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A New York Times Notable Book • Daily Beast Best Nonfiction of 2014 • Inc. Magazine's Most Thought-Provoking Books of the Year
“Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles.”
How did we get from Scrooge’s office to “Office Space”? From bookkeepers in dark countinghouses to freelancers in bright cafes? What would the world be like without the vertical file cabinet? What would the world be like without the office at all? In Cubed, Nikil Saval chronicles the evolution of the office in a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is. Drawing on the history of architecture and business, as well as a host of pop culture artifacts—from Mad Men to Dilbert (and, yes, The Office)—and ranging in time from the earliest clerical houses to the surprisingly utopian origins of the cubicle to the funhouse campuses of Silicon Valley, Cubed is an all-encompassing investigation into the way we work, why we do it the way we do (and often don’t like it), and how we might do better.
- Sales Rank: #387626 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-06
- Released on: 2015-01-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.14" l, .82 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
Praise for Cubed:
"... Excellent ... fresh and intellectually omnivorous ... 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."
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Cubed is...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, The New York Times Book Review
"Lush, funny, and unexpectedly fascinating ... [G]enius ... Cubed stands as one of those books readers can open to any page and find the kind of insight they’ll want to yank strangers out of their bus or subway seats and repeat ... [A] beautifully written, original, and essential masterpiece."
—Jerry Stahl, Bookforum
"There are a lot of books about work... but Cubed offers something different: an entertaining look at the history of the modern worker that the modern worker can actually learn from."
—Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR
"Impressive... Beautifully written... delightfully readable..."
—Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books
"Thorough and diligent...Saval works hard, and effectively, to demonstrate how the evolution of workspaces paralleled social shifts in the workforce that we’re still living out.... Saval is a tireless researcher, and he turns phrases with a flair that would get an Organization Man fired."
—Jennifer Howard, The Washington Post Book World
"... Cleverly pieced together...subtle and sophisticated."
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
"Nikil Saval's new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, is a fascinating guide to the intellectual history of the American office. Part cultural history, part architectural analysis and part management theory—with some labor economics, gender studies and pop culture thrown in for good measure—the book is a smart look at the evolution of the place where we spend so much of our lives."
—The Washington Post
"In his first book, Saval sets out to chronicle the evolution of the American office from airless prison to what it is today, reflecting upon the transformation of the office worker from emasculated novelty to unremarkable figure of ubiquity. To accomplish this, he synthesizes an impressive number of books, films, articles, and first-person accounts relating to the daunting number of historical forces and ideologies that have shaped white-collar work: architecture, philosophy, labor disputes, class conflict, the women’s movement, and technological advances, just to name a few. Saval considers each of them, forming a cogent and compelling narrative that could very easily have been scattered or deathly dull. To keep things lively, Saval deploys deft analytical skills and a tone that’s frequently bemused, making difficult and important concepts palatable to the casual reader."
—The Boston Globe
"Over the past week, as I've been carrying around a copy of Nikil Saval's Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, I've gotten some quizzical looks. 'It's a history of the office,' I'd explain, whereupon a good number of people would respond, 'Well, that sounds boring.' It isn't. In fact, Cubed is anything but... Saval's book glides smoothly between his two primary subjects: the physical structure of offices and the social institutions of white-collar work over the past 150 years or so. Cubed encompasses everything from the rise of the skyscraper to the entrance of women in the workplace to the mid-20th-century angst over grey-flannel-suit conformity to the dorm-like 'fun' workplaces of Silicon Valley. His stance is skeptical, a welcome approach given that most writings on the contemporary workplace are rife with dubious claims to revolutionary innovation—office design or management gimmicks that bestselling authors indiscriminately pounce on like magpies seizing glittering bits of trash."
—Salon.com
"Five days a week I commute to a skyscraper in the main business district of a large city and sit at a desk within whispering distance of another desk. Whatever the word 'work' used to conjure, my version is now quite standard. About 40 million Americans make a living in some sort of cubicle. Are we happy about that? The likelihood that we are not is central to Nikil Saval's impressive debut, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace."
—The New Republic
"... Formidable ... Beautifully rendered ... Sections of the book shine—especially when it discusses gender in the workplace ... The elegance of his prose and the intensity of his moral commitment linger."
—The Nation
"... Cubed is so stimulating, so filled with terrific material and shrewd observations, that it’s a must-read for anyone pondering how America arrived at its current state of white-collar under-employment and economic insecurity."
