The Office: A Hardworking History

A comprehensive history of the office that references all popular culture, this book traces its origins from merchants and monks to the gleaming glass towers of New York and the space-age sweatshops of Silicon Valley.

Finding an extraordinary legacy of invention and ingenuity—shaped by the telephone, the typewriter, the elevator, and e-mail among others—this account discovers a world teeming with dramas great and small. It also explores the array of archetypes, including the Whitehall mandarin, the Wall Street banker, the Dickensian clerk, the Japanese salaryman, the French bureaucrat, and the Soviet official. Far from simply being a place where people earn a living, the office emerges as a way of seeing the entire world.