What makes good offices go bad?

Introduced to the market in 1967, Herman Miller’s Action Office II system promised to revolutionize the office furniture and office architecture industries by adding humanity, flexibility, and integrating sophisticated technology into spaces previously ignored by architects and designers. Such optimism, however, was not to last long. Twenty-five years after the system’s launch, Action Office was widely understood as the progenitor of the dreaded, dreary, uniform, and inflexible cubicle style of office interior.

How can this discontinuity between the well-meaning intention of Action Office and the negative spatial realities the system eventually brought about be understood? To date, the literature has suggested that the transformation of Action Office into the cubicle occurred after the system’s widespread adoption; that the cubicle’s most hated features came about as the result of individual bad actors (corporations and managers), and fault in this process lies outside of Herman Miller’s walls.

This paper proposes an alternative understanding of the evolution of Action Office. Through mobilization of Marxist Labor process theory and an interrogation of labor relations within Herman Miller itself, this paper suggests that the cubicleization of Action Office can be understood as a natural progression of understanding of labor within Herman Miller, within the company’s understandings of and attitudes toward work, labor processes, and labor relations.

Examining Herman Miller’s corporate ethos toward labor and work through archival research and examination of the company’s Scanlon (profit-sharing) plan, the paper outlines the idealistic and simplistic attitudes taken toward labor at the company, mapping these attitudes and understandings onto the physical reality of the office furniture systems the company designed.

Broadly, this paper argues that office spaces, places designed explicitly around work tasks, cannot be understood without simultaneous exploration of work and labor – both in terms of the particular corporate conceptions of labor and of the reality of work within and under capitalism.

Download the full paper here.