— American Journal of Sociology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Routinizing Morals
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0000
[Routines, Morals, Silence, Socialization, Formal Organization, Higher Education, Business Education, Max Weber, John Van Maanen, Robin Leidner]
The introduction sets up the empirical puzzle for the book, namely, whether morals can really be written into a script. At first glance, the answer seems to be no. Routines enable people to act without much thinking; by contrast, moral judgments require individual volition. The book's findings point, however, to a largely overlooked way to reconcile this contradiction, namely by scripting vocal silence. Vocal silence is an organizational routine that calls for significant decision-making on the part of those involved with little direct guidance from higher-ups. Because the settings for such routines are rich in indirect signs, variation in outcomes remains contained. Thus, vocal silence refrains from fully stabilizing what is ultimately assumed to grow from an individual's private judgment. Besides setting up the empirical puzzle and summarizing the book's main argument, the introduction also presents an overview of the study's context (i.e., Harvard Business School) and its methodological approach (i.e., an auto-ethnography), and outlines the book's chapters. (pages 1 - 16)
One: A Footbridge to the World
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0001
[Campus, Physical setting, Architecture, Urban sociology, Robert E. Park, Herbert Gans, Mario Luis Small, Harvard Business School]
This chapter is a guided visit to the Harvard Business School's physical environment. The chapter suggests an attempt to transform a densely populated community into a more ordered one and points to the harmonious coexistence on campus of distinct populations, such as faculty, staff, and students. It depicts a stratified small town as a natural setting for activity and provides the first and most evident vocal background at the School. (pages 17 - 34)
Two: Reshaping Academic Purity
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0002
[Academic publishing, Academic labor market, Academic purity, Relevance, Diane Crane, David Riesman, Fritz Roethlisberger]
This chapter shows how the School's ordering enterprise extends beyond the physical campus to the academic labor market as well. The promotion of a distinct perspective within the faculty is shown to rely essentially on assessing performance according to a fairly School-specific formula. Many other schools and universities enforce a "publish-or-perish" model that outsources the assessment of their faculties' performance to guardians of academic subfields, but the School's parallel focus on managerial relevance adds complexity to this assessment. At the School, something deemed almost sacred (i.e., relevance) is perceived as equally important as scholarship. Many incoming junior faculty members find the School's scholarly norms to be at odds with those they learned during their training. For instance, newcomers gradually grasp that conducting relevant research is different from simply conducting research. Similarly, disseminating their research findings to a broader audience, including non-academics, is novel for many incoming faculty members. By creating a new metric to assess academic purity, the School promotes a fairly vocal view of business scholarship. (pages 35 - 50)
Three: Preaching in Silence
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0003
[Harvard Business School, Teaching, Courses, Classrooms, Case Method Teaching , Business Education, Higher Education, Self-Discovery]
This chapter describes a typical teaching session from start to finish at the Harvard Business School, and documents the School's many supporting routines designed to facilitate skilful in-class delivery. From pre-teaching faculty group meetings to pre-session reviews of which students to call on during upcoming class discussions, much organizational effort goes into ensuring consistent delivery of courses. In contrast to matters of delivery, a session's take-away--particularly its moral lesson--is relatively free of direct organizational guidance. The chapter concludes with a quote from a School dean describing the difficulty of finding lecturers "at once practical and elevating, without being 'preachy.'" (pages 51 - 70)
Four: (Un)Scripted Journeys
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0004
[Business Education, Teaching, Case Method Teaching, Teaching Note, Archival Analysis, Morals, Business Ethics, Corporate Morals]
This chapter reports on an analysis of a random sample of teaching notes from the first-year MBA curriculum at Harvard Business School. First-year MBA students are divided into sub-groups, called sections, with close to ninety students each. The section provides a highly social small-world experience in which faculty members are partly entrusted with students' learning. All sections follow a similar curriculum. The teaching notes that accompany most class sessions help faculty members prepare their courses and might predetermine outcomes. Analysis shows, however, that while much is scripted in these notes (e.g., the leading question with which to open the discussion of a case), the actual overarching purpose of the cases remains largely unspecified. In that sense, teaching notes support the development of partially discretionary behavior among faculty members. (pages 71 - 88)
Five: Doing What Others Don't
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0005
[Division of Labor, Higher Education, Emile Durkheim, Discretion, Student Grading, Consulting, Faculty Income]
This chapter delves deeper into faculty members' non-teaching activities to better understand what faculty perspectives might be favored at the Harvard Business School. Besides teaching, for instance, faculty members are also expected to patrol continued community membership. They need to decide which students who underperform academically (i.e., those who "hit the screen") are deemed worthy of continued membership. In addition, faculty members are expected to command proper earnings when taking on external jobs (e.g., consulting engagements). By proper earnings, I mean either earnings high enough to align with the School's prestige or, when the work is deemed "worthy," no earnings at all. Again, faculty members enjoy discretion when deciding which students are deemed worthy of membership or what faculty work is deemed worthy of forsaking compensation. (pages 89 - 108)
Six: Selecting Faculty in the Proper Spirit
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0006
[Faculty Recruiting, Harvard Business School, Academic Labor Market, Inbreeding, Research Associate, Insecurity, Theodor Caplow, Reece J. McGee]
Given the uncertainty surrounding faculty members' discretionary behaviors, this chapter examines the "quality control" needed in such an organizational model. Vocal silence only functions because it is left to the discretion of "known" individuals in a context rich in indirect signs. This chapter shows that, to achieve consistency, the School historically relied on a cadre of mostly internally trained faculty members--namely, individuals whose highest academic degrees were conferred by the School or by Harvard University. The chapter details the faculty recruiting and exit process, the changing faculty pipeline, and suggests that shifts in faculty composition that are too dramatic can easily undermine the School's capacity to manage quality control and lead to slippage in the preferred perspective. (pages 109 - 122)
Conclusion: Vocal Silence
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226092508.003.0007
[Routines, Morals, Social Control, Silence, Vocal Silence, Corporate Morals, Emile Durkheim, Gideon Kunda, Calvin Morrill, Norbert Elias]
The book's conclusion revisits the question of the hopes and limits of routinizing moral pursuits in light of the above analyses. First, it presents a summary of the vocal silence solution to the problem of routinizing morals. In doing so, key attributes of the vocal silence model are discussed: (a) the gradual approach toward attaining higher morals; (b) the high reliance on its members to enact morals; (c) the fact that minority members are more likely to feel conflicted in such a model than in ones relying on more direct control; and (d) the inherent immaturity of such a model. Implications for our understanding of higher education and corporate morals are also discussed. In particular, the conclusion posits that in the corporate world, being relatively silent about endorsing any unique moral perspective might be a form of morals. (pages 123 - 142)
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Data and Methods
Notes
References
Index
