Ilana Gershon, "The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode Overview

Episode: Ilana Gershon, "The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office"
Air Date: February 25, 2026
Host: Tom Disena (joined by co-producer Julie Smith)
Guest: Ilana Gershon, Herbert S. Autry Chair of Anthropology, Rice University

This episode features an in-depth conversation with anthropologist Ilana Gershon about her book, “The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office.” Drawing from over 220 interviews, Gershon explores how the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the American workplace, revealing it as a laboratory for democratic engagement, negotiation of authority, and the collective struggles of individuals navigating risk, decision-making, and the meaning of citizenship at work.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Transformation of the Workplace during COVID-19: The pandemic forced a reevaluation of work structures, relationships, and authority.
• Workplaces as Sites of Democratic Practice: People negotiated power, responsibility, and the common good in new and visible ways.
• Work Contracts and Authority: The pandemic exposed the complexities of employment contracts and shifted how individuals viewed employer-employee relationships.
• Analogies between Private Government and the Office: Gershon operationalizes Elizabeth Anderson's notion of private government, showing how workplaces serve as models of governance and citizenship training.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Gershon’s Motivation and Research Evolution

• Initial Research Focus: Gershon originally planned to study “boring” topics like employment contracts and noncompete clauses.
  • Example: Noncompete clauses for bike shop or sandwich shop workers—"I found a noncompete contract in a Jimmy John's sandwich maker job" (02:58–03:19).
• Pivot During the Pandemic: Attempting to interview people about contracts felt out of touch; pandemic realities brought sharper focus on decision-making and authority at work.
  • “...all of a sudden people were channeling Locke and Hobbes and Rousseau and talking about the Social Contract...” (07:39–08:17).

American Workplaces as Training Grounds for Citizenship

• Historical Perspective: Earlier in the 20th century, involvement in civic groups was seen as training for democracy. Gershon argues the workplace now fills that role.
• Tension of Authority: Americans are conflicted about telling others what to do; the pandemic heightened reliance on formal authority (bosses, laws, state mandates).
  • “...people sometimes desperately wanted to tell another person what to do, but they felt that this was too problematic...so they wanted a boss, or they wanted state regulation...to point to...” (14:55–16:26).

The Nexus of Contracts vs. Community of Practice

• Contracts: Legal relationships (e.g., employer-employee) insufficiently capture the interactive, evolving nature of workplaces.
• Community of Practice: Drawing from Lave & Wenger’s “Situated Learning”—workplaces are communities where newcomers and old-timers continually negotiate practices and norms.
  • “...every community is a combination of newcomers and old timers...people have very shifting understandings of how to solve problems together...” (11:20–12:19).

Navigating Risk and Collective Action

• Authority Structures: Especially in crisis (e.g., COVID), people want decisions handed down from above to absolve themselves from contentious roles.
• Complexity in Schools: Schools exemplify conflicting authority (school boards, principals, parents, unions), making collective action and decision-making especially fraught.
  • “...so many different ways in which democracy and autocratic decision making were getting structured and kind of lumped together to jostle with each other...” (24:22–25:09).

The Challenges of Collective Action

• Limited Stories of Solidarity: Gershon notes a surprising lack of collective workplace action; quitting was the dominant response to workplace dissatisfaction.
  • “Their first moment...was, ‘well, I can always quit.’ Quitting was the first political strategy—not, ‘oh, I can talk to my coworkers.’...” (37:02–38:45).

Distinctions in Authority and the Right to Exit

• Quitting as Agency: The freedom to leave replaces attempts at reform or solidarity.
• Analogy to Marriage and Private Government: The “right to exit” resonates with Anderson and Hirschman’s political theory, but economic realities constrain actual freedom.

Analogies between School Shooter Drills and COVID Protocols

• Teachers compared the existential risks posed by COVID to those of school shootings; both shifted the narrative of responsibility and sacrifice.
  • “In active shooter training, they were told how to sacrifice themselves for the children…In COVID, they were suddenly potentially the vectors; all of a sudden this shifted the ways in which they were supposed to be understanding risk…” (21:14–22:53).

