CUBED
A Secret History of the Workplace
Nikil Saval
Doubleday; 352 pages; $26.95
"The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society," C Wright Mills writes in White Collar (1951), his classic sociology text, as if he were describing a race of wan termites. Nikil Saval's excellent new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, was inspired by Mills' book, and it's a fresh and intellectually omnivorous extension of its themes.
I've spent about half my working life sitting in, and loathing, cubicles. You've probably spent years in one, too. About 60 per cent of us work in cubicles, and 93 per cent of us dislike them. You may ask yourself, as David Byrne sings, well, how did I get here? "Cubed" will supply answers. Most of them will not make you happier.
Mr Saval is a young editor at n + 1, the literary magazine. So many good writers have come tumbling out of that small journal in the past few years that it's begun to resemble an intellectual clown car.
If you are sitting in a cubicle right now, push back in your knockoff Aeron chair and allow Mr Saval, a shrewd and history-minded docent, to speak about your surroundings. In Cubed he walks us through the invention of a few of our favourite things: the vertical file cabinet, the suspended ceiling, the fluorescent light bulb, the elevator, the Dictaphone, the human-resources department.
He introduces us to many of the major figures in the development of modern office culture, including Frederick Taylor, the first widely influential efficiency expert; Katharine Gibbs, who ran finishing schools for young women (Gibbs girls) who wanted to enter the workplace; Willis Carrier, who invented modern air-conditioning; and Robert Propst, who developed the rudiments of what would become known as ergonomics and inadvertently gave us what would become the modern cubicle.
In 1964, Propst introduced what he called the Action Office, a flexible, semi-enclosed work space that had some style and wit to it. He meant to liberate workers. But the Action Office never caught on. Companies saw the benefit of small, one-size-fits-all work spaces, however, and they quickly bastardised Propst's idea. The modern cubicle was born.
Mr Saval describes the image we have of the cubicle today: "the flimsy, fabric-wrapped, half-exposed stall where the white-collar worker waited out his days until, at long last, he was laid off." Standard 6-by-6 sets of them became known as six packs. In the 1991 novel Generation X, Mr Saval notes, Douglas Coupland coined the term "veal-fattening pen."
Mr Saval is a vigorous writer, and a thoughtful one. What puts him above the rank of most nonfiction authors, even some of the better ones, is that he doesn't merely present information. He turns each new fact over in his mind, right in front of you, holding it to the light.
When he discovers that half of Americans report that their bathrooms are larger than their cubicles, for example, he writes: "One wonders to what extent the extravagant growth of the American bathroom, and of the suburban home in general, is partly a reaction against the shrinking of cubicles, where the owners of those bathrooms spend so much of their time."
He lingers on notions of class. Who are these office workers, exactly? Somehow they are "neither of the working class nor of the elite holders of capital". They dress well; they're clean and pale, as aristocrats once were.
Can we refer to office workers, as some do, as knowledge workers? Perhaps not. Mr Saval quotes Peter Drucker, the management consultant, who said: "They expect to be 'intellectuals.' And they find that they are just 'staff.' " The author says it out loud: "The United States is a nation of clerks."
Mr Saval is well read. In Cubed he moves with curiosity and ease among writers as disparate as John Dos Passos and Helen Gurley Brown, Lewis Mumford and Thomas Pynchon, Aldous Huxley and Studs Terkel. He is often darkly witty, too. Putting a spin on Rousseau, he says, "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles."
If this book has a downside, it's that reading about mostly unhappy people doing vaguely unhappy work isn't always an invigorating experience. It's not like reading about lumberjacks and crop-dusting pilots. It's hard to make monotony fascinating.
It would be wrong to think that Mr Saval doesn't acknowledge the upsides of office life for many. Offices got people out of dangerous factories. Clerical jobs paid better than blue-collar work. They helped many women climb into the workplace, and out of poverty.
The 1987 stock crash, which set loose increasingly rapacious corporate raiders, began to change something about the nature of office work. Downsizing was the euphemism of the era. "The cost of shedding middle management would prove high," Mr Saval writes, "for middle managers had been the basis of the American middle class itself."
By the end of Cubed, the author is dropping in on Silicon Valley offices, where companies like Google cater to their employees' every need, almost eliminating the distinction between work and leisure. Mr Saval savours the fact that so many well-known Silicon Valley figures dropped out of college yet want their offices to resemble college campuses.
Mr Saval closes by observing that, with the rise of freelancing and other forms of what he calls "precarious employment", work "appears to be moving not forward but back: back to an earlier era of insecurity". Many of the career paths once taken for granted are vanishing. "A new sort of work, as yet unformed, is taking its place."
I no longer work in a cubicle. I've exchanged my short leash for a somewhat longer one, and work from home. But you never know, in America, when a cubicle might again be your future.
I occasionally catch a bit of Mike Judge's classic satirical movie Office Space (1999) on cable. From now on, whenever I see it, one of Mr Saval's lines will ring in my ears: "After such knowledge as 'Office Space' offered, what forgiveness?"
