"Work is the inescapable starting point for all social inquiry." — Robert Heilbroner
I've worked in offices on four continents, and small differences astonished me. For instance, bathrooms.
In Saudi Arabia, when women first started working in offices, there were no women's bathrooms. It was easier to bring women into the workforce than to redesign the buildings to include them. In Kenya, the women's bathroom is more like a backstage lounge than a utility room. An outside woman comes in every day to wax and braid hair, and no topic is off limits. It's an ecosystem of gossip, care, and counsel. In London, offices have showers for sweaty commutes. The first time I saw my colleagues' shower gels lined up, I was embarrassed. Here, the office runs right up against the private routines of home.
My name is Mona, and I'm taking a break from work to explore the ethnography of work. Work is changing so fast, and I feel an urgency to understand it. I'm fascinated by the office as a habitat with its own ecology. This project is personal to me for several reasons:
- When I was born in 1990, only 0.4% of Saudi women worked in an office, about 12,000 women. Today it's 10%, roughly half a million. But AI could clear them out as fast as they arrived. Their entire time in the office could begin and end within one lifetime, mine.
- Work changed my life more than anything else. It carried me from a married woman in an insular Saudi community to a divorced woman in New York working as a venture partner. I grew up with no access to secular books, music, or art. Hungry for the intellectual life I'd been denied, I fed that hunger with work. It paid for my life and taught me the world. Work was my education, my passport, and where almost all my friendships were built.
My project, Poetics of Work (PoW), is for aliens who arrive in 2070, or for our grandchildren, or possibly our alien grandchildren, trying to make sense of what we did all day. It is also for today's worker who doesn't feel seen or understood at work.
Something that takes a third of our waking hours leaves a footprint on everything: identity, status, purpose, the school day, the shape of the family, the city, the weekend. When AI changes work, that change will trickle to all of that. Before it slips away or hardens into nostalgia, I want a clear record of what it was like, and of what we should keep as we build whatever replaces it.
Tyler Cowen once said that economics, and most disciplines, are parasitic on anthropology: because every model of people rests on some description of people. That's especially true of work. It needs to be understood and observed. But most narratives today focus on measuring and optimizing. Management science, HR, and labor economics miss the inner life of workers. That life shows up in direct observation, personal accounts, and artifacts, which is also what I want to capture.
I’m inspired by projects and books like:
- In 1974, Studs Terkel published Working, a book of interviews that described work as “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” Since then, work has changed. I’m trying to write an update
- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1994). An influence not for the topic, but for his approach: an amateur approaching a topic from outside the discipline, with curiosity and playfulness.
- Mass Observation Project to document what they observe at work. I would love to involve more people in the project in the form of soliciting input, surveys, etc.
- On time and water: The gap between what we know and what we feel. The existing language for climate change is professional, scientific, and adequate only to itself. The Poetics of Work project is the analogous attempt for labor in the AI age: to capture what the policy conversation lacks. On the same premise. What cannot be felt cannot be reformed.
- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Close, street-level attention to how a city actually works, from someone outside the planning establishment. I want to do for the office what she did for the city.
- Georges Perec’s "endotic" and "infra-ordinary”
I'll make these records and my notes public. So the felt life of the office exists somewhere. But my goal is also to identify in them the structures and theories that can accompany and support later grounds for politics and economics.