The Allure of Small Business Ownership

• Alternative to Corporate Private Government: Small business/family business seen as an escape from corporate authority—though this is often more fantasy than reality.
  • “The fantasy is that the way out is to become the dealer down the road. Whether or not that's actually possible is a different story.” (42:30–42:49).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Changing Research Direction:
  “I always try to become a member of the Society for the Study of Boring Things...and then the pandemic happened...and then I realized, oh, I have a book on my hands.” (01:49–05:46)
• On American Attitudes Toward Authority:
  “How incredibly loaded it is in the United States to tell another person what to do. Now we tell each other what to do all the time, right. But it's still a very loaded act…” (14:55)
• On Committees & 'Fake' Workplace Democracy:
  “...people felt that the kinds of democracy they were experiencing in the workplace felt like fake democracy...the committee functioned as a black box…” (27:29–29:11)
• On Why Collective Action is Scarce:
  “Quitting was the first political strategy...not, ‘oh, I can talk to my coworkers...’” (37:02–38:45)
• On Small Business as a Political Fantasy:
  “...the fantasy is to be able to strike off on your own and, and, and tell other people what to do instead of being told what to do.” (41:36–42:30)

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Important Timestamps & Segment Highlights

• [01:44–05:46] — Gershon’s research background and shift in focus due to pandemic
• [06:19–08:17] — Read-aloud of book passage: pandemic dilemmas, neoliberalism, and social contract thinking
• [08:36–10:57] — How the workplace became a substitute for civic engagement and a site for learning citizenship
• [11:07–14:39] — Discussion of workplaces as contracts vs. communities of practice; practical examples
• [14:55–17:56] — Authority, telling others what to do, and the loadedness of directive relationships in American culture
• [18:17–20:37] — Social and work contracts; negotiation in retail and institutional settings
• [21:14–23:42] — Teachers’ analogies between COVID protocols and school shooter training
• [24:22–25:49] — The complications of school decision-making: the role of multiple authorities and unions
• [27:29–29:11] — Workplace democracy as “fake democracy”; how workplace processes can feel opaque and frustrating
• [30:47–33:17] — Discussion of Elizabeth Anderson’s “private government” and how the pandemic highlighted differences in governance experience across workplace types
• [36:41–39:25] — The exit strategy: why quitting predominates over collective action
• [41:36–43:06] — Why small business ownership serves as an appealing but problematic alternative to corporate control

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Flow and Style

The conversation is informal, highly analytical, and occasionally wry, as Gershon brings anthropological theory into close dialogue with the everyday struggles and revelations of pandemic-era workers. The host and co-host’s questions nudge out both theoretical insights and relatable stories, maintaining accessibility for a public audience.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• The pandemic workplace became a key arena for Americans to negotiate ideas of authority, democracy, and the common good—often in ways that echoed and challenged national politics.
• Workplaces are not simply webs of legal contracts but dynamic, situational communities where power, responsibility, and belonging are continually re-negotiated.
• Americans’ discomfort with giving orders and preference for formal structures of authority (bosses, states, etc.) shaped responses to unprecedented crises.
• The dominant strategy for work dissatisfaction is exit (quitting), which can undercut chances for collective change or solidarity.
• Aspirations to escape by becoming small business owners reflect deeper desires for autonomy and control, even if rarely realized.

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Closing

Ilana Gershon’s “The Pandemic Workplace” provides not only a chronicle of workplace change during COVID-19 but also a lens for understanding how democratic skills, attitudes toward authority, and visions of the common good are being reshaped at work. The discussion offers both practical anecdotes and theoretical depth for those grappling with the evolving landscape of work and citizenship.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disenith from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. I'm joined today by my co producer Julie Smith, a Master's student in the Department of Communication. Our guest today is Alana Gershon, the author of the Pandemic How We Learn

[B]

to Be Citizens in the Office.

[A]

Anthropologist Elena Garshan 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 200 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 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. The successable book shows how the workplace teaches us to become democratic citizens. Elana 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 is the Herbert S. Autry Chair of Anthropology and the co director of the Program in Science and Technology Studies at Rice University.

[B]

Alana Gershon, welcome to the New Books Network.

[C]

Thank you very much for inviting me to this.

[B]

So to get us started today, what brought you to the topic of the pandemic workplace?

