By Authors: Nishani Bourmault (NEOMA Business School); Michel Anteby (Boston University)
Interviewers: Farnam Mohebi (Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley); Leticia Smith (Carroll School of Management at Boston College)
Article link: 10.1177/00018392231190300
We found the population you studied very unconventional and interesting. You mention that the research direction emerged from the data itself. What first drew you to studying anesthesiologists who use hypnosis? Was there a particular moment or conversation that sparked your interest?
Nishani: In general, I’m interested in understanding how people experience changes in their work, and I just randomly heard of this. I knew someone who was an anesthesiologist, and he was going to Paris for a training in hypnosis, and when I heard that, I was like, what?! This is wild. This seemed like a really fundamental change. I had always imagined anesthesiologists as these very evidence-based people, and hypnosis just seemed so different from that. I was curious to learn more. I heard about this a while ago and kept it in the back of my mind until I had some time to actually dig into it. I thought maybe it’s just this one random anesthesiologist doing it, and then I found out this was really a thing in France and in many parts of Europe.
Michel: Nishani is the one who drew my attention to this context. She started to approach me and ask me questions about these intriguing anesthesiologists in France who used hypnosis. I was already somewhat aware of hypnosis being used in medical settings in France. I’d encountered cases where it was offered for procedures like MRIs, particularly where claustrophobia might be an issue. So, it’s more common, at least in France, than in other countries, I would say. I just found the population intriguing, because hypnosis is not something you would typically expect from scientifically trained professionals. There’s this inherent tension that I think drew me in. I’d also seen hypnosis used successfully in other therapeutic contexts –helping people quit smoking, for example. It made me curious about how it might work in surgical settings.
The concept of “rebooting” really resonates with us. Do you see this as primarily a response to professional stagnation or mid-career burnout? We’re also wondering how you situate this phenomenon in our current moment—especially as AI is reshaping so much professional work. Are we going to see more of this?
Nishani: Part of it is this idea that as anesthesiologists, they had this very technical job. They were using machines. Their interactions with their patients were in the background and not at the forefront of their work. They definitely mentioned that, not that their jobs were boring, but it was kind of standard. They’re doing relatively the same thing when they’re using machines and technologies all the time. I think they definitely found great meaning in having this much deeper interaction with their patients, which they didn’t have in their traditional roles. They were socialized to actually kind of put those aside a bit and focus on the technical part. Your question of how things are going to be when there’s more and more AI and technology – I mean, I don’t know, but I’m guessing that people perhaps will value these interactions with others even more if they have less of it or they’re asked to do more of the technology stuff.
Michel: What surprised me is that not all of them actually decided to reboot—they stumbled into it, more than anything else. Some wanted to do something different, but others just discovered this different way of doing things and then adopted it. It wasn’t a straightforward trajectory. We iterated on the term to describe this, and we ended up with rebooting – a real reset, not an agentic reinvention or a conscious career change. I hope the term captures this somewhat serendipitous quality we observed.
As for the AI moment – it hadn’t struck us initially, but this is the most low-tech form of “tech” adoption. It’s extremely patient-provider-specific. For hypnosis to occur, you have to use whatever the patient tells you (e.g., their preferred, soothing vacation memory), very specifically. It’s not easily replicable because it’s one-to-one, but as I’m describing it, there’s no reason why AI couldn’t do this as well. We could imagine an AI-enabled hypnosis process that would be more deployable or scalable. Most physicians in our sample would disagree with being replaced by AI, yet some do use apps for self-hypnosis. So, there’s an understanding that technology can allow for beneficial outcomes. How AI reshapes work remains to be seen, but I suspect we’ll see professionals seeking out these pockets where the human element feels irreplaceable, even as they adopt technological tools in other aspects of their work.
It sounds like you had remarkable access and incredibly rich data. We’d love to hear more about the fieldwork itself. Could you share a memorable moment or maybe an unexpected challenge you encountered? What was it like being in those spaces?
Nishani: Just getting access to this field was a bit of a challenge because I was just a complete outsider, and I didn’t have access through a specific organization. I just started having to contact random anesthesiologists at first, and so getting access was not easy. I think what helped was those first few interviews going really well and the anesthesiologists being interested in the project, and then they helped us get into the network of their world. In terms of doing fieldwork, I mean, for me, everything was a memorable moment. It was during COVID, actually, so I was going to hospitals in the middle of this. We were going to their training sessions, and then I spent some time in the operating room. It was just such a new world that I didn’t know anything about. It was amazing to be in the operating room, for example. It’s a very closed world that most people don’t have access to, so I was very grateful to be able to see that.
“I think what helped was those first few interviews going really well and the anesthesiologists being interested in the project, and then they helped us get into the network of their world.”
Michel: One significant challenge was navigating French professional etiquette, particularly the formal language distinctions between vous and tu. Nishani and I developed a strategic approach – we’d ping-pong between formality levels depending on the situation. Sometimes I’d use tu (informal you) with a highly placed physician to signal we were on the same level, that we were asking for access as peers. This linguistic negotiation became a strategic tool in our fieldwork, though it’s not discussed much in methods literature.
Another key aspect was that in France, lots of important conversations happen over lunch, meaning our research budget was best spent on lunches! Those moments are the ones when you actually get good information, especially with physicians who have no time and barely eat lunch in hospital settings. We also spent endless hours at events and conferences to build rapport. Nishani had excellent access to a hospital in Lyon, including being in the operating room sometimes, which is very unusual. Our only regret is to not have gotten access to an archive of memoirs that we discovered trainees write when completing a certificate in hypnosis, but we weren’t able to secure that access. No article is fully data-complete in some ways, so you work with what you have and compensate where needed.
