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The politics of office space
29 June 2010
By Sarah Davies
I have a feeling this is a topic we’ve touched on before on this blog, but recently I’ve been thinking about the pros, cons and politics of office space – perhaps partly because I’m currently without one, and am working from various coffee shops and libraries. In previous departments office shares have been incredibly contentious, with a finely graded scale of where your office is, how big it is, and how many people are in it dependent on your exact status (surely an anthropology PhD just waiting to happen). So: if you’re the Head of Department you get a floor to yourself – possibly with a small swimming pool thrown in – while if you’re a lowly postgraduate there are 18 of you in a broom cupboard. Not surprisingly, this has always caused resentment, with some radicals suggesting that space might be allocated instead according to how often you actually work from that office (as opposed to your home/lab/other office/field site at the other end of the country).
However, Matthew’s rather inspiring story of an unexpectedly fruitful office share got me thinking about what I’ve gained from relatively crowded research conditions in the past. I’ve mentioned that I’ve shared spaces with colleagues from very different disciplinary backgrounds: certainly, I wouldn’t know nearly as much as I do about forestry management in Scotland, earthquakes in India, or the translation of technical texts if it hadn’t been for this. You can also get a great dynamic in which, if you need distraction, there are people who are happy to provide this (via – for example – cups of tea, Office Olympics or EastEnders chat), but when you need to work it’s comfortably silent. And of course it’s always nice to have a sympathetic audience if you desperately need to sound off about something.
Overall I think I miss the solidarity of a research staff office. But what about others? Do you like or loathe your officemates? And what are the rules on who gets what where in your department?
Hannah Dee29 June 2010 at 02:40 PM
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I'm not a huge fan of massive open plan spaces. One lab I was in had about 30 post-docs and PhD students, so we had to be fairly strict about mobile phones and so on because otherwise they'd be going off all day. I much prefer situations where you share with a handful of others (3 or 4 is good, I think). Enough people for useful debate and discussion but not so many that there's loads of noise. One side effect of the large open plan space is the aircon wars - I swear that we occasionally had weather fronts forming as different corners of the room had different ideas about what a good working temperature was!
Matthew Salois30 June 2010 at 11:46 AM
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Given my new post as fixed-term lecturer, I now have (for the first time in my life) my own office. The room is small but cozy and something I can call my own. I wish I could say that something as material as an office does not matter to me, but I must admit that I do feel more important as both a colleague and a researcher having an office to myself. Having previously shared an office since I started as a graduate student in 2001, I have mixed feelings regarded shared office space. I of course love the conversation, socialization, and friendships that go along with sharing a space with colleagues -- something that I currently miss. However, inevitable no matter how much you like the people you are sharing an office with there will be times when they grate on you. The annoying times always seem to coincide with those moments in which you need peace and quiet the most!
Andy Humphrey06 July 2010 at 01:57 PM
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The research staff offices in my building are open-plan. Things aren't too bad in the chemistry office, perhaps because we're relatively low on numbers working at the moment (if you discount the crowd of project students temporarily occupying the space) - and my experience is that even when full it doesn't tend to get too noisy. In fact, I'm possibly the noisiest one here! The biology office, by contrast, is permanently overcrowded and I've no idea how my colleagues can actually work productively in there. The only downside I experience is the telephone. Because of my other job as a union rep, I often get people phoning me to ask for advice - sometimes on quite sensitive subjects, or subjects that require lengthy discussions. When the one office phone is a shared facility with a dozen other people, any of whom might be due an urgent call, this can sometimes get a bit tricky. And I get very wary when people want to talk about delicate subjects, such as being bullied or their sickness record, when there are other people in the office who are bound to overhear.