Imagine the following scene: seated at either side of a conference room table are an employee for a software company and two consultants who have been hired to review the firm's efficiency. The consultants, both named Bob, are backed by a glass wall on the other side of which are rows of cubicles lit by rows of fluorescent lights. The consultants find that Tom's job is quite literally useless. "You take the specifications from the customers, and you bring them down to the software engineers," they say. Tom confirms this, but also admits in the process that his secretary is the one who physically takes the printed specifications to the engineers. He becomes increasingly agitated as they question him. "What would you say you do here?" they ask. "I have people skills," he screams. "I am good at dealing with people!"
Imagine another office: this one is dank and darkly lit, illumined by a small sky-light and windows that open out to brick buildings mere feet away. It is the small Manhattan office of a 19th-century lawyer who employs four clerks. When the lawyer interrupts one of the clerks, Bartleby, who is otherwise hard-working, to perform an additional task, he is rendered speechless when Bartleby says, "I would prefer not to," and walks away. The lawyer follows him to his desk and asks him again, but Bartleby only responds to repeated petitions with defiant politeness: "I would prefer not to." The lawyer is appalled but can find no way to force the hand of a clerk who refuses to cooperate and refuses to leave.
These two scenes are easily recognizable. The first is from the late-1990s film Office Space, one of a generation's defining depictions of the banalities and disappointments of the modern corporate office. The second is from Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), a celebrated short story that depicts the ennui and neuroses endemic to countinghouses. Both bookend Nikil Saval's Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.
Cubed is an ambitious and remarkable book—a cultural and social history of the office that makes smart forays into architecture and design as well as managerial theory and business psychology. At its heart, it tells a story about corporate capitalism seen through the spaces in which white-collar Americans have worked. These spaces are the site of the struggle between capital and labor; at the same time, they are the places where so many have convened five days a week to earn a living and, in some cases, find satisfaction as well.
Cubed begins in the early 19th century with the modern office worker's ancestor, the clerk. In those days when men like Bartleby walked the streets of major cities in detachable and immaculately white collars and other trappings of pseudo-gentility, the clerking class represented a small portion of workers. There was a great deal of anxiety about the place of the clerk in society. What exactly did they produce? Unlike factory workers or farmers, they didn't make anything. They mostly copied documents and kept account books. Critics like Henry David Thoreau, who upheld Jeffersonian notions of producerism whenever he had the chance, mocked the bookkeepers in Walden. He spoke for many Americans who saw clerks as members of an alien class that reaped where they did not sow.
The relative paucity of clerks would soon change. Between 1860 and 1890, the number of those who worked in "professional service" grew from 750,000 to more than two million. Twenty years later, the census counted nearly four and a half million office workers. In the classic explanation of the historian Alfred Chandler, Jr., the transportation and communication revolution that came on the heels of the Civil War had called forth a new kind of organization—the modern business corporation. All those trains and telegraphs required coordination and that could only be accomplished by means of an emerging group of middle managers, "paper-pushers," and specialization among all workers.
In a few years the corporate ladder was born and the modern office with it. Whereas in Bartleby's countinghouse the clerk and the partner worked together, in these new spaces hierarchy was immediately apparent. Increasing specialization in the office made tokens of status significant: managers received wooden furniture in private offices while clerks settled for metal desks in open rooms. And as business theorists like Frederick W. Taylor made strides in conceptualizing new means of efficiency, the office would go through a number of revolutions in management's ability to quantify and surveil the actions of office workers.
The Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, is a good example of these changes. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1904, it was innovative and, much like Google's campuses today, an advertisement for the soap company that built it. The building had air-conditioning, ubiquitous natural lighting, a YWCA for its many women employees, a library, and roof gardens. It was a progressive achievement; many called it a breakthrough in humane design. But Saval draws attention to the underlying character of such projects: "What passed for workers' welfare could with a little imagination be seen as social control," he writes. "Was this a communal, team-focused environment? Or was it one designed for easy supervision and surveillance, a way to enforce discipline and adherence to unity?" His rhetorical questions suggest that spaces are always enactments of power. Whether one considers this sinister or not, as corporate managers realized the importance of architecture and design they ensured that the construction of office spaces, even the most luxurious and hip, would attend to the needs of business efficiency.
