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3 Times the Insurance Industry Helped Change the Workplace

In "Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace," Nikil Saval looks at the trends and mores that helped change the American workplace. Three of them were spurred by insurance companies.

By Laura Mazzuca Toops | Updated on June 02, 2014

Described as the first formal sociological examination of the American workspace, “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” by Nikil Saval (Doubleday) documents changes in the physical office environment–from the “countinghouses” of the 1850s to the cube farms of the ‘80s and ‘90s, through today’s “collaborative workspaces” and co-working arrangements.

Saval examines the technology, architecture, social mores and pop culture surrounding the changes in the physical workplace. In the Civil War era, clerks and bosses sat cheek by jowl at high desks, the clerks hand-copying documents. The typewriter and the telegraph revolutionized the office; as women emerged into the workplace as stenographers and typists, the steno pool was born and managers retreated into their own offices.

From there, the morphing of the American workspace followed technology and the popular thinking of the day—from Frederick Taylor’s time and motion efficiency studies that broke each office worker’s tasks down to a codified, measurable unit, to the wacky workplace-as-playground feel of the dot.com era.

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