Abstract
A classic theme in the sociology of work is the tension between organizational and professional values, which itself is a variation on grander themes of power and autonomy. Expert workers fight to determine the ends and control the means of their activities while organizations struggle to channel their work toward attaining organizational ends. In universities, for example, administrators and faculty battle over academic freedom. This can make for high drama, as in the popular TV series about a physician and his assistant pursuing a controversial research agenda in the face of conservative opposition from the medical school and hospital administrators. Masters and Johnson’s work is today regarded as pathbreaking, so perhaps we may say that the professionals won that one.
Michel Anteby’s Manufacturing Morals engages with this enduring theme through a case study of Anteby’s own experiences as a newly minted PhD taking up a position as an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Business, which he and his colleagues call “the School.” Early in his time at the School, Anteby found himself journaling about his experiences. He gradually arrived at the idea of recording them more systematically to use as data for a study of how an organization socializes new members and communicates its values in the process.
If their graduate departments succeed, novice assistant professors arrive on campus having just completed an experience laced with challenges and adversities designed, among other purposes, to create people who trust their own expertise and are confident that they know what work is worth doing and when it is done well. The challenge for university departments is in getting these new members to adopt the organization’s vision of what work is important, worthwhile, and estimable. This challenge is easier to surmount if the values of the sending and receiving departments are consonant. One way to ensure this is to hire one’s own graduates, either straight out of the gate or after some time at another institution—as indeed the School frequently has.
Different kinds of organizations have various means at their disposal for inducing new members to be open to resocialization. Universities have a particularly powerful tool in the form of an extended probationary period with a highly consequential conclusion. Postulants who demonstrate that they embrace and will fulfill the organization’s vision of what their work should be receive the prize of lifetime job security. Those whom the organization decides are rejecting its vision—whether because they choose not to fulfill it or are unable to do so—get fired, and their contributions while at the university are quietly erased from collective memory, so that the organization need not be challenged by its failures.
Anteby’s account includes an analysis of a body of pedagogical tools, the School’s collectively produced teaching notes, which are passed on from generation to generation of instructors. These describe in minute detail how to teach a class on a given business case study, including suggestions about how to handle predicted tangents in class discussions and at which minute into a class period to introduce a specific idea. Anteby also documents other ways in which the School deploys its tremendous resources to gently, seemingly inexorably re-form new members. Readers who are faculty at less wealthy institutions may feel some envy. But they may also feel some gratitude that their own schools are not so creepily successful as the School at creating the total institution-like experience of resocialization that Anteby describes. Not only his colleagues, but support staff, students, and facilities workers are constantly reminding him of who he is supposed to be and what he should and should not be doing. In a telling illustration, Anteby describes a day he ran out of post-it notes. His assistant and others at the School had by this point successfully taught him that Harvard professors do not solve such problems for themselves. However, his assistant was out of the office. So, rather than walking over to the bookstore himself, Anteby telephoned his spouse and asked for a delivery of office supplies; the spouse declined. Anteby’s point is that this was more than just a mundane moment of self-absorption. Rather, it was the result of a powerful reshaping of the self that affects not only one’s work but one’s personality and one’s relationships outside work.
Anteby uses the term “vocal silence” to signify how the School is explicit about how to do work but not about the proper choice of ultimate ends or purposes. The teaching notes are detailed instructions about how to teach a specific case, but not what the case’s overall message should be. The notes and the cases nonetheless communicate consistent themes. For example, many cases teach that history is driven by personal choices made by individuals with a high level of agency, rather than by luck or circumstance. Many valorize working as an executive, comparing it to fighting a war, where the stakes are very high, the battles are “individual,” and it is “heroic figures” who win (p. 81). In the classroom, ideally, “the students, not the instructor, voice compelling arguments and articulate the lessons learned” (p. 63): the instructor leads them to the deeper messages, which students then “discover” as their own.
Anteby’s clean writing makes the book a pleasure to read. His work nicely illustrates the genius of this model of elite socialization. No one has to tell him and his colleagues what is important. The real work of creating the new person desired by the organization is accomplished bit by bit and day by day, through hundreds of ordinary interactions and routine practices, shaping a new self from the outside in, replacing the professional scholar’s values with the organization’s own. Manufacturing Morals illuminates how these organizations so often win.