Foreign workers are often extolled for their superior work ethic, a presumably essential trait wh... more Foreign workers are often extolled for their superior work ethic, a presumably essential trait which characterizes them prior to working in host countries. The trope of the hard-working foreigner appears in both popular and scholarly accounts. In contrast, we consider hard work as a learned disposition, and ask, how do foreigners learn to embrace working hard at low-wage jobs? Based on a qualitative longitudinal study of foreign student workers in temporary service jobs, we examine hard work as a process of acculturation to the American workplace. Using ethnographic data on three seasons in a tourismdependent location, we show that, over the course of their seasonal employment, students shift from consumers seeking a cultural experience to economically motivated hard workers: industrious, managing multiple jobs, and uninterested in leisure. While their employers see foreign students as possessing a superior work ethic, we argue that their work habits result in part from prevailing labor conditions in the work setting and beyond, including high living costs, restricted leisure time, and precarious pay and hours. In the course of becoming marginalized, these students become hard-working foreigners. Our findings inform debates on foreign labor by unpacking and partly challenging notions of culturally specific work ethics.
Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from th... more Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions' core cultural tenets. When these individuals face external pressure (e.g., via new technology or regulation), they typically turn to peers for guidance in such involuntary reinventions of their work. But it is unclear how some professionals may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective and even magical, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists' ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers. Overall, we show a pathway to such reinvention that entails turning inward and outward (rather than to peers), a result that diverges significantly from prior understandings of professionals' transformations.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022
How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequenc... more How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequences? Extant research has documented how public narratives can gradually moralize societal perceptions of select occupations. Yet, the implications of how workers individually respond and form self-narratives in light of-or in spite of-a sudden moralizing event remain less understood. Such an understanding is even more critical when workers are weakly socialized by their organization, a situation increasingly common today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, radically shifting public narratives suddenly transformed grocery delivery work, previously uncelebrated, into highly moralized "heroic" pursuits. Drawing on interviews (n = 75), participant artifacts (n = 85), and archival data (e.g., newspaper articles), we find that these workers (here, shoppers on the platform organization Instacart), left mainly to themselves, exhibited varying responses to this moralizing and that their perceived relations to the organization, customers, and tasks shaped these responses. Surprisingly, those who facilely adopted the hero label felt morally credentialled, and they were thus likely to minimize their extra-role helping of customers and show low commitment to the organization; in contrast, those who wrestled with the hero narrative sought to earn those moral credentials, and they were more likely to embrace extra-role helping and remain committed to moralized aspects of the work. Our study contributes to literatures on the moralization of work and narratives by explaining why some workers accept a moralized narrative and others reject or wrestle with it, documenting consequences of workers' reactions to such narratives, and suggesting how a moralized public narrative can backfire.
Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across... more Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across work contexts, how expertise translates across contexts is less well understood. Here, we examine how a shift in context—which reorders the relative attention experts pay to distinct types of audiences—redefines what it means to be an expert. Our study’s setting is an established expertise in the creative industry: puppet manipulation. Through an examination of U.S. puppeteers’ move from stage to screen (i.e., film and television), we show that, although the two settings call on mostly similar techniques, puppeteers on stage ground their claims to expertise in a dialogue with spectators and view expertise as achieving believability; by contrast, puppeteers on screen invoke the need to deliver on cue when dealing with producers, directors, and co-workers and view expertise as achieving task mastery. When moving between stage and screen, puppeteers therefore prioritize the needs of certain audiences over others’ and gradually reshape their own views of expertise. Our findings embed the nature of expertise in experts’ ordering of types of audiences to attend to and provide insights for explaining how expertise can shift and become co-opted by workplaces.
Scholars have long debated how rigor can be achieved in qualitative analysis. To answer this ques... more Scholars have long debated how rigor can be achieved in qualitative analysis. To answer this question, we need to better understand how theory is generated from data. Qualitative analysis is, at its core, a categorization process. Nevertheless, despite a surge of interest in categorization within the social sciences, insights from categorization theory have not yet been applied to our understanding of qualitative analysis. Drawing from categorization theory, we argue that the movement from data to theory is an active process in which researchers choose between multiple moves that help them to make sense of their data. In addition, we develop a framework of the main moves that people use when they categorize data and demonstrate that evidence of these moves can also be found in past qualitative scholarship. Our framework emphasizes that if we are not sufficiently reflexive and explicit about the active analytical processes that generate theoretical insights, we cannot be transparent and, thus, rigorous about how we analyze data. We discuss the implications of our framework for increasing rigor in qualitative analysis, for actively constructing categories from data, and for spurring more methodological plurality within qualitative theory building.
