Office Design, Neoliberal Governmentality and Professional Service Firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how neoliberal governmentality is conveyed and promoted through office design technologies within professional service firms (PSFs). Our data, constituted through interviews with firm representatives and site visits, points to the pursuit by PSF management of a core principle of marketization, which is promoted through a range of spatial technologies inscribed in the office space to sustain the development of subjectivities reflective of Homo economicus. Specifically, we found that fluid open-plan layouts and adaptable workplaces constitute technologies of government with great ambitions, aiming to cultivate a paradoxical climate of cooperative competitiveness within the firm, a constant endeavor toward efficiency, and a transformation of firm members into neoliberal self-entrepreneurs. One of the chief ideas that motivates office designers is to provide PSF members with the freedom to work how, where, and when they want in order to meet their firm’s imperatives of effectiveness and client satisfaction. Ultimately, our study shows that office design initiatives within PSFs constitute tools of neoliberal governmentality that aim to govern subtly the emancipation of firm members as accomplished self-entrepreneurs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".