Behind Office Doors

Jens van de Maele is a postdoctoral member of the research group Modernity and Society 1800–2000 at KU Leuven. Martin Kohlrausch is professor of European Political History and head of the research unit Modernity and Society at the KU Leuven.

Devoted to the role of uses and users in the configuration and appropriation of the space of administrative work, this book opens up a new perspective on the history of the office, inviting us to move away from linear narratives based on the analysis of the architectural canon and on a reductionist vision of the dynamics of power and control that have often marked the historiographical tradition on the office. - Gianenrico Bernasconi, Université de Neuchâtel

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction. Retracing Use and Users in the History and Historiography of the 20th-Century Office Building Jens van de MaelePart 1. Categories and representations of office usersChapter 1. What’s the Use? The Users and Usability of the Filing Cabinet Craig RobertsonChapter 2. The Office in Popular Culture, or the “Plight of the Clerk” Nicola BishopPart 2. The impact of normativity and standardisation on the office as an “environment”Chapter 3. Too Cold? Gendered Conflicts over Mechanical Cooling in Early Post-war Japanese Office Spaces Tatsuya MitsudaChapter 4. Thresholds of Comfort : Managing Light, Sound and Focus in the Post-War Office Environment Joeri BruyninckxChapter 5. Surviving the Office : Workplace Design, Activism and the Health of Women Workers in 20th-Century Britain Amy ThomasChapter 6. Measuring, Evaluating and Configuring : The German Debate about Safe and Healthy Screen Work Bernd HoltwickPart 3. Office uses conceptualised by and for the managerial eliteChapter 7. A “Facility Based on Change” (for the Worse) : Leveraging Labour Process Theory to Understand the Evolution of Herman Miller’s Action Office Petra SeitzChapter 8. The European Commission’s Office Spaces in the 1950s and 1960s : Constructing a Materialised Imaginary Marco NinnoPart 4. Visual essaysChapter 9. “Mimic Men” in the Office Spaces of a “Nervous State” : The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Late Colonial Congo Johan Lagae and Jens van de MaeleChapter 10. Between Hierarchy, Efficiency and Pragmatism : Picturing Portuguese Government Offices in Historic Buildings during the Estado Novo Dictatorship Ana Mehnert PascoalChapter 11. Office Life in Chandigarh Ruth Baumeister (text), Shaun Fynn (photography)Epilogue Martin Kohlrausch and Andreas FickersContributors Index