Michel Anteby

Associate Professor of Business Administration

Michel Anteby is an Associate Professor and Marvin Bower Fellow in the Organizational Behavior area at the Harvard Business School. He teaches in the School's MBA, doctoral, and executive programs, most recently the second-year MBA elective "Managing Human Capital" course, the doctoral "Design of Field Research Methods" course, and in the executive “Leading Change and Corporate Renewal” and “Talent Management” programs.

His research mainly examines occupational and organizational cultures. More specifically, he tries to understand how meaning is built at work and how moral orders are sustained. He has pursued these questions through the lens of diverse social groups (e.g., academics, clinical anatomists, and factory craftsmen). In doing so, he has looked at the many ways individuals sustain chosen cultures and identities: for instance, by engaging in collective forgetting or deviant behaviors. Field settings for these inquiries include whole-body donation programs, manufacturing workshop, and higher-education.

He is the author of Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and Moral Gray Zones: Side-Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautic Plant(Princeton University Press, 2008). His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Ethnography,Organization Science, Social Science & Medicine, and Sociologie du Travail. He serves on the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly andOrganization Science.

Michel earned a joint Ph.D. in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and in management from New York University. He holds a MA in economics from the Sorbonne and a MPA from Harvard. He grew up in France, previously worked as a consultant (focusing on labor issues), and remains affiliated as a Research Fellow with the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris.

Teaching

Managing Human Capital: Keeping Hope Alive in Organizations

Managing Human Capital has been specifically designed to teach practical skills for the general manager who seeks to manage both other people and his or her own career with optimal effectiveness. Any and all students who believe they will need to effectively manage other people to produce superior business results should take this course. In the Managing Others' Human Capital (MOHC) segment, during the first part of the semester, we will cover best practices in the design of recruiting, performance-evaluation, and compensation systems; how to develop people, manage workforce reductions, and have difficult conversations; and how to manage corporate culture and change. In the Managing Your Own Human Capital (MYHC) segment, students will learn how to develop as a professional, navigate the transition to general manager, and evaluate career transitions and choices strategically.

The management of human capital has the potential to be the source of competitive advantage in high-performance organizations. Due to rapidly changing demographics, technologies, mergers, alliances, and increased global competition, the processes of managing human capital are becoming more central to effective organization practices and outcomes. It is obvious that companies that want to succeed need excellent people. But companies need cultures and systems in which individuals can use their talents. More importantly, general managers must be aware of their own assumptions about people and why individuals come to work. While virtually all leaders in organizations say they are committed to their people, many do not apply this belief.

The course takes the point of view of the general manager (not just the human resource practitioner) attempting to leverage the human capital of an organization in ways that create not only revenues, profits, and growth, but also create a unique place to work and employees and customers who are apostles of the enterprise (Heskett, Schlesinger, and Sasser, 1997). We want future general managers to be clear about how people are motivated, and how managers’ assumptions drive the kind of processes, structures and strategies they create. The desired outcome is to have students’ assumptions questioned, and to create high expectations of self and others not only within the class but also within the organizations students will join after Harvard Business School.

This course is based on four themes: (1) as the general manager, how do you think about leveraging your people in strategic and systematic ways; (2) what specifically needs to transpire in order to act on those beliefs, assumptions, policies, and levers to achieve competitive advantage in talent management; (3) what are the specific skills required for a general manager to operate those levers to achieve the desired results; and (4) as the professional and/or general manager, how should you think about managing your own human capital?

The course is integrative in that it builds on material addressed in the first-year courses Strategy, Economics, Organizations and Markets, and Leadership and Organizational Behavior. It is more practice-based than LEAD, highlighting how to create and adjust basic levers in the organization. Our protagonists will provide additional insights during class visits.

Design of Field Research Methods (DFRM)

Field research involves collecting original data (qualitative and/or quantitative) in field sites. This course combines informal lecture and discussion with practical exercises to build specific skills for conducting field research in organizations. Readings include books and papers about research methodology and articles that provide exemplars of field research. Specific topics covered include: the role of theory in field research, variance versus process models, collecting and analyzing different kinds of data (observation, interview, survey), levels of analysis, construct development and validity, blending qualitative and quantitative data (in a paper, a study, or a career), and writing up field research for publication.

