Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  Robert Propst at work. Courtesy of Herman Miller

  At the same time, he was reading voraciously in journals of sociology and behavioral science. It was the early 1960s, and a new attitude toward man and his relationship to his environment was coming into view. Norbert Wiener was one voice; the influential founder of cybernetics, he argued that technology had the potential to take on human characteristics and become an extension of man. Marshall McLuhan followed with his analogous arguments regarding media. A particular influence was the anthropologist Edward T. Hall. His popular book The Silent Language (1959) focused on the varieties of nonverbal understanding among the cultures of the world, including space. “Literally thousands of experiences teach us unconsciously that space communicates,” he wrote. “Yet this fact would probably never have been brought to the level of consciousness if it had not been realized that space is organized differently in each culture.”6 He followed this with a book explicitly focused on the unconscious attitudes toward space, The Hidden Dimension, which held enormous fascination for architects, designers, and planners of all sorts. A gently meandering discussion of “social and personal space and man’s perception of it,” The Hidden Dimension coined a term for its branch of study: “proxemics.” As a field, it grew out of Hall’s argument that “man and his environment participate in molding each other. Man is now in the position of actually creating the total world in which he lives … a frightening thought in view of how very little is known about man.”7 Hall was speaking to Americans experiencing the pummeling of their cities by urban renewal and their heated descent into the crucible of racial integration. But the drama of a civilization that had forgotten its own understanding of its surroundings also took place, Hall showed, in the banal setting of an office—since inattentiveness to one’s environment was even more common in spaces people cared the least about, like their workplace. Based on more than one hundred interviews, Hall disclosed that an office contained three “hidden zones,” which most designers tended to ignore:

  1. The immediate work area of the desktop and chair.

  2. A series of points within arm’s reach outside the area mentioned above.

  3. Spaces marked as the limit reached when one pushes away from the desk to achieve a little distance from the work without actually getting up.8

  Taylor’s disciple W. H. Leffingwell had studied similar minutiae of office life. His reaction, however, was to rationalize inefficiencies in the use of those spaces out of existence. If one followed Hall, however, the “inefficient” use of space began to seem less like a bad habit and more like the expression of a human need—or of a tacit dimension to a worker’s knowledge that could be neither replicated nor eradicated.

  This was the sort of material that seized a man like Propst. As a restless intellectual without a proper profession, he devoured these items, ranging freely across the worlds of anthropology, sociology, and social psychology, propelled by curiosity; nonetheless, as a designer manqué, he also began to imagine practical applications in the office. The language of the office and the language of social science were, to Propst, coterminous. He set out on research trips, interviewing workers, doctors, psychologists, and scholars of industrial relations. They confirmed the insights that he had developed in his own office: the importance of balanced physical activity; the need for an environment conducive to concentrated work; the practical function of visual stimulus and an open work space. He gradually began to feel the need for a new way of working, one more sensitive to the manifold varieties of how people reacted to their space. It contained prototypes for a stand-up desk with closable top, visible color-coded file folders, a communications workstation, and a low desk with flip-down display. Each interviewee was asked about twenty-five somewhat leading questions regarding their work spaces: “Do you feel deskbound and too sedentary?” “Are you improperly insulated from key information?” and—most important—“Is your office adaptable to change?”

  In these early, amateur attempts at defining a better working environment, we see Propst developing the rudiments of what would become known as “ergonomics” (from the Greek, meaning something like “the rules governing tasks”). What has since become a banal discourse about lumbar support began with men like Propst seeking to understand the relationship between human beings and their environment—the very nature of how one labored. And it mattered that Propst was specifically concerned with office work, that he considered it an altogether unique kind of activity. Since the Taylorists had ratified the mechanical order that saw office work as largely akin to factory work, nearly no one had bothered to undertake a holistic examination of the office as being fundamentally different. Though office work enjoyed all the status privileges associated with white collars and clean environments, designers had yet to confer on it a system—a layout, a plan—that would actually make its specific work easier and more productive. Propst was among the first designers to argue that office work was mental work and that mental effort was tied to environmental enhancement of one’s physical capabilities. To change a desk, then, was to change one’s entire way of being in the world. As George Nelson, one of Herman Miller’s most illustrious designers, stated loftily, “The Lord never meant a man to be immobilized in one position … These are not desks and file cabinets. They are a way of life.” Office design was coming into its own.