“No article is fully data-complete in some ways, so you work with what you have.”
Every project teaches us something new about our own practice. What did this one teach you about doing research or writing? And if you were sitting down with graduate students who are just starting out, what lessons from this project would you want to share with them?
Nishani: I think one of the things was getting access to these very closed worlds where you don’t have an agreement with the organization. I think what it taught me was how important it is, especially when you don’t have a link with people, to get their understanding of their experiences, but also to convince them that the project is really interesting for them as well. I think that was something that I learned to do as I was going through the interviews, understanding what’s important to them, talking about that a bit more, and asking more questions about that to get them interested. The other thing I always think about when I’m writing is doing our job as social scientists, but also wanting to tell the story of these people that probably no one knows about – these untold stories. In this particular project, I was just greatly admirative of these people who were going so far from their original professional norms, and doing it on their own will. So when writing it up, what was on my mind was analyzing as we do as social scientists, but also wanting to tell their story that I found very inspiring.
“I was just greatly admiring these people who were going so far from their original professional norms, and doing it on their own will. So when writing it up, what was on my mind was analyzing as we do as social scientists, but also wanting to tell their story that I found very inspiring.”
Michel: First, what it taught me was how people can continue in their professional track and grow in new ways. These individuals were able to continue doing working despite being in environments where burnout was rampant. That has implications for other professions facing pressure – like academia, healthcare, and policing. I will remember this fieldwork as being about maintaining faith in one’s professional ability while doing something a bit different than one imagined up front. Second, the counterintuitive learning for doctoral students comes from our findings: physicians had to rely on their own reactions to patients, not much on those with their peers. So, work with your academic advisors, but whatever drives you that can come from outside our narrow (peer) space of academia (like clients, students or field-participants) – hold onto that dearly because that will carry over. Third, in terms of writing, I learned to create (basic!) figures.
Most of my articles don’t have any, but a reviewer wanted one. I realized it’s okay – it didn’t do violence to our writing, and if some people are more visual, why not? Sometimes, accommodating different ways of processing information strengthens a paper.
“I will remember this fieldwork as a way to think about maintaining faith in one’s professional ability while doing something a bit different than one imagined up front.”
Finally, I learned a lot about collaborating in this project. For most qualitative inductive researchers, collaboration isn’t the default, which is problematic given publishing pressures. Working with Nishani, here, has been great! Make sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to bring—clear role delineation prevents friction. Nishani and I had worked together on the Paris subway project, so we knew how to work together. We share this curiosity about unconventional settings and the margins of professional practice. That shared sensibility, that willingness to look where others aren’t looking – that’s what attracted us both. Also, she loves to write up the data, and I love to see patterns. The best collaborations happen when people are pursuing questions that genuinely intrigue them and expectations are clear.
This might be a more reflective question, but we’re curious: Did conducting this research shift how you think about your own professional identities as scholars? We’re thinking particularly about how you describe your participants “turning inward or outward” in their work—did you find yourself thinking about that in relation to your own academic practice?
Nishani: I think, as my co-author Michel and I were writing it up, thinking about the particular setting we were studying and how it can perhaps apply to other professions, a lot of our conversations were thinking about students and professors and the relationship we have, and how our interactions with students change how we are doing things. I think in that respect, reflecting on our own profession and our experiences with our students, who we may turn to in a way. Yeah, I definitely started thinking about that from this paper. And in general thinking about how our own professional identities may shift in our careers, before deciding to get a PhD, I did a kind of a big transition. I used to work in finance and was a trader on Wall Street – very different than the qualitative research, social science, sociology kind of stuff – and so maybe that’s part of why I’m so interested in these kinds of questions.
Michel: What sustained these physicians’ careers was holding more strongly onto an idea (their commitment to patient carer) than only to their peer-approved and prescribed ways of doing. That insight has definitely shaped how I think about my own academic practice. The ideas that drive me, that pull me toward certain research sites, often differ from conventional expectations and I think that’s not just okay – it’s essential for doing work that sustains us over a long career. Let me give an example and then return to myself. Damon Phillips has done extensive work with formerly incarcerated individuals, that seems to enrich his career and scholarship. In my case, the project I conducted with Audrey Holm on puppeteers was linked to my (and her) genuine interest in performing arts and puppetry. Those personal connections made the research more meaningful, and I hope that comes through in the work.
“The things that drive me, that pull me toward certain research sites or questions, often differ from conventional expectations, and I think that’s not just okay – it’s actually essential.”
Interviewer Bio:
Farnam Mohebi is a PhD Candidate in the Management of Organizations (Macro-track) at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies, and a researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology at UCSF. Farnam’s research examines how professionals navigate emerging technologies, particularly AI, drawing on medical sociology, organizational theory, and STS. Using AI as a lens, Farnam revisits longstanding assumptions about professional work and expertise, drawing on an MD-MPH background and a dual commitment to understanding both the practice and theory of organizations and management studies.
Leticia Smith is a PhD student in the Management and Organization Department of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. She is interested in using qualitative methods to explore questions of identity and belonging, including how the social groups and structures we are part of influence our behaviors and sense of self, as well as how organizational calls to bring our “whole” selves to work impact how work is organized.