Collegiality is a fragile and mysterious thing. It can’t be quantified or mandated, and it doesn’t figure prominently in public discussions of work. Political discourse, reasonably enough, is preoccupied with unemployment and wages, with matters of policy and economics. Just as work claims more and more of our lives, so does the lived texture of work occupy an ever larger place in the pop-cultural imagination. It’s all about meetings, deadlines, impossible tasks, scary or clueless bosses and, above all, the people in the next cubicle, with whom we spend most of our waking hours, even when we’re trying to avoid them.
A.O. Scott, “Superhuman Resources”, The New York Times (14 August 2016), AR10.