Set changes are necessary as the spirit shifts and the plot develops.īut does capitalism actually have a spirit? And what does it mean to claim that it does? Language that flirts so casually with poetic analogy demands a basis in some kind of formal definition. From Taylorism to the open-plan design, the office is a stage on which we act out capitalism’s fantasies of itself.
Each new management technique or architectural fad, if not the direct result of some larger shift in modes of production, at least isomorphically reflects the evolution of capitalism’s spirit. From their earliest days as dingy counting houses in Boston and Manhattan, American offices have adapted to the flux of capitalism. But the claim wouldn’t be entirely misleading, either, and it might even shed some light on what the office actually is. It would be too much to say that the office is the prime locus of utopian aspirations in American life.
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