The Interloper

Michel Anteby is professor of management and organizations and (by courtesy) of sociology at Boston University. He is the author of Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education and Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautic Plant (Princeton).

"Anteby takes the reader on a tour of particular forms of resistance to our presence as interlopers in a field excursion, focusing on its relational character and on how much those resistances inform what the stakes of the field are. . . . The Interloper is also an invitation to consider the role of failed beginnings in the generation of qualitative knowledge. It helps us to better understand the need to patiently take the false starts and the struggles we experience in establishing the study object as part of the knowledge enterprise."---Claudio E. Benzecry & Andrew Deener, American Journal of Sociology --- "A significant contribution. . . . Amid contemporary struggles with diversity, equity, and inclusion, Anteby’s reflections carve out space for those of us who have not historically been held up, and even have been actively resisted and thereby marginalized, by the worlds constituting our everyday. He shows how such personal experiences with resistance through marginalization may, in fact, uniquely position us to understand others in a world that has increasingly valued the ability to do so. Said otherwise, he honors the interloper in all of us, encouraging us along the way to honor it within ourselves as well."---Kevin Woojin Lee, ILR Review --- "Anteby is a great storyteller. . . . He offers many lively examples of his trials and tribulations in accessing various fields in his ethnographic projects, punctuated by self-deprecating comments and humor. . . . Exemplifying this move between a personal, local, historically bound experience and the general insights it may yield, Anteby’s [The Interloper] attests to the ethnographic tradition at its best."---Tammar B. Zilber, Administrative Science Quarterly --- "Wide-ranging. . . . [D]efensiveness can, of course, be frustrating for researchers. What The Interloper demonstrates is that it can also offer a vital tool for uncovering the very things people most want to keep hidden."---Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education