Over the next several decades, as skyscrapers shot up in cities across the country—Lewis Mumford called them "greedy buildings, hogging every cubic foot of space the law allows"—the number of office workers ballooned. By 1956 there were 27 million, seven million more than the number of blue-collar workers. Abram Chayes and other intellectuals suggested that community itself was being redefined along institutional rather than geographical lines. Runaway bestsellers like The Organization Man (1956) and The Lonely Crowd (1950) argued that a fundamental shift had occurred in the American character. Office workers were anxious about their loss of independence while they also enjoyed the unprecedented benefits of a career within a single organization.
Firms like Connecticut General soon looked to the countryside. They built sprawling campuses filled with amenities that seemed to fulfill the promise of welfare capitalism. Meanwhile, Robert Propst was hard at work conceiving of new ways to make the office more productive and egalitarian. A designer at the Herman Miller Company, he was as exacting about efficiency as Frederick W. Taylor had been but much less suspicious about the workers themselves. He believed that office work could be improved by improving the spaces in which it was performed.
Propst belonged to a generation of theorists from the 1960s and 1970s whose vision of the office was less hierarchical and more free-floating than that of their industrial predecessors. The field of human relations was coming into its own, promising to solve the problem of demoralized labor by means of nice things like openness and self-actualization. Business theorist Peter Drucker pontificated about the needs of the coming "knowledge worker." And Propst set about designing a suite of office furniture. "Action Office II," as it was called, was meant to be versatile. It was composed of three interlocking walls, set at obtuse angles, along with movable desks. Shelves and tables were set at variable heights above the ground. Fabric-covered walls and tackboards allowed workers to personalize their spaces. And workstations could be arranged idiosyncratically.
Propst sought to revolutionize the workplace and make it more flexible for the workers themselves, but companies were far more conservative. They "had no interest in creating autonomous environments for their 'human performers.' Instead, they wanted to stuff as many people in as small a space for as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible," Saval writes. The obtuse angles could easily be squared, and they soon were. A bitterly disappointed Propst became known as the "Father of the Cubicle."
Neither office design, human relations, nor business theory could hold back the neoliberal era that came next, what Saval calls the "lean and mean" years, marked by the hollowing out of middle management and the end of the safety nets and amenities that Organization Man enjoyed. While today's tech industry often hearkens back to the confident years of corporate capitalism—think Google and Apple—most Americans work in less secure circumstances. The film Office Space gave voice to the increasingly common experience of job insecurity and daily work in "intrinsically bad jobs, in a bad environment." And in recent years the empty spaces and dark windows of suburban office parks outside Princeton, New Jersey, for example, or Northern Virginia have given rise to the belief that the conventional workplace is becoming obsolete.
From the countinghouse of "Bartleby" to the suburban workplace of Office Space, what is fascinating about the office—and what animates the narrative of Cubed—is that it is an ambiguous space where longings for community and a satisfying vocation commingle with the instruments of business efficiency. Every generation reinvents the office. Saval interviews designers and theorists who predict the imminent end of the traditional workplace, sketching a future in which the cubicles of so many office complexes give way to the homes and co-working spaces more suitable for our increasingly atomized and contracted labor. Like all moments in history, ours is marked by uncertainty, but one thing is for sure: in the spaces where we convene on Monday mornings to carry on our business, cultural needs and social needs will meet and contend with economic forces in unexpected ways.
Kyle Williams is a PhD student at Rutgers University, where he studies American history, particularly late 19th- and early 20th-century intellectual and cultural history.
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