[C]

I actually wasn't planning to do this research at all. I had really wanted to understand something about the ways in which people were experiencing and living under neoliberalism. And I was about to. When the pandemic happened, I was about to go on sabbatical and ask. And one of the things about many of my research projects is that I'm always trying to become a member of the Society for the Study of Boring Things. And the boring thing that I was planning to study on my sabbatical was employment contracts. I was really interested in the ways in which all these very strange neoliberal clauses had begun to enter into employment contracts and become widespread. So you have non compete clauses for yoga instructors and bartenders. And I found a non compete contract in a Jimmy John's Sandwich Maker

[B]

job

[C]

that was really strange because it said not only could he not work for another sandwich making franchise like Subway, but he also couldn't work for another Jimmy John's franchise for six months after working at one Jimmy John's franchise. And I was just really curious about how are people dealing with all these employment contracts that were encouraging them to imagine themselves as a business contracting with another business. Right. That they would be asking them not to see themselves as employees but as businesses, metaphorically. And then the pandemic happens and all I can do is doom scroll. And I said, well, okay, maybe I can continue doing this project on employment contracts. Turns out that is the most boring thing to ask anybody to talk about, especially by zoom during a pandemic. And it felt very surreal to me to be talking to people about their employment contracts while a pandemic was happening and people were game, but they hadn't, you know, they hadn't read their employment contract for a while. This wasn't the way that I was planning to do the research. I had wanted to kind of hang out in employment law clinics and see what problems came up. And then so I was trying to interview people and feeling very sad for the people who I was interviewing because they were being so patient and kind to me and, and, and, and really didn't have much to say and were just being very nice. And then at some point in July, I was having a conversation with someone who suddenly began talking to me about all the issues that were coming up for her about working in person during the pandemic. And this was the moment where everything that I was really trying to understand, which is how do people experience workplaces as sites of private government, suddenly became really visible in the ways in which she was talking about all the decision making that was happening. And so I thought, oh, you know, maybe I should have a chapter on how people are making decisions around working in person during the pandemic. And so I started interviewing people about this and it turns out that that chapter just grew and grew and I suddenly realized, oh, I have a book on my hand. This is much more than just a chapter in a book on employment and contracts. And so I ended up with this book having interviewed like over 220 people around what their experiences were like working in person during the pandemic.

[B]

Well, great. So this is, I'd like to. If you would. I think you've already sort of expressed this. Oh, and by the way, just before the pandemic, I accepted a job at a bike shop and was asked to take to sign a non compete agreement. I Couldn't work for another bike shop within, like, think 30 miles of the one where I was working. It was astonishing to me. So, anyway, so on page 21, if you could read the passage that begins, this is a book about capitalism's Covid.

[C]

This is a book about capitalism's Covid, about the dilemmas people had in a pandemic. Participating in organizations that had to balance profits with the health risk to workers and customers, or participating in organizations that were geared towards addressing the social costs and pressures that capitalism exerts on people. But it is, much to my own surprise, not a book about contemporary capitalism's Covid. The concerns that people face, the political strategies that people thought possible, were not unique to what capitalism has become since Ronald Reagan, which now revolves around financialization and debt. And many U.S. american who were. Who work at. And wait, I'm reading a passage badly. And many US Americans were working at some point were asked to imagine themselves as the CEO of ME Incorporated. I was expecting to see people struggling with the tensions between financialized understandings of risk, grappling with the ways risk is dangerous and the path towards creating a successful life. For example, following one's passion is always about embracing risk due. Instead, people responded to the pandemic by talking about more longstanding American concerns about how to balance individual needs with the common good. I mean, I think the short thing that I was saying in that kind of passage was all of a sudden people were channeling Locke and Hobbes and Rousseau and talking about the Social Contract when I was interviewing them in a way that I just. I thought I was going to get a lot of more material about neoliberalism. And I mean, you will notice I'm trying very hard not to say the word neoliberalism in that book because I have been cautioned that neoliberalism is not something that a general public knows. And this book I really was trying to write for anybody who I was interviewing.

