Cubicles

Cubicles are a type of office systems furniture that promotes a particular kind of physical and social structure in the modern workplace. Cubicles were born out of an idealistic effort to increase productivity and even social equality, but within a few years of their introduction, cubicles had become emblematic of the alienation typical of some modern office work.

Small cubicles may consist of a desk for the worker and partitions about four feet high on one, two, or three sides. Large, single-occupant cubicles may be eight feet on a side, contain two or three desks and/or work tables arranged in an L or U shape, and be surrounded by partitions six feet high. Approximately 60 to 70 percent of American office workers are stationed in cubicles.

The system now universally called “cubicles” began as the Action Office in 1968, when the Herman Miller Company began selling a new line of office furniture developed under the guidance of designer Robert Propst. Propst's idea was to increase worker productivity by providing plenty of horizontal space on which to spread out work. Partitions provided some privacy and more surface area to pin up work in progress, but the overall effect was to produce an office more “open” than the traditional hierarchical workplaces that included closed offices and marked status distinctions between different levels of workers. At the same time, the Action Office, as originally conceived, amounted to a step up for office workers in terms of prestige, quality, and space compared to a simple desk in the middle of a bullpen, an environment common at mid-century.

Enthusiasts touted the relative egalitarianism of the open cubicle design. Some went so far as to suggest that the nascent cubicle system helped women break into office work previously characterized by a male-dominated and masculine bullpen culture. But critics recognized that some manufacturers, and then the whole industry, moved almost immediately from building and selling generously sized and expensive Action Office-style cubicles to smaller, cheaper variations on the theme. Office managers were delighted to be presented with a new system of office furnishing that was cheap to buy and that could fit many more workers into the same space. Robert Propst eventually came to characterize office cubicles as “monolithic insanity.”

In terms of worker dignity and autonomy, jobs can range from closely monitored and “Taylorized” work that is very efficient, on one hand, to highly autonomous and fulfilling work on the other. Cubicled work ranges from unfulfilling Taylorized telemarketing jobs to prestigious jobs with considerable autonomy, such as stock brokerage and middle management.

However, in the public imagination, cubicles imply Taylorism, panoptic surveillance, and alienation. Popular culture is full of images of dispirited cubicle workers. Scott Adams's comic strip “Dilbert” lampoons the irrationality of rationality in the “cubicle farms” of corporate America. The movie Office Space has become a classic since its release in 1999, in part because of its depiction of rage and stultification in the face of a cubicled daily grind. The homogenous grid of a cubicled office can remind many employees of the cells of a beehive with its mindless workers.

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