Abstract
Can organizational routines produce morality? Manufacturing Morals examines the standard organizational conflict between routinization and morality: standardization, including scripted behavior, permits an actor less discretion and removes responsibility. How do organizations thus imbue meaning in their standardized activities? More specifically, what role do standard scripts for how to do things—and the gaps between scripts, what Michel Anteby calls “vocal silence”—allow for organizational control and change? Sometimes organizations are deliberately silent, even in scripted interactions, and an individual must make a decision with only general guidelines. It is in the space where an individual is allowed to use discretion and a variety of views can exist, Anteby argues, that morality can be made.
Anteby conducted his research for five years as a “participant observer,” while an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School (HBS; also the School). Although about business education, the book is really about organizational culture writ large and thus could be applied to any large organization. We already know organizations can use silence to produce a particular moral perspective, but often think about this insidiously—as a form of control. Here, Anteby theorizes that silence has the potential to be a positive thing. It is the difference between using silence to dictate, and silence to permit. Rather than thinking about silence as something that masks a particular set of values one wants to remain hidden, Anteby theorizes vocal silence as a way of allowing morality to be created.
As an analysis of how organizations such as universities socialize individuals into loyalty to the reigning values, such as what it takes to get tenure, the book is top-notch. The chapters on publication and teaching are the most theoretically valuable, because of the generalizability across organizations. Readers will be familiar with the ubiquitousness of silence to cue us into the values of the organization when those values are ambiguous or cannot otherwise be spelled out. At the School, the issue of relevance of one’s publications takes the typical uncertainty behind tenure even farther. “Relevant” publications (and to some extent, one’s teaching) must advance business practices and have real world managerial implications, but “its nature still often proves elusive” (p. 39).
Routinization through scripts is even stronger in teaching. Like other business schools, Harvard relies on the case method, but at Harvard the professors often write and teach their own or colleagues’ cases. These cases are often adopted at other B-schools, another opportunity to demonstrate one’s competence. The teaching of cases at the School is a very fine-tuned routine, however, uniform across sections, complete with teaching plans, rehearsals, and seasoned section leaders. Each case is taught in roughly the same fashion, down to notes on how students typically respond and how to regain control if the case discussion goes off track or if students ask an “inappropriate” question, about, say, unions. “With respect to teaching and other activities, all but morals appear to be scripted” (p. 13, emphasis in original). Teaching is a collective performance, choreographed but also customized.
This short volume is also a delightful ethnographic account of the ways in which the material culture of the campus, offices, and classrooms—space, landscaping (down to the squirrels!), architecture, furniture, even clothing is scripted so as to shape the organizational culture, creating insularity, timelessness, cohesion, and privilege. One gets the impression of a well-oiled machine; everyone pulling together for the good of the organization.
The metaphor is apt—a machine, perhaps, but without character, without overt principles. The teaching of cases is highly scripted, but to what end, in terms of student socialization? Anteby himself is somewhat silent on what exactly he means by “morality.” Sociologists might instead use the terms professional expectations, perspective, or even ideology (although these can have moral underpinnings). At times, HBS sees its task as constructing business as a more principled “higher calling,” a goal that would lead to a heightened sense of social responsibility (or at least civility) in students. Yet professors studiously avoid having normative discussions about business cases. Students are supposed to decide for themselves, supposedly given some guidelines for “moral awakening,” but there is no structure for thinking through multiple interpretations and then choosing one to guide actions. Elsewhere, the emphasis is even vaguer, merely to create “better business standards.”
What, for example, is the moral message in the notion of “relevance” of one’s publications? Sociologically, the notion of academic “purity,” however you establish it, is less about morality than it is about upping the ante, setting Harvard at a higher standard from other schools as a means of heightening its collective eminence. The moral work is actually the maintenance of the HBS model, in a self-perpetuating way. HBS is good, therefore upholding the school is prima facie a moral good. I wonder, what message is conveyed about privilege when students realize that their professors don’t have to open their own mail? Or buy their own snacks between classes (aides bring them)? Or wipe their own boards?
On the surface, professors are not providing normative messages about how to do business. In discussing cases without overt moral content, students are encouraged to be analytic but not reflective. As Anteby acknowledges, however, some of the more subtle messages of the cases include: individuals surmount challenges; failure happens—often if one reacts too emotionally—but ultimately successes outweigh failure; change is and ought to be gradual, not radical; conflict ought to be avoided; and finally, what executives do is important and business operation has high stakes. Overall, what students are taught is that meritocratic individualism always triumphs over structural constraints.
HBS has repeatedly avoided establishing a code of business ethics. Professors are socialized to provide a moral education but hamstrung from providing any specific moral guidance, with the hope that silence will speak volumes; that underspecification of morals will lead to positive outcomes. “Scripting vocal silence might seem like a risky solution, partly because it relies on the hope that, at the individual level, the desired perspective will almost magically emerge” (p. 16). But does it? Anteby is himself reticent on this topic, although his reference to recent financial scandals involving HBS graduates suggests that the answer is no. He does discuss the shortcomings of vocal silence, including high reliance on the correct composition of the membership, reluctance to change, and the heightened conflict faced by minority members with regard to vocal silence.
This ultimate weakness of the book of course points to its profound strength: the book perfectly illustrates the tension between providing an illustrative insider’s perspective and the ability to be fully critical of the very socialization process one is undergoing (Anteby was on the tenure track at the time). There is really nothing more he can do than draw attention to this limitation of the study; however, by doing so, it is an excellent demonstration of how thoroughly HBS professors are socialized. Even reading his study in light of these limitations, it is fascinating and nuanced. I would highly recommend it for courses in organizations and organizational behavior.