[B]

It's interesting that when I wrote my book, I was told I had to talk about neoliberalism, but that's a different discussion. Early in the book you describe, and I think this is pertinent to that quote. Earlier in the book, you describe how people develop their political imaginations through their understanding of the workplace. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

[C]

I think that this is actually. This is something that's actually been used to be talked about a lot in the 1930s and the 1940s, when people were kind of trying to understand where and how People learn to be democratic citizens. For me, I was really picking this up from Tocqueville, who's kind of great French ethnographer from the 1830s who comes to the United States to study prisons. And like my story, and like almost every good anthropologist, finds that they're doing something completely different when they land and start doing fieldwork. And he ends up studying American How Americans learn how to be Democratic. And he hypothesizes that this is something that you learn in civil society, that you learn by going to the Rotary Club, that you learn by all the local ways in which you're organizing with other people and you're giving. You're learning how to think about the common good of an organization in very practical ways instead of thinking about your own family interests. But as I talk about in the book, people have been pointing out that Americans don't participate in civil society in this way anymore very much at all. So now the question becomes, is if you have to learn how to be a democratic citizen, where are you learning to be a democratic citizen? And I began to realize that people were learning a lot about what it meant to be political and what it meant to be democratic or autocratic in the space of the workplace. They were learning their understandings of what good leadership was in this place and what it meant to make an evaluation towards a common good. But the common good is often a corporation. And so what does it mean suddenly to be choosing for a common good? Where the question is how to. How, when the common good is being defined by a profit making organization instead

[B]

of a nation, and then do those skills become transferable?

[C]

I think that this becomes the metaphorical way in which people are understanding what government is supposed to do and who a president is supposed to be. Yeah, I, I really went that far.

[B]

Okay, so you describe the workplace as a nexus of contracts and a community of practice. What do you mean by those terms?

[C]

You know, Jensen and Mickling famously said that workplaces were nexus of contracts. And I was actually kind of being grumpy about that.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

In what I was talking about, because I felt that understanding that when people were understanding the workplace solely in terms of their contractual relationships with people, it was missing a lot about the ways in which workplaces were actually interacting and people were engaging with each other in the workplace. And I love Jean Le and Etienne Wenger's book, Situated Learning. This is, this is one of the most beautiful books I've come across. And I keep trying to get everybody who ever has to take a class from me to read this book. And I tell them this is going to be like one of the most useful books for you. And in these books, what they talk about is the ways in which every community is a combination of newcomers and old timers, that people are constantly shifting in kind of these are heterogeneous communities in which people have very shifting understandings of how to solve problems together. And that as they're solving problems together, there's often an idea about the way things are always supposed to be done. But it turns out that that's always a shifting target and that every time you have new people coming into a setting, it's changing the ways in which things are done. And so there's this constant dynamic happening. And, and that this is part of what I was seeing all the time in my interviews around the pandemic workplace is that people were really living out community of practice problems and that to make it about contracts was to erase a lot of the dynamics of the workplace.

[B]

How did your interviews express that idea?

[C]

Well, I mean, people would be talking about the ways in which they were solving the problems that the pandemic threw at them. Right. So you have all these decision making problems that kind of, you have to make all sorts of complicated decisions about what's happening in the workplace. And part of what was really vivid about the pandemic is that it was a moment in which so many decisions that used to be settled all of a sudden had to be remade in new ways. And like, you could have very small decisions that you would have to remake that had cascading effects, and that all of a sudden you made one decision in a new way and then you'd have to make all sorts, you'd have to deal with all sorts of other problems. And what you saw was people with different histories in the companies and in these workplaces bringing their experience to bear in different ways about what was possible and what was not. And also, people were getting new jobs during the pandemic. And so people were bringing their understanding of how other workplaces were solving the same problems. So as newcomers, they might be saying, oh, but you know, at this other place that I worked, here's the ways in which we dealt with bathroom breaks and other things like that. And so there were these kind of ongoing conversations to deal with what was functionally very set of new problems that people had to resolve.

[B]

So you just talk about how some people seem to want to balance between democratic and autocratic decision making, especially in the sort of, you know, high tension situation like the pandemic. What factors do you think influence their views in one direction or another?

