“It just seems kind of nutty,” Peter Cappelli tells Fortune, on a Zoom call, as he and his coauthor, Ranya Nehmeh, discuss their new, aptly titled book, In Praise of the Office. The past five years have been quite a journey from fully remote work to an uneasy hybrid truce to a battle at many big companies to bring workers back five days a week, to wherever we are now. “People were starting to see this just as a kind of Marxist [thing], they were never saying that, but that’s the way they were thinking about it, right? Class battle, capital versus labor stuff, you know?”
Cappelli insists he and Nehmeh, both college professors and management scholars with expertise in human resources, were clear-eyed about what they’d find when they began researching their new book. Cappelli is a long-tenured management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Nehmeh is an adjunct professor at Vienna’s University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication. “We both work remote,” Cappelli acknowledged, but he also pointed out he’s racked up four decades of experience.
“I don’t need to be in the office … But I can also see how much worse the place is, because people like me are not in the office, and because we’re not in, the junior people aren’t there either, and so nobody’s there, right?”
