Neil Usher is an energetic, wiry critic of workplaces and offices. Long ago – in 2018, actually – his proposal that the good office is composed of 12 simple elements, beginning with daylight, was also energetic and wiry. Here he widens out from the delicious nitty-gritties of temperature control and lighting in The Elemental Workplace to the wider phenomenon of work. As the title already suggests, the style is laden with expletives: there are no fewer than 25 mentions of the word ‘crap’. He is withering, too, about the ‘easiest fat-arsed squatting duck of targets, the hapless office, with its rituals and theatrics’. On top of a fresh, Elemental-style bow to the nostrum of inclusion, there is a critique of management fads, but also reference made to (white male) privilege, plus, in a lofty manner, ‘our essentially Stone Age cognitive wiring’.

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The great bandwagon of bullshit that is the home v office debate looks set to trundle into a third year. What is increasingly obvious is that it is the mainstream media that is holding the reins and refusing to release them. Here’s a BBC story from this week that doesn’t exactly mischaracterise the Microsoft report on which it is based, but does place the emphasis where it doesn’t need to be. The binary headline doesn’t help, of course, except to launder the idea and drive a needless wave of social media chatter. (more…)