  It hardly needs adding that in societies throughout the world, the 1960s more generally saw deep transformations in relationships and culture. But it would be a mistake to see these currents as uniformly hostile to business and to the gray flannel suits of the office world. As Thomas Frank showed in his book The Conquest of Cool, business—and particularly the softer arts, like advertising, management theory, and public relations—took warmly to the new spirit of individualism pervading the nascent counterculture. Rather than co-opting the counterculture, business anticipated many of its changes, incorporated them, and in fact propagated several of its currents. The old obsession with conformity and bureaucracy had been internal to business itself. So too would the interest in individuality. Members of Students for a Democratic Society and middle managers alike were avid readers of The Lonely Crowd. And of course we recall that The Organization Man was written by an editor at Fortune magazine. Only incidentally an indictment of a society, it was specifically a goad at business leaders to shape creative workplaces, which could cease churning out Whyte’s much-loathed conformist drones and foster individuality instead.9

  The management guru Douglas McGregor’s book The Human Side of Enterprise, from 1960, was only the most famous of the new, “spiritual” guides to corporate life. McGregor seemed to be speaking alongside figures like Hall, calling for a new, social scientific approach to the question of human values and needs. “Management’s freedom to manage has been progressively curtailed in our society during the past century,” he wrote. “One approach to these problems is to see all restrictions on management as unreasonable and to fight blindly against them … The other approach is to become more sensitive to human values and to exert self-control through a positive, conscious, ethical code.”10 Like all successful business books since, McGregor had a groundbreaking “theory,” which he condensed into a short, easily digestible handle—one that any time-strapped businessman, after quickly browsing the executive summary, could comfortably wrap his mouth around. As many would do, McGregor positioned himself against Frederick Taylor, whom he associated with the “Theory X” version of management. Theory X was hierarchical; it involved coercion, manipulation, supervision. Theory X supposed that men and women had a natural inclination against working; the managerial prerogative, then, was to control, direct, and threaten workers into work. The personality testing that Whyte saw as the sign of a control society, McGregor, too, singled out for censure, as an invasion of privacy: Why should the smallest details of a person’s preferences and social attitudes be available to a private company?

  “Theory Y” was the alternative. It proceeded from the idea that p
leasure in work was “as natural as play or rest,”11 and so, too, were self-direction and self-control the necessary correlates. A worker’s intellectual potential was enormous and only partially realized in contemporary life: management needed to be open to recognizing a junior staffer’s individual initiative, subtly encouraging him toward realizing his individual goals rather than terrorizing him with the fear of discipline. McGregor used New Agey phrases out of the psychologist Abraham Maslow to describe Theory Y, like “the satisfaction of higher-level ego” and “self-actualization needs.” He spoke of participation, openness, humanism. In an environment already seeded by frank discussions of stifling conformity, McGregor’s book was immediately and widely accepted. It was one of the most discussed and influential books of the 1960s—perhaps the management treatise most quoted by managers themselves.12 Though management books since, such as the former Intel CEO Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive, have rediscovered the value of Taylorist coercion and brutality, they still insist on the need for respecting a worker’s individuality. Few adopt McGregor’s gentle, New Age tone, but they follow in McGregor’s footsteps—or, as Frank puts it, “the bloated corpus of recent management literature seems like one long tribute to McGregor’s thought, an interminable string of corollaries to ‘Theory Y.’ ”13 In fact, McGregor was himself the culmination of two decades of human relations theories—people who had dissented from Elton Mayo’s pessimistic view of industrial progress but who saw the need for psychological training all the same.14 And the growth in human relations theories was connected to the implacably growing ratio of office workers to production staff. With the incredible number of office workers, it became impossible for all the employees to be promoted; human relations practices tried to get workers to find satisfaction in their work rather than in the possibility of advancement. It became useful, too, to use one’s knowledge of human relations—the ability to slyly manipulate others or to “win friends and influence people,” in Dale Carnegie’s phrase—to rise up an office bureaucracy.15

  The growth of the friendly, Theory Y–ish workplace had of course more directly been a response to the industrial unrest brought about by labor unions. A backlash to their success on the shop floor in the 1920s and 1930s arrived in the form of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which placed huge legal barriers against strikes and new organizing. But the level of labor union membership would peak in the postwar years, with 35 percent of private-sector workers belonging to a union and strike activity continuing to grow: the average American worker lost 0.55 of a working day to strikes (compared with 0.13 of a day in Britain and only 0.04 of a day in Germany). Yet the unions were facing a silent problem. Thanks partly to automation, their traditional base—the factory worker—was no longer growing at the pace it had; the other side of the workforce was not only growing faster but statistically growing beyond the blue-collar worker. Finally, in 1956 the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the sea change: there were just over twenty million blue-collar workers, while white-collar workers numbered nearly twenty-seven million. This was a momentous shift for an industrial powerhouse like the United States, one that organizers and managers alike struggled to grapple with.

