A history of office in the US
Saval, N. (2014).Cubed: A secret history of the workplace. Doubleday.
Nikil Saval was a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English, Stanford University. His dissertation topic was about the problem of white-collar worker in culture. He is now an editor of a Philadelphia-based print and digital magazine N+1. The goal of the book was to a synthesize the historical records, literature, movie, architecture design, furniture, and interior design which were related to the topic of the office environment. It started from the clerking class in the early industrialization era to skyscrapers, open-plan offices and ended up at the IT company campus in Silicon Valley. The book emphasized on the interpretation of the changes of the values and ideas in office design based on the analysis of the social, technological, economic contexts at different times.
The author spent a lot of pages on interpreting why people, both men, and women, wanted to become white-collar workers and how they coped with the office landscapes that organizations designed for their employees. In the mid-nineteenth century, clerks worked in small, dank spaces called counting-houses. These were all-male enclaves, where clerks worked on paperwork together. At that time, clerking was not considered as a real work comparing to farming labors. But as the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial manufacturing, and then from industrial to information economies, the idea of management, the occupation of managers, the structure of organization evolved along with them, and the paperwork workers took over the office.
The book also revealed an interweaving relationship between office design and the development of management literature and business history. It showed a constant back and forth of the workplace design concept between focuses on organization performance, efficiency, and worker autonomy. In the early twentieth century, offices became rationalized, designed for both higher efficiency the enhancement of worker productivity. Women entered the office and revolutionized the social world from within. Skyscrapers which created powerful organization images and was filled with office space which was easy to rent out started to reshape the urbanization in American cities. In the 1960s, when the human side of management which was about worker satisfaction and self-actualization was celebrated in management literature, the workplace autonomy, individualism started to emerge in workplace design. Office cubicles such as Action Office designed by Robert Propst were at first trying to embrace the idea of uniting the aesthetics of design with human needs. However, the cubicles were soon adopted by the organizations and became a hatred figure of organization hierarchy and efficiency in the following decades.
Following the last book review’s discussion about the researcher’s stands on the organization or individual worker, I find the designer’s willingness to promote individual worker’s workplace experience was based on the stands on the designer’s value of individualism and collectivism. The value shifts could be triggered by the changes in the social and economic context. Because of the great recession in the 1980s, the American management literature looked at Japanese management and embraced the idea of a cooperative rather than adversarial relationship with the labor. It was a collectivist approach that focused on promoting cooperation and loyalty. Individualism seems to be luxury. It turned out that whenever the business performance went down, the trend of workplace design would shift to the side of collectivism, focusing on efficiency and organizational performance. When the economy rose up again, the worker’s autonomy and workplace democracy became the selling point for organizations to recruit talents.
The trend of workplace design changes along with the fluctuation of the social and economic conditions. In different times among the history of office design in the US, the open-plan design did not mean equality but hierarchy, and personal office did not mean stability but autonomy. The question about which kind of workplace strategy is optimal should be based upon the specific organization, users and the context. The result of the design is also significantly influenced by the cultural context of the organization. It turns out that a workplace design concept can easily result in a workplace that looks creative and flat but works terribly. For design starting from a utopian concept of workplace autonomy, rather than the experience of actual workers, the design fails not for lack of trying but for lack of listening.
Nikil Saval was a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English, Stanford University. His dissertation topic was about the problem of white-collar worker in culture. He is now an editor of a Philadelphia-based print and digital magazine N+1. The goal of the book was to a synthesize the historical records, literature, movie, architecture design, furniture, and interior design which were related to the topic of the office environment. It started from the clerking class in the early industrialization era to skyscrapers, open-plan offices and ended up at the IT company campus in Silicon Valley. The book emphasized on the interpretation of the changes of the values and ideas in office design based on the analysis of the social, technological, economic contexts at different times.
The author spent a lot of pages on interpreting why people, both men, and women, wanted to become white-collar workers and how they coped with the office landscapes that organizations designed for their employees. In the mid-nineteenth century, clerks worked in small, dank spaces called counting-houses. These were all-male enclaves, where clerks worked on paperwork together. At that time, clerking was not considered as a real work comparing to farming labors. But as the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial manufacturing, and then from industrial to information economies, the idea of management, the occupation of managers, the structure of organization evolved along with them, and the paperwork workers took over the office.
The book also revealed an interweaving relationship between office design and the development of management literature and business history. It showed a constant back and forth of the workplace design concept between focuses on organization performance, efficiency, and worker autonomy. In the early twentieth century, offices became rationalized, designed for both higher efficiency the enhancement of worker productivity. Women entered the office and revolutionized the social world from within. Skyscrapers which created powerful organization images and was filled with office space which was easy to rent out started to reshape the urbanization in American cities. In the 1960s, when the human side of management which was about worker satisfaction and self-actualization was celebrated in management literature, the workplace autonomy, individualism started to emerge in workplace design. Office cubicles such as Action Office designed by Robert Propst were at first trying to embrace the idea of uniting the aesthetics of design with human needs. However, the cubicles were soon adopted by the organizations and became a hatred figure of organization hierarchy and efficiency in the following decades.
Following the last book review’s discussion about the researcher’s stands on the organization or individual worker, I find the designer’s willingness to promote individual worker’s workplace experience was based on the stands on the designer’s value of individualism and collectivism. The value shifts could be triggered by the changes in the social and economic context. Because of the great recession in the 1980s, the American management literature looked at Japanese management and embraced the idea of a cooperative rather than adversarial relationship with the labor. It was a collectivist approach that focused on promoting cooperation and loyalty. Individualism seems to be luxury. It turned out that whenever the business performance went down, the trend of workplace design would shift to the side of collectivism, focusing on efficiency and organizational performance. When the economy rose up again, the worker’s autonomy and workplace democracy became the selling point for organizations to recruit talents.
The trend of workplace design changes along with the fluctuation of the social and economic conditions. In different times among the history of office design in the US, the open-plan design did not mean equality but hierarchy, and personal office did not mean stability but autonomy. The question about which kind of workplace strategy is optimal should be based upon the specific organization, users and the context. The result of the design is also significantly influenced by the cultural context of the organization. It turns out that a workplace design concept can easily result in a workplace that looks creative and flat but works terribly. For design starting from a utopian concept of workplace autonomy, rather than the experience of actual workers, the design fails not for lack of trying but for lack of listening.
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