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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Ilana Gershon, "The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Description: A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically. In The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office (U Chicago Press, 2024) anthropologist Ilana Gershon 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 rethoug...