Abstract
When the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in early 2020, causing offices in many countries around the world to shut down for months on end, organizations and the people within them coped much better than anyone would have predicted. Often within a space of mere days, work was shifted to the home, collaboration moved to digital platforms, and business persisted. Staff began to enjoy commuting-free days and greater levels of flexibility endowed by new working practices.
This unasked-for global experiment is continuing to uproot our understanding of the office as the sole place for white-collar work, a position it held unquestioned for centuries.
In Unworking: The Reinvention of the Modern Office, Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross argue that the pandemic has merely accelerated broad forces already in place beforehand that shift how work is defined and where it takes place. The authors invite the reader to relearn work, or, in their words, to practice “unworking,” defined as “to unravel how we work, to unbundle the assumptions that are baked into the modern office, and to unlearn the habits, management styles and workplace cultures that have traditionally defined our behaviour at work” (p. 203).
The book is divided into three main parts, tracing the path from the past to the present shape of offices, what comes next for the office, and how it can be reinvented.
In Part I, three chapters summarize the history of the office, relying on telltale case studies, most of them well-discussed in the extant literature, from the Taylorist machine-like office of the 1920s to 1940s (Chapter 1: Efficiency) and the softened social democratic office of the 1960s to 1990s (Chapter 2: Community), all the way to a more dynamic and flexible workplace organization of the twenty-first century (Chapter 3: Network). Part II then dedicates a chapter each to ten social forces identified by the authors as key drivers to work practices, offering descriptions and reflections what these mean for the physical office (experience, organization, urbanism, space, technology, designing, diversity, well-being, hybridity, demography). Part III concludes the book with two chapters, sketching the three emerging camps in the hybrid office debate (Chapter 14: Repurposing) and providing a sketch of how the office of the future will transpire, that is, as social, healthy, sentient, purposeful, elastic, personalized, contextualized, digital, consumerized, and shared workplaces (Chapter 15: Unworking).
Unworking is well written and very readable; it contributes to important discussions, for example on the need for healthy and well-ventilated buildings for work (Chapter 14), or on approaches to enable participatory design (Chapter 9 and 11). The analysis and classification of common return-to-the-office strategies into three camps—resolute returners, choice champions, and space shavers—is enlightening (Chapter 14). The book is certainly going to be a good resource for practitioners wanting to understand the complexity of issues facing them in the post-pandemic world of work and organizations.
However, from a scholarly point of view the book leaves many open questions.
There is no discernible theory or methodology underpinning the argument. For example, Chapter Five, with the slightly odd title “Organization,” which discusses ways of structuring that move from hierarchies to more dynamic forms of organizing, does not refer to Weber (1947) as a classic text on bureaucracy, nor to more recent nuanced takes, for example Lazega (2020) and its insightful argument that today’s organizations use and combine both logics of bureaucracy and of collegiality. While some scholarly literature is cited, the majority of sources in Unworking are reports, grey literature, or are otherwise not peer reviewed, making the book less valuable for the scholarly community. This also means the book lacks the depth, nuance, and critical views that distinguish academic thought.
For example, the general thesis of the book that work needs to be unlearned is intriguing, but no deeper reflections are offered into how this unlearning could occur, or how and why stakeholders might be able to change their deeply held assumptions. The authors repeatedly argue that siloed professions such as human resources, facilities management, and IT need to work together to support the change needed, however the reader is left in the dark about what might bring these differentiated functions, each with their own systems of incentives, together. Sociological reflections of that nature, as for example offered by Nassehi (2021), are beyond the scope and aim of Unworking.
In the places where it sketches the future, the book seems overly optimistic and leaves out critiques, for example of AI and machine learning, which are repeatedly purported to positively revolutionize workplace design and experience by making usage patterns measurable. Chapter Fifteen claims that the new paradigm of work will be evidence-based, drawing on ever more data, including dystopian-sounding visions of “corporate athletes” who allow companies to extract marginal gains via the quantified self by extracting data on employee health. No mention is made of algorithmic bias or ableist underlying assumptions. Chapter Six, on urbanism, leaves a wide gap where rising inequalities in cities that are no longer affordable for workers could be discussed.
In addition, the argument appears almost arbitrary at times. For instance, well-being is lauded as an effectiveness tool for organizations in Chapter Eleven, only for the authors then to side with workers on how well-being has turned into a stress factor itself (“It has all become exhausting” [p.158]). Chapter Thirteen goes on and on about the different generations and what they might need from the workplace—without providing scientific evidence that generations in fact have different needs—only then to admit that “what the different generations hold in common is far greater than what differentiates them” (p. 184). Other contradictions are not resolved either, for example whether the social-democratic office deviates centrally from the Taylorist office, or whether it is a continuation with a softer façade; whether awe and extraordinary experiences are needed in offices, or whether they should support the everyday; whether diversity is considered the road to higher organizational profits, or a necessity based on principles of justice.
Possibly the biggest merit of Unworking for scholars in sociology, organization science, architecture, and related fields might lie in taking some of the many claims and statements dotted throughout the book and reinterpreting them as hypothesis to be tested. To give an example, in Chapter Six Myerson and Ross argue that coworking is the guild of the twenty-first century. Rather than taking this at face value, it would make for a fascinating study comparing social norms, rules of organization, socioeconomic relations, and spatial forms of medieval guilds versus modern coworking providers to test to what degree this assumption holds. There are many more examples like this, for instance the argument "diversity of spaces can trigger a diversity of behaviours and responses" (p. 217), which could be rigorously tested by psychologists and neuroscientists.
In summary, the book presents some good summaries of current debates and will likely be read widely in business circles but is of more limited value to the academic community.