A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally dista... more A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally distant from their charges (such as clients or patients). Such distancing is said to protect workers from the emotionally draining aspects of the job but creates challenges to feeling and behaving compassionately. Because little is known about when and how compassion occurs under these circumstances, we conducted a multi-phased qualitative study of 119 correctional officers in the U.S. using interviews and observations. Officers’ accounts and our observations of their interactions with inmates included cruel, disciplinary, unemotional, and compassionate treatment. Such treatment varied by the situations that officers faced, and compassion was surprisingly common when inmates were misbehaving—challenging current understanding of the occurrence of compassion at work. Examining officers’ accounts more closely, we uncovered a novel way that we theorize human services workers can be compassionate, even under such difficult circumstances. We find that officers describe engaging in practices in which they (a) relate to others by leveling group-based differences between themselves and their charges and (b) engaged in self-protection by shielding themselves from the negative emotions triggered by their charges. We posit that the combined use of such practices offsets different emotional tensions in the work, rather than only providing emotional distance, and in doing so, can foster compassionate treatment under some of the most trying situations and organizational barriers to compassion.
Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that correspon... more Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that corresponds to a gain in responsibility. There is evidence, however, that some individuals experience "managerial blues" or disenchantment with their managerial jobs after being promoted. While past scholarship points to individual differences (such as skills inadequacy) or the promotion circumstances (such as involuntary) as possible explanations for such blues, less is known as to how the expectations that people carry with them from past jobs – such as expectations about what responsibility entails – may shape their first managerial experience. To answer this question, we compare the experiences of supervisors coming from different jobs – i.e., former Paris subway drivers (working independently and impacting the lives of others) and station agents (working interdependently with limited impact on others’ lives) – that left them with distinct sets of expectations around responsibility. Drawing on interviews and observations, we find that former drivers developed a deep sense of "personal" responsibility. After promotion, their perceived managerial responsibility paled in comparison to their expectations of what it felt like to have personal responsibility, leading the majority to experience managerial blues. In contrast, former agents had few expectations of what responsibility entailed and reported no disenchantment once they joined the managerial ranks. Overall, we show how imprinted expectations shape people’s future managerial experiences, including their managerial blues, and discuss the implications of our findings for literatures on job mobility and job design.
Ghostwriters represent a form of labor aimed at producing someone else’s self, or what we label “... more Ghostwriters represent a form of labor aimed at producing someone else’s self, or what we label “stand-in labor.” This growing workforce sits at the intersection of critical developments in today’s neoliberal economy: the rise in self-branding, the growth in outsourcing of the self, and mounting income inequality. This article explores the experience of stand-in workers and its implication on the economy of self. Relying on 72 interviews with ghostwriters and publishing industry insiders, we show that ghostwriters face recognition estrangement because they are often asked to stay out of public view for the crafted selves to prove “authentic.” As creative workers with a high degree of investment in their work, ghostwriters are quite sensitive to this form of estrangement. They manage this tension in a unique way: they claim a professional need to disappear in order to properly put forth a subject’s “true” voice, yet emphasize their active contribution to the crafting of a subject’s public self that differs from the subject’s “true” self. In doing so, ghostwriters alter the subjects they impersonate by creating a distance between the subjects’ crafted and “actual” selves. Our study therefore uncovers a paradoxical dynamic—namely, taking professional pride in disappearing, yet reappearing in the act of altering others’ selves—that we posit might prove inherent to the performance of stand-in labor. More broadly, we suggest that many stand-in workers engaged in this growing economy of self might alter the people they impersonate, thus leading to a situation where calls for authenticity breed adulteration.
In the past few decades, the growth of surveillance has become a fixture of organizational life. ... more In the past few decades, the growth of surveillance has become a fixture of organizational life. Past scholarship has largely explained this growth as the result of traditional managerial demands for added control over workers, coupled with newly
available cheap technology (such as closed-circuit televisions and body-worn cameras). We draw on the workplace resistance literature to complement these views by suggesting that workers can also drive such growth. More specifically, we show that workers under surveillance can feel constantly observed and seen, but they can also feel largely unnoticed as individuals by management. This paradoxical experience leads them to interpret the surveillance as coercive and to engage in invisibility practices to attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed. Management, in turn, interprets these attempts as justification for more surveillance, which encourages workers to engage in even more invisibility practices, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle of coercive surveillance. Our study therefore offers one of the first endogenous explanations for the growth of surveillance while also isolating unique forms of resistance attached to such surveillance.
