Conventional histories of the commercial office would have us believe that we are living in the glory days of office design. Commentators suggest we are the beneficiaries of a century-long evolution of these spaces from the dank and oppressive cave-like offices of the early twentieth century to the rationalized and streamlined spaces of the midcentury, to the technology and amenity-laden campuses of contemporary Silicon Valley (Duffy, 1997; Haigh, 2012; Liming, 2020).

In actuality, the broad design of white-collar workspaces seems to have stayed remarkably static since the first commercial office spaces at the turn of the twentieth century. Open offices, characterized by large spaces with minimal levels of visual and auditory privacy can be identified as the dominant typology throughout history from the strict uniformity of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1908 Larkin Administration building to the contemporary Clive Wilkinson designed Googleplex. The open office has persisted despite both loud and sustained displeasure from office workers, and decades of peer-reviewed quantitative studies calling into question the ultimate efficacy of such designs (Bernstein and Turban, 2018; Brenan, Chugh and Kline, 2002; Hedge, 1982; Morrison and Macky, 2017; Oldham and Brass, 1979; Kaarlela-Toumaala, Helenius, Keskinen and Hongisto, 2009; Kim and de Dear, 2013).

This paper argues the technology and task-based approach taken by much of the literature toward understanding various changes (or staticity) in office architecture and design falls significantly short of providing meaningful explanations for the sustained prevalence of the open office. In place of traditional architectural analytical methods, this paper posits that analysis based on Labor Process theory is best positioned to explain the contradiction of the longevity of the open office design.

Labor Process Theory, the paper argues, re-frames the specific architecture and design features of the office as a tool of managerial control, a method of ensuring worker compliance with management-dictated labor processes, and a means of reminding workers of their place within capitalism. The open office design is one way, this paper argues, that management implements Harry Braverman’s conception of the ‘reins, bridle, spurs, carrot and whip’ (Braverman, 1975) of managerial control. Through this lens, the open office has remained prevalent because of the design’s unique ability to enable managerial control over the labor process while simultaneously engendering employee self-regulation, and continually enforcing corporate hierarchies and power dynamics.

Furthermore, the paper argues that locating the genesis of the open office design within the capitalist labor process begins to shed light on why so many optimistic and perhaps well-intentioned office designs, such as Herman Miller’s Action Office system, have a plethora of unexpected negative outcomes; these systems are attempting to solve a political problem with a design intervention – an impossible, Sisyphean task.