Have you ever felt like an outsider, struggling to find your footing in a world that seems to resist your every step? Professor Michel Anteby, our esteemed guest for today's episode, knows that feeling all too well. In our engaging conversation, he shares how his personal battles with being a minority have equipped him with a unique resilience, one that he has applied to his field research in some of the most secretive and resistant organizations. From the guarded corridors of Disneyland to the strategic planning rooms of Harvard Business School, Professor Anteby's tales offer a fresh perspective on viewing resistance as an ally rather than a foe.
As the author of "The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field," Professor Anteby emphasizes that the walls we encounter in new environments are not just barriers but windows into the underlying cultural and organizational fabric. His experiences in a French aeronautic factory and with the TSA reveal the unexpected value in the pushback we face. Throughout this episode, Anteby weaves a narrative that transforms resistance from an insurmountable obstacle into a powerful current that, when navigated skillfully, propels us toward greater understanding and personal growth. Join us as we uncover the winds of wisdom that can lift us to new heights in our research, as well as personal and professional journeys.
Have you ever felt like an outsider, struggling to find your footing in a world that seems to resist your every step? Professor Michel Anteby, our esteemed guest for today's episode, knows that feeling all too well. In our engaging conversation, he shares how his personal battles with being a minority have equipped him with a unique resilience, one that he has applied to his field research in some of the most secretive and resistant organizations. From the guarded corridors of Disneyland to the strategic planning rooms of Harvard Business School, Professor Anteby's tales offer a fresh perspective on viewing resistance as an ally rather than a foe.
As the author of "The Interloper: Lessons from Resistance in the Field," Professor Anteby emphasizes that the walls we encounter in new environments are not just barriers but windows into the underlying cultural and organizational fabric. His experiences in a French aeronautic factory and with the TSA reveal the unexpected value in the pushback we face. Throughout this episode, Anteby weaves a narrative that transforms resistance from an insurmountable obstacle into a powerful current that, when navigated skillfully, propels us toward greater understanding and personal growth. Join us as we uncover the winds of wisdom that can lift us to new heights in our research, as well as personal and professional journeys.
JP Matychak:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Insights at Questrom podcast. I'm JP Matychak, your host, and joining me, as always, is my co-host, Shannon Light. Shannon, how are you today?
Shannon Light:
Great, thank you.
JP Matychak:
All right. Well, we've got another great episode for today, and it's another installment of the Questrom Book Club. Michelle Anteby is professor of management and organizations at Boston University's Questrom School of Business and Sociology at Boston University's College of Arts and Sciences. He also co-leads Boston University's Precarity Lab. His research looks at how individuals relate to their work, their occupations and the organizations they belong to. He examines more specifically the practices people engage in at work that help them sustain their chosen cultures or identities. In doing so, his research contributes to a better understanding of how these cultures and identities come to be and manifest themselves. He's the author of the upcoming book the Interloper Lessons from Resistance in the Field. The book discusses the concept of resistance, 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. So how can researchers learn about a community when its members resist so strongly? Well, Michel has the answer. Michel, welcome.
Michel Anteby:
Thank you, jp. Thank you, shannon, it's great to be with you today.
JP Matychak:
So, Michel, you yourself are a field researcher and have been for most of your career, right, I mean, you make a living on it, right? So talk to us a little bit about what inspired you to write the Interloper. You know what were some of the central themes or messages that you really wanted to convey through this book.
Michel Anteby:
So there are two main reasons that inspired me. One are my students and the other are my own experience doing field research, as you mentioned. First, my students, because I've worked with many people who try to access a firm, a government agency or even a non-profit and only rarely do doors open up, so they complain to me very often that they can't gain access. I personally have learned that refocusing our attention on the resistance we get can be very productive and that we can learn from these failures. So that's what I wanted to convey to these people I've worked with. And the second reason is that I've tended to study a lot of settings or topics that resist to be clear. So, for instance, companies like Disneyland, harvard Business School or the Transportation Security Administration so very secretive settings or topics that many would consider off limits ghostwriting a memoir for others or trying to secure human cadavers for medical education, for medical education. And all this has led me to have a good kind of you know grasp of what to do when people don't really want to let you in. Wow.
JP Matychak:
Okay.
Shannon Light:
Could you elaborate on how you explore the concept of resistance, and I know in your book you offer many specific examples. Could you kind of go into more detail about an example there? Of course, yeah.