Business schools offer a unique window into the making of corporate morals since they bring toget... more Business schools offer a unique window into the making of corporate morals since they bring together future executives at formative moments in their professional lives. And business school faculty members play a crucial role in shaping these morals. This article relies on an analysis of faculty members' teaching tasks at the Harvard Business School to better understand the making of corporate morals. More specifically, it builds on a coding of teaching notes used by faculty members in the first-year MBA curriculum to highlight the importance of silence in promoting a culture of moral relativism. Indeed, while notes heavily script faculty members' teaching tasks and cast business decisions as matters of individual choice, they also remain silent on the moral compass that might guide these choices; allowing for moral relativism to prevail. Put otherwise, faculty's teaching tasks are structured to promote moral silence or refrain from passing judgment on any given moral viewpoints. In doing so, a form of moral pluralism or relativism is promoted. The ideology of silence that guides and gets reflected in faculty's teaching tasks, constitutes, I argue, a powerful ideology-one allowing multiple viewpoints to flourish and also protecting (future) business leaders from critical assessment. An ideology of silence implicitly primes business leaders not to vilify any moral stand, but also justifies almost all stands. This structuring of faculty members' teaching tasks proves extremely consequential. In this context, almost anything can now be labeled "moral" and thus nothing can be deemed "immoral." Word count: 245
This spring the Freelancers Union conducted an online survey to find out who freelancers are, how... more This spring the Freelancers Union conducted an online survey to find out who freelancers are, how they work and how they are faring. 1 With more than 2,800 participants in the New York metropolitan area, this survey is one of the first efforts to get a comprehensive picture of New York's independent workers. Four key findings emerged from the results:
This article uses conversational processes to advance idea development related to researching soc... more This article uses conversational processes to advance idea development related to researching socially disapproved organizational behavior (SDOB). Ideas are grounded both in the authors' individual experiences researching such “tainted topics” and in insights that emerged through conversation about their research process related to SDOB. The transcript from their conversation reveals five common themes cutting across all three researchers' experiences with
This study examines whether self-monitoring—a ubiquitous social psychological construct that capt... more This study examines whether self-monitoring—a ubiquitous social psychological construct that captures the extent to which individuals regulate their self-presentation to match the expectation of others—varies across demographic and social contexts. Building on Erving Goffman’s classic insights on stigma management, the authors expect that the propensity for self-monitoring will be greater among sexual minorities, especially in areas where the stigma surrounding minority sexual orientations is strong. The authors’ survey of U.S. adults shows that sexual minorities report significantly higher levels of self-monitoring than heterosexuals and that this difference disappears in large cities. These findings speak to sociological research on self-presentation, with implications for the literatures on identity formation, stigma management, and labor markets.
Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and profess... more Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional—as opposed to organizational—dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming,” “doing,” and “relating.” We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.
In this article, we examine a case of task segregation—when a group of workers is disproportionat... more In this article, we examine a case of task segregation—when a group of workers is disproportionately allocated, relative to other groups, to spend more time on specific tasks in a given job—and argue that such segregation is a potential mechanism for generating within-job inequality in the quality of a job. When performing those tasks is undesirable, this allocation has unfavorable implications for that group’s experienced job quality. We articulate the processes by which task segregation can lead to workplace inequality in job quality through an inductive, interview-based case study of airport security screening workers in a unit of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a large urban airport. Female workers were disproportionately allocated to the patdown task, the manual screening of travelers for prohibited items. Our findings suggest that this segregation led to overall poorer job quality outcomes for women. Task segregation overexposed female workers to processes of physical exertion, emotional labor, and relational strain, giving rise to work intensity, emotional exhaustion, and lack of coping resources. Task segregation also seemed to disproportionately expose female workers to managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off and a narrowing of their skill set that may have contributed to worse promotion chances, pay, satisfaction, and turnover rates for women. We conclude with a theoretical model of how task segregation can act as a mechanism for generating within-job inequality in job quality.
Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in cer... more Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States. Consistent with prior research, lesbian and gay workers are more likely than heterosexual workers to cross gender lines in occupations, but even after controlling for this tendency, we show that common to both lesbians and gay men is a propensity to concentrate in those lines of work that are associated with relatively high levels of task independence or social perceptiveness, or both. This study points to a more comprehensive theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets.
Foreign workers are often extolled for their superior work ethic, a presumably essential trait wh... more Foreign workers are often extolled for their superior work ethic, a presumably essential trait which characterizes them prior to working in host countries. The trope of the hard-working foreigner appears in both popular and scholarly accounts. In contrast, we consider hard work as a learned disposition, and ask, how do foreigners learn to embrace working hard at low-wage jobs? Based on a qualitative longitudinal study of foreign student workers in temporary service jobs, we examine hard work as a process of acculturation to the American workplace. Using ethnographic data on three seasons in a tourismdependent location, we show that, over the course of their seasonal employment, students shift from consumers seeking a cultural experience to economically motivated hard workers: industrious, managing multiple jobs, and uninterested in leisure. While their employers see foreign students as possessing a superior work ethic, we argue that their work habits result in part from prevailing labor conditions in the work setting and beyond, including high living costs, restricted leisure time, and precarious pay and hours. In the course of becoming marginalized, these students become hard-working foreigners. Our findings inform debates on foreign labor by unpacking and partly challenging notions of culturally specific work ethics.
Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from th... more Individuals deeply socialized into professional cultures tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions' core cultural tenets. When these individuals face external pressure (e.g., via new technology or regulation), they typically turn to peers for guidance in such involuntary reinventions of their work. But it is unclear how some professionals may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective and even magical, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists' ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers. Overall, we show a pathway to such reinvention that entails turning inward and outward (rather than to peers), a result that diverges significantly from prior understandings of professionals' transformations.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2022
How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequenc... more How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequences? Extant research has documented how public narratives can gradually moralize societal perceptions of select occupations. Yet, the implications of how workers individually respond and form self-narratives in light of-or in spite of-a sudden moralizing event remain less understood. Such an understanding is even more critical when workers are weakly socialized by their organization, a situation increasingly common today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, radically shifting public narratives suddenly transformed grocery delivery work, previously uncelebrated, into highly moralized "heroic" pursuits. Drawing on interviews (n = 75), participant artifacts (n = 85), and archival data (e.g., newspaper articles), we find that these workers (here, shoppers on the platform organization Instacart), left mainly to themselves, exhibited varying responses to this moralizing and that their perceived relations to the organization, customers, and tasks shaped these responses. Surprisingly, those who facilely adopted the hero label felt morally credentialled, and they were thus likely to minimize their extra-role helping of customers and show low commitment to the organization; in contrast, those who wrestled with the hero narrative sought to earn those moral credentials, and they were more likely to embrace extra-role helping and remain committed to moralized aspects of the work. Our study contributes to literatures on the moralization of work and narratives by explaining why some workers accept a moralized narrative and others reject or wrestle with it, documenting consequences of workers' reactions to such narratives, and suggesting how a moralized public narrative can backfire.
Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across... more Expertise is a key currency in today’s knowledge economy. Yet as experts increasingly move across work contexts, how expertise translates across contexts is less well understood. Here, we examine how a shift in context—which reorders the relative attention experts pay to distinct types of audiences—redefines what it means to be an expert. Our study’s setting is an established expertise in the creative industry: puppet manipulation. Through an examination of U.S. puppeteers’ move from stage to screen (i.e., film and television), we show that, although the two settings call on mostly similar techniques, puppeteers on stage ground their claims to expertise in a dialogue with spectators and view expertise as achieving believability; by contrast, puppeteers on screen invoke the need to deliver on cue when dealing with producers, directors, and co-workers and view expertise as achieving task mastery. When moving between stage and screen, puppeteers therefore prioritize the needs of certain audiences over others’ and gradually reshape their own views of expertise. Our findings embed the nature of expertise in experts’ ordering of types of audiences to attend to and provide insights for explaining how expertise can shift and become co-opted by workplaces.
Scholars have long debated how rigor can be achieved in qualitative analysis. To answer this ques... more Scholars have long debated how rigor can be achieved in qualitative analysis. To answer this question, we need to better understand how theory is generated from data. Qualitative analysis is, at its core, a categorization process. Nevertheless, despite a surge of interest in categorization within the social sciences, insights from categorization theory have not yet been applied to our understanding of qualitative analysis. Drawing from categorization theory, we argue that the movement from data to theory is an active process in which researchers choose between multiple moves that help them to make sense of their data. In addition, we develop a framework of the main moves that people use when they categorize data and demonstrate that evidence of these moves can also be found in past qualitative scholarship. Our framework emphasizes that if we are not sufficiently reflexive and explicit about the active analytical processes that generate theoretical insights, we cannot be transparent and, thus, rigorous about how we analyze data. We discuss the implications of our framework for increasing rigor in qualitative analysis, for actively constructing categories from data, and for spurring more methodological plurality within qualitative theory building.
A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally dista... more A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally distant from their charges (such as clients or patients). Such distancing is said to protect workers from the emotionally draining aspects of the job but creates challenges to feeling and behaving compassionately. Because little is known about when and how compassion occurs under these circumstances, we conducted a multi-phased qualitative study of 119 correctional officers in the U.S. using interviews and observations. Officers’ accounts and our observations of their interactions with inmates included cruel, disciplinary, unemotional, and compassionate treatment. Such treatment varied by the situations that officers faced, and compassion was surprisingly common when inmates were misbehaving—challenging current understanding of the occurrence of compassion at work. Examining officers’ accounts more closely, we uncovered a novel way that we theorize human services workers can be compassionate, even under such difficult circumstances. We find that officers describe engaging in practices in which they (a) relate to others by leveling group-based differences between themselves and their charges and (b) engaged in self-protection by shielding themselves from the negative emotions triggered by their charges. We posit that the combined use of such practices offsets different emotional tensions in the work, rather than only providing emotional distance, and in doing so, can foster compassionate treatment under some of the most trying situations and organizational barriers to compassion.
Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that correspon... more Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that corresponds to a gain in responsibility. There is evidence, however, that some individuals experience "managerial blues" or disenchantment with their managerial jobs after being promoted. While past scholarship points to individual differences (such as skills inadequacy) or the promotion circumstances (such as involuntary) as possible explanations for such blues, less is known as to how the expectations that people carry with them from past jobs – such as expectations about what responsibility entails – may shape their first managerial experience. To answer this question, we compare the experiences of supervisors coming from different jobs – i.e., former Paris subway drivers (working independently and impacting the lives of others) and station agents (working interdependently with limited impact on others’ lives) – that left them with distinct sets of expectations around responsibility. Drawing on interviews and observations, we find that former drivers developed a deep sense of "personal" responsibility. After promotion, their perceived managerial responsibility paled in comparison to their expectations of what it felt like to have personal responsibility, leading the majority to experience managerial blues. In contrast, former agents had few expectations of what responsibility entailed and reported no disenchantment once they joined the managerial ranks. Overall, we show how imprinted expectations shape people’s future managerial experiences, including their managerial blues, and discuss the implications of our findings for literatures on job mobility and job design.
