By Ilana Gershon

Author of

The Pandemic Workplace:  How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2024).

The Pandemic Workplace opens with a question: where are US citizens learning their political imaginations these days? In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville thought that Americans began to think about both politics and the common good by participating in civic associations, like a Rotary Club or a soup kitchen. In these organizations, people came to understand how to make decisions based on what would benefit the organization as a whole, not just their own interests.

But as Robert Putnam argued in Bowling Alone, Americans don’t participate in civic associations at the rates that they did in the 1830s, or much at all. So where are they discovering how to be democratic citizens? These days, I argue, Americans are learning how to govern and be governed in the workplace.

This should give everyone in the United States pause. Many workplaces are only focused on making a profit, and all workplaces lie somewhere on the continuum between autocracy and democracy. Where any workplace is on this continuum can shift internally from team to team or even decision to decision. As Americans learn to accept autocratic presuppositions about how governing should take place in the office, they also learn to accept autocracy more generally and to find such practices acceptable on the national political stage.

The Covid pandemic was an especially good moment to study how the American workplace shapes political imaginations. Workplaces, after all, bring together people with potentially disparate approaches to managing health risks and ask them to share space. During the pandemic, everyone had to change their daily practices—how they moved through their work spaces, interacted with their co-workers, took breaks, and so on. In short, workplaces had to quickly regulate very minor aspects of tasks and social interactions, and to create systems of enforcement when people failed to enact these new regulations. What’s more, they had to do all this in a context marked by disagreement about whether there was a pandemic, or what would be effective at halting the spread of the virus.  People were uncertain about the nature of the virus, and often had very different expectations about what would make them feel safe at work. In general, people became very conscious of how decisions were being made in their workplaces, and they had many strong opinions about how workplaces were controlling behavior and managing potential risks..

A widespread social assumption turned these new regulations into socially charged moments. Americans generally hold that it is inappropriate to tell another person what to do unless the relationship involves family ties or a contract. So bosses felt free to tell their employees what to do, but retail workers felt uncomfortable telling customers. Contracts and kinship didn’t always make it easy to issue an order—in-laws and middle managers often wrestle with whether they can successfully control another person’s actions.  The pandemic turned this general reluctance to tell others what to do or to be told into a public health dilemma.

In a climate of political upheaval, The Pandemic Workplace offers a new angle on how Americans learn what democracy is and how it functions. Peoples’ experiences during the pandemic showed just how important it is to see American workplaces as the laboratories of democratic practice that they, in fact, are. The office is where American workers learn how to think about governing and being governed—and it’s also where they can experience the value and effectiveness of participating in a deliberative democracy, if workplaces are structured to encourage this.

Ilana Gershon is a US focused anthropologist with broad interests in political and legal anthropology, linguistic and media anthropology, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of work. She has two major theoretical projects at the moment. First, with Sarah Green, she is surfacing an emerging theoretical movement in anthropology that assumes everyone lives among multiple social orders, and endeavor to form boundaries between these social orders that are stable and yet porous enough to allow people, objects, forms, and ideas to circulate in appropriate ways. With this as a starting point, ethnographers are analyzing anew circulation, power, ritual, and scale, among other traditional anthropological foci. Second, she endeavors to generate a historically specific and rigorous understanding of neoliberalism as a distinct moment of capitalism through various axes of comparison. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren, SSRC, NSF and fellowships at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and Notre Dame’s Institute of Advanced Study.