Comment Taylor's "Scientific Management" (Score 1) 314
Very reminiscent of the sad story of Frederick Taylor and "Scientific Management." Taylor meant to be a good guy, and believed he researches on the best ways to organize industrial work would be a good-for-everything win-win. He advocated good pay, good treatment, frequent breaks, etc.
He actually believed that scientific management would put an end to labor-management conflict: "The great revolution that takes place in the mental attitude of the two parties under scientific management is that both sides take their eyes off the division of the surplus as the all-important matter, and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus until this surplus becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided."
Labor unions opposed "scientific management" as just a kind of speed-up, a way of squeezing workers, and that essentially is how it was applied. In his later years Taylor regretted what he said was the misapplication of his methodology, but the damage was done.
And so it is with the open office. What might originally have become a well-intentioned effort at innovating on office architecture quickly became just a way of squeezing workers--almost literally, into smaller and smaller spaces, with facile "proof by repeated assertion" that it was an actual improvement on what had gone before.
The best that can be said about it is that cubicles are at least better than the arrangements of some office in the 1960s and 1970s, which looked just like classrooms but with bigger desks.