Michel Anteby:
So you know, what I love is that people tend to be frightened of resistance and not want to deal with it. The main message of the book is that resistance can actually be very beneficial. You can learn a lot from how you get pushed back. So, if there's you know, one thing that I hope readers get from it is that there are way more possibilities when dealing with resistance than anything else. You asked about specific examples, so I'll give you one, but I'm happy to share others as well. I think every form of resistance is telling. When I was conducting, for instance, some research in a French aeronautic factory at the time, like today, I was affiliated with a US university and plant members were kind of puzzled why a US academic would want to learn about their life.
Michel Anteby:
You know, they were suspicious even. I would say, you know, was I a spy? Something even more ominous, who knows? And that proved really difficult for me when I was trying to gain access. I also at that time was able to affiliate myself with a French university and gradually I discovered that my French affiliation actually helped a lot. I wasn't sure why, but it did. Unbeknown to me at that time, the specific plant I was studying had a very murky past. In fact it had collaborated with foreigners in order to achieve the success it had today in France. So you know, to put it very bluntly, they had hired Nazi scientists after World War II to help build French capacity and then later on in the 70s, they worked with General Electric, an American company, to kind of develop their expertise. So by presenting myself as American, I was kind of triggering this vague sentiment of unpatriotic behavior that really rubbed them the wrong way but was also very diagnostic of what mattered most to them.
Shannon Light:
And I know you use the TSA. You go into a chapter about TSA. Can you talk about that? That one I thought was interesting. Oh, sure, yeah, I'm happy to.
Michel Anteby:
Talk about that, that one I thought was interesting? Oh sure, yeah, I'm happy to. So TSA was very different and every field has its own different kind of tension. So remember, the French factory was about how patriotic they were and the problem was my US-ness or Farness. TSA has a very different issue, or at least at the time we were studying it. They were concerned by being monitored by outsiders, because there were rumors at the time that TSA employees might be stealing from customers' luggage.
Michel Anteby:
So this was the early years right of TSA, and they had installed cameras on every lane because that was the way to control for that. So when I approached them, I was working with a doctoral student at that time who went to an airport, unnamed I'll say and was trying to see what they did. Within 10 minutes of her being there, they noticed her watching them, they called state police. She got detained and had to explain what she was doing and at that time I thought you know, this is just odd, but let's continue but the fact that she was picking up on the idea of observing them and that's what bothered them was really telling about what they were concerned about. Employees at TSA were concerned about being over-monitored by management, even outsiders, and the resistance she faced and we faced, in that sense, was a wonderful signal, you know, to guide our discovery.
Shannon Light:
And I know you've mentioned resistance now a couple of times why should we care about it? Why not? Okay, I'll give a better answer.
Michel Anteby:
Resistance is the social mechanism that a group deploys whether it's a firm, you know, a family or government agency to maintain the status quo.
JP Matychak:
Yeah, and.
Michel Anteby:
I love resistance because it tells us what the status quo is about. So if we really pay attention to how people push back, it tells us what they want to maintain in place, and that's why resistance is a wonderful, informative kind of tool, a diagnostic tool, to help us understand what matters to individuals. Does that capture it to you?
JP Matychak:
Yeah, so you know, you as a sociologist, in a lot of what you do and you're in a business school, and so you yourself can, can may have already felt like an interloper yourself in some instances, or you know. So talk a little bit about how you have worked to overcome some of those obstacles. You know in here in your career as an academic, but even in the business world, right, you know you are by nature trying to study people, which can make people feel anxious, right, and can make them feel resistant. So what have you? What methods have you employed during your career that you brought to this book that you hope others can, tactics that others can bring to yeah, thanks, JP.
Michel Anteby:
So first to set the record straight, I think sociologists belong in business schools.
JP Matychak:
Great. .
Michel Anteby:
Maybe there are fewer sociologists than other types of economics or economics trained people.
Michel Anteby:
We all have our place. Economics, trained people yeah, we all have our place. What I've learned is you know you have to like, embrace the resistance you face and kind of run with it, so not view it as an obstacle, pass as French than being an American, and I wasn't entirely sure why, but I felt it. And I did that when I was working on a different project that entailed interviews with ghostwriters of memoirs. My collaborator and I discovered that ghostwriters didn't think of themselves at all as ghostwriters, despite the overwhelming evidence that they had ghostwritten books right. So we learned quickly not to call them ghostwriters but to call them co-writers, which they preferred. And these kind of adaptation strategies to pass, to accept, to run with it even if you don't fully understand why at that time I think are good ways for field researchers to deal with resistance. To deal with resistance.
