Manufacturing Morals. The Values of Silence in Business School Education

Citation

Matthew Brannan (2015), "Manufacturing Morals. The Values of Silence in Business School Education", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 134-136. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-01-2015-0004

Manufacturing Morals is an ethnographic account of junior faculty at Harvard Business School. It extends and builds upon a growing literature that has, as its focus, the activities of business schools and the processes involved in shaping the identities of staff and students alike. The elite context of this contribution, together with the author’s bona fide insider status, gives the account added interest and appeal.

Anteby, argues that “we need to better understand the specific way a given school or university ‘thinks’ in order to assess its broader role in society” (p. 139) and “Manufacturing Morals” attempts this by examining Harvard Business School’s DNA. The book is important because Harvard Business School is important; not just to the self-proclaimed managerial elite that graduate from it classrooms but perhaps more so for the countless employees who will serve under them and the “wannabe” business schools that caricature it.

Yet Manufacturing Morals is more than just a straight insider’s account. Whilst the book provides an excellent insight into the socialisation of faculty, the more general concern is to explore moral elements of practice at the School and more specifically, how moral codes are communicated and thus encouraged. Early in the text Anteby notes the relationship, or rather tension, between the School and its immediate environment. He claims the campus is a “separate, insular, ordered and fairly vocal world” (p. 18) and that the campus is relatively closed to the outside population nurturing feelings of elite privilege. The “consistency” of campus aesthetics produces order, architectural styles are complemented by the design of human traffic around the campus (vehicles are prohibited) and trash and deliveries are routed subterraneously. The lack of signage contributes to a feeling of “insiderness”, or exclusion and a pervading sense of order continues indoors where we find orderly description of orderly offices. Anteby explains how teams of estate workers ensure rooms are prepared for the arrival of new staff and any trace of previous incumbents are completely removed. Neatness required, “visual disturbance” (p. 27) avoided.

Assessing meaning and significance in any culture is grist to the ethnographer’s mill; here judgements about the performance and worth are based on publication of scholarly books and articles yet, unlike many institutions, scholarship that is deemed relevant is prized above all. Relevance appears a very vexed and ambiguous concept, open to interpretation and negotiation but deeply imbued with significance.

In the section “Preaching in Silence”, Anteby explores the culture of teaching at the School, the high regard in which teaching is held and the much-famed “case method” on which it is based. The imperative for good teaching, as defined by what students appreciate, is high and the author provides a vivid sense of the lateral control that students exert over faculty via teaching evaluations. Readers come to appreciate a palpable sense of the exercise of self-control that faculty exert over themselves, so that glitches in teaching become the stuff of ‘war or horror stories’ and generally understood euphemistically as “derailments”.

Teaching is compared to a “performance”: “[…] one in which most moves and steps are rehearsed many times before class” (p. 52). This metaphor seems to convey at least two meanings. First, in common with most institutions, there is a performance in the immediate sense of the instructor reviewing, planning and preparing for the session ahead, non-preparation being the ultimate taboo. In a dramaturgical sense we understand the performance as something “put on” for a specific audience. Detailed “teaching plans” provide scripted directions and prompts. Somewhat surprisingly, however, we also learn that, in a more literal sense, these classes are performances, or more precisely, reiterations of previous classes, “Teaching plans from previous years, some of which date back a decade, are circulated. Though each faculty member is free to teach as she or he wishes the norm is to try to adhere (at least once) to the plan” (p. 53). Ordering the class in very specific ways these plans cover class content, use of additional resources and even notes on how to engage participants in discussions and steer the minds of students. In addition teaching notes “capture the accumulated experience of various instructors who have taught the case and familiarise other instructors with the case’s various usages” (p. 72).

The account of teaching produces a sense of both continuity and conservatism, a kind of “one best way” for the classroom. Taken together, teaching plans and notes effectively produce a sort of petrification of learning. Rather than see this as potentially homogenous and stagnant, the author draws attention to the way in which processes are outlined but outcomes, expressed in terms of wider teaching goals, are not. Here and in the case method more generally, the objective is thus not to arrive at answers, nor solutions to the problems presented, but rather to help faculty and students identify questions in the first instance.

