Monday, September 03, 2007
Labor Day, offices, and freedom
I received an email from my friend and coworker in the Netherlands - Gerrit Visser. Inspired by a confluence of circumstance - his thoughts about the possibilities for changing office culture, Labor Day, a long exchange we've been having about coworking, coliberation, and the like - I wrote the following:
It doesn't take long for us to figure out why we want to change office culture. Or even what we want to change about it. We sit at our desks, sickened by fear and mistrust, by pettiness and isolation. Well-reasoned fear and mistrust. We are asked to be loyal to organizations that repeatedly demonstrate their lack of loyalty to us. Systemic pettiness and isolation. Where we are divided into cubicles and carrels. Where we spend hours drinking the dregs of envy for those who get bigger windows and better parking spaces.
Here, in the States, it's Labor Day. As we battle our way across the freeways towards a spot on the beach, we devote at least some small part of our awareness to the memories of how bad it has been, this experience of labor, of working for a living. How violent and oppressive and corrupt it once was, this whole thing between bosses and those that are bossed. And we think ourselves fortunate, we workers, that today's violence, oppression and corruption is, for most of us, a far more subtle phenomenon - though equally as thorough.
It's that very subtlety and thoroughness that makes it so difficult for us to think about change. We have learned even to mistrust each other, to be afraid even of ourselves. So we don't know, really, how to make it better. So huge and vague is the culture of the office place, so profound and permeating that we are tempted to believe that we, ourselves, are not qualified enough to change anything.
Perhaps we aren't. Not as long as we are part of that culture. Not as long as we find ourselves inside. Which is why I place my faith in the outsiders - those who work outside the walls and halls of industry. In the people who are reinventing work, on maybe an hourly basis. The outsiders who work by phone and fax, computer and Internet, people who meet in coffee houses and kitchens, online, via computer. The outsiders who work together without bosses to tell them how to work.
Instead of changing office culture, they are creating an alternative. An alternative that is not driven by fear, but by commitment. Not by mistrust, but by a belief in themselves, in each other, in their ability, together, to find and create meaningful work. They are the ones who are changing the very definition of office culture, just as they are changing the very nature of work.
from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith
It doesn't take long for us to figure out why we want to change office culture. Or even what we want to change about it. We sit at our desks, sickened by fear and mistrust, by pettiness and isolation. Well-reasoned fear and mistrust. We are asked to be loyal to organizations that repeatedly demonstrate their lack of loyalty to us. Systemic pettiness and isolation. Where we are divided into cubicles and carrels. Where we spend hours drinking the dregs of envy for those who get bigger windows and better parking spaces.
Here, in the States, it's Labor Day. As we battle our way across the freeways towards a spot on the beach, we devote at least some small part of our awareness to the memories of how bad it has been, this experience of labor, of working for a living. How violent and oppressive and corrupt it once was, this whole thing between bosses and those that are bossed. And we think ourselves fortunate, we workers, that today's violence, oppression and corruption is, for most of us, a far more subtle phenomenon - though equally as thorough.
It's that very subtlety and thoroughness that makes it so difficult for us to think about change. We have learned even to mistrust each other, to be afraid even of ourselves. So we don't know, really, how to make it better. So huge and vague is the culture of the office place, so profound and permeating that we are tempted to believe that we, ourselves, are not qualified enough to change anything.
Perhaps we aren't. Not as long as we are part of that culture. Not as long as we find ourselves inside. Which is why I place my faith in the outsiders - those who work outside the walls and halls of industry. In the people who are reinventing work, on maybe an hourly basis. The outsiders who work by phone and fax, computer and Internet, people who meet in coffee houses and kitchens, online, via computer. The outsiders who work together without bosses to tell them how to work.
Instead of changing office culture, they are creating an alternative. An alternative that is not driven by fear, but by commitment. Not by mistrust, but by a belief in themselves, in each other, in their ability, together, to find and create meaningful work. They are the ones who are changing the very definition of office culture, just as they are changing the very nature of work.
from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith
Labels: work
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