The most recent, pandemic-induced spike in telecommuting, remote working, and other alternatives to in-person office work has focused considerable attention on the culture and politics of the workplace. But the office is not a new topic of study or criticism. Technologies and cultures of office work have been the subjects of research in anthropology, business history, media studies, organization theory and sociology for decades. In the early 2000s, design and architectural historians joined this conversation with a surge of important scholarship that disclosed design's critical role in shaping the spaces and rituals of white-collar work.1 Two recent books, Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler's Open Plan and Craig Robertson's The Filing Cabinet, signal a new wave of interdisciplinary interest in the visual and material culture of the office, and of corporate capitalism more broadly.2 Their subtitles, however, indicate differing methodologies-one a 'design history' and the other a 'vertical history'-as well as their unique investments- the design and culture of the American office, on the one hand, and a conceptualization of information rooted in a particular piece of office equipment, on the other. Together, these texts show us that present ways of working and processing information, which have become habitual and normative, are in fact the result of office environments and equipment that designers developed over the course of the twentieth century-spaces and tools that, as Kaufmann-Buhler and Robertson remind us, have never been neutral.
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