Thinking Allowed

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Thinking Allowed: Office Life

Office Life

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Office Life

Office life: the evolution and meaning of the filing cabinet. Also, objects at work.

Office life: Laurie Taylor explores the evolution and meaning of the filing cupboard. Also, the personal significance of objects at work.

Office life: As more people return to the conventional workplace, Laurie Taylor talks to Craig Robertson, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Northeastern University, about a new study which charts the ‘vertical’ history of the filing cabinet and its role in capitalist modernity.  Why was it  advertised alongside gleaming skyscrapers & how did the logic of the cabinet come to penetrate the  domestic sphere? Also, Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at UWE, Bristol, considers the ways in which people deploy private possessions, from toys to photos, to  personalise their increasingly sanitised  working environments. Has Covid changed our relationship to such objects at work,  as Zoom meetings have blurred the private and professional  allowing us to enter our colleagues homes?

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

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