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"The importance of the business office and its techniques is undeniable. Max Weber saw the office’s methods of organization, its rationality, and its disciplines as hallmarks of modern capitalism, making possible dramatic gains in efficiency and forever altering the economic and cultural landscape. Perhaps even more significant in our time, when millions of American workers spend most of their waking day in an office, is the sense that the organizational technologies of office life provide a kind of moral education, that offices shape character, that they create a certain kind of person. And perhaps no aspect of today’s office is more symbolic of office life and office lives than the cubicle."
-David Franz, "The Moral Life of Cubicles," The New Atlantis
"The borderless fluidity of open offices seems perfectly suited to the ambitions of the internet age—while also replicating its failed aspirations toward “connectivity.” Just as hyper-modulated online interactions, contrary to the promise of their conceptual foundations, cordon people into niche micro experiences,25 so the open office counterintuitively isolates office workers."
-Scott Beauchamp, "The Open Office and the Spirit of Capitalism," American Affairs
"As the office walls come down, so will the temporal and ideological barriers separating work from nonwork. The office of the future, in other words, won’t be a place, but an identity. The office of the future will be your most intimate conceptions of self, somehow put to work."
-Scott Beauchamp, "The Open Office and the Spirit of Capitalism," American Affairs
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