NY Times Sunday Book Review, June 15 2014 Office Max ‘Cubed,’ by Nikil Saval By RICHARD SENNETT
CUBED A Secret History of the Workplace By Nikil Saval Illustrated. 352 pp. Doubleday. $26.95. How you work depends in large part on the spaces in which you work. This big theme is taken up by Nikil Saval in “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace.” There is in fact nothing “secret” about this history; from the Civil War on, as the white-collar world grew, managers and designers thought out loud about where workers should sit, the furniture they should use, the walls and windows that should surround them. Instead of a secret history, Saval, an editor of n+1, has written something more interesting. He has infused a straightforward factual account with all sorts of literary, cultural and political insights; these make the story he tells more dark than dry. There was no white-collar class in the modern sense before the late 19th century. Most offices were small, employing at most a few dozen clerks to service managers and partners; even big factories could be run lean. Offices themselves tended to be intimate and informal spaces, clerks and partners sitting near to, if not next to, one another. Everyone dealt with everything; spoken exchanges rather than paper memos got the work done. This was no happy paradise, as Saval shows in a brilliant analysis based on Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener”; rather, it was often an intimate tyranny. What’s more, the gulf separating threadbare existence from well-fed prosperity was dramatized in adjoining desks. Still, “the distance between junior clerk and partner was seen as both enormous and easily surmountable.” Saval’s story is essentially about what happened when this office realm got bigger and more organized. In fact, as the office became a bureaucracy ruled by the internal division of labor, the American dream faded, though it was still trotted out ceremonially. National railroads and the coal and steel industries led the way in this transformation, requiring hundreds of specialized service workers rather than a handful of all-purpose clerks. In a nice touch, Saval shows how the advent of the telephone and the typewriter aided this transformation, changing the office from a spoken to a written culture: The telephone forced people to keep records of far-flung, impersonal communications; the typewriter enabled them to do so. Architecturally, growth meant growth upward, since in many of America’s expanding cities land to spread out was increasingly scarce and costly. At first, designers had no idea how to organize the interiors of the metal-framed tall buildings that rose up toward the end of the 19th century. Saval suggests that the equally new vertical filing cabinet became a “metaphorical stand-in for the office itself,” with each floor in a building stacked up like a separate file. It’s a neat conceit; it may even have been true. The time-and-motion engineer Frederick Taylor was the villain in this organizational effort. He sought to transform office work so that it was as efficient as manual labor in a factory. This translated into regimented work spaces: rows and rows of identical desks in open areas for the lower-level bureaucrats; cubicles nearly identical in form for middle-level functionaries; offices with some personal character for the few at the top. But it was clear by the end of World War II that regimented space could prove self-defeating; by then, the industrial analyst Elton Mayo and others had shown that the neat, filing-cabinet office was literally counterproductive, depressing and demotivating people, and so slowing them down. Saval evocatively describes designs by a very few visionary architects who sought to humanize the workplace. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building of 1906, for instance, a light-filled atrium space in Buffalo, was an early effort to do so; Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, finished in 1958, is about as beautiful an office environment as High Modernism could imagine. But what was the everyday alternative to routinized space if the designer was not a genius artist-architect backed by an unusually enlightened client? What is the vernacular form of the humane office? The question is perhaps more complicated now than a half-century ago, because the work of white-collar organizations has been transformed in the last two generations. The corporate ladder on which a person climbs up or down, or at least stands, is gone; in its place is a more flexible organization, which means more short-term, episodic work. By my calculation, for example, white-collar workers changed employers four or five times on average in 1965, whereas today they are very likely to work for more than a dozen firms in the course of a lifetime. Even if they stay within one company for a long time, they are probably going to move erratically as the organization tacks to and fro. It’s often said that fixed corporate identity is dead; if so, this means that workers’ sense of self-identity is, at the very least, disturbed. The design that might remedy this condition, rather than make it worse, confuses Saval — and rightly so. It’s an open question about the transforming power of architecture. “Office landscapes,” which mix large groups of people, have been tried; so, too, the “hot desk” and the “electronic umbilical cord,” which allow people to connect to work without a fixed office or work-space. The planners of office campuses like Silicon Valley’s Googleplex have created something like the modern company town, mixing labor and leisure, providing gyms and upscale restaurants as well as doctors and day care. The problem with such solutions is in part that the functional amenities bind people to offices for ever-longer periods of the day. From a critical viewpoint, these constitute an architecture of submission. Saval believes that white-collar workers should resist, somehow, but as he searches for alternatives, he leaves off writing history and becomes a sociologist. His book, he tells us at the very start, is inspired by “White Collar,” the great study by the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills from 1951. By the end of “Cubed,” what exactly inspired Saval has become clear: It is Mills’s worry that white-collar workers are an oppressed class, and also that, because they are resistant to unions and convinced of the American dream, they are passive in their own defense. They may fantasize trashing the office, but they do nothing effective about their rage. Workers, in Saval’s view, have to cease thinking like the proverbially conformist, if unhappy, “organization man.” Does office architecture have anything to do with organizing the middle-class? Saval interviews radical office architects like Francis Duffy. He leaves the United States to inspect Dutch experiments in organizing work flow. He is given some crude advice by the design consultant Erik Veldhoen: “You know Karl Marx? He has to live now.” Saval is too sophisticated to swallow this pill, but even so, he finds something attractive in the medicine. Maybe if workers think about how to take control over work space, they will begin to think about how to transform the work itself — but none of the experts Saval interviews quite convince him. This is an unsatisfying end to the book, but it is an honest one. “Cubed” is itself a pleasure to read: beautifully written and clearly organized. Since many Americans now, women as well as men, spend more than half their waking hours at work, it’s also an important exploration. Richard Sennett teaches sociology at New York University. He is the former president of the American Council on Work. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