[C]

Well, so what? One of the things that I found really fascinating in this research that I had it, I mean, maybe I knew it tacitly before, but it really became obvious during this research is how incredibly loaded it is in the United States to tell another person what to do. Now we tell each other what to do all the time, right. It's not like we aren't doing that, but it's still a very loaded act to do that. And so people were able to tell each other what to do if there was a contractual relationship. So if they had agreed to have a boss, then you know that your boss is going to tell you what to do. And if you're in a family, there are family relationships that allow you, that allow for people to be told what to do. But mother in laws and daughter in laws sometimes have a lot of issues around whether you can actually tell someone what to do or not to tell something. What tell someone what to do. When I mentioned this to my mother in law, she was very clear that she never tells me what to do. I have like active experience otherwise. So that was kind of very interesting that people are very self. What they believe is true about how they manage this is not necessarily what they actually practice, which one knows as anthropologists all the time. And what this meant was that this was really a loaded issue during the pandemic where people sometimes desperately wanted to tell another person what to do, but they felt that this was too problematic of a situation. So they wanted a boss, or they wanted state regulation, or they wanted government regulation. They wanted something to point to, to be able to coordinate with other people and get them to follow the regulations that they wanted followed.

[B]

It's interesting. The state of Michigan, like many states right now, is going through this process of trying to ban cell phones in schools. And someone made the point that if, you know, the parents are the ones pushing for the state board of education to institute this ban on cell phones. And someone made the point that, well, why don't the parents just not buy the cell phones for the kids?

[C]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. And it's, you know, again, there's like someone else needs to be the bad guy.

[C]

Right, Right. Well, but also parents, parents want to know where their kids are, but they don't want the kids to be using the phones at particular times. And so they too. I mean, this is kind of what I was talking finding all the time in the work in this research that there are two opposing pools that are happening at the same time. And people want someone else to come in and make the rules to solve the two kind of opposing tugs on what people would like to have happen.

[B]

Yeah. So you described the boundary between work life and private life during the pandemic, and how maintaining that boundary changed based on factors such as seeing only coworkers, working with the public, working where others live, and travel between workplaces. How did people understand social and work contracts in these various situations?

[C]

Oh, I think that's a very interesting question. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that the contractual differences were what was at play. Right. I mean, so I think what happened is that people, when they understood themselves to be in something like a total institution. Right. So that they were living with other people, that they were. That they were also working with and tending to. Let's say they were in assisted living situation or they were in. They were working with people in a version of a prison. I don't think I ever interviewed prison guards, but I did interview people who were on that continuum. They very much were understanding this as an issue of the common good and that they were thinking very much in terms of how everybody could protect each other and that everybody was a possible vector. In other settings where people were having very different kinds of relationships, this became more complicated. And I think the kind of most complicated relationship that people had around kind of contractual understanding was the retail spaces. Like when you had a consumer and employee interaction that was really loaded because the employee was supposed to tell the consumer what they were supposed to do, but there was no contractual relationship between them. And so that became very complicated.

[B]

Sure. And how did they negotiate those?

[C]

So what people would tell me is that they always would turn to the business rules and say, look, I could be fired if I don't tell you to do this. Even in moments where they just wanted the person to do it because they thought that that would be the way that could protect their health. But like, this kind of always pointing to an authority as a way to manage how complicated. The kind of the task of telling someone else what to do when you didn't have a contractual bind came up over and over and over again.

[B]

I'm going to turn the next question over to Julie.

[D]

So I was curious that both in chapter two and chapter three, so, like, multiple times in the book, when talking with specifically teachers in terms of COVID 19 protocols, there was also references to, like, school shooting incidents or school shooter training that these teachers felt like they had already been putting in, like, a sense of risk of life by going to work that did you see, like, commonalities or differences in terms of the risk of life, going to work, planning for school shootings, and going to work, planning for COVID 19 infection?

[C]

So what I. I mean, you're asking me what I found, but what I thought was so interesting was how much teachers were using that as an analogy themselves, that this was something that they found really a gripping. Gripping and good to think with. And one of the things that they would tell me was that in active shooter training, they were told how to sacrifice themselves for the children and how to protect the children. And in Covid, they were suddenly potentially the vectors. And that all of a sudden this shifted the ways in which they were supposed to be understanding risk, and that they found it really problematic and that the children also were potentially vectors that might be bringing in a virus that would then kill their family. Right. Or family members who were elderly or vulnerable because they were immunocompromised. And so the ways in which the virus shifted, how responsibility could be allocated and. And changed the kind of heroic narrative of confronting a person into managing not to spread a virus really threw them. And they found this a very different kind of way of dealing with these things. I mean, there was also. This was also something that they would bring up often when they were protesting in school board meetings. Right. Because they were often trying to get school boards to make decisions that were more in line with what teachers found would protect their own safety. And they would also say, why are you giving us this much authority in a moment of active shooting training where you are telling us we're supposed to be the medics and we're supposed to be able to save people, or maybe we should have guns and be shooting people. And you do not trust us during COVID to be able to know how to protect our students. Like, why. Why are you giving us some kinds of burdens, responsibility and expertise in some situations and then completely disregarding our interests and others? I always found that really evocative, actually. That really worked on me.

