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The Pandemic Workplace

How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office

The Pandemic Workplace

How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office

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.

176 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2024

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Culture Studies

Sociology: Occupations, Professions, Work

Reviews

“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

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Agreeing to Have a Boss
Chapter 2: Being Governed, Governing Others at Work
Chapter 3: Risking Workplaces
Chapter 4: Organizing Work in a Pandemic
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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