Estructura Urbana

Office decoration and layout has developed over the past century as a means of controlling workers’ output and social interactions and to segregate activities. Walls and furniture serve as barricades between workers, and between the powerful and those lacking power, in strategies of surveillance and concealment. Surveillance by the high, of the low, is a means of maintaining control (Giddens 1991: 149-51). Managers use sight and sound to monitor staff and use their own physical presence as an unspoken reminder to their subordinates that they must keep to the rules of work. In response, subordinates may erect barriers to avoid being watched too closely. Some groups hide from others in order to maintain appearances and prevent one from observing how another really operates. Spaces are created in the office that are used for only specified purposes and some activities are only carried out in some spaces.

Interior decoration as a tool for the control of office workers began to be developed over a hundred years ago (Forty 1986). In the late nineteenth Century, the office was a small affair with only a few workers per enterprise. The standard clerk’s desk had a high back with pigeon holes and drawers in it, sometimes a roll top. A clerk at such a desk could see his work before him and had only a limited view to either side, so that the room was hidden by the furniture. The desk made the clerk difficult to supervise because of the screen afforded by the desk back. This concealment was lost with the introduction of new “scientific” desk design.

Before the turn of the Century, Western office work areas were designed along the principles of “scientific management”, which was an approach originating in the 1880s with Frederick Taylor (see footnote 3 in Chapter Two). The office was laid out much as a factory would be, relying

upon an industrial design paradigm. Desks were arranged in neat tight rows utilising space at maximum efficiency (Forty 1986; Lupton 1993). Design was marshalled to improve surveillance of the worker. These changes coincided with the entrance of women into the clerical work force who were in any case a social group subject to greater control than the former all male clerical work force. The result was the removal of the back of the desk. This opened up the clerk's space to full view of the supervisor and also allowed the clerk to see the remainder of the office clearly. In theory, scientific management should have applied to all grades of workers. In practice, managers were allowed to break away from the uniformity and control imposed on the juniors and had more space and more privacy (Forty 1986).

The design and overall environment of most offices unden/vent a radical change in the 1950s and 1960s. The office came to take on the characteristics of the fashionable home as a result of competition for labour within a tight market. As the service sector increased, so too did the demand for clerical workers. Offices came to be in direct competition for the same relatively low-paid work force as the industrial sector. Factories tended to respond to labour shortages by increasing wages. Offices did this by providing a higher status and more comfortable environment. The old factory inspired designs were discarded in favour of new domestic referents and the office furnishings became more comfortable and attuned to fashion (Forty 1986). The office became a prestigious work site for women seeking to assert middle-class status (Lupton 1993: 45)

The service sector continues to grow in importance in modern economies. Automation and bureaucratisation have led to a standardisation of tasks within the office work programme where more and more workers become specialised in low-skill tasks (See for instance Braverman 1974; Webster 1990). Forty noted a relation between the growing impersonalism of office work and the improvement of its the environment. The “Bürolandschaft” concept, developed in Germany in the 1950s, rejected the rigid standardisation of interior design of scientific management and the somewhat

impersonal “open plan" schemes of the time (See Delgado 1979: 98) The grid layout was replaced with a more natural arrangement that was meant to reflect working and personal relationships (See also Grajewski 1993: 24). Using quality carpets, sensitive lighting, potted plants and upholstery to give a domestic feel to the office environment, the overt physical references to hierarchy were removed. “For a manager anxious to prevent his staff from feeling that they had become a clerical proletariat, the landscaped office was a valuable innovation” (Grajewski 1993: 143). In fostering a feeling of “openness” and democracy, many employers encouraged the workers to add individual touches such as pictures on the walls or small objects. However, no matter what the changes, managers remained in enclosed spaces while subordinate workers were located in “open plan” arrangements. In the 1960s, in order to accommodate the needs of emerging new professional high status groups such as computer and technical specialists, screen-mounted furniture was introduced. This created low walls which afforded visual but not sound barriers and allowed hierarchy to be reasserted.

Many of these historical points find close parallels in the office under study. The organisation had only come into existence a few years before this fieldwork began and therefore the history of the layout was easy to trace. When it first came into being, the office began with only three people: the chief, the deputy and a secretary who served them both. The chief found the building and signed the lease for space on the third and fourth floors. As is often the case in London, the two floors that had been let by this organisation at the time that the contract was signed had no internal dividing walls. The managers were left to customise the space in the manner that they thought most suitable for the needs of the employees and the work that was to be done.

The chief made plans with building contractors and fitters to have walls, phone points and kitchen areas put into place, but before he could bring his plans to fruition, he chose to take another job and the task of designing the office space was left to the deputy. The deputy had his own

ideas about office layout. He was an avowed fan of modern design and preferred open plan over many small compartmentalised office spaces. Whereas the departed chief had wanted a number of walls and separate offices to mark out working areas, the deputy believed that the fewer walls the better. He explained to me that open plan offers a number of advantages. It fosters a sense of teamwork. It also allows managers to see what staff are doing, or more importantly, to hear if there is a “happy buzz of work". By not having to come out of his office in order to be seen to be supervising, he believes that his influence is more pervasive yet also more subtle, and therefore less obviously threatening. He also believes that it is unwise to overtly express, or at least to make too much of, hierarchical differences. He showed great offence at my suggestion that there was a relationship between who had a private office and who sat in the open area. He emphasised to me that power differentials were unimportant, though as will be described below, this is patently not true. For him however, an open plan arrangement for non- managerial staff facilitates a set of relationships that are based on team-work and sharing, where there are no secrets and no obvious material differences between team members. He also admitted that his choices of layout were highly personal: if another manager had designed the space, the result would probably have been dramatically different.

When it fell upon him to arrange for the accommodation, the first thing he did was to modify his predecessor’s plans by “taking out a few walls”. The work had progressed to the point however where he could only make minor adjustments - he could take away but not add. The resulting layout consisted of a number of small offices for the managers, a conference room for meetings, two small utility rooms, and a hodgepodge of other spaces broken up with room dividers, book cases and filing cabinets. He opined that he regretted that any of the small personal offices remained and claimed that he would have preferred an entirely open plan - he took advantage of his access to his own office however, and when he needed to work uninterrupted, he would shut the door, thus having the best of both worlds.