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Cubed

A Secret History of the Workplace

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

You mean this place we go to five days a week has a history? Cubed reveals the unexplored yet surprising story of the places where most of the world's work—our work—gets done. From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office, from the steno pool to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is—and what it might become.

In the mid-nineteenth century clerks worked in small, dank spaces called “counting-houses.” These were all-male enclaves, where work was just paperwork. Most Americans considered clerks to be questionable dandies, who didn’t do “real work.” But the joke was on them: as the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial economies took place, and then from industrial to information economies, the organization of the workplace evolved along with them—and the clerks took over. Offices became rationalized, designed for both greater efficiency in the accomplishments of clerical work and the enhancement of worker productivity. Women entered the office by the millions, and revolutionized the social world from within. Skyscrapers filled with office space came to tower over cities everywhere. Cubed opens our eyes to what is a truly "secret history" of changes so obvious and ubiquitous that we've hardly noticed them. From the wood-paneled executive suite to the advent of the cubicles where 60% of Americans now work (and 93% of them dislike it) to a not-too-distant future where we might work anywhere at any time (and perhaps all the time), Cubed excavates from popular books, movies, comic strips (Dilbert!), and a vast amount of management literature and business history, the reasons why our workplaces are the way they are—and how they might be better.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 3, 2014
      Journalist Saval (an editor at n+1) offers a detailed social and cultural history of the white-collar workplace. He narrates the evolution of the office in the first decades of the 20th century and tells how “administration and bureaucracy over the world of business.” Along came the typewriter, vertical file cabinet, managers, and efficiency experts to organize this new class of workers. The most influential and ultimately terrifying of these is Frederick “Speedy” Taylor, the father of the time and motion study, who was responsible for “vast caverns of bull pens and steno pools” and “eventually workers the impression that their work was routine and dead-end.” Saval spends considerable time on the successes and failures of an office’s architecture and design: Frank Lloyd Wright’s radically organized Larkin Building in Buffalo in 1904 somehow leads us to Clive Wilkinson’s Disneyland-like paradise for TBWA/Chiat/Day in 1997. Saval’s readings of pop culture representations of the office and its workers add a lively and ironic perspective. We may have come to the point, Saval suggests, when the office may be disappearing. Self-identified as a “work of synthesis,” the book draws heavily on the credited work of others, so one wonders about the “Secret” of the title. Never mind. The result is an entertaining read. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick & Williams.

    • Kirkus

      March 15, 2014
      An editor of n +1 offers an illuminating study of the modern office and its antecedents. Many Americans spend most of their working hours in cubicles, but 93 percent of those individuals report disliking their work environments. Yet this Dilbert-esque disgruntlement with office life is nothing new. Saval shows that from the beginning of its existence in the 19th century, cultural observers like Herman Melville and Charles Dickens considered the office a suspect space. The activities that took place there were "weak, empty and above all boring" since they lacked the dynamism of the deal making that went on in the business world they supported. At the same time, the office has also been "a source of some of the most utopian ideas and sentiments about American working life." Through analyses of historical, sociological and cultural texts, Saval examines the double-edged promise that the office has held to American workers over the last 150 years. In the 19th century, life behind a desk offered social respectability and security while providing an apparent refuge from the physical hardships of factory work. As the business world expanded and work became increasingly rationalized for maximum output and efficiency, so did the office. This gave rise to the hyperefficient offices of the 20th century, where managing workers--down to their very movements and behaviors--as well as data and space became a frighteningly exact science. In the 21st century, technological shifts and global economic downturns have wrought still further changes in office life. Freelancers now inhabit homes and cafes, transforming leisure and living spaces into work spaces. These developments have not only stripped office professionals of the illusion of security; in a wickedly ironic, but perhaps predictable, historical twist, they have also cast them back into the "contingency and precariousness" from which the office was supposed to save them. Ferociously lucid and witty.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      May 15, 2014

      In 2011, more than 60 percent of employed Americans worked in "some form of a cubicle," states the opening of this book; 93 percent of them, the author goes on to say, disliked the environment in which they worked. Numbers like these, even though their source isn't noted, are startling. How and why did we get to a situation in which the majority of us work in places we don't like? Saval (editor, n+1 magazine) traces the history of the office from 19th-century counting houses (in an opening discussion of Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener") to mid-20th-century skyscraper workplaces ("an especially tall collection of boring offices"), with row after row of desks and the bosses working elsewhere, and on to designer Robert Propst's Action Offices and cubbies. While plenty is said about design styles, even more of the content is the author's social commentary. In Saval's view, management is less concerned with making the office a creative place than with duping employees into thinking that their situation is better than it actually is. VERDICT The prose is lively and sharp. This isn't a scholar's book, but Saval is an acute observer whose tart observations may attract an unexpectedly wide audience.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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