Book Review: Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

Hard to believe it, but the American office we go to Monday through Friday actually has quite a history. Deborah C. Andrews of the University of Delaware recently reviewed “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” by Nikil Saval in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly.

Nikil Saval: Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2014. 352 pp. $26.95, hardback.

From the review:

The communication required to get things done in offices, studios, and laboratories shapes and reflects the design of the spaces themselves. Nikil Saval’s Cubed provides an evocative historical perspective on the physical and social dimensions of the U.S. workplace over the past 200 years. Hardly a “secret” history, it is a history that makes explicit changes in a space—the office—that has been more sat in than examined. Saval, an editor at n + 1, a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics, does not focus directly on the impact of office design on communication. But teachers of professional writing can make good use of his book to inform their research and guide students to an awareness of how the arrangement of physical spaces affects workplace communication.

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