Introduction: Book Forum on The Pandemic Workplace

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us wondered whether work had changed forever. Every day, we heard how the pandemic was impacting Americans’ ideas about work—people deciding their jobs weren’t worth risking their lives for; others discovering the joys and drawbacks of telecommuting; working mothers reaching their breaking point; still others deciding it was finally time to change careers. As an anthropologist of work, I’ve been eagerly awaiting ethnographic explorations of how this tumultuous moment looked and felt in actual workplaces.

With The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office, Ilana Gershon has contributed one of the first, and undoubtedly most impactful, of such studies. Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon makes the startling and persuasive claim that it is in the workplace that Americans today learn how to be democratic citizens. During the pandemic, as they negotiated tensions around safety, authority, and the common good, workers articulated competing values around work that connect to their broader understanding of what it means to govern and be governed.

This book forum gathers responses by Jane Collins (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Carol Greenhouse (Princeton University), and James Slotta (University of Texas at Austin), as well as a thoughtful response from Gershon.

Editor Bio

Carrie Lane is Chair and Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her latest book, More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working, uses organizing’s rise as a lens for thinking through the nature of overwork and overwhelm in the United States today.