A core aim of the course is to help students develop intuition about the contingent relationship between the nature of the research question and the field research methods used to answer it as a foundation for conducting original field research. Field research is presented as a learning process in which researchers are engaged in a dialogue initially with the phenomena they study and later with a specific audience for their ideas. Course requirements are designed to suit your interests and current stage of research involvement, with the ultimate purpose of advancing your particular research agenda. (See “Requirements” below.)  Previous course work in research methods is a prerequisite. Although it is not a focus of this course, students will be expected to understand basic principles of statistical analysis as a foundation for engaging in discussions about effective field research. This is a limited enrollment course. If this course is not part of your required curriculum, explain in an email to Lisa Riva your motivation to enroll.

Module I of the course is a two-week introductory module on the nature of grounded and inductive theory building and how this kind of research differs from traditional deductive research methods.  Module II focuses on collecting field data and Module III on analyzing them.  Module IV concerns writing and reviewing field research for publication in refereed journals.

Featured Work
Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education (book)
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 the School 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. 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.
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Relaxing the Taboo on Telling our Own Stories: Upholding Professional Distance and Personal Involvement (article)
Scholars studying organizations are typically discouraged from telling, in print, their own stories. The expression “telling our own stories” is used as a proxy for field-research projects that, in their written form, explicitly rely on a scholar’s personal involvement in a field. (By personal involvement in a field, I mean a scholar’s engagement in a set of mental activities that connect her to a field.) The assumption is that personal involvement is antithetical to maintaining professional distance. In this paper, I argue that the taboo on telling our own stories stems in part from an epistemological misunderstanding...
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Automating the Paris Subway (case)
In 2001, the head of the Paris Subway reflected on how to transform Line 1 into a driverless line without triggering a social conflict. After the shock of the 2000 Notre Dame de Lorette subway accident, in which a train derailed and caused 25 people to be injured in a subway station, the state-owned Paris subway operator Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) decided to adopt new security measures and to automate the oldest and the busiest line of the network. The Head of the Paris Subway, Serge Lagrange, believed that automating Line 1 would improve security as well as performance. However, the automation would bring about the downsizing of 219 drivers' positions. Lagrange had to figure out how to get the RATP employees on board, particularly drivers and trade unions. How could he convince them of the necessity to automate Line 1? How could he prevent the potentially major social conflict that might result from downsizing the drivers' positions?
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Markets, Morals, and Practices of Trade: Jurisdictional Disputes in the U.S. Commerce in Cadavers (article)

This study examines the U.S. commerce in human cadavers for medical education and research to explore variation in legitimacy in trades involving similar goods. It draws on archival, interview, and observational data mainly from New York state to analyze market participants' efforts to legitimize commerce and resolve a jurisdictional dispute. Building on literature on professions, the study shows that how goods are traded, not only what is traded, proves integral to constructing legitimacy, thus suggesting a practice-based view of moral markets. The study's findings shed light on the micro-foundations of market legitimization and on the role of morals in sustaining professional jurisdictions.

Publications
Books

• Anteby, Michel. Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Anteby, Michel. Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautic Plant. Princeton University Press, 2008.
  

