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Accepted Paper:
When sharing became toxic: the open-plan workplace through the Covid-19 pandemic
Joseph Cook
(University College London)
This paper presents outcomes from an ethnography of workplace consultants undertaken in London before and during the Coronavirus pandemic. It will reflect on the careful branding of ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom’ in the promotion of open-plan, and how Covid-19 may disrupt this march towards ‘sharing’.
Paper long abstract:
This paper stems from an 18-month ethnography undertaken amongst ‘workplace designers’ and ‘workplace consultants’ within one of the world’s largest architecture firms. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic the often derided open-plan office found itself being carefully rebranded as a space of caring and opportunity, with ‘sharing’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom’ being pushed as positives in a world of increasing density.
With the Covid-19 pandemic however arguments for sharing space and facilities at work became suddenly unconvincing. Sharing became toxic. The office went from increasingly dense to suddenly empty, and possibly unnecessary.
I will present evidence from fieldwork interlocutors who have spent decades in the workplace industry, some of whom have lost their jobs post-covid, examining how professionals in this field think about the workers they design for, real or idealised, and how a tight community of workplace professionals create the physical environments which many of us did, until recently at least, spend huge amounts of our waking hours working.