BY ILANA GERSHON 

Academic freedom sounds so academic—especially for employees frustrated at work because they are answering workplace surveys all the time, and yet somehow their insights about how to make an office or a task function better are never taken seriously. Faculty members are not the only experts in their workplaces, so, if we would like the freedom to express our expertise without being disciplined or censored, then maybe the best way to persuade a public weary of elites of all stripes is to call for freedom for all, and to be as expansive as possible. We should fight for the rights of workers in all workplaces to have their expertise valued.

The idea of intellectual freedom for all is not new. For well over a century, some have argued that workers in all lines of work have valuable insights and their right to present these views should be institutionally protected. One can find traces of this perspective in early twentieth-century management-consultant and organizational literature and even recently in popular reality-TV shows. A common theme of this unlikely coupling is that workers have expertise because of their structural positions, not despite them. What an employee can know about how an organization functions or a set of tasks depends on how that worker figures out how to navigate the daily challenges of a particular job role. What one knows about a company from the sales floor is very different than what one knows as the director of marketing—and should be understood to be equally valuable.

Recognizing the dignity of situated expertise is hardly new. Decades ago, in the 1920s and 1930s, public intellectuals were already arguing for workers’ expertise and intellectual freedom, although perhaps not in those words. Mary Parker Follett was an early New Deal management theorist and a participant in the settlement house movement who was sharply critical of Taylorism because of how it turned workers into extensions of machines. Advocating for greater democracy in the workplace, Follett was deeply opposed to the contemporary worker’s all too common experience of being consulted and ignored. She believed that the problem with clashes between management and labor was that they obscured how much workers could—and would—be invested in helping factories run as well as possible if only they were encouraged to do so. It also made good business sense to see the workplace as a shared community in which everyone might want to support a common good if only workers were treated with respect. Follett was writing at a time of strong unions and many strikes, and she was trying to imagine more effective strategies for negotiation between management and workers. In her vision, everyone could contribute to the strength of a company if their perspective was taken as not only valid but insightful.

More recently, this notion that intellectual freedom at work might be beneficial has surfaced in the UK version of Undercover Boss—whose very appeal signals that maybe there is indeed an audience eager for this proposition. Undercover Boss’s basic plot is exactly what the title implies: the CEO or someone in upper management pretends to be a newly hired entry-level worker for five days at their own company. The structure has familiar antecedents in folktales, popular films such as Freaky Friday or Trading Places, and well-known novels such as The Prince and the Pauper. In folktales, a prince travels as a peasant in disguise and gains valuable humility and insights into how the kingdom functions. Or a husband is forced to change roles with his wife for a day, and, in the struggle to manage all her tasks, discovers how hard she works and comes to see how much he has been undervaluing her. Changing structural position in these narratives is revelatory, and the superior gains valuable insight into how a company, kingdom, or household functions by listening to another’s practical expertise.

In one striking example from Undercover Boss, the CEO of Quicksilver, a chain of stores filled with gambling machines, shadows Ian, a technician responsible for servicing machines in nine stores that day. Ian explains early on that he likes his job because he sets his own schedule and doesn’t have to work too hard. He makes other comments about his commitment to inefficiency, explaining as he drives, “I like to go in circles—I don’t like driving back on the same road.” As the day wears on, the undercover boss discovers that this worker had made suggestions for how to improve the repair work a year or two earlier, only to have his suggestions completely ignored. This is a revelation that the technician doesn’t have a bad attitude, but he has been actively demoralized by a middle-level manager’s inability to recognize a good idea. The CEO’s response during his final scene of revelation with this worker is to reward him, explaining that his idea to have a workshop was “a bloody good idea” that the company will institute.  The lesson repeated over and over is that bosses can learn new and productive ideas by listening to what workers in a different structural position know—a very satisfying story for many frustrated by workplace politics. We need to persuade nonacademics to support academic freedom—people who value what businesses have to offer, who are reformists, not revolutionaries; from this perspective too, intellectual freedom for all workplaces can seem reasonable and even beneficial.

If faculty want to advocate for academic freedom, why limit this advocacy to the university? Make it about respect for expertise at work in general—for knowledge evaluated and valued by a community of practice according to shared and hard-won standards. We should fight for the idea that all of us have valuable insights into what we know about the world and how we can get things done.

Ilana Gerson is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology at Rice University.