—The Daily Beast
"...[A] sharp and absorbing history of the office."
—The Economist
"Saval's book... stands out as one of the best pop histories to come out in years, and on a topic that most of us (statistically speaking) can relate to."
—Fast Company
"[An] absorbing history of office life...It sits cheerily between the academic and the journalistic register...Saval's style is nicely spiked with colloquialism... [His] debunking temper serves him well."
—The Guardian
"... An entertaining read ... Saval's readings of pop culture representations of the office and its workers add a lively and ironic perspective."
—Publishers Weekly
"Ferociously lucid and witty."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A sprightly historical tour of the vexed, overplanned world of the modern workplace."
—In These Times
“Marvellous… in the vein of Barbara Ehrenreich’s brilliant renderings of the ‘Inner Life of the Middle Class’… Saval’s accomplishment is to restore the strangeness of the common cube.”
—Michael Denning, New Left Review
"Part cultural study, part architectural analysis...a fascinating journey through the history of the American office environment from cubicle life with a dress code to Google-fied fun spaces with Fussball tables."
—Theis Duelund, Los Angeles Magazine
“Why did no one write this necessary book before now? Never mind: it wouldn’t have been as good. Cubed has that combination of inevitability and surprise that marks the best writing—and thinking.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision
“Required reading for anyone who works in an office, and for those fortunate enough to have escaped.”
—Ed Park, author of Personal Days
"Nikil Saval is a superstar! He does for offices what Foucault did for prisons and hospitals, transforming a seemingly static, purely functional, self-evident institution into a rich human story, full of good and bad intentions, chance, and historical forces. Reading Cubed is like watching an amazing magic trick where the very boringness of the office turns out to be what is the most interesting. I found myself wishing he would do waiting rooms next."
—Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
About the Author
Nikil Saval, an editor of n+1, lives in Philadelphia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition
1
The Clerking Class
The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.
—Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary (1849)
They labored in poorly lit, smoky single rooms, attached to merchants and lawyers, to insurance concerns and banks. They had sharp penmanship and bad eyes, extravagant clothes but shrunken, unused bodies, backs cramped from poor posture, fingers callused by constant writing. When they were not thin, angular, and sallow, they were ruddy and soft; their paunches sagged onto their thighs.
Clerks were once a rare subject in literature. Their lives were considered unworthy of comment, their workplaces hemmed in and small, their work indescribably dull. And yet one of the greatest of short stories is about a clerk. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Herman Melville, who had become famous for writing memoirs and novels about spectacular sea voyages to exotic islands—gaining a readership he eventually lost with that strange, long book about a whaling voyage—decided to turn inward, to the snug, suffocating world of the office. The titanic hunt for the white whale was exchanged for the hunt for the right-sized pen. And for finding the right position to sit at a desk: “If, for the sake of easing his back, he brought the table lid at a sharp angle well up towards his chin, and wrote there like a man using the steep roof of a Dutch house for his desk, then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms. If now he lowered the table to his waistbands, and stooped over it in writing, then there was a sore aching in his back.”
Melville himself had worked as a clerk for a merchant in Hawaii before he—as Ishmael put it—took to the ship. He knew from the inside the peculiar emptiness that office work could often have, its atmosphere of purposeless labor and dead-endedness. Even in Moby-Dick he speaks of the thousands in Manhattan who idle along the Battery, lost in “sea-reverie,” avoiding returning to their work lives “pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” Appropriately, the few windows in the Bartleby office look out onto nothing but more walls. “On one end,” the unnamed narrator writes, the window faced “the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom.” And on the other side, “an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade.” This wall, the narrator adds, wryly, “required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but, for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed to within ten feet of my window panes.” On two sides, then, two walls: one, the white wall of the light shaft; the other, a soot-black brick wall hemming in vision and light. A walled-in window: a room with no view.
But the office of “Bartleby,” like the Pequod of Ishmael and Ahab, is also a place of male bonding, cheery with camaraderie and bonhomie. The narrator, a lawyer, initially employs three clerks with absurd nicknames—Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut—that he uses affectionately. Each of them behaves with exact predictability the same way every day; for example, Turkey, an old man, always ceases to get work done after his noontime dinner, which he takes with an inordinate quantity of wine, causing his face to “blaze like a grate full of Christmas coals.” But the boss is too kind to do anything Trump-like, and the distempered workers never challenge their boss.
