Why What Resists is Often Revealing | Research Seminar with Michel Anteby

A researcher enters your world and starts asking questions you would prefer not to answer. What do you do? Mostly, when an interloper appears, communities find ways to resist; they obstruct investigations and hide evidence, shelve complaints, silence dissent, and even forget about their own past. Such resistance—that is, the mechanisms deployed by social groups to maintain the status quo—is the bane of field researchers, for it often seems to slam the door in our face. How can we learn about a community when it resists so very strongly? The answer is that, sometimes, the resistance is itself the key. By closing ranks and creating obstacles, community members can disclose more than they mean. This talk will discuss how such resistance manifests itself and what it reveals about a given field and a particular researcher. Insights will be drawn from resistance in diverse field settings to help analyze resistance. I will argue that field resistance contains way more analytical possibilities than we imagine. Overall, resistance needs to be understood as a routine product (not by-product) of the field. That means that resistance is not only indicative of something else happening. Instead, it can prove rich data for our inquiries.

Michel Anteby is a Professor of Management & 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, opens in new tab. 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. Studied populations have included airport security officers, anesthesiologists, clinical anatomists, factory craftsmen, ghostwriters, puppeteers, and subway drivers.