By Allison Pugh
Princeton University Press, 384 pages
Published June 4, 2024
Trained as a journalist and sociologist, Allison Pugh knows the inherent value of an interview. “Most people I interview,” she writes, “tell me that they find the experience one of being intensely seen.” Thinking about what this kind of close attention does for people, including herself, she notices it everywhere — her kids’ school, her doctor’s office, the hairdresser’s. She also realized that, as widespread and foundational as this work is, it has been more assumed than acknowledged; only when something goes missing do we stop taking it for granted.
At risk of going missing is what Pugh calls “connective labor.” She coined this term to refer to “that work that involves forging an emotional understanding with another person to create the outcomes we think are important.” The crux of this labor involves seeing another person and conveying to them that they are seen. Increasingly, connective labor is squeezed out and even erased as it is subjected to systems of data collection and analytics to be made more efficient, measurable and reproducible. By giving this labor a name, Pugh wants society “to consider its conduct and impact, encourage its incidence, and, if we choose, organize for its protection.”
In nearly every chapter, Pugh offers vocabulary and concepts that help us name and understand the phenomenon we all experience – that is, the depersonalization of the social sphere beyond our most close-knit sphere of family and friends, which she calls a sphere of “social intimacy”– and ability to build “social architecture” to protect against depersonalization. These concepts serve as useful tools for anyone interested in building community.
As a pastor, I cannot help but note that the church has, from its origins, relied on its own concept of connective labor, that is, the work of the Holy Spirit. While the concept of the Holy Spirit was not new even in Jesus’ day, it gave birth to something new — the church. From the beginning, the disciples were instructed to wait for the Spirit. Empowered and encouraged by the Spirit, organized to do the work of the Spirit, intended to bear the fruits of the Spirit, the church has never been able to take the Spirit for granted. Despite the Spirit’s ubiquity, the church continues trying to find fresh words to describe its work. While we often describe the Spirit as invisible and mysterious, churches that want to organize themselves around the work of the Spirit could benefit from the concepts of connective labor and social architecture about which Pugh writes.
Pugh spends time analyzing social architecture that works. Vital components include 1) a “relational design” putting people in relation to one another; 2) a “connective culture” in which shared values, practices, and rituals bind individuals to systems of meaning; and 3) resources of time and space that shape people’s connection. It is curious to me that, though Pugh conducted more than 100 interviews, including with hospital chaplains, she did not interview pastors of congregations, who are surely engaged in connective labor, whose congregations are spheres of social intimacy, and who are fully occupied with building social architecture for the work of the Holy Spirit.
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