  For the unions, it was manifestly a growing crisis, though one that for the time being they failed to register. In a piece for Harper’s in 1957, one labor official tasked with organizing white-collar workers plainly stated that his job was impossible and that unions trying to win them over, unless they changed tack completely, were doomed. The author—writing anonymously for fear of reprisal from his higher-ups—drew the conclusion that so many had refused to draw before but were now conceding: white-collar workers were different. They had clean jobs that didn’t force them to shower when they came home each day. They believed ardently in the American dream of relentless upward mobility. They preferred the insecurity of getting promoted based on merit to the steady advance of seniority. Unions promised one thing above all—dignity—which white-collar workers claimed they already had, thanks to the prestige of their professions, the bleached stiffness of their collars. Many children of blue-collar workers were getting jobs in offices because, tacitly or otherwise, they agreed.

  Office workers believed their work had skills that could carry them anywhere. According to the writer, people who worked in steel or coal simply saw their jobs as empty vessels: they were more inclined to talk about the industry they worked in than the specific positions they held. Meanwhile, the average office workers identified themselves by profession—as a “stenographer” or a “file clerk.” And if they advanced in their positions, it was because of their talents for their particular jobs. “The white collar worker thinks in terms of her skill, which she can carry with her from employer to employer,” he wrote. “She didn’t fall into her job haphazardly as the result of lining up before a personnel supervisor. She has some training, perhaps some talent, invested in it. She is likely to be just as concerned about what she contributes to the job as she is about how well the job pays.”16 “The Great American Dream still has a firmer hold on white collar workers than on blue collar workers,” he concluded.

  There was also the nasty atmosphere that people associated with unions. Publicly, the world of organized labor seemed to be filled with frank talk and aggressive strikes. Such confrontational methods were inimical to the subtle arts of office politics, where insinuation and subterfuge prevailed. Unions argued this was only a sign of the white-collar worker’s profound exploitation:

  White collar workers are the most exploited group in our economy. Tied to a fixed non-negotiable salary, victims of every price rise (with no escalator clause to help them), without a political voice raised on their behalf, they are truly “on the short end.” But, like Steinbeck’s tenant in The Grapes of Wrath, whom do they shoot? Mr. Turner, the head of the accounting department, who is so grouchy when he comes to work in the morning? The Steelworkers who always get those big wage raises for their members and thus—according to steel executives—force prices up all along the line? The politicians who never keep their promises? The company for which they work?

  No, instead of shooting the company executives or joining a union, they mouse along and live with their hopes.17

  The organizer’s main concern was whether unions could actually accomplish the task they set for themselves and get white-collar workers to organize. But for us, looking back at this moment—and knowing the less than happy results for organized labor—the question is deeper: How did office workers see themselves? For C. Wright Mills, as we know, there was a hopeless and irremediable mediocrity to the new middle class: they were unlikely to develop a distinctive profile or form of political agency, and they would only follow whatever political force seemed to be winning. Subsequent surveys of the attitudes of office workers seemed to confirm this middling-ness. In one such study from 1962, office workers were asked to rate their perceptions of high-level business managers and those of average industrial workers, as well as themselves. In all instances, office workers considered themselves distinct from both, but they tended to rate the business managers with total favor-ability, compared with themselves; meanwhile, blue-collar workers under those same characteristics—“worthy of trust,” “conscientious about work,” and “dependable”—rated the lowest in the eyes of the office workers.18 So they felt themselves to be distinguished from the workers “below,” if not quite as distinct as the managers “above.”

  But to hear that labor organizer tell it, there was a different voice emerging: that of the office worker who saw himself possessed of a particular skill, a certain kind of knowledge, that made him professionally mobile. These were figures who saw themselves not as tied to an organization, as Whyte suggested, but as possessing power, agility, the capacity to shift from one place to another. They weren’t likely to respond to the human relations injunction to take solace in the satisfactions inherent to the job. Instead, they wanted organizations that responded to the claims of talent: what they were seeking was meritocra
cy.

  The understanding that a small but vocal fraction of office workers had of themselves didn’t correspond to the managerial hierarchies set up by a different age. From left to right—labor organizer to business professor—a new conception of the office worker was coming into view.

  The task of describing this new kind of worker—almost invariably called “knowledge worker”—has consumed academic sociologists and management theorists for two generations. Among the managers themselves, the task of propagandizing on the knowledge workers’ behalf fell to the century’s most renowned theorist of management, the Austrian émigré Peter Drucker, who helped to coin the term. He was part of that great wave of Austrian conservatives—Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Sir Karl Popper—who departed their country as the Germans completed the Anschluss. The crisis of the 1930s was as formative for him as it was for them.