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Cubed, May 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Doubleday
May 2014
On Sale: April 22, 2014
368 pages
ISBN: 0385536577
EAN: 9780385536578
Kindle: B00FUZQZE0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
You mean this place we go to five days a week has a
history? 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 steno pool 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 clerks
worked in small, dank spaces called “counting-houses.” These
were all-male enclaves, where work was just paperwork. Most
Americans considered clerks to be questionable dandies, who
didn’t do “real work.” But the joke was on them: 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—and the clerks took over. Offices
became rationalized, designed for both greater efficiency in
the accomplishments of clerical work and the enhancement of
worker productivity. Women entered the office by the
millions, and revolutionized the social world from within.
Skyscrapers filled with office space came to tower over
cities everywhere. Cubed opens our eyes to what is a
truly "secret history" of changes so obvious and ubiquitous
that we've hardly noticed them. From the wood-paneled
executive suite to the advent of the cubicles where 60% of
Americans now work (and 93% of them dislike it) to a
not-too-distant future where we might work anywhere at any
time (and perhaps all the time), Cubed
excavates from popular books, movies, comic strips
(Dilbert!), and a vast amount of management
literature and business history, the reasons why our
workplaces are the way they are—and how they might be better.
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