The entire order dissolves, however, when a sudden increase in the volume of business pushes the narrator into hiring a new scrivener—the eponymous Bartleby. He arrives looking “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable,” and, mysteriously enough, “incurably forlorn.” The narrator gives him a desk next to a window, but like the other windows it offers little to look at, “having originally afforded a lateral view of certain grimy backyards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all, though,” the narrator concedes, “it gave some light.”
At first Bartleby works diligently, his thinness inversely proportional to his ravenousness for writing: “As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on, silently, palely, mechanically.” The trouble comes when this routine is interrupted. The lawyer-narrator calls Bartleby in for assistance in comparing two copies of a document. After outlining the duty, the narrator is stunned by Bartleby’s infamous reply—“I would prefer not to.” Repeating the maddening phrase at the narrator’s every spluttering attempt to get him to work, Bartleby plunges the calm predictability of the office into thunderous irregularity. In the end, the lawyer, baffled by Bartleby’s intransigence, his passive resistance, is forced to leave his office altogether; Bartleby himself is taken off to prison, where, bereft of his sustenance of documents, he starves to death.
What “Bartleby” means has been a subject of endless debate. Office workers have always taken it to be a mirror of their condition, with Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” an encapsulation of how the office reduces all titanic conflicts to petty grievances and simmering resentments. But in 1853, when the story was written, the term “office”—and the sort of labor that was performed there—had nowhere near the universal significance it has now. In those tense years before the Civil War, clerks were a small but unusual phenomenon, a subject of anxious scrutiny; their workplaces were at once significant centers of American business and breeding grounds for a kind of work that nobody recognized as work. Clerks were a kind of worker that seemed, like Bartleby, at once harmless and ominous. “Bartleby” was evidence that the office had just begun to blot its inky mark on the consciousness of the world.
When does the office begin? It’s a question without an easy answer. One can associate the origins with the beginning of paperwork itself—until recently, the most common mental association with office work (think of the derogatory phrase “paper pusher”). In other words, since the invention of writing and the corresponding ability to keep records in a systematic manner, there have always been places that resemble offices: monasteries, libraries, scholars’ studies. Banking furnished an especially large amount of paperwork; the Uffizi, an incomparable gallery of Renaissance art in Florence, was also one of the first office buildings—the bookkeeping offices of the Medici family’s groundbreaking financial operations. Clerks, too, have existed for ages, many of them unclinching themselves from their desks to become quite famous: from Samuel Pepys, the British government diarist who reported on the gossipy world of seventeenth-century England, to Alexander Hamilton, who had cut his teeth as a merchants’ clerk before he became the first secretary of the Treasury of the United States; Benjamin Franklin, paragon of pecuniary restraint and bourgeois self-abnegation, started out as a dry goods clerk in 1727. Perhaps some of the tediousness of Franklin’s own writing was honed in the conditions of his first job: since clerks have had the opportunity to keep diaries, they have bemoaned the sheer boredom of their tasks—the endless copying, the awkward postures, the meaninglessness of their work. When not doing writing for the job, clerks have cultivated the habit of writing about the job—or literally around it, as in the case of some infamous marginalia from medieval scribes. “Writing is excessive drudgery,” one such jotting reads. “It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.” “Oh, my hand,” goes another—even though writing out that sentence would have only magnified the problem it described.
The notion of the office as the quintessential location of alienated work, or simple drudgery, is far from the etymological root of the word. “Office” itself comes from the Latin for “duty.” One of the more famous philosophical works of Cicero, long-winded scold of the latter days of the Roman Republic, is a treatise called De officiis, usually translated as “Of Duty” or “On Duty,” though it might just as well be “Of Office.” For Cicero’s understanding of duty isn’t far from our contemporary sense of “holding office” or the “office of the president”: “office” as connoting a specific set of responsibilities. For Cicero, “office” was what was proper to you, what fitted you as your natural duty. This, too, seems far from any understanding of the office as workplace: few people have ever considered office work to be natural, proper, or fitting.