Herein lies what is perhaps most problematic in that outcomes are not defined but left to reflection on the part of the individuals, be it student or faculty. This is an important clue to the resolution of the author’s initial concerns with the practice of the communication and encouragement of moral behaviour. The assumptive rationale behind much of the author’s depiction of teaching at the School is always the agency and sovereignty of the individuals involved. This refers not only to the protagonists found on the pages of the case studies but also to students and faculty alike. Thus the cases provide both opportunities and pitfalls (p. 79), corporate life is seen itself as a performance in which actors determine their own destiny. Anteby offers a brief critique by acknowledging that analysis of cases are often more ambiguous and less certain than their classroom discussion would lead us to believe and that they typically rely upon rather out-dated notions of heroic action vs foolish action or cowardly inaction.

The division of labour within the School moulds character, or atleast sets expectations. Faculty labour is constituted both formally (teaching, research, grading) and informally (meeting students). In contrast to many academic settings, the division of labour is made more complex by extended hierarchical division. The existence of assistants for example, whilst the envy of many peers, also work to manufacture their own productive expectations. Having an assistant for “mundane” tasks of academic life, allows the author to “focus on other things” (p. 91), clearly removing potential excuses for non-productivity in culturally defined “core activity”. An attention to focus seems to lie at the heart of the organisational culture and effectively proscribes performance of roles for which one has not been appointed or trained, whether this be hanging a picture in their office or offering first response in a medical emergency. The enforcement which has powerful effects of inducing sense of shame in individual faculty members (p. 95) for both what is beyond their scope (p. 95) and those activities such as research that are deemed mandatory (p. 96) but not performed satisfactorily.

The School embraces strong notions of “service” and, like many academic institutions this includes service within the School, to the wider institution and to the broader discipline. Despite ideals and purposeful pursuits, money remains the “cardinal device by which values become rationalised” (p. 102) and Anteby gives two examples of this in terms of the pricing of faculty involved in charity auctions and the commanding of proper earnings for external engagement such as talks and consultancy. Both involve initial self-evaluation and setting of floor fees. Setting too low a fee is faux par and the setting of an appropriately high enough valuation becomes read as a form of service to the school as it “up holds and reflects the value of the School’s brand” (p. 104).

Modesty perhaps prevents a broader and more detailed account of faculty recruitment, although we do learn that, like other US institutions, the process involves extensive vetting over a range of social functions, many of which involve food. Despite recent changes, marked preference for internal, or certainly “Harvard trained” (p. 113) recruitment remains, only supplemented with “select outsiders” (p. 113). Recruited junior faculty are granted only a limited time to convince their seniors of their worth in terms of achieving a tenured position leading to “selective and routine involuntary exit” (p. 119) – a social fact of the school, and many other elite institutions which, it is claimed, reinforce exclusivity and the school brand.

In concluding, and returning to the theoretical themes, the author outlines the role that institutional routines play in moral projects; the focus on the school and its faculty clearly facilitates an exploration of the way individual discretion can have a role alongside organizational scripts. The value of this ethnographic contribution lies in the way that it shows that in the absence of direct, or vocal instructions on how to behave, a context of rich signals acts as an indirect guide to expected behaviour and values or what the author calls “Vocal Silence”. In many ways this contrasts to more formalised and visible attempts at socialisation of morality at work which is often found wanting. Despite this, however, there are few examples of the exercise of moral behaviour or the resolution of moral dilemmas in practice from either staff or students. Vocal Silence theoretically allows for flexibility and, like the ideal of “relevant research” so prized, “plasticity” (p. 39), whilst preserving individual discretion and autonomy. A sceptical reader would therefore be more cautious than Anteby in accepting the effectiveness of Vocal Silence for moral projects and less keen to explore how such mechanism might be applied to, and even scaled up, in other organisations.

Taken broadly then, in the pages of this ethnography we see the role of business education envisaged as not to aspire to try and change or shape the behaviour of students, but rather to recognise that their values are likely to be already deeply entrenched. Therefore the role of business education becomes the holding up a (moral) mirror to the students, so that they might come to see the ethical implications of their deeds. Yet outside the rarefied campus air of the School, we might wonder if this form of moral reflection is likely to be sufficient when seen from a broader social perspective. Indeed the raising of the moral mirror, in the light of the 2008 financial crisis, suggests not. When two faculty members’ proposed the adoption of a similar oath “I will act with utmost integrity and peruse my work in an ethical manner” (p. 134) students, we are told, rebelled. Although there is much to learn from this ethnography ultimately perhaps we might also learn from what is not said. The value of silence tells us, I think, about the difficulty of being critical whilst remaining in situ. Given the role that the School plays in global business education the lack of effective critique of the School in this account is rather unsatisfying and might usefully act a cautionary tale for those ethnographers that seek to provide insider account of their own dominion.