Abstract
In The Pandemic Workplace, Ilana Gershon offers a timely account of how U.S. Americans experienced and understood work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on over 200 in-depth interviews, Gershon takes readers into the transformed landscapes of offices, schools, clinics, and factories to ask a compelling question: Where are Americans learning how to govern and be governed today?
Gershon’s central premise is a compelling one: If Alexis de Tocqueville found the roots of democratic sensibility in civic associations, today’s Americans are finding theirs in the workplace. This argument is illuminating. The notion that the workplace has eclipsed traditional civic life as a training ground for governance, responsibility, and notions of the common good reframes longstanding questions in organizational studies. Gershon’s invocation of Tocqueville serves as a powerful throughline connecting the micro-politics of workplace governance to broader democratic life.
Gershon’s use of oral histories and interviews reveals how people understood their contracts as social and moral bargains. She brings readers into the minds of librarians, retail clerks, health care workers, and many others as they reevaluated their relationships to risk, authority, and mutual obligation. What makes her analysis particularly compelling is her attention to the methodological challenges of conducting research during a crisis. She navigates the limitations of remote interviewing while capturing the urgency of workers’ experiences in real time. Her research reveals how pandemic protocols exposed deeply held assumptions about workplace hierarchies that had previously remained implicit. Especially noteworthy is her use of the private government framework, drawing on Elizabeth Anderson (2017) and Stewart Macaulay (1963), to expose the latent hierarchies embedded in employment structures and to analyze how different workplace structures, such as family-owned businesses and employee-owned cooperatives, responded differently to the crisis, revealing their underlying governance models.
A significant contribution is Gershon’s notion of contractual sociality, a framework that illuminates how and why workers so often frame conflicts in terms of loyalty or exit rather than pursuing organizational transformation. By examining how daily experiences of workplace governance shape political imagination, Gershon connects workplace dynamics to broader democratic participation. She demonstrates how the private employment contract becomes a model for social contracts more generally, creating a political template that prioritizes exit over voice when workers are dissatisfied. This framework complements her analysis of communities of practice, in which informal learning networks and tacit knowledge enable adaptive responses during crisis. Gershon shows how these communities operate alongside formal hierarchies, revealing that organizational resilience often emerges not from official protocols but through experiential knowledge sharing and collaborative problem solving. Together, these frameworks of contractual sociality and communities of practice offer a lens for understanding how workplace experiences shape both organizational adaptation and broader political consciousness during times of disruption.
That said, from the perspective of someone who studies remote, hybrid, and the digital transformation of work, the scope of Gershon’s book might be somewhat limited. This does not diminish its value, however. Gershon focuses primarily on in-person workers, often by design. As a result, the experiences of those who worked fully remotely are underrepresented. This group faced distinct challenges related to governance, connection, and collaboration. While the book captures the realities of essential workers, the pandemic also triggered a major shift in how knowledge work is organized and understood. Expanding on the population of essential workers, this designation officially comes from governmental agencies to determine which employees are required to work when an office is closed. In the United States during the pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security published an advisory list recommending workers who may be deemed essential in industries ranging from food and agriculture to energy (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency). Organizational scholars note that shifting public narratives also determine which work is labeled essential. The work of essential employees, such as custodians and meat processing plant workers, is often unappreciated and marginalized by the public (Kim et al., 2023). However, during the pandemic, many of these roles became newly moralized and celebrated as essential and heroic (Cameron et al., 2022).
Related to its limited exploration of remote workers, the book lightly touches on the role of technology, including Zoom, Slack, and learning management systems. However, it stops short of deeper engagement with how digital tools restructured work flows, trust, supervision, and even employee identities. For many, remote work environments became extensions of the workplace, not separate spheres. In these contexts, technology was both an enabler and the infrastructure of continuity.
Moreover, while Gershon addresses work-life tradeoffs, she does not fully explore the integration of work and life as an emerging norm, especially for remote workers. The pandemic collapsed spatial and temporal boundaries, forcing individuals and organizations to renegotiate expectations regarding availability, productivity, and care. These issues are central to any long-term view of the post-pandemic workplace and are arguably vital to the very governance questions the book foregrounds.
Lastly, Gershon reflects on workplace structures and their implications for democracy but offers less projection into the future of work. The text could more explicitly engage with questions about the permanence of hybrid models, the implications of decentralized workforces, or the lasting redefinition of employer–employee relations in a digitally mediated world. Still, The Pandemic Workplace is a triumph of method, theory, and human insight. It is an addition to the literature on labor, governance, and political socialization. For scholars in organizational studies, sociology, anthropology, and political theory, the book offers a fertile conceptual toolkit—particularly in its dual attention to contracts and communities of practice. For all its emphasis on in-person work, it opens pathways for future research into how remote and hybrid environments are reconstituting authority, social contracts, and the very meaning of work.
Drawing on her analysis, a key question for organizational behavior is how the pandemic’s disruption forced a conscious re-evaluation of the fundamental bargain of employment—trading freedom for security—especially as health risks cast doubt on the value of that security. Going to work became a way to potentially catch or spread a deadly disease, putting economic stability at odds with good health. Evoking Buroway’s (1979) ethnography of labor relations, this experience highlighted the tension between organizational profit and employee well-being, as profitability often depended on workers accepting health risks outside their comfort zone. It also challenged previous assumptions about the fixed nature of work practices and the boundaries between personal life and the job. The pandemic made maintaining this boundary almost impossible, and the effort required to balance work and family obligations, which Acker (1990) illuminated, became much more complicated and visible. Ultimately, the pandemic workplace revealed work’s meaning not just as a site of economic exchange built on contract logic but also as a site of social contracts: The meaning of work was shown to be a crucible for negotiating individual vs. collective needs and for shaping citizens’ political imaginations about governance and agency, providing the type of civic associations that Tocqueville (1838) believed to be core to United States society. Connecting to Hirschman’s (1970) framework for understanding employee responses, the logic of contracts, while foundational, also constrained what people felt was politically possible, often leading them to see quitting as a primary form of resistance. In the end, Gershon’s insights into contracts, communities of practice, and governance demonstrate how the pandemic workplace functions as both a political and moral space. While future research might extend her analysis into digital domains and the future of work, The Pandemic Workplace is a useful launchpad for those seeking to understand the evolving relationship between work and governance.