Ghostwriters represent a form of labor aimed at producing someone else’s self, or what we label “... more Ghostwriters represent a form of labor aimed at producing someone else’s self, or what we label “stand-in labor.” This growing workforce sits at the intersection of critical developments in today’s neoliberal economy: the rise in self-branding, the growth in outsourcing of the self, and mounting income inequality. This article explores the experience of stand-in workers and its implication on the economy of self. Relying on 72 interviews with ghostwriters and publishing industry insiders, we show that ghostwriters face recognition estrangement because they are often asked to stay out of public view for the crafted selves to prove “authentic.” As creative workers with a high degree of investment in their work, ghostwriters are quite sensitive to this form of estrangement. They manage this tension in a unique way: they claim a professional need to disappear in order to properly put forth a subject’s “true” voice, yet emphasize their active contribution to the crafting of a subject’s public self that differs from the subject’s “true” self. In doing so, ghostwriters alter the subjects they impersonate by creating a distance between the subjects’ crafted and “actual” selves. Our study therefore uncovers a paradoxical dynamic—namely, taking professional pride in disappearing, yet reappearing in the act of altering others’ selves—that we posit might prove inherent to the performance of stand-in labor. More broadly, we suggest that many stand-in workers engaged in this growing economy of self might alter the people they impersonate, thus leading to a situation where calls for authenticity breed adulteration.
In the past few decades, the growth of surveillance has become a fixture of organizational life. ... more In the past few decades, the growth of surveillance has become a fixture of organizational life. Past scholarship has largely explained this growth as the result of traditional managerial demands for added control over workers, coupled with newly
available cheap technology (such as closed-circuit televisions and body-worn cameras). We draw on the workplace resistance literature to complement these views by suggesting that workers can also drive such growth. More specifically, we show that workers under surveillance can feel constantly observed and seen, but they can also feel largely unnoticed as individuals by management. This paradoxical experience leads them to interpret the surveillance as coercive and to engage in invisibility practices to attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed. Management, in turn, interprets these attempts as justification for more surveillance, which encourages workers to engage in even more invisibility practices, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle of coercive surveillance. Our study therefore offers one of the first endogenous explanations for the growth of surveillance while also isolating unique forms of resistance attached to such surveillance.
Business schools offer a unique window into the making of corporate morals since they bring toget... more Business schools offer a unique window into the making of corporate morals since they bring together future executives at formative moments in their professional lives. And business school faculty members play a crucial role in shaping these morals. This article relies on an analysis of faculty members' teaching tasks at the Harvard Business School to better understand the making of corporate morals. More specifically, it builds on a coding of teaching notes used by faculty members in the first-year MBA curriculum to highlight the importance of silence in promoting a culture of moral relativism. Indeed, while notes heavily script faculty members' teaching tasks and cast business decisions as matters of individual choice, they also remain silent on the moral compass that might guide these choices; allowing for moral relativism to prevail. Put otherwise, faculty's teaching tasks are structured to promote moral silence or refrain from passing judgment on any given moral viewpoints. In doing so, a form of moral pluralism or relativism is promoted. The ideology of silence that guides and gets reflected in faculty's teaching tasks, constitutes, I argue, a powerful ideology-one allowing multiple viewpoints to flourish and also protecting (future) business leaders from critical assessment. An ideology of silence implicitly primes business leaders not to vilify any moral stand, but also justifies almost all stands. This structuring of faculty members' teaching tasks proves extremely consequential. In this context, almost anything can now be labeled "moral" and thus nothing can be deemed "immoral." Word count: 245
This spring the Freelancers Union conducted an online survey to find out who freelancers are, how... more This spring the Freelancers Union conducted an online survey to find out who freelancers are, how they work and how they are faring. 1 With more than 2,800 participants in the New York metropolitan area, this survey is one of the first efforts to get a comprehensive picture of New York's independent workers. Four key findings emerged from the results:
This article uses conversational processes to advance idea development related to researching soc... more This article uses conversational processes to advance idea development related to researching socially disapproved organizational behavior (SDOB). Ideas are grounded both in the authors' individual experiences researching such “tainted topics” and in insights that emerged through conversation about their research process related to SDOB. The transcript from their conversation reveals five common themes cutting across all three researchers' experiences with
This study examines whether self-monitoring—a ubiquitous social psychological construct that capt... more This study examines whether self-monitoring—a ubiquitous social psychological construct that captures the extent to which individuals regulate their self-presentation to match the expectation of others—varies across demographic and social contexts. Building on Erving Goffman’s classic insights on stigma management, the authors expect that the propensity for self-monitoring will be greater among sexual minorities, especially in areas where the stigma surrounding minority sexual orientations is strong. The authors’ survey of U.S. adults shows that sexual minorities report significantly higher levels of self-monitoring than heterosexuals and that this difference disappears in large cities. These findings speak to sociological research on self-presentation, with implications for the literatures on identity formation, stigma management, and labor markets.
Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and profess... more Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional—as opposed to organizational—dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming,” “doing,” and “relating.” We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.
In this article, we examine a case of task segregation—when a group of workers is disproportionat... more In this article, we examine a case of task segregation—when a group of workers is disproportionately allocated, relative to other groups, to spend more time on specific tasks in a given job—and argue that such segregation is a potential mechanism for generating within-job inequality in the quality of a job. When performing those tasks is undesirable, this allocation has unfavorable implications for that group’s experienced job quality. We articulate the processes by which task segregation can lead to workplace inequality in job quality through an inductive, interview-based case study of airport security screening workers in a unit of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a large urban airport. Female workers were disproportionately allocated to the patdown task, the manual screening of travelers for prohibited items. Our findings suggest that this segregation led to overall poorer job quality outcomes for women. Task segregation overexposed female workers to processes of physical exertion, emotional labor, and relational strain, giving rise to work intensity, emotional exhaustion, and lack of coping resources. Task segregation also seemed to disproportionately expose female workers to managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off and a narrowing of their skill set that may have contributed to worse promotion chances, pay, satisfaction, and turnover rates for women. We conclude with a theoretical model of how task segregation can act as a mechanism for generating within-job inequality in job quality.
Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in cer... more Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States. Consistent with prior research, lesbian and gay workers are more likely than heterosexual workers to cross gender lines in occupations, but even after controlling for this tendency, we show that common to both lesbians and gay men is a propensity to concentrate in those lines of work that are associated with relatively high levels of task independence or social perceptiveness, or both. This study points to a more comprehensive theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets.
Resistance is the bane of all field researchers, who are often viewed as interlopers when they en... more Resistance is the bane of all field researchers, who are often viewed as interlopers when they enter a community and start asking questions. People obstruct investigations and hide evidence. They shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget their own past and deny having done so. How can we learn about a community when its members resist so strongly? The answer is that the resistance itself is sometimes the key.
Michel Anteby explains how community members often disclose more than intended when they close ranks and create obstacles. He draws insights from diverse stories of resistance by uncooperative participants—from Nazi rocket scientists and Harvard professors to Disney union busters and people who secure cadavers for medical school dissection—to reveal how field resistance manifests itself and how researchers can learn from it. He argues that many forms of resistance are retrospectively telling, and that these forms are the routine products, not by-products, of the field. That means that resistance mechanisms are not only indicative of something else happening; instead, they often are the very data points that can shed light on how participants make sense of their worlds.
An essential guide for ethnographers, sociologists, and all field researchers seeking access, The Interloper shares practical and theoretical insights into the value of having the door slammed in your face.
Comment sont formés les futurs patrons américains ? Quel sens moral retirent-ils de leur passage... more Comment sont formés les futurs patrons américains ? Quel sens moral retirent-ils de leur passage sur les bancs des fameuses business schools où ils acquièrent leur formation ? L’analyse ethnographique de la plus emblématique de ces écoles, celle de Harvard, apporte des réponses. Michel Anteby nous découvre les rouages d’une institution centenaire et dresse des parallèles frappants entre la socialisation des professeurs et celle des élèves. De la préparation des séances de cours à la circulation dans les tunnels du campus, du système d’évaluation et de notation aux suspensions pour motif d’insuffisance académique, ce livre retrace le parcours éducatif, à la fois mythique et singulier, de ceux qui aspirent à devenir patrons. Car ils évoluent dans un contexte qui promeut un silence normatif relatif. Arguant de respecter une multitude de points de vue, l’école se refuse à prôner ouvertement une norme. C’est donc une étrange idéologie de la non-idéologie qui est interrogée ici, et un silence bien plus parlant qu’il n’y paraît.
Corporate accountability is never far from the front page and Harvard Business School trains many... more Corporate accountability is never far from the front page and Harvard Business School trains many future business leaders. But how does HBS formally and informally ensure its members embrace proper business standards? Relying on his first-hand faculty experience, 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, HBS has long tried to promote better business standards. Anteby’s rich account reveals the surprising role of silence in HBS’s process of codifying morals and values. As he describes, 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.
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.
Anyone who has been employed by an organization knows not every official workplace regulation mus... more Anyone who has been employed by an organization knows not every official workplace regulation must be followed. When management consistently overlooks such breaches, spaces emerge in which both workers and supervisors engage in officially prohibited, yet tolerated practices--gray zones. When discovered, these transgressions often provoke disapproval; when company materials are diverted in the process, these breaches are quickly labeled theft. Yet, why do gray zones persist and why are they unlikely to disappear? In Moral Gray Zones, Michel Anteby shows how these spaces function as regulating mechanisms within workplaces, fashioning workers' identity and self-esteem while allowing management to maintain control.