A Secret History of the Workplace
Nikil Saval
Doubleday; 352 pages; $26.95
"The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society," C Wright Mills writes in White Collar (1951), his classic sociology text, as if he were describing a race of wan termites. Nikil Saval's excellent new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, was inspired by Mills' book, and it's a fresh and intellectually omnivorous extension of its themes.
I've spent about half my working life sitting in, and loathing, cubicles. You've probably spent years in one, too. About 60 per cent of us work in cubicles, and 93 per cent of us dislike them. You may ask yourself, as David Byrne sings, well, how did I get here? "Cubed" will supply answers. Most of them will not make you happier.
Mr Saval is a young editor at n + 1, the literary magazine. So many good writers have come tumbling out of that small journal in the past few years that it's begun to resemble an intellectual clown car.
If you are sitting in a cubicle right now, push back in your knockoff Aeron chair and allow Mr Saval, a shrewd and history-minded docent, to speak about your surroundings. In Cubed he walks us through the invention of a few of our favourite things: the vertical file cabinet, the suspended ceiling, the fluorescent light bulb, the elevator, the Dictaphone, the human-resources department.
He introduces us to many of the major figures in the development of modern office culture, including Frederick Taylor, the first widely influential efficiency expert; Katharine Gibbs, who ran finishing schools for young women (Gibbs girls) who wanted to enter the workplace; Willis Carrier, who invented modern air-conditioning; and Robert Propst, who developed the rudiments of what would become known as ergonomics and inadvertently gave us what would become the modern cubicle.
In 1964, Propst introduced what he called the Action Office, a flexible, semi-enclosed work space that had some style and wit to it. He meant to liberate workers. But the Action Office never caught on. Companies saw the benefit of small, one-size-fits-all work spaces, however, and they quickly bastardised Propst's idea. The modern cubicle was born.
Mr Saval describes the image we have of the cubicle today: "the flimsy, fabric-wrapped, half-exposed stall where the white-collar worker waited out his days until, at long last, he was laid off." Standard 6-by-6 sets of them became known as six packs. In the 1991 novel Generation X, Mr Saval notes, Douglas Coupland coined the term "veal-fattening pen."
Mr Saval is a vigorous writer, and a thoughtful one. What puts him above the rank of most nonfiction authors, even some of the better ones, is that he doesn't merely present information. He turns each new fact over in his mind, right in front of you, holding it to the light.
When he discovers that half of Americans report that their bathrooms are larger than their cubicles, for example, he writes: "One wonders to what extent the extravagant growth of the American bathroom, and of the suburban home in general, is partly a reaction against the shrinking of cubicles, where the owners of those bathrooms spend so much of their time."
He lingers on notions of class. Who are these office workers, exactly? Somehow they are "neither of the working class nor of the elite holders of capital". They dress well; they're clean and pale, as aristocrats once were.
Can we refer to office workers, as some do, as knowledge workers? Perhaps not. Mr Saval quotes Peter Drucker, the management consultant, who said: "They expect to be 'intellectuals.' And they find that they are just 'staff.' " The author says it out loud: "The United States is a nation of clerks."
Mr Saval is well read. In Cubed he moves with curiosity and ease among writers as disparate as John Dos Passos and Helen Gurley Brown, Lewis Mumford and Thomas Pynchon, Aldous Huxley and Studs Terkel. He is often darkly witty, too. Putting a spin on Rousseau, he says, "Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles."
If this book has a downside, it's that reading about mostly unhappy people doing vaguely unhappy work isn't always an invigorating experience. It's not like reading about lumberjacks and crop-dusting pilots. It's hard to make monotony fascinating.
It would be wrong to think that Mr Saval doesn't acknowledge the upsides of office life for many. Offices got people out of dangerous factories. Clerical jobs paid better than blue-collar work. They helped many women climb into the workplace, and out of poverty.
The 1987 stock crash, which set loose increasingly rapacious corporate raiders, began to change something about the nature of office work. Downsizing was the euphemism of the era. "The cost of shedding middle management would prove high," Mr Saval writes, "for middle managers had been the basis of the American middle class itself."
By the end of Cubed, the author is dropping in on Silicon Valley offices, where companies like Google cater to their employees' every need, almost eliminating the distinction between work and leisure. Mr Saval savours the fact that so many well-known Silicon Valley figures dropped out of college yet want their offices to resemble college campuses.
Mr Saval closes by observing that, with the rise of freelancing and other forms of what he calls "precarious employment", work "appears to be moving not forward but back: back to an earlier era of insecurity". Many of the career paths once taken for granted are vanishing. "A new sort of work, as yet unformed, is taking its place."
I no longer work in a cubicle. I've exchanged my short leash for a somewhat longer one, and work from home. But you never know, in America, when a cubicle might again be your future.
I occasionally catch a bit of Mike Judge's classic satirical movie Office Space (1999) on cable. From now on, whenever I see it, one of Mr Saval's lines will ring in my ears: "After such knowledge as 'Office Space' offered, what forgiveness?"
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