Journal Articles

• Anteby, Michel, and Amy Wrzesniewski. "In Search of the Self at Work: Young Adults' Experiences of a Dual Identity Organization." Research in the Sociology of Work (forthcoming).
• Anteby, Michel. "Relaxing the Taboo on Telling Our Own Stories: Upholding Professional Distance and Personal Involvement." Organization Science vol. 24, no. 4 (July–August 2013): 1277–1290.
• Anteby, Michel, and Virag Molnar. "Collective Memory Meets Organizational Identity: Remembering to Forget in a Firm's Rhetorical History." Academy of Management Journal 55, no. 3 (June 2012): 515–540.
• Anteby, Michel, Filiz Garip, Paul V. Martorana, and Scott Lozanoff. "Individuals' Decision to Co-Donate or Donate Alone: An Archival Study of Married Whole Body Donors in Hawaii." PLoS ONE 7, no. 8 (2012). (e42673. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042673.)
• Anteby, Michel. "Markets, Morals, and Practices of Trade: Jurisdictional Disputes in the U.S. Commerce in Cadavers." Administrative Science Quarterly55, no. 4 (December 2010): 606–638.
• Battilana, Julie, Michel Anteby, and M. Sengul. "The Circulation of Ideas across Academic Communities: When Locals Re-import Exported Ideas." Organization Studies 31, no. 6 (June 2010): 695–713.
• Anteby, Michel. "A Market for Human Cadavers in All but Name?" Economic Sociology: The European Electronic Newsletter 11, no. 1 (2009): 3–7.
• Anteby, Michel. "Working in the Gray Zone." Forethought. Harvard Business Review 86, no. 5 (May 2008): 20.
• Anteby, Michel. "Identity Incentives as an Engaging Form of Control: Revisiting Leniencies in an Aeronautic Plant." Organization Science 19, no. 2 (March–April 2008): 202–220.
• Anteby, Michel, and Mikell Hyman. "Entrepreneurial Ventures and Whole-body Donations: A Regional Perspective from the United States." Social Science & Medicine 66, no. 4 (2008): 963–969.
• Anteby, Michel, and Amy Wrzesniewski. "Focusing on Lone Trees in the Forest: Members' Experience of a Multiple Identity Organization." Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings (August 2007).
• MacLean, Tammy, Michel Anteby, Bryant Hudson, and Jenny W. Rudolph. "Talking Tainted Topics: Insights and Ideas on Researching Socially Disapproved Organizational Behavior." Journal of Management Inquiry 15, no. 1 (March 2006): 59–68.
• Anteby, Michel. "Factory 'Homers': Understanding a Highly Elusive, Marginal, and Illegal Practice." Annual English Language Edition Sociologie du travail 48, no. S1 (2006): e22–e38. (Read an interview about this article in HBS Working Knowledge.)
• Anteby, Michel. La "Perruque" en Usine: Approche d'une Pratique Marginale, Illegale et Fuyante. Sociologie du travail 45, no. 4 (October–December 2003): 453–471.
• Anteby, Michel. The "Moralities" of Poaching: Manufacturing Personal Artifacts on the Factory Floor. Ethnography 4, no. 2 (2003): 217–239.
• Anteby, Michel. "La Table de Cana: A New Model or an Exception in Corporate Social Responsibility?" Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 24, no. 2 (fall 2000): 129–141.
  