[B]

Yeah, it does for me too. So what kinds, what kinds of responses did they get to. To those kinds of arguments?

[C]

Oh, but these are school board meetings.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

I mean, school board meetings are masterfully organized so that you can ignore people when you want to.

[B]

Well, I guess that's true. And there was a huge push. And I can still remember driving around during the pandemic and seeing the signs to unmask our kids.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Okay. So going back to schools in particular, why do K12 schools seem to be such a complicated Network of factors that impact the changing of sedimented decisions.

[C]

I mean, it was really because there were so many different sources of authority for the schools. Right. So I'm talking about school board meetings, but there were also principals and superintendents, and then there were kind of questions of how one takes into account parents interests and students interests. There were so many different ways in which democracy and autocratic decision making were getting structured and kind of lumped together to jostle with each other during the schools in schools that it became extremely complicated. Oh, and I'm forgetting unions. Some states had unions that were able to play really important roles in how decisions were getting made.

[B]

Okay. So this is a particular fascination for me. What role did they play?

[C]

They would negotiate different kinds of protections. Right. And what I kept coming across was that because there are different. Because employees are in different unions in schools, that employees suddenly began to learn which unions were better at negotiating health protection than others. And they would have different kinds of. People would have different kinds of obligations to work depending on which union they were part of. And suddenly that becomes really visible.

[B]

So you described some of the benefits of the pandemic as being animal shelters connecting more people in the community by having individuals go door to door to their neighbors when finding a stray animal.

[C]

Yes. Yeah. Well, because all of a sudden you had to come up with these new solutions that there were all these, like, unexpected pockets in which you discovered, oh, if you cannot turn to this other authority to solve things, how do you suddenly form community decisions? Right.

[B]

Yeah. I'm sorry. Could you just elaborate on that for just a little bit? I think I'm trying to get to the. I think I'm trying to move away. Well, not move away from again, that idea of extending the idea of citizenship in the workplace to the broader community. Like, what happens when we take some of those skills that we practice within the workplace and bring them out to the larger community?

[C]

I think that it's a very good question. I'm not sure that actually I have all that much material on it because of what I was doing Right. As I was interviewing people around, what were the decisions that were getting made in their workplaces at the time? And so I wasn't getting to see that many examples of what you're talking about. And whatever I could, I put in the book.

[B]

Okay. So sort of from the conclusion, we get to some ideas about our current political situation and our current kind of autocratic boss.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Can we talk a little bit about that?

[C]

Sure. I mean, this was one of the things that I was really Struck by was how often people felt that the kinds of democracy that they were experiencing in the workplace felt like fake democracy. And that a lot of the ways in which people were making decisions through committees ended up feeling like the committee functioned as a black box and they weren't able to know why the decisions got made the way they were getting made. And people often weren't getting any insights when they had been consulted by a committee or when they were consulted by a survey. They weren't getting insights about how to like what anybody did with those opinions and how that was being processed. Like they, they weren't getting a sense of the process of the democracy. And so they were getting very frustrated with this. And I began to see signs of if of hints of why someone like, I'm not ready to say second term Trump, but I am ready to say first term Trump might have seemed appealing to them. Right. Which was, this is someone who I had kind of wondered for a while, why doesn't everybody talk about Trump as a flip flopper? Right. I mean, we now have Trump as kind of as Taco Trump. But for a while he seemed to flip flop all the time. No one got upset about it. No one seemed to be bothered by it. And I began to realize that what he's performatively doing is responding to feedback. Like people are telling, he makes a decision, people say, oh, this is really a terrible decision. Here are the reasons it's a terrible decision. And then he changes his mind. And we don't have many instances of that in corporations where you try something for a while, you say, okay, we're going to try this solution, but then we're going to get feedback from people about how this solution is working for them. And then if there's problems with that, we're going to revise accordingly. You get a decision, you have to live with it. Right. And how the decision gets made is sometimes very opaque. When the decision that is getting made is very opaque is because it's in someone's mind and then they're ready to change their mind to responding to feedback that may be more appealing to people.