To find the emergence of the office in history—the workplace that prefigures the offices of today—one has to look at a peculiar confluence of new sorts of buildings, deep economic changes, as well as (most slippery of all) new kinds of feelings and mass awareness of one another among particular strata of the workforce. Industrialization in Britain and America was producing more and more administrative work, and alongside it a need for a rational approach to managing accounts, bills, ledgers: in short, paperwork. Rising to take these positions were clerks, who, looking around, began to see themselves growing in number, and to feel themselves as belonging vaguely to a special group. One finds the evolution of the office coinciding, then, with a change in the position of the clerks themselves—a new restiveness on their part, a new sense of power. They were not quite sure of themselves, but they were no longer isolated. By the middle of the nineteenth century, clerks and their workplaces begin to appear with a new regularity in the literature and journalism. “Bartleby,” with its simultaneously assertive and retiring protagonist, nicely captures this ambivalence in the early world of the office.
What “Bartleby” also captured, as other descriptions of office life at the time did, was the sense that office work was unnatural. In a world in which shipping and farming, building and assembling, were the order of work, the early clerical worker didn’t seem to fit. The office clerk in America at the high noon of the nineteenth century was a curious creature, an unfamiliar figure, an inexplicable phenomenon. Even by 1880, less than 5 percent of the total workforce, or 186,000 people, was in the clerical profession, but in cities, where the nation’s commentariat was concentrated (who themselves tended to work in office-like places), clerks had become the fastest-growing population. In some heavily mercantile cities, such as New York, they had already become ubiquitous: the 1855 census recorded clerks as the city’s third largest occupational group, just behind servants and laborers.
For many, this was a terrible development. Nothing about clerical labor was congenial to the way most Americans thought of work. Clerks didn’t work the land, lay railroad tracks, make ammunitions in factories, let alone hide away in a cabin by a small pond to raise beans and live deep. Unlike farming or factory work, office work didn’t produce anything. At best, it seemed to reproduce things. Clerks copied endlessly, bookkeepers added up numbers to create more numbers, and insurance men literally made more paper. For the tobacco farmer or miner, it barely constituted work at all. He (and at that point it was invariably a he) was a parasite on the work of others, who literally did the heavy lifting. Thus the bodies of real workers were sinewy, tanned by the relentless sun or blackened by smokestack soot; the bodies of clerks were slim, almost feminine in their untested delicacy.
The lively (and unscrupulous) American press occasionally took time to level invectives against the clerk. “We venture the assertion that there is not a more dependent or subservient set of men in this country than are the genteel, dry goods clerks in this and other large cities,” the editors of the American Whig Review held. Meanwhile, the American Phrenological Journal had stronger advice for young men facing the prospect of a clerical career. “Be men, therefore, and with true courage and manliness dash into the wilderness with your axe and make an opening for the sunlight and for an independent home.” Vanity Fair had the strongest language of all: clerks were “vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly” and spent all their minimal strength attempting to dress better than “real men who did real work.” Somehow it was never questioned that journalism, also conducted in offices and with pen and paper, constituted “real work.”
Clerks’ attire was a glaring target for the barbs of the press, since the very concept of business attire (not to speak of business casual) came into being with the mass appearance of clerks in American cities. “In the counting-room and the office,” wrote Samuel Wells, the author of a “manual of republican etiquette” from 1856, “gentlemen wear frock coats or sack coats. They need not be of very fine material, and should not be of any garish pattern.” Other fashion advisers pointed to a whole host of “business coats,” “business surtouts,” and “business paletots,” which you could find at new stores like Brooks Brothers. Working-class Americans would be seen in straw hats or green blouses; what distinguished the clerk was his collar: usually bleached an immaculate white and starched into an imposing stiffness. But collared business shirts were expensive, so stores catering to the business customer began to sell collars by themselves, half a dozen collars running to under half of what a cheap shirt would cost. The white collar, detachable and yet an essential status marker, was the perfect symbol of the pseudo-genteel, dual nature of office work.
The self-regarding clerk in his white collar became a stock subject of satire. Edgar Allan Poe, in his story “The Man of the Crowd,” saw the “tribe of clerks” as being composed entirely of overdressed dandies, imitating aristocratic styles already several years old:
There were the junior clerks of flash houses—young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the cast-off graces of the gentry;—and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.
