Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy

Abstract

Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy. By Cynthia Estlund. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 240p. 18.95 paper.Writing from New York in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville described “a society formed of all the nations of the world”—peoples of different languages, beliefs, and opinions forming a society without roots, memory, common ideas, or, indeed, a national character. What held such a polity together? “Interest. That is the secret” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “To Ernest de Chabrol 9 June 1831” in Roger Boesche, Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, 1985. p. 38). Such observations and their author's subsequent hypotheses linking self-interest to the Americans' “science of association” figure centrally in recent studies of “social capital” and “strong democracy.” Cynthia Estlund contributes to the literature on communal ties, civic life, and self-government by considering the broad political effects of relationships formed in the not-so-voluntary arena of the American workplace. “Interest” that can initially amount to little more than a shared requirement to “get the job done,” the “working together” thesis maintains, may develop into shared understandings when activities undertaken in common cultivate and enlarge participants' common ground.