THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINARY; OR THE WORKPLACE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
It is a classic anthropological conceit that the most mundane aspects of people’s lives can shed light on their most profound metaphysical and moral realities. A cockfight can be a meditation on cosmic order. A house, an inverted microcosm of the world.
In the Pandemic Workplace, Ilana Gershon directs our attention to that most mundane of all settings: the contemporary American workplace. Originally the fieldsite for a project about employment contracts, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic it became a window onto something quite different. As employees talked with her about working in the volatile pandemic context, she found them reflecting on weighty matters of authority, freedom, constraint, and obligation. And underpinning these reflections, Gershon discerns a kind of contemporary political imaginary—a way of thinking about governing and being governed—reminiscent of that curious concoction that 17th and 18th century philosophers called “the social contract.”
On the face of it, there is something very strange about this. The social contract was an esoteric contrivance that early modern philosophers used to debate the legitimacy of different forms of government. As they framed the issue, humans are by nature free and equal, but on their own they lack protection for their life and property. So, they agree to give up some of their freedom and submit themselves to government to gain the security that government provides. The question was: what sort of government would provide the desired protections while infringing the least on their natural freedom?
As influential as this thought experiment has been, it isn’t exactly the stuff of everyday experience. Whenever we read Locke in my introductory anthropology class, my students are always quick to point out that they never signed any social contract. But Gershon makes the case that this political imaginary is more close at hand than we might think: there in the actual contracts that govern many of our working lives. Like the social contract, in employment contracts people agree to limit their freedom, submit to authority, and do as they are told (up to a point) in exchange for the security that a paycheck and health insurance provide.
Much of the time, of course, people don’t reflect on the way they exchange freedom for security in their employment contract. But in context of the pandemic, this contractual logic loomed large. Was their employer providing them the security they desired in the form of masking policies, social distancing measures, and the like? Were they now being asked to sacrifice too much of their freedom as they were subjected to vaccine mandates, in person work requirements, and so on? The terms of their contracts—the authority they allowed others over them, the benefits they received in exchange—became palpable on a day-to-day basis.
Finding this contractual logic alive in the workplace raises some intriguing questions for Gershon and her readers. Might the workplace be an important site where Americans today develop their political imaginaries, learning about what it means to govern and be governed? Might the contractual logic that plays such a prominent role in the workplace shape how Americans think more broadly about authority and freedom in their political lives together?
Gershon does not dwell at length on these questions. But early in the book she describes the eureka moment when she realized that the answer to both of them is yes. Reading an account of the January 6 assault on the US Capitol, she can’t help but notice the way the attackers use workplace metaphors to explain what they are up to. As a grandmother in the fray that day puts it: “Whose house is this? This is the house of “We the People” If you do a bad job, your boss will tell you about it….We’re not happy with the job you’ve done” (p 6).
The workplace provides this woman with a framework to conceptualize her political activity that day. Interestingly, though, hers is not a metaphor that involves social or employment contracts. Here, the government is not a boss who one listens to in exchange for security of one sort or another. In fact, in this metaphor government is no boss at all. We, the people are the boss and the legislators in the Capitol our employees!
In a striking way, the woman’s metaphor flips the everyday experience of being governed in the workplace on its head. And in doing this, it gives expression to a political imaginary that is widespread in the United States—one rooted not in the logic of contracts, but in the ideal of popular sovereignty and the logic of political representation. In this vision of politics, it is the people who are the ultimate authority and the role of government officials is to represent and execute their views.
If we look for the source of this democratic political imaginary in Americans’ everyday lives, we are likely to find it in many places: civics lessons and history classes, politicians’ speeches and patriotic rituals, political reporting and polling results. But I’m not sure an analogue will be found in the workplace. As Gershon’s book shows us, authority in the workplace typically operates according to a different logic.
But that does not mean the democratic political imaginary is unconnected to Americans’ everyday experiences in the workplace. As the woman’s metaphor above suggests, this imaginary may prove particularly resonant not because it mirrors people’s experience of authority in the workplace, but because it inverts it. It is the workplace turned upside down. Here, we, the people get to be the boss. And wealthy and powerful men and women compete to work for us. Even our current president, who clearly likes to be the boss, promises to tackle our problems for us. In this imaginary, we don’t need to submit to bosses to get the things we desire; we don’t need to sacrifice our freedom in exchange for security. We are the boss; we just need to choose our employees well.
