The politics of office design

Abstract

Recent changes in open plan office design are intended to facilitate flexible and collaborative work practices. Though promoted in terms of aesthetics and functionality, these changes in layout and furnishing communicate a great deal about how work and the workers that perform them are understood. Drawing upon the semiotics of framing and the chronotope, the open plan office is analyzed as a multimodal realization of neoliberal discourses on the flexibilization and deregulation of work. As such, the collaborative open plan office does more than represent or give expression to neoliberal ideologies, it normalizes and makes durable the work processes, identities and temporalities of neoliberalized labour.

The work environment pilot: An experiment to determine the optimal office design for a technology company

“…In contrast to Open-plan offices, cubicles are a way of breaking up open office floors with partitions between desks, providing an enclosed desk space for each employee. The design was once the most common type of office design, but has become less popular in recent years [29]. Some benefits of this type of office design, such as reduced visual distraction leading to increased perseverance [30] have been identified, but these are now seen as being offset by negative cultural effects and reduced collaboration [31,32].…”

Epilogue: Generations “Birthed in Flickering Lights”

“…Telework has developed into the experience of being 'always on'; it is not just an extra option to follow up on tasks, or work from home from time to time, it has established itself fully as the norm. Telework was succeeded by 'new ways of working' , a specific type of open office use applied at random for a more efficient use of workspaces over time.1 At the root of this development seems to be an increase in both standardisation and control of work, partly driven by technology, but mainly by the primacy of economics and an attitude based on consumerism (Parker & Jarvey, 1995;Roderick, 2016) as a consequence of what is called the neoliberal turn (Van der 2006;Davies et al, 2006;Lorenz, Of course, not all organisations produce or demand office times and spaces, but our society does a lot of 'office work' in the form of service institutes and maintenance organisations providing supervision and control. Higher education and academia especially seem to produce and require offices under the guise of the growing importance of education (in the form of institutes of higher education) as a commodity, along with an increase in bureaucracy as a format to control the times of the people in it, as a function of the desired output.…”

Epilogue: The Empire Writes Back

“…Telework has developed into the experience of being 'always on'; it is not just an extra option to follow up on tasks, or work from home from time to time, it has established itself fully as the norm. Telework was succeeded by 'new ways of working' , a specific type of open office use applied at random for a more efficient use of workspaces over time.1 At the root of this development seems to be an increase in both standardisation and control of work, partly driven by technology, but mainly by the primacy of economics and an attitude based on consumerism (Parker & Jarvey, 1995;Roderick, 2016) as a consequence of what is called the neoliberal turn (Van der 2006;Davies et al, 2006;Lorenz, 2012). Of course, not all organisations produce or demand office times and spaces, but our does require a lot of 'office work' in the form of service institutes and maintenance organisations providing supervision and control.…”