Introduced to the market in 1968, 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 (Kauffman-Buhler, 2021; Haigh, 2012; Duffy, 1997). 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 (Saval, 2014).

Finding such explanations fall short of convincing, this paper locates the ‘problems’ with Action Office in the system’s founding principles, in the research and development methods employed, and in the Herman Miller Furniture Company’s broader approaches to labor relations. Drawing on Marxian labor process theory (Braverman, 1974), it argues that through mobilization of corporate conceptions and design processes which did not reflect the reality of monopoly capital, Herman Miller and Propst created a system which was set up from the start to fail, and which could be easily moulded to meet the (inhumane) fundamental and operational needs of capitalism

This video is a recording of a paper delivered to the 2026 North American Labor History Conference, held at Wayne State University.