JP Matychak:
So it seems like a key then, if you would agree, is being able to diagnose early that resistance, and I liked how you talked about this is the how are they resisting. You can waste time trying to figure out the why right off the bat, but if you can glean from noticing the observations of, like how you're feeling the resistance, it could offer a lot. So how can individuals say in the workplace you know, not necessarily. I mean I see this as being applicable to not only field researchers but leaders as well. I mean I see this as being applicable to not only field researchers but leaders as well. And so how can leaders take a look at this sort of tactic to identify that resistance early on by observation of how people are resisting?
Michel Anteby:
Yeah, it's a wonderful insight you know you're pinpointing the fact that you should just embrace it and try to understand how it manifests. Once you do, you can try to understand what's the form of resistance that you're facing. Is it silencing? Is it obstruction? Is it forgetting? And what the form tells you about your organization or the place you're leading you about your organization or the place you're leading.
Michel Anteby:
I'll give a quick example. But if you're a manager of a newly merged firm and you're talking to employees and they never, ever reference the merger right, but reference like the new products or the customers, as if the merger didn't happen, you know, the way of forgetting might be indicative of how they perceive the merger and what it means to them or how threatening it might be to them. So I think trying to find these forms and what they echo in every day's life is the key for leaders, field researchers or anyone who's interested in discovering their context.
JP Matychak:
So let's play that one out a little bit more. So let's take that example. You have a merger. They're talking about the products, they're talking about these things. They're not talking about the merger. So what might that tell you about how people are feeling?
Michel Anteby:
So you know at this point probably you don't yet know, but there's something in the history of the merger that's mind must have rubbed them the wrong way, in the same way that the use of foreign employees in the factory was problematic. And if that's problematic, you would want to know why and how you could address it right.
JP Matychak:
Right. So it might not, um, but just the reason why I'm carrying this out is because it might not be that the workers are, um for lack of a better term not fans of the new products. They may be very excited about the new products, but there's something else during the process of that merger that hit them on a personal level that could be causing a little bit of that tension and that resistance. So you know, sometimes, I'm sure you see, leaders may be quick to write these folks off as they don't want what, ultimately, is going to be good for this organization, and so they're the detractors. So we need to find ways of removing that detraction. That can be a mistake leaders can make, could it not, if they're not trying to understand better what that cause of that resistance is.
Michel Anteby:
Yeah, I fully agree. Use the word tension resistances. Yeah, I fully agree, use the word tension and I think that's a perfect word. You know, resistance uncovers tensions. So ignoring resistance is putting tensions under the carpet and pretending it doesn't exist. Versus there are flavors of resistance that can tell you about forms of tensions.
Michel Anteby:
Maybe I can give you another example that builds a bit on the ghostwriters, but you know, the ghostwriters didn't want to be called ghostwriters because in their eyes, they were co-creators of memoirs, so they were active participants. They were almost artists, they had agency and they weren't people who were writing someone else's memoir, they were co-writing like an art object. So labeling them ghostwriters went completely against the ethos of what they did. They really were co-creators and that's why when we asked them, are you a ghostwriter, they were like no, no, that's not us. We're people who are almost artists creating another persona. So the typical example here would be a book that's now is famous, but the memoirs of former President Donald Trump. His ghostwriter went public and explained how he had co-created something and was very, you know, transparent on his role in creating the persona and in that sense, was kind of gaining agency and regaining his place in the project, even though his name was under, you know, donald Trump's, and it was written with the help of Right right.
Shannon Light:
You, just a little while ago, talked about the different types of resistance which I know each chapter in your book kind of breaks down the types obstructing, hiding, shelving, silencing, forgetting and denying. I'm curious which type was the most interesting to you to write about?
Michel Anteby:
I love them all. You're asking me to pick, like a child. But okay, maybe the one that's a bit less common, let's say, is the run around shelving. So shelving is when organizations or companies kind of deploy efforts to apparently try to solve a problem when at the same time they make every effort to ensure that nothing happens. So you're doing, on the surface, a lot of things that seem right, yet you know and hope this will never happen. Why is shelving interesting, you know? Or ad hoc committees that seem to be very on point and on target and yet lead to nothing.
Michel Anteby:
This is very common, I think in corporate America, but honestly also in government agencies.
JP Matychak:
Education. They always say educationism.
Michel Anteby:
I'll say it, so you know the fact that you need to shelve like this an issue is interesting because it signals that you also want to maintain appearances For the organization that engages in that. It tells us that that organization cares about its outside image more than anything else. It's not a surprise that I describe shelving in the context of Disneyland. You know Disney is about image creation, so obstructing or hiding is not part of the repertoire. You know that's not good. We're here to have people smile and be happy and therefore shelving is a much better way for us to deal with potential tensions than just saying no or kicking you out of.
