The Pandemic Workplace

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 to work and think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. It also led us as workers to exercise our freedom in previously unimaginable ways, 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 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 accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.