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"In this book, Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed-and changed us-during the pandemic. The unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic, she argues, forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes to work and think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. It also led us as workers to exercise our freedom in ways that were previously unimaginable, 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 workplaces into a laboratory for democratic living-the key places where most Americans are learning effective political strategies and how to think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this provocative book shows how the workplace can teach us to be democratic citizens"--

Preface: a book about advice, not an advice book -- Introduction: the company you keep -- You are just like Coca-Cola: selling your self through personal branding -- Being generic--and not--in the right way -- Getting off the screen and into networks -- Didn't we meet on LinkedIn? -- Changing the technological infrastructure of hiring -- The decision makers: what it means to be a hiring manager, recruiter, or HR person -- When moving on is the new normal -- Conclusion: we wanted a labor force but human beings came instead

Finding a job used to be simple. You'd show up at an office and ask for an application. A friend would mention a job in their department. Or you'd see an ad in a newspaper and send in your cover letter. Maybe you'd call the company a week later to check in, but the basic approach was easy. And once you got a job, you would stay often for decades. Now ... well, it's complicated. If you want to have a shot at a good job, you need to have a robust profile on LinkedIn. And an enticing personal brand. Or something like that - contemporary how-to books tend to offer contradictory advice. But they agree on one thing: in today's economy, you can't just be an employee looking to get hired - you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals. That's a radical transformation in how we think about work and employment, says Ilana Gershon. She digs deep into that change and what it means, not just for job seekers, but for businesses and our very culture. In telling her story, Gershon covers all parts of the employment spectrum: she interviews hiring managers about how they assess candidates; attends personal branding seminars; talks with managers at companies around the United States to suss out regional differences like how Silicon Valley firms look askance at the lengthier employment tenures of applicants from the Midwest. And she finds that not everything has changed: though the technological trappings may be glitzier, in a lot of cases, who you know remains more important than what you know.

Abstract In this homage to David Graeber, I turn to Americans' experiences working in person during the pandemic as an ethnographic lens for understanding how workers respond when implicit social contracts are violated and when ideas about the common good are being contested. Because the United States federal government and many state governments refused to mandate appropriate pandemic protocols, businesses became the source of pandemic regulation in the United States. During the pandemic, Americans have been made vividly aware of the tacit social contracts shaping their workplace commitments. Building upon Graeber's insight that at the heart of work is a complex theory of contract and exchange, I explore how contractual sociality shapes Americans' understandings of the political possibilities available to them at work. I focus in particular on the icon of the Trumpian Republican and how other Americans are responding by turning to historically grounded visions of the common good. In general, this article explores what the pandemic has revealed about Americans' political imagination, about how to govern and be governed in the workplace, with a Graeberian focus on the role that contractual sociality plays in structuring this imagination.

How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control—in short, new social practices. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences.

In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person encounters adopting a form of corporate personhood? How does one foster relationships or networks that will lead to a job, not just a circulation of one's brand identity? Based on research in Indiana and northern California, this article explores the conundrums of marketing oneself as a desirable employee on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and so on. I address the reasons why the increased use of social media contributes to popularizing a notion of self‐branding. I also discuss the quandaries people face when using social media to create this self‐brand. In sum, this article investigates the obstacles people face when they try to embody a form of corporate personhood across media, a form of self putatively based on the individual, but one that has been transformed into a corporate form that people can not easily inhabit.