Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education by Michel Anteby

Abstract

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education by Michel Anteby David Colander Michel Anteby. Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 248 pp. ISBN-13-978-0-09247-8, $25.00 (cloth); 13-978-0-09250-8, $18.00 (e-book). This is a book about what goes on behind the scenes in the Harvard MBA program. It is written by Michel Anteby, a sociologist/anthropologist, [End Page 477] and is presented as a follow up to his ethnography of a factory, Regulation in an Aeronautics Plant. In this new book, Anteby looks at Harvard Business School (HBS), as an anthropologist might look at Trobriand Islanders. What is unusual about the project is that the author is (or at least was, when the book was written and published) a HBS professor—so he is both the watcher and one of the watched. The book is a combination of description and interpretation of those descriptions (What it is like to be an HBS professor, and what implicit rules guide the school?) and integration of the description and interpretations into the author’s broader sociological sensibility. It consists of eight chapters, six of which describe various aspects of the HBS experience. These chapters look at issues such as how the case method works, the nature of the socialization process of a new professor, the implicit understandings and rules that guide HBS professors, and the promotion and advancement process. These chapters are sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion that put the observations in a sociological/anthropological theoretical context and draw out relevant insights. (The title, Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education, gives the reader a succinct summary of those insights.) In addition to these eight chapters, there are a postscript and an appendix on methods and data. The description and interpretations part of the book is written for interested lay people such as myself. I enjoyed reading this part of the book and found it provocative and informative. It has nice discussions of issues such as the following: • How the case method—the distinguishing feature of HBS—is made into a useful method through lots of hard work and coordination among the various professors. • What is expected of HBS professors in terms of research and teaching—much more focus goes into teaching there than at most other colleges, including colleges and universities devoted to teaching. • What HBS professors are expected to do, such as dress appropriately (Brooks Brothers is highly recommended—I suspect not the 346 line, however). • What HBS professors are expected not to do—for example, hang a picture in one’s office, do one’s own bibliography, or pick up one’s own cleaning. Their concierge sees that all those are taken care of. The second part of the book is written more for the sociological/anthropological cognoscenti and is filled with the type of sociological jargon that C. Wright Mills lamented in his Sociological Imagination. [End Page 478] In this part of the book, the author develops his major theme—how vocal silence on moral issues is not silence at all; it simply hides unvocalized views that become built into the institutional structure—in this case, the HBS approach to teaching. The author sees this part of the book as addressing three main questions: 1. Whether morals can be transmitted on a large scale via organizational scripts and routines 2. Whether the process of scripted morals might modify or even destroy them 3. How morals might endure in organizations His answers are the following: 1. Morals cannot be written into scripts, but scripts can allow the prospect of morals to emerge. 2. Vocal silence is flexible, and morals can evolve without major organizational revisions. 3. It depends on how one defines morals. Although I agree with the sense of vocal silence—what reasonable observer cannot in this post-modern era?—I found the emphasis on it labored and lacking nuance. These issues have been explored deeply by modern and post-modern philosophers and methodologists, and I would have preferred that these issues were discussed within that context. Can One Watch Oneself...