The division of the upper clerks of staunch firms, or of the “steady old fellows,” it was not possible to mistake. These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with cravats and waistcoats, broad solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters.—They all had slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen-holding, had an odd habit of standing off on end. I observed that they always removed or settled their hats with both hands, and wore watches, with short gold chains of a substantial and ancient pattern. Theirs was the affectation of respectability;—if indeed there be an affectation so honorable.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating History Of Work
By Louis N. Gruber
This is a fascinating treatise on work, particularly office work, white collar work, its history and development, from the nineteenth century clerk who may have worked next to the business owner in a cramped office, to the nameless clerical drones toiling in vast cubicle farms, to the age of the personal computer, to the angst-ridden workplace of the twenty-first century. The author explores not only the changing nature of work, but its architecture, its furniture, its psychology, management fads and foolishness, office politics, office sexuality, the mistreatment of women, the ever-changing fluid boundaries between work and home life, and many other topics. In the final chapter, a glimpse into the future, where a steady job with an office--or even a cubicle--may be increasingly rare.
Author Nikil Saval has incorporated enormous amounts of scholarship into this treatise, exploring great thinkers and outdated theorists of work, of offices, of interior design, of popular culture, the changing role of women in the workplace, the workplace in movies and cartoons, and the recurring struggles of the workers for autonomy and of management for control. Naturally I can't summarize this massive work for you, but it's well worth reading for yourself.
The book is surprisingly entertaining and reads at a brisk pace. It is not light reading but remains accessible. If you have ever enjoyed the tribulations of Dilbert or the ironic despair of Office Space, if you have ever wanted to know more about offices are designed and how they really work, this is a must read book for you. If you want to know what lies ahead for the white collar worker, you may find it disturbing. I recommend this one with five well-deserved stars. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating look at a major institution in society
By Dr. Cathy Goodwin
Saval's book is a "must-read" for anyone interested in the world of work. For one thing, the author chose a topic that's gotten little attention from researchers or popular writers. He takes us through the history of the office, going back to the days of all-male offices with male clerks. He traces the development of office equipment - not just typewriters, but even desks and filing cabinets.
We also get reminded of past workplace trends.
Remember GIlbreth's Cheaper By The Dozen? This family dynamic was fueled by an offshoot of Taylorism, a system of measuring productivity that seems cruel to many of us today.
And then remember the 40s, 50s and 60s? The world of Mad Men and the movie The Best of Everything? Women dressed up in dresses, hose and heels (girdles, too!) sitting at rows of typewrters. Katherine Gibbs School was the female Harvard MBA, an entry to the most elite secretarial positions.
Cubed then fast forwards to the present, where companies experiment with a variety of formats, including open offices resembling coffee shops and coworking spaces.
Cubed is best read as a series of loosely themed chapters. My only quibble is that the focus of the chapters (what social scientists call the unit of analysis) shifts. Clerks, secretaries, engineers, call center workers, and software developers might work in similar spaces, but their perspectives will be different, as they have widely divergent opportunities for promotion, marketability and day-to-day flexibility. An engineer sitting in a cubicle probably can take off a couple of hours to get a hair cut or run an errand; a clerk or call center worker probably cannot do the same. That's huge.
Ultimately Cubed seems to raise many questions that demand answers in future books and articles. For one thing, everyone agrees that offices are highly stressful places. We didn't hear much talk about stress in the early days of work, possibly because people had lower expectations and less understanding of the impact of stress on health. But today there's a certain irony in the fact that companies gripe about increasing medical bills and pay for wellness centers, while adding to workers' health risks by dialing up the stress levels.
An even bigger elephant in the room is the alliance of government infrastructure to the cubicle world. People who work full time for large companies get access to benefits that are beyond the reach of all but the richest self-employed entrepreneurs. In a world where jobs are becoming obsolete, the next shift needs to take workers out of the "job" mindset. I remember hearing companies described as "little Swedens" back in the day when you were covered for all sorts of benefits and you were rarely terminated except for egregious cause. Now, as Cubed points out, workers can challenge the structure by becoming freelancers. Ultimately, the ability to work on one's own terms will carry the day, not the unions.
Finally, we could take the whole concept one step further and note that every aspect of life in the world today is becoming cubed, including health and education sectors. We look for systems, processes and ultimately uniformity, and we revert to a form of Taylorism as we demand tangible outcomes.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Hard to stay focused
By Hanna.w.
I felt as if the author looked up every paper/film/book written with any reference to the office workspace, took a quote from it, and dedicated one paragraph to use the quote and follow up just enough to fill the paragraph before moving on to the next. The subject matter could change in the blink of an eye, and, more often than not, didn't move along the main idea of what I thought the book was going to be about - the history of the workplace - in one smooth narrative. It's more like endless references to things tangentially related to the office workplace. It seemed like an assignment for an undergraduate writing course that the teacher would pass just so they could stop reading it.
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