Lying in bed on a quiet Sunday morning, I listened to Gideon Haigh talking on ABC National Radio about his latest book The Office in which he traces the invisible history of the office. Along the way, he's uncovered heroes, villains and some great stories. Best of all, he's managed to make it entertaining.
Let's face it: offices are us. Offices are ubiquitous and office culture is global. The most powerful people in the world - our presidents, prime ministers and corporate moguls - are no longer warriors or priests, but glorified pen-pushers. Our increasingly urbanised lives are now less about growing or making material things and more about virtual exchange - sitting in an office, sliding symbols around a screen.
And yet we portray office workers as the antithesis of action heroes. Sneered at as boring or corrupt, they're more often figures of fun or derision - clock-watchers, desk jockeys, paper shufflers. Being called a ''bureaucrat'' is to be insulted - the typical bureaucrats of Kafka's stories, for example, aren't just ridiculous, they're evil, mere baby steps away from slipping into Nazi, Soviet or Stasi uniforms.
But if the rise of Homo officens in the post-industrial era has a history, why is it a history without events? Where are the stories? Where is the drama? These are the questions Gideon Haigh sets out to answer in this, his 25th book - an ambitious 600-plus-page epic that ranges from the archaeological evidence of office work in 2000BC Egypt to the epitome of super-cool 21st-century style, to the office-fetishistic TV series Mad Men.
This is how Jose Borghino reviews this absolutely rivetting book:
Haigh is Australian non-fiction's Mr Versatile - equally adept at unpicking the cult of the chief executive as he is at making sense of international cricket. He has written about abortion, asbestos and the mystery spinner of the 1950s, Jack Iverson. He's been a business journalist for Fairfax and News Limited, his cricket analysis has featured in The Guardian, and he is a regular on ABC TV's Sunday morning sports show Offsiders.
Haigh has always been an erudite writer, glorying in the precise placement of mots justes, and sure enough The Office sent me scurrying to my dictionary app for definitions of ''nouvelles couches sociales'', ''defalcation'' and the second, older meaning of ''skivvy''.
But Haigh is also an elegant stylist and the opening chapters, because they rely so much on visual art to represent the early history of the office, have the same confident zip and sparkle as writers such as Robert Hughes and Simon Schama at their authoritative, breezy best: ''In one 11th-century Byzantine codex, St Gregory of Nazianzus has his feet on a footrest, his work stored in a doored cabinet and his eye fixed on a bookmount that might almost be a flatscreen monitor … The St Jeromes of Jan van Eyck (c. 1435) and Domenico Ghirlandaio (c. 1480), propped on their elbows over bulky texts, even look a little bored.''
This familiar tone and formidable range of reference is enhanced by The Office's beautiful production values. There are images everywhere - mostly in black and white - sometimes breaking up the text or occupying the outer margins of the page. The first half of The Office is an exhilarating sweep through history, outlining the inventions and technology that have made the modern office possible.
Haigh is particularly good on architecture, especially the rise of the skyscraper. But he also devotes considerable space to the development of the elevator, the telephone, airconditioning, the typewriter, email and the cubicle. (There are also asides about staplers, water coolers and the pencil with attached eraser.) Haigh romps through four millenniums of history with gusto, but always with a journalist's eye for the telling anecdote and the memorable character.
For instance, nestling within the chapter about office automation is a brief mention of champion typist Margaret Hamma, who in 1935 demonstrated the speed of the new IBM electric typewriter by dashing off 150 words a minute while balancing cups of water on the backs of her hands!
Every now and then, Haigh allows himself the space to dwell on a topic. For example, Japan clearly interests him and for a whole chapter he revels in the cultural peculiarities of the sarariiman (salaryman or office worker) and the kakunin (government bureaucrat).
He draws on the usual array of historical documents and archival photos but the chapter is galvanised by Haigh's savvy references to films by Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, and to Japanese novels, TV series and manga. What could have been cold, distant and impenetrable ends up being both familiar and exotic, chatty and technical. This is emblematic of the whole book.
Haigh calls the second half of his book a ''story of office life''. Starting with a history of how people are selected to join the world of the office - civil-service exams and job interviews - it ends with tales of retirement and termination. In between, the familiar tropes of 20th-century social history are explored - feminism, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism - all of them told from the perspective of the unrelenting bureaucratisation of life.
Again, Haigh illustrates standard history by pointing to popular culture. When discussing sexual discrimination in the workforce, he compares the 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show with its 1980s avatars Murphy Brown and the comedy film Nine to Five starring Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda. This mixing of history with popular culture has the advantage of embodying rarefied concepts in concrete examples.
Offices have their darker sides and Haigh investigates the career of the ultimate ''organisation man'', Robert McNamara, the accountant who rose from president of the Ford car company to become the architect of the US's disastrous strategy in Vietnam. The Office is not a populist book - it's too long and too complex for that. But neither is it a dry, academic tome - it's too well written and engaging.
It is encyclopaedic and joyously international. With confidence and alacrity, Haigh orchestrates a cast that ranges from Billy Wilder, Michel Houellebecq and Donald Trump to Frank Lloyd Wright, Barbara Stanwyck and Helen Gurley Brown - the only Australian to pop up is a Harvard professor of industrial research, Elton Mayo, who is dubbed ''the father of the coffee break''.
Having spent over forty years in more than fifty offices in some fifteen different countries, it's about time I knew where I have been. It's time I took my first long coffee break and read this book. I've just ordered it from Booktopia.
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it gives you something to do but doesn't get you anywhere.
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