Imagine me, falling in love...and with a machine! The automated office and social control. (Volumes I-III).
Item
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Title
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Imagine me, falling in love...and with a machine! The automated office and social control. (Volumes I-III).
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Identifier
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AAI9119645
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identifier
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9119645
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Creator
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Klein, Stephan Marc.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Maxine Wolfe
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, General
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Abstract
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This dissertation investigated the role of the physical environments of offices in the social control of office workers. It examined how computers and information technology are affecting this role; and how this role is concealed through myths.;It analyzed two sets of accounts: one told by management consultants and management oriented literature, the other by workers from lower ranks in office hierarchies. The former set emerged through review of management oriented literature including environmental design research (EDR) discourse. The latter set from interviews, conducted individually and in groups, over varying periods lasting up to three years, with informants from five office settings where computers were in use and whose work was primarily computer mediated. These accounts formed the basis for a critical analysis of the first set of accounts, particularly those comprising EDR discourse about the office setting.;An historical overview situated the contemporary office in a temporal context: Although specific forms change, the social relations of office work and the spaces that housed them are related to the history of capitalism. The historical overview also demonstrated that to a large extent most contemporary EDR in office settings continues and extends past practices of management consultants of assisting their clients in extending workplace control.;Social control was found to be a salient factor in the design and uses of office environments. Social control operated as an ecology of multiple factors including: type of work done, work processes, spatial environment, technology, organizational culture, and personnel characteristics. These factors, comprising coercive methods and those intended to engender cooperation, were targetted at both workers' bodies and souls. However, workers often appropriated the environment to survive and challenge the controls imposed on them. Control was thus found to operate dialectically; and the office environment emerged as a zone of conflict, although one in which unequal power relations predominate.;Most office setting EDR supported the use of the environment as an instrument of social control. Its focus on the subjective aspects of descriptors of environment and behavior relations while neglecting their material and social aspects distorts the meanings of these terms.;A theory and problematic was proposed for future research aimed at understanding the environmental psychological relations of office settings. It proposes that understanding the political anatomy of office settings requires reinterpreting traditional environmental psychological issues and adding new explanatory terms that account for issues of power and social control.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