Cases and Teaching Materials

• Anteby, Michel. "Leading by Leveraging Workers' Occupational Identities." Harvard Business School Module Note 413-098, March 2013.
• Anteby, Michel, and Ayn Cavicchi. "Automating the Paris Subway (TN) (A) & (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 413-093, March 2013.
• Anteby, Michel. "ProPublica." Harvard Business School Video Supplement 413-708, February 2013.
• Anteby, Michel, Felicia Khan, and John Ng. "'Made in India': Human Capital at the Base of the Pyramid (TN)." Harvard Business School Course Overview Note 413-092, January 2013. (Revised March 2013.)
• Groysberg, Boris, and Michel Anteby. "Teena Lerner: Dividing the Pie at Rx Capital (Abridged)." Harvard Business School Video Supplement 413-707, February 2013.
• Anteby, Michel, Elena Corsi, and Emilie Billaud. "Automating the Paris Subway (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 413-062, September 2012. (Revised May 2013.)
• Anteby, Michel, Elena Corsi, and Emilie Billaud. "Automating the Paris Subway (A)." Harvard Business School Case 413-061, September 2012. (Revised May 2013.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Erin McFee. "The Freelancers Union (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 413-034, July 2012.
• Anteby, Michel, and Erin McFee. "The Freelancers Union (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 412-066, March 2012. (Revised May 2013.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Erin McFee. "The Freelancers Union (A)." Harvard Business School Case 412-056, November 2011. (Revised May 2013.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Mikell Hyman. "The Redgrove Axial Workshop." Harvard Business School Case 409-034, August 2008. (Revised October 2011.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Erin McFee. "The Redgrove Axial Workshop (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 410-078, March 2010. (Revised October 2011.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Erin McFee. "Mina O'Reilly at Logan Airport's TSA." Harvard Business School Case 409-116, June 2009. (Revised October 2011.)
• Anteby, Michel, Philippe Bertreau, and Charlotte Newman. "ProPublica." Harvard Business School Case 410-140, June 2010. (Revised October 2011.)
• Anteby, Michel. "TSA: An Overview." Harvard Business School Video Supplement 411-707, May 2011.
• Anteby, Michel, and Ryan Johnson. "ProPublica (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 411-086, March 2011. (Revised January 2013.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Erin McFee. "Mina O'Reilly at Logan Airport's TSA (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 410-025, August 2009.
• Anteby, Michel, and Nitin Nohria. "Michael Fernandes at Nicholas Piramal." Harvard Business School Case 408-001, September 2007. (Revised December 2008.)
• Anteby, Michel, Julie Battilana, and Anne-Claire Pache. "Marie Trellu-Kane at Unis-Cite." Harvard Business School Case 407-106, June 2007. (Revised December 2008.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Julie Battilana. "Marie Trellu-Kane at Unis-Cite (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 408-083, November 2007. (Revised July 2008.)
• Anteby, Michel, and Julie Battilana. "Marie Trellu-Kane at Unis-Cite." Harvard Business School Video Supplement 408-709, June 2008.
• Anteby, Michel, and Nitin Nohria. "Michael Fernandes at Nicholas Piramal (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 408-132, May 2008.
• Anteby, Michel, Julie Battilana, and A.-C., Pache. "Marie Trellu-Kane at Unis-Cite." Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007.
• Hill, Linda A., and Michel Anteby. "Analyzing Work Groups." Harvard Business School Background Note 407-032, August 2006.
  

Other Publications and Materials

• Horowitz, Sara, Stephanie Buchanan, Monica Alexandris, Michel Anteby, Naomi Rothman, Stefanie Syman, and Leyla Vural. "The Rise of the Freelance Class: A New Constituency of Workers Building a Social Safety Net." Report, Working Today, Brooklyn, NY, 2005.
  

Dear Dr.Anteby,

I would like your guidance for the following:

1) What dimensions could be set to evalute a team leader's contribution (or otherwise negative impact) on forming a team's teamwork culture?

2)Of hierachical management and flat management, which one could be considered  better for teamwork?

3) How to control office polities at an acceptable balance within an organization ?

4) Regarding management of Human Capital, can I measure it by quantitating the corelation between wage and production  output? If not what else could be considered better for such kind management estimation?

5) The last question, again regarding human capital, I run regression analysis on the corelation between worker's monthly wage and production output. It has been found only 66% of output variation can be explained by the wage variation(Significance
F =0.007). Is there any implication regarding human capital management? What approach could you advise us if it is some kind
of managerial or operational issue?  

Looking forward to your savvy insight.  Thank you very much in advance for your kind goodwill and patience .

Dear Prof. Anteby,

A lot of critics have emerged about bureaucracy’s comeback with numbers men--the linear programmers, the budget experts, and financial analysts to control the chaotic situation around the world in that companies used to be physical assets, run by families and their helpers, whereas nowadays they are largely people, helped by physical assets. Instead, it will be more attractive to people with the innovative and rapidly changing organizations that are made up of temporary groups, temporary authority systems, temporary leadership and role assignments, and democratic access to the goals of the firm within a wide set of industries and markets characterized by rapidly changing technologies and unstable, turbulent environments. But it will be so hard to achieve such a balance between the inside harmony and outside shocks from constantly changing business environment. So which governance structure and other useful plans may be considered and chosen to obtain such a balance?

Really appreciate your kind answers!!