Manufacturing Morals
The Values of Silence in Business School Education
272 pages
|
18 halftones, 1 line drawing, 2 tables
|
6 x 9
|
© 2013
Corporate accountability is never far from the front page, and as one of the world’s most elite business schools, Harvard Business School trains many of the future leaders of Fortune 500 companies. But how does HBS formally and informally ensure faculty and students embrace proper business standards? Relying on his first-hand experience as a Harvard Business School faculty member, Michel Anteby takes readers inside HBS in order to draw vivid parallels between the socialization of faculty and of students.
In an era when many organizations are focused on principles of responsibility, Harvard Business School has long tried to promote better business standards. Anteby’s rich account reveals the surprising role of silence and ambiguity in HBS’s process of codifying morals and business values. As Anteby describes, at HBS specifics are often left unspoken; for example, teaching notes given to faculty provide much guidance on how to teach but are largely silent on what to teach. Manufacturing Morals demonstrates how faculty and students are exposed to a system that operates on open-ended directives that require significant decision-making on the part of those involved, with little overt guidance from the hierarchy. Anteby suggests that this model—which tolerates moral complexity—is perhaps one of the few that can adapt and endure over time.
Manufacturing Morals is a perceptive must-read for anyone looking for insight into the moral decision-making of today’s business leaders and those influenced by and working for them.
John Van Maanen, MIT
“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.”
Robert Jackall, author of Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
“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.”
Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy
“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.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
Google preview here
Economics and Business: Business--Business Economics and Management Studies
Education: Higher Education
Sociology: Occupations, Professions, Work
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
