Cubicle Culture

Are you one of those lucky people who works in a vast cubicle farm, or oversees those who do? If so, you may be interested in "The Moral Life of Cubicles," by David Franz, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia, in The New Atlantis. Franz has an interesting take on how cubicle-based workplaces came into being. Aside from the obvious cost savings associated in replacing individual offices with prefabricated work units, there was this:

Offices in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to their critics burdensome remnants of an older age, symbolic shackles of bureaucracyâ€"a system as inhuman as it was ineffective. Cubicles, by contrast, seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul.

It hasn't quite worked out that way, has it?

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)