The Pandemic Workplace - by Ilana Gershon (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this book, Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed-and changed us-during the pandemic. The unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic, she argues, forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes to work and think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. It also led us as workers to exercise our freedom in ways that were previously unimaginable, as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do. Based on over 200 interviews, Gershon's book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made workplaces into a laboratory for democratic living-the key places where most Americans are learning effective political strategies and how to think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this provocative book shows how the workplace can teach us to be democratic citizens"--

Book Synopsis

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically.

In The Pandemic Workplace, anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed--and changed us--during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do.

Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon's book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living--the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.

Review Quotes

"The stories of [Gershon's] interlocutors give a sense of how people thought about their pandemic workplaces in terms of the common good and an ethic of care. . . . This book is recommended to anyone interested in the anthropology of work, or how the pandemic changed individuals and society."-- "Choice"

"Anthropology meets political theory in this deeply engaging ethnography of the contemporary workplace. Gershon deftly explores how the pandemic unmasked the undemocratic relations at the heart of the employment contract and presents an important argument about how this is of vital relevance to our political lives."-- "Kathi Weeks, Duke University"

About the Author

Ilana Gershon is professor of anthropology at Rice University. She is the author of several books, including Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don't Find) Work Today, also published by the University of Chicago Press.