[B]

So this is going back to the beginning and this is sort of maybe where we'll sort of begin to wrap up. I know you make use of Elizabeth Anderson's notion of private government a great deal. And I want to talk a little bit about, because I also am very influenced by Dr. Anderson and especially that work, her work on private government. How do you see your work as sort of operationalizing some of her insights onto how the workplace functions. Yeah.

[C]

So when I really like that book a lot, but when I was reading it, I saw it as a philosopher offering a hypothesis to, to, to. To the world that we then have to go and figure out how does it actually work. Right. And one of the things that I kept read as she, she has this kind of lovely set of two or three pages about what does it mean to if. What. What would it be like if a workplace actually was experienced as a nation's government. Right. And he. She talks about some of the way, my students always get a kick out of the paragraphs in which she talks about how a company in and of itself functions like a communist government in terms of how it doles out supplies that you don't have market exchange for getting the paper clips or getting the paper to put into the photocopier. And that this is communist. And they always are like, oh my goodness, this is really fascinating. But in this moment she's offering one version of a corporation. And it's not the ways in which a lot of different businesses are. And what I wanted to know is how are. What. What are the range of businesses and how do they manage this? Right. The kind of the private government lesson that, that we have is something that you can then ask ethnographically, how do different kinds of businesses do teach you about what government is? Which is why I ended up talking about, if you look at this from the, during the pandemic, the kinds of decision making that was happening depended on some of the ways in which the workplaces were structured. That was actually different than how Anderson imagines it. Right. And we had talked a little bit about it really matters whether your business is the kind of business where you are entering into different workplaces all the time and navigating foreign governments rules, in a sense. Or are you in a total institution or are you having people dealing with the public all the time and trying to manage those relationships without contracts as a way to bind you.

[B]

Well, Alana Gershon, thank you so much. Before I let you go today, what are you working on next?

[C]

Oh, so I, I really don't understand something about what's happening in the contemporary moment. There are many things not to understand. There are many things not to understand. But. So I don't know if you can quite tell how obsessed I have been with neoliberalism for like, well, like what. What feels like decades and decades, but is probably. But it's probably only like two, one and a half decades. And all of a sudden the, like the Republican party that I thought I understood and knew is making all these decisions that are not neoliberal at all. And I really want to know how. What are the social consequences of changing your mind in this way? And how do people understand themselves as belonging to a party that has shifted in this way? Right. I'm really fascinated by this. So I kind of want to talk to people about what it means to live in mixed political families. And I'm thinking about mixed political families and is extended families, like not just mixed marriages, but like what happens in Thanksgiving when you're suddenly faced talking to uncles and aunts who've had these political shifts and may or may not be self aware of that. Right. And kind of I'm interested in like, what are the social consequences in terms of how you're managing these kinds of things? And I'm thinking about families in particular because it's harder to get rid of a family member. Like we're very good in the United States at getting rid of friends, but family members are people who you have. It's a bit more complicated. It's a different kind of tie that you have to negotiate. And I'm also hoping to start interviewing retiring Republicans who've been active in the Republican Party to think about what they understood the party was being and what its trajectory is now and what they hope their children will do. I'm interested in ways to make visible not the political position, but the social implications of the political position, if that makes sense.

[B]

Yeah, I'm just. Wow, that would be. If you could dive into the heart of that, that would be a fascinating work.

[C]

Yeah. Well, see, this is. Right now I should tell you, this is a gleam in my eye and it may have been a gleam in like it may go the way of the non compete clauses in the bike shops. Right.

[B]

But then they'll lead you to something even better. Right.

[C]

From your lips to God's ears. And guys, do you have any questions for me?

[B]

Julie has one.

[C]

Okay.

[D]

I've got a quote, I believe from chapter one.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

The possibility that one can choose otherwise sometimes makes the problem seem more tolerable. And the freedom to leave can be used as a temper, can be used to temper the need for change. Can you elaborate a bit on that idea of having the freedom to leave or like breaking the contract and that being the way out. There's either.

