From Wooton to Workstation: Mechanisms of the Visible in Office Spaces

Abstract

The historical development of the North American office, and the disciplinary power relations that obtain within it, is marked by the clinical gaze of systematic management. The technological artefacts and organizational practices associated with these workspaces deploy spatial and power relations via mechanisms of power which centre upon rendering workflows visible. The office desk provides an exemplar for this situation inasmuch as it acts as the interface between worker, work, and organization.By sketching the convergence of spatial, visual, and technological practices revealed in the historical development of the North American office, I hope to foreground the office as an exemplar for the significant role played by workrelated information and communications technologies (ICTs) in relation to power-knowledge relations. The argument is that the deployment of mechanisms of visualization in the form of ICTs is manifested by the obvious panoptic disciplinary surveillance that exists within the space of the office. In addition, there is an equally significant clinical gaze at work in the history of the office, its technologies, and the analysis of its work processes. Many of the officerelated technological innovations that have emerged since the mid-nineteenth century are based on producing, copying, distributing, and archiving documents so as to render visible a record of the myriad processes involved in controlling the ongoing operations of an institution. The notion of workflow is therefore fundamentally based upon the visualization of information for the purposes of organizational control.In the contemporary office, strategies of control are numerous: keystroke monitoring, dataveillance, managerial oversight, electronic document handling, and databases are but a few examples. It should not be forgotten, however, that earlier technologies such as time recorders, mimeographs, press books, filing systems, and even the lowly carbon paper served to enact the same functions of visualization and control, albeit in a rudimentary form. The historical development of the office has been significantly influenced by the ways in

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“…These top 3 references with higher centrality focused on decision-making at various levels, and they represent central references that have greatly influenced office workspace research by connecting various relevant documents together. Four documents (references) received citation bursts viz: Nourse and Roulac (1993) (burst strength 5.29, spanning 2004, Brennan, Chugh, and Kline (2002) (burst strength = 4.23, spanning 2008, Manning and Roulac (2001) (burst strength =3.89, spanning 2003, Becker and Steele (1995) (burst strength = 3.85, spanning 2003-2007. These are documents that have attracted the attention of the research community in different timelines.…”