Ilana Gershon Bücher

Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories cultural and acultural become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.

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

"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"--