[C]

Yeah. No, you, you, you've chosen a lovely quote. This is what I ended up being absolutely obsessed with after writing the book. What I'm trying to point to is, as I was Interviewing people. The thing I most wanted to hear about was collective action. And you just heard me say I'd interviewed over 220 people and I got two interviews about collective action at the workplace. And one of the interviews that I got about collective action was because I was starting to complain to all my friends about how I wasn't getting any interviews about collective action. And one of my friends said, okay, I can find, stop the complaining. I can connect you to someone who's doing collective action in their workplace. So I was getting these random interviews, like just interviewing whoever was coming my way. And I wasn't getting stories about collective action. And part of what I was trying to think about was what are the ways in which contracts shape people's ideas about what is politically possible? And so much about the non union, the contract, the employment contract that we now have is geared towards being at will. And when I would interview people about at will employment, what they liked about it was that they could leave too. And so when I talk to people about when something was going wrong at work, their first moment that they would refer back to was, well, I can always quit. Quitting was the first political strategy. Not, oh, I can talk to my co workers and figure out how to change this. Not, oh, I can go in and negotiate for something else. The first thing that they thought of was, oh, I should just quit. And then when they weren't quitting, in a sense, they were recommitting to the workplace in a particular way. But that was a very. That was redoing the contract in a certain way. That was. But for me, that was very much kind of contracts give you the guardrails or gives you kind of the train tracks for thinking about what is politically possible. And that's what I was trying to talk about in that passage a little bit too opaquely. And you're being very kind and pretending that it's legible.

[B]

Oh no, not at all. Although don't. The freedom to exit, right, the ability to quit. I mean, it sort of worked during the pandemic because there was, for a brief time, a kind of a social safety net that allowed people to do that. I'm not sure. And you know, Dr. Anderson talks about this a great deal, that the right to exit is, you know, it almost is akin to, you know, the right to emigrate from a country. It's not something that is taken lightly by most people.

[C]

Well, one of the things that she says that I really like, I mean, because what you've done is talk. Hirschman, A.O. hirschman talks about exit, loyalty and voice. And when you kind of delve into his book, he's talking about how Americans love to think about exit because they come generationally from people who have left nations. Right. But part of what Anderson also says is, she says, but a little bit of this is like being a woman in the 18th and 19th century where, you know, if you quit a marriage, you still have to get married to someone else to be a full human being and have certain kinds of property rights. So what is it in the world that means that you have to work for a corporation that functions as private government no matter what? And I want to say that part of what I was really interested in is how much small business owners become an alternative to this. I don't know if you guys in this class have been reading Melinda Cooper, but Melinda Cooper has this really lovely book about how what Trump and MAGA are standing for is a new version of a capitalist group, the small business owner, the family owner, who imagines themselves as not being part of this larger private government. And so that the fantasy is to be able to strike, strike off on your own and, and, and tell other people what to do instead of being told what to do.

[B]

Yeah, I think sort of living in metropolitan Detroit, we're familiar with this because there's the sort of class of people who are associated with the big three automakers, then there's this other strata of people who I think are similar. Similar to what you're talking about. Who are the dealership owners?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

And, you know, and those folks. Right. They're not, I mean, small business, I suppose they're smallish, but they're, they're, they're really well off. Like, you know, lots of people probably in this room went to school with someone who's. Was the child of a, of a car dealership owner, but it's. Yeah. I don't know. It's one thing to say I'm going to leave General Motors and go to work for, for the dealership down the road, or become the dealer down the road, I guess, is sort of the suggestion.

[C]

I think the fantasy is that the way out is to become the dealer down the road. Whether or not that's actually possible is a different story. Right. But part of the possibility about this is to say that that is a different way of understanding private government.

[B]

Yeah, it is.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

That gives you a different kind of political understanding of what the appropriate politics and way of managing government can be, is to do it that way, start

[B]

your own country to see how to

[C]

start your own country in a sense.

[B]

Well, again, thank you again so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

[C]

Alana Gershon, this was an absolute delight. Thank you.

[B]

Once again, our guest today has been Alana Gershon, the author of the Pandemic Workplace How We Learn to Be Citizens in the Office from University of Chicago Press. My name is Tom Disena. I have been joined today by Julie Smith and you are listening to the new books Networks.

[E]

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[C]

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