You cannot tell me that there’s a book about the history of the workplace and not expect me to read it – I may have given up on history after O Levels but I love reading about the history behind things we take for granted (if you have any book reccs, let me know!). As a fan of Dilbert and someone who’s probably going to remain an office-dweller for the next few years, I was curious about the history behind the place I sit in almost every day.

While I never thought too much about when the office came into being, it makes sense that it’s fairly recent. It was in the mid-nineteenth century that clerks started working in dark, cramped, places – the proto-office. And when America industrialised and the railroad came into being, the need for administrative workers increased and the modern office came into being. It’s pretty interesting to see all these side effects of railways; did you know that another effect of the railways was the standardisation of time?

Apart from the physical evolution of the dark counting rooms to the office, Cubed also tracks the changes in the way Americans think about the office. At first, office workers were seen as “dandies” who didn’t do real work – unlike the rest of the Americans who laboured with their hands. But clerks were also one of the few jobs where it was possible to progress; with some hard work (and perhaps the wooing of the boss’s daughter), a clerk may become a businessman in the future.

As time went on, women entered the workforce (mostly because upper management realised they could pay people less for equally great work), were the target of some seriously sexist thinking (aka all women are here to sleep with men for work) and eventually started challenging these norms. This was something that resonated with me because even now, so many years later, we’re still feeling the effects of sexism in the workplace and it’s still something that we need to work to correct.

Another interesting section was about the evolution of the open-plan office. Apparently, the idea of the flexible office came from Europe, but the implementation went wrong. One of the ideas for revolutionising the office was called the action office and it eventually became… the cubicle. The original design was a lot more open, but someone soon realised you could turn it into a little box and save space.

I also learned that there was a “postwar mania for personality testing” as part of the corporate office’s efforts to “mould [the] personalities” of their workers. I don’t know if it’s still being doing in America, but when I was job hunting in Japan, personality tests were very common. I wonder if this was something that they took from America, given that the American army took control of Japan from 1945 to 1952.

Overall, I thought this was very interesting. The book talks about the evolution of the physical office and how that ties into our views and thoughts about the office. As such, the book draws upon significant American buildings, movies, and even comic strips to bring together a narrative of how the office came to be, how people have tried to change it, and what people are doing to try and change it.

Feature Image: Photo from Pixabay via Pexels