Book Review: Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work, by James A. Chamberlain

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720939041
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Joel Winkelman
• Date: 01 June 2021
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(3) 508 –522

© The Author(s) 2020

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work, by

James A. Chamberlain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018, 192 pp.

Reviewed by: Joel Winkelman, Department of Government, Hamilton College, Clinton,

NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720939041

I agreed to review this book a few weeks before the global pandemic upended

society and forced us all to reexamine our underlying ideas about work and

community. It may be that the coming years force us all to reckon with urgent

questions about our society’s relationship to work, from what we consider

“essential” services to how we compensate paid labor. The limits of our

imagination may be stretched beyond what we had once considered possible.

Or, we may return to business as usual without any fundamental changes to

our ideas or institutions. In a time of profound uncertainty, it’s valuable to

have texts that can help us rethink our society’s deep assumptions. James

Chamberlain’s Undoing Work, Rethinking Community is one such book. It

confronts the deepest conceptual challenges that face us as we turn toward

building a common future amid the devastating evidence of our shared human

frailty.

Chamberlain’s book comprises six chapters, each focused on a particular

conceptual thread that forms our contemporary regime of work. The analysis

moves from abstract themes of identity and membership in the first two chap-

ters to the material conditions of contemporary work in the middle two chap-

ters, which treat workplace flexibility and debate about how work is rewarded.

The book concludes with two chapters on the idea of community and the

postwork society. Chamberlain’s interlocutors vary, but in each chapter the

critical idea he targets is the “work society,” his term for the underlying

assumption that work reifies social attachments. In the work society, indi-

viduals precede communities, which are themselves created by work. An

individual who fails to work has weakened society. The main purpose of the

book is to convince readers to “abandon the view that community is con-

structed by work, whether paid or not” (2). Instances of the “work society”

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