The Office As Workplace Fief
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THE OFFICE AS WORKPLACE FIEF (Prof) G D Donleavy * Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Qld 4702. Email [email protected] THE OFFICE AS WORKPLACE FIEF (Prof) G D Donleavy * Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Qld 4702. Email [email protected] Office As Workplace Fief Page 1 THE OFFICE AS WORKPLACE FIEF ABSTRACT The Office is a very successful television series and the office is the weekday, daylight home of the population most ANZAM members study. Yet it has hardly been researched at all in its own right as a workspace or domain. This paper argues its significance, posits its feudal character as the heir of the medieval fief (not the Boisot-Child fief); and suggests research questions for the near future. KEYWORDS Organizational culture, job and work design, perception THE OFFICE Put the key of despair into the lock of apathy. Turn the knob of mediocrity slowly and open the gates of despondency - Welcome to a day in the average office. Thus spoke Ricky Gervais playing office manager, David Brent, in the British series, “The Office” in the year 2000. “The Office “was a huge success in the UK. Its American and European counterparts have also done very well. They tap into a long tradition of baleful workplace humour syndicated in such cartoons as Blondie, Bristow and Dilbert. The message communicated over the years of this tradition is well described by the following quotation. At the office, we have come to understand, the boss is always a blustery martinet; abbreviations are a B.F.D.; your co-workers eat your food, talk your ear off, and stab you in the back; and work has no inherent value. (Friend, 2006). Although so many people over so many generations have spent so much of their lives at the office, it was not until the very end of the 20 th century that it inspired a TV serial. Similarly, office life and structure have only recently begun to appear in management literature. So far none of such studies have concerned the office itself but only its boundaries. Office As Workplace Fief Page 2 Why should the physical office be a matter for Critical Management Studies (hereafter CMS)? A key work in the development of CMS gives the core of the answer as follows. An important role for critical social science is to relate what is perceived to be a manifestation of individual, technical incompetence to a system that institutionalizes the non-accountability of managers to their subordinates. The central problem of management resides in the social relations of production which systematically foster and sustain very limited and often distorted forms of communication between those occupying positions within the horizontal and vertical divisions of labour. (Alvesson and Willmott 1992) The place where that non-accountability is reinforced daily is the office, for it is the main arena where managerial power is exercised; especially now that manufacturing is largely outsourced so primitive capitalist exploitation is centered more on overseas sweatshops than in local factories. This exposing of true relations has been at the heart of the critical theory project from the start. Thus in the words of a founding father:- Critical thinking is motivated by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity and rationality, and those work processes on which society is built. (Horkheimer 1976:220) At the very heart of those processes lies the office. Another key reason for CMS to have the office on its agenda is the silence in the literature about the office. It is arguable that this silence helps reinforce the unequal and unaccountable power relations that CMS seek to expose and deconstruct. During the decades of silence, we have seen the rise of open plan office, cubicles replacing rooms and the appropriation of home time and space by office work. These developments have received a certain amount of Office As Workplace Fief Page 3 discussion in the classical management literature and are presumptively developments with only productivity rationales. “Expert cultures, such as those of the management specialisms, are ‘socially structured silences’ that exhaust the space of possible discourse.” Alvesson and Willmott (1992:13). Discourse about the office itself in academic management literature is so scarce that the interests served by such silence could well be the very interests CMS aims to expose and deconstruct. Lastly consider the effect of casualisation on office life and structure. A sense of impermanence is blowing through the labor force, destabilizing everyone from office temps to high-tech independent contractors to restaurant and retail clerks. Factory jobs are being outsourced, garment jobs are morphing into homework and in every industry, temporary contracts are replacing full, secure employment. In a growing number of instances, even CEOs are opting for shorter stints at one corporation after another, breezing in and out of different corner offices and purging half the employees as they come and go. (Klein 2005:231) In parallel with casualisation, the division of office space between permanent private offices for full time staff and common open plan space for casuals has manifested in physical structures the emerging class divide between those with and those without security of tenure at work. OFFICE TIME AND SPACE Corporate practices pervade modern life by providing personal identity, structuring time and experience, influencing education and knowledge production, and directing entertainment and news production. (Deetz 1992:2). It is at the office that the daily interactions occur which forge the personal identities, or at least the working personas, of white collar employees. Lyotard 1984 defines a performative intent as intent to develop and celebrate knowledge which contributes to the production of maximum output for minimum input. Performativity serves to subordinate knowledge and truth to the production of efficiency. (Fournir and Grey Office As Workplace Fief Page 4 2000). Such studies as there are about the office in recent years are mostly performative, sometimes militantly and unashamedly so. For example, Halpern et al (2008:175) preface their article in the Journal of Business Ethics with these declarations of performative dogma:- Any management that fails to oversee its workforce to ensure that employees are not expending valuable company time, for which they re being compensated, on personal business, including unauthorized communications, is remiss in its responsibilities to shareholders. One performative study on psychological depression in the workplace links it to an ugly neologism called ‘presenteeism’ (Sanders and Andrews 2006) where the worker is present but only abstractedly. An area of performative interest in the office has been the effect on productivity of the laptops and mobile phones. The performative justification for mobile phones is flexibility. Allowing people to work at home is one of the mechanisms for providing flexibility (Daniels et al 2001) There are a few critical works on the impact of mobile phones on the boundaries between office space/time and personal space/time – a division first noted in a critical and phenomenological way by Zerubavel (1990) who characterized the formation of personal identity as being shaped by a distinction we all make between on duty and off duty identity. A critical study of the office boundary by Towers et al (2006) looked at the impact of mobile technology. Mobile technology enables work extension into the home and outside office hours so managers expect staff to be always available to do work. The main empirical evidence is a survey of 33000 Canadian office workers by Duxbury and Higgins (2001). In another non performative study, Prasopoulo et al (2006) found that mobile phone users are becoming more vulnerable to organisational claims and that in consequence the office is always present. Mobile phones mediate the organizational world and personal world since one device serves both but there only limited efforts to understand how the use of mobiles Office As Workplace Fief Page 5 affects and restructures the temporal boundaries segregating work and non work activities (Srivastava 2005). Green (2002:41) found ‘the presence of the employer becomes embodied in the devices, and...the presence of such devices prompts self-regulation on the part of the workers to be constantly available for work in a domestic setting.’ Only one non performative study could be found on the office itself, albeit a doctoral thesis rather a refereed article. Dunn-Jensen (2006) made a study of face time - the "perceived pressure to be seen" at work and how the pressures associated affect individual employees. Her findings were that individuals may spend long hours at the office for reasons that cannot be accounted for by the actual volume of work that they have to do, and that perceived pressure to be visible is associated with face time and that face time, in turn, is associated with work-family conflict. Yet the office workplace has long been recognized as a plentiful source of stress. White (1956:136/7) wrote: In almost all companies, the five day week is pure fiction. Executives are quick to learn that if they drop around the office on Saturday to tidy things up a bit, it won’t be held against them in the slightest. Similarly, while the organization encourages executives to do extensive reading of business periodicals and trade journals, few executives would dream of being caught reading them in the office. Such solitary contemplation during the office day, for some reason, is regarded by the executive himself as a form of hookey. THE OFFICE AS A FIEF Feudal vassalage was, in some senses, the medieval equivalent of employment. The vassal employee paid homage to his lord in a ritual act promising aid and obedience in exchange for protection, succour and the fief itself.