The book provides a unique window into gray zones through its in-depth look at the manufacture and exchange of illegal goods called homers, tolerated in a French aeronautic plant. Homers such as toys for kids, cutlery for the kitchen, or lamps for homes, are made on company time with company materials for a worker's own purpose and use. Anteby relies on observations at retirees' homes, archival data, interviews, and surveys to understand how plant workers and managers make sense of this tacit practice. He argues that when patrolled, gray zones like the production of homers offer workplaces balanced opportunities for supervision as well as expression. Cautioning against the hasty judgment that gray zone practices are simply wrong, Moral Gray Zones contributes to a deeper understanding of the culture, group dynamics, and deviance found in organizations.
Organizational cultures encompass the norms, values, and beliefs that guide the thinking and acti... more Organizational cultures encompass the norms, values, and beliefs that guide the thinking and actions of organizational members. In this chapter, we highlight the moral power and ambiguity of such cultures. We review early research on organizational culture, and show- case its historical roots in moral questions around ideological control. We then trace how an emphasis on strong culture and firm performance slowly eroded these moral underpinnings. We also highlight specific studies that have surfaced the oft-forgotten moral consequences of these strong cultures. Next, we illustrate our argument with two research streams (i.e., research on person– organization “fit” and research on culture of higher education) that reveal a darker, more insidious, side of strong organizational culture. The darker moral side occurs when the moral repercussions of organizational culture are masked by good intentions from management, internalized by employees as beneficial, and lead to harmful consequences for workers, firms, and/or society. Finally, we discuss how increased public awareness of the moral dimensions of work necessitates a deeper understanding of the moral implications of organizational culture.
The extensive literature on organizational wrongdoing tends to assume that a clear red line divid... more The extensive literature on organizational wrongdoing tends to assume that a clear red line divides the moral terrain. However, many organizations function not as moral orders, but as moral pursuits in which there is intentionally no explicit definition of right and wrong; members are encouraged to engage in an ongoing pursuit of personal morality. We use illustrations from field sites in which red lines proved either well-defined or elusive to theorize differences in forms of wrongdoing in moral orders versus moral pursuits. More specifically, we explore cases in which organizational actors seek to (re)define right and wrong and to pursue actions that they consider moral, but that others in their setting consider wrongdoing. We identify two sets of misaligned moral strategies: one involving moral hijacking, moral assembling, and moral blurring that occurs when individuals engage in a moral pursuit from within the context of a moral order; and another involving moral circumscribing, moral spotlighting, and moral seceding that occurs when individuals seek to establish a moral order from within a moralpursuit. We develop this typology to highlight the importance of context in defining wrongdoing, and to better understand the variety of wrongdoing in organizations.
The Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods: Innovative Pathways and Methods, 2016
The means by which field participants collectively resist an inquiry into their social world—that... more The means by which field participants collectively resist an inquiry into their social world—that is, the repertoires of field resistance they deploy—can vary radically from one setting to the next. For example, factory craftsmen who produce in their plant and on the side illegal artifacts might resist a scholarly inquiry into their practices by denying that they are thieves. By contrast, clinical anatomists who procure human cadavers for medical education and research might physically obstruct a scholar’s access to the field. Alternatively, business school faculty members faced with an inquiry into their work practices might decide to remain silent as a way to deflect the inquiry. This chapter reviews several forms of field resistance and discusses what they can teach us about their respective field settings. Moreover, by treating acts of resistance as data points rather than merely irritating impediments to field inquiries, this chapter calls for paying closer attention to repertoires of field resistance and highlights the benefits of collecting, analyzing, and qualifying field participants’ acts of resistance as innovative forms of data. A similar argument can also be made for paying closer attention to forms of field embrace or the various (and telling) means by which field participants embrace a scholars’ inquiry into their social world.
Oxford Handbook of Management: Management – Past, Present and Future (eds. A. Wilkinson, S. Armstrong and M. Lounsbury)
Prepared for the Oxford Handbook of Management: Management -Past, Present and Future (eds. A. Wil... more Prepared for the Oxford Handbook of Management: Management -Past, Present and Future (eds. A. Wilkinson, S. Armstrong and M. Lounsbury) -June 9, 2014 -Word count: 6,849 words (including references)
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Papers by Michel Anteby
often asked to stay out of public view for the crafted selves to prove “authentic.” As creative workers with a high degree of investment in their work, ghostwriters are quite sensitive to this form of estrangement. They manage this tension in a unique way: they claim a professional need to disappear in order to properly put forth a subject’s “true” voice, yet emphasize their active contribution to the crafting of a subject’s public self that differs from the subject’s “true” self. In doing so, ghostwriters alter the subjects they impersonate by creating a distance between the subjects’ crafted and “actual” selves. Our study therefore uncovers a paradoxical dynamic—namely, taking professional pride in disappearing, yet reappearing in the act of altering others’ selves—that we posit might prove inherent to the performance of stand-in labor. More broadly, we suggest that many stand-in workers engaged in this growing economy of self might alter the people they impersonate, thus leading to a situation
where calls for authenticity breed adulteration.
