Cubed: the secret history of the workplace

✍ Scribed by Nikil Saval

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 1 MB
• Edition: 1st ed
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0385536585

✦ Synopsis

You mean this place we go to five days a week has a history? Yes it does, and Cubed reveals the unexplored yet surprising story of the places where most of the world's work--our work--gets done. From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office , from the wood-lined corner office to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is--and what it might become.

In the mid-nineteenth century clerical workers were called "clerks"--they were all men and they did their paperwork in the corners of dark workspaces and were considered questionable dandies. But as the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial economies took place, and then from industrial to information economies, the organization of the workplace evolved along with them. Offices became rationalized , designed for both greater efficiency in the...