Working Together How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy [Paperback]

At a time when communal ties in American society are increasingly frayed and segregation persists, the workplace is more than ever the site where Americans from different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds meet and forge serviceable and sometimes lasting bonds. What do these highly structured workplace relationships mean for a society still divided by gender and race? The involuntariness of workplace interactions--prescribed by both external law and internal constraints--helps ensure that the often-troubled and often-failed project of racial integration succeeds at work. People can be forced to get along--not without friction, but with surprising success.

This highly original exploration of the paradoxical nature--and the paramount importance--of workplace bonds concludes with concrete suggestions for how law can further realize the democratic possibilities of working together. In linking workplace integration and connectedness beyond work, Estlund suggests a novel and promising strategy for addressing the most profound challenges facing American society.


1. Introduction: Working Together
Part I. Connectedness and Diversity in the Contemporary Workplace
2. Connectedness in the Workplace, A Sketch
3. From the Workplace to Workplaces: Variety and Change in the Organization of Work
4. Working Together Across Racial Lines: How Much Does It Happen and What Difference Does It Make?
5. Men and Women Working Together: Workplace Interaction Across Gender Lines (and Some Other Lines of Division)
Part II. How Workplace Bonds Enrich Democratic Life
6. Situating the Workplace in Civil Society: Social Integration, Social Capital, and Deliberation at Work
7. Compulsion, Connectedness, and the Constitution of the Workplace
Part III. Building Better Workplace Bonds: Preliminary Thoughts on What Law Can Do
8. Refining the Equal Protection Clause of the Workplace
9. Protel#-