Michel Anteby:
Disneyland.
Shannon Light:
And bringing it back to you. What ways, would you say, has your up bringing shaped your trajectory towards success and how would you say it shapes who you are today?
Michel Anteby:
That's a long question.
Michel Anteby:
I'll try to make it short, right. This is not therapy session. We bring many of ourselves or parts of ourselves to our work, and I don't want to be too typifying in my answer, but I think growing up as a minority was an experience that really made me very attuned to pushback and resistance. I grew up as gay in a mostly straight environment. I grew up as a religious minority in France. I came from a Jewish household and was probably the only Jewish kid in every class I went to in high school until I reached university, and also both my parents were foreign, born in France. So all this kind of set me up to deal in various ways with resistance.
Michel Anteby:
I'm not saying in good or bad ways. Right, you know, accepting denials might not be the best way to do it, but anyhow. So I had fluency in that, and over time I came to realize that that fluency also matched me with hard-to-access fields. Right, because I don't know if I'm good at it, but I had experience and I knew what to do when people said no. So when TSA closes its doors or Disneyland says never, I'm like yes, this is normal, it's fine. I know how to deal with this and in that sense, I believe that part of my upbringing prepared me well for this type of work and for the book.
JP Matychak:
So in what ways do you think that the work you've done in the Interloper resonates with sort of this broader societal and cultural issues, you know, and what do you think the or what I say? What do you think, though, what do you hope the implication would be for those that read the book, for individuals, organizations, society as a whole? I mean, because it's very, you know, it's always great to see the tangible stories that bring these things to life. So, you know, as you wrote this and you see it now, you know, as a published work, you know, what do you hope that people will take from this?
Michel Anteby:
My biggest hope is that it will invite all derailed kind of travelers, you know, whether a new field worker, a new manager or even someone like moving countries to pause a bit on the presumed failures and pushback they get and use them as opportunities to learn more about their context. Opportunities to learn more about their context. So it's almost like a travel companion, you know, for these individuals who might not fully fit.
Shannon Light:
And.
Michel Anteby:
I would argue all of us don't fit right. Even if you're an insider, even if you think this is your world, you'll face situations where very quickly you realize you're maybe slightly off compared to the expectations. So to me that's the main hope of the book. Put otherwise, you know the hurdles that we kind of drive over should be embraced and allow us to see the relief of the terrain. So when we see a bump, you know run over it, you know it might be painful at that moment, but also try to see what it tells you about the terrain you're just going over. And that's the main message of the book.
Shannon Light:
You kind of just touched on it, but if there's one idea people should take away from this book, what would it be?
JP Matychak:
Maybe even just like one strategy. That's what I'm thinking about. What's one way I can change the way I do something to help overcome these resistance?
Michel Anteby:
So, again, I think we shouldn't overcome them. That's part of the problem, right, Because if we're trying to overcome them, it's because we see them as hurdles and challenges. It's because we see them as hurdles and challenges. So the one strategy would be you know, if you think something is preventing you from moving forward, try to consider how it might actually be helping you advance. I'll attempt an image with the birds. Image with the birds. You know, when small birds learn to fly, they probably think that the wind is preventing them from moving fast and where they want to go. If you accept that the resistance that the wind is creating is actually what allows you to move forward and fly further, then you're in a better shape. And that's kind of one nugget I hope readers will take from this book.
JP Matychak:
And I think that that is a great nugget to end on, the imagery is perfect. I really do. I like that because I think that that's something that we can all relate to in our own organizations. It's like because you're right. My first instinct was like how do we overcome this right? And we shouldn't be thinking about how to overcome it. How do we use that right and how do we use that as an opportunity to understand more and to propel forward Very good stuff. The book is the Interloper Lessons from Resistance in the Field, available for pre-order now, released April 9th. Michel, thank you so much for joining us today.
Michel Anteby:
Thank you, Shannon, Thank you JP.
JP Matychak:
Well, that'll wrap things up for this episode of the Insights at Questrom podcast. I'd like to thank our guest again, Michel Anteby, Professor of Management and Organizations at Boston University, Questrom School of Business. Remember, for additional information on this show, our previous shows and additional insights from Questrom faculty on the world of business, visit insights. bu. edu For my co-host, Shannon Light. I'm JP Matychak. So long.
