Nikil Saval > Quotes

“skyscraper would remain one of the most peculiarly American of white-collar institutions, much more a symbol of the prowess, even ruthlessness, of American-style capitalism than what it equally was: an especially tall collection of boring offices.”
― Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

“There is not a single worker, Taylor would repeat, “who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.”
― Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

“The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All of these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.”
― Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

“The “ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work,” he writes. “It became increasingly clear . . . from the distance between the top and the bottom rungs of the ‘ladder,’ that some workers were never going to join the upper layers of management. For some, work was always, frankly, going to suck.”
― Nikil Saval