Nikil Saval

Draws from popular books, movies, comic strips, management literature, and business history to show how the white-collar world came to be, from the mid-nineteenth century to today, and reveals what it might become.

A Secret History of the Workplace

Cubed

You mean this place we go to five days a week has a history? Cubedreveals 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, Cubedis 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 ocounting-houses.o These were all-male enclaves, where work was just paperwork. Most Americans considered clerks to be questionable dandies, who didn't do oreal work.o 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 allthe time), Cubedexcavates 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.

De Bartleby, o escriturário, clássico de Herman Melville, à série The office, os escritórios são alvo de rancor e escárnio desde que, no século XIX, começaram a se inscrever em nossa geografia urbana. Até hoje, no entanto, ninguém tinha parado para narrar as origens desse lugar onde, a contragosto, muitos acabam por passar boa parte da existência. É o que Nikil Saval faz em Cubiculados, com um resultado que, em contraposição ao tema, não tem nada de burocrático. Mesclando o pop ao acadêmico, ele remete a Rousseau (que disse que "o homem nasce livre, mas passa a vida em cubículos") e chega a Mad men, Dilbert e Como enlouquecer seu chefe para traçar uma crônica saborosa sobre a evolução desses ambientes de trabalho, discutindo, com astúcia e humor, o que isso tem a dizer sobre nós. Cubiculados é um livro que, apresentando uma pesquisa inédita e aprofundada, fala por intermédio de funcionários anônimos e suas máquinas de escrever, armários de arquivos, escrivaninhas e cadeiras, mas é também uma obra sobre indivíduos que procuraram modelar o escritório – física e socialmente – com o objetivo de melhorar a vida e, claro, a produtividade dos trabalhadores. Mas o maior mérito de Nikil Saval é lançar mão de um símbolo universal do tédio para produzir uma obra brilhante e coesa que, a despeito do tema, é leitura indicada até mesmo para as horas vagas e os dias de folga.

Uma história secreta do local de trabalho

Cubiculados

Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval tells the story of an unlikely partnership between June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and their attempt to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots. In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections, then-candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a story about Black feminist writer June Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and community grieving made a lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist, responded with a proposal for a multiple-tower housing design. Through an unlikely partnership with R. Buckminster Fuller, Jordan’s “Skyrise for Harlem” project offered a Futuristic vision for Harlem that argued for environmental redesign: “it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern, and quality of living experience.” Jordan was not an architect in the conventional sense, Saval says. “But in the understanding of someone who sought to propose and build interventions in public space, she was.”

Nikil Saval

About

Books

Join the club