available cheap technology (such as closed-circuit televisions and body-worn cameras). We draw on the workplace resistance literature to complement these views by suggesting that workers can also drive such growth. More specifically, we show that workers under surveillance can feel constantly observed and seen, but they can also feel largely unnoticed as individuals by management. This paradoxical experience leads them to interpret the surveillance as coercive and to engage in invisibility practices to attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed. Management, in turn, interprets these attempts as justification for more surveillance, which encourages workers to engage in even more invisibility practices, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle of coercive surveillance. Our study therefore offers one of the first endogenous explanations for the growth of surveillance while also isolating unique forms of resistance attached to such surveillance.
performing those tasks is undesirable, this allocation has unfavorable implications for that group’s experienced job quality. We articulate the processes by which task segregation can lead to workplace inequality in job quality through an inductive, interview-based case study of airport security screening workers in a unit of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a large urban airport. Female workers were disproportionately allocated to the patdown task, the manual screening of travelers for prohibited items. Our findings
suggest that this segregation led to overall poorer job quality outcomes for women. Task segregation overexposed female workers to processes of physical exertion, emotional labor, and relational strain, giving rise to work intensity, emotional exhaustion, and lack of coping resources. Task segregation also
seemed to disproportionately expose female workers to managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off and a narrowing of their skill set that may have contributed to worse promotion chances, pay, satisfaction, and turnover rates for women. We conclude with a theoretical model of how task segregation can act as a mechanism for generating within-job inequality in job quality.
often asked to stay out of public view for the crafted selves to prove “authentic.” As creative workers with a high degree of investment in their work, ghostwriters are quite sensitive to this form of estrangement. They manage this tension in a unique way: they claim a professional need to disappear in order to properly put forth a subject’s “true” voice, yet emphasize their active contribution to the crafting of a subject’s public self that differs from the subject’s “true” self. In doing so, ghostwriters alter the subjects they impersonate by creating a distance between the subjects’ crafted and “actual” selves. Our study therefore uncovers a paradoxical dynamic—namely, taking professional pride in disappearing, yet reappearing in the act of altering others’ selves—that we posit might prove inherent to the performance of stand-in labor. More broadly, we suggest that many stand-in workers engaged in this growing economy of self might alter the people they impersonate, thus leading to a situation
where calls for authenticity breed adulteration.
available cheap technology (such as closed-circuit televisions and body-worn cameras). We draw on the workplace resistance literature to complement these views by suggesting that workers can also drive such growth. More specifically, we show that workers under surveillance can feel constantly observed and seen, but they can also feel largely unnoticed as individuals by management. This paradoxical experience leads them to interpret the surveillance as coercive and to engage in invisibility practices to attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed. Management, in turn, interprets these attempts as justification for more surveillance, which encourages workers to engage in even more invisibility practices, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle of coercive surveillance. Our study therefore offers one of the first endogenous explanations for the growth of surveillance while also isolating unique forms of resistance attached to such surveillance.
performing those tasks is undesirable, this allocation has unfavorable implications for that group’s experienced job quality. We articulate the processes by which task segregation can lead to workplace inequality in job quality through an inductive, interview-based case study of airport security screening workers in a unit of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a large urban airport. Female workers were disproportionately allocated to the patdown task, the manual screening of travelers for prohibited items. Our findings
suggest that this segregation led to overall poorer job quality outcomes for women. Task segregation overexposed female workers to processes of physical exertion, emotional labor, and relational strain, giving rise to work intensity, emotional exhaustion, and lack of coping resources. Task segregation also
seemed to disproportionately expose female workers to managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off and a narrowing of their skill set that may have contributed to worse promotion chances, pay, satisfaction, and turnover rates for women. We conclude with a theoretical model of how task segregation can act as a mechanism for generating within-job inequality in job quality.
Michel Anteby explains how community members often disclose more than intended when they close ranks and create obstacles. He draws insights from diverse stories of resistance by uncooperative participants—from Nazi rocket scientists and Harvard professors to Disney union busters and people who secure cadavers for medical school dissection—to reveal how field resistance manifests itself and how researchers can learn from it. He argues that many forms of resistance are retrospectively telling, and that these forms are the routine products, not by-products, of the field. That means that resistance mechanisms are not only indicative of something else happening; instead, they often are the very data points that can shed light on how participants make sense of their worlds.
An essential guide for ethnographers, sociologists, and all field researchers seeking access, The Interloper shares practical and theoretical insights into the value of having the door slammed in your face.
In an era when many organizations are focused on principles of responsibility, HBS has long tried to promote better business standards. Anteby’s rich account reveals the surprising role of silence in HBS’s process of codifying morals and values. As he describes, 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.
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.
The book provides a unique window into gray zones through its in-depth look at the manufacture and exchange of illegal goods called homers, tolerated in a French aeronautic plant. Homers such as toys for kids, cutlery for the kitchen, or lamps for homes, are made on company time with company materials for a worker's own purpose and use. Anteby relies on observations at retirees' homes, archival data, interviews, and surveys to understand how plant workers and managers make sense of this tacit practice. He argues that when patrolled, gray zones like the production of homers offer workplaces balanced opportunities for supervision as well as expression. Cautioning against the hasty judgment that gray zone practices are simply wrong, Moral Gray Zones contributes to a deeper understanding of the culture, group dynamics, and deviance found in organizations.