The evolution of workspace in the information technology industry in recent years, I believe, has been the result of transformation and decline of the material requirements of what has been needed to create value, and to manage work-force. So there are less functional requirements influencing the structure of workspace, and moreover, making the notion of work-space loose meaning.
On one hand, the means of production has become more immaterial or portable. During the past 5 years, the cloud technology, apart from the hype of creating endless possibilities in computation, has eliminated the spatial correlation between hardware and software. In this technology, software runs on virtual servers that are automatically being created and shut down on different server grids around the world based on the load of the system. These virtual servers are not even necessarily run on a single physical server. A virtual server can acquire resources from multiple physical servers in different locations.
On the other hand, as Ross notes, in such industries, “companies that trade in creative ideas, services and solutions, everything that employees do, think, or say in their waking moments is potential grist for the industrial mill”. In such a setting that companies are able to turn what employees are willingly offer into profit, what has been used in traditional work-spaces for the purpose of control of employees, such as the work-space variation of Panopticon, the cubicle, is no longer needed.
One of the other important factors is the externalization of human resource management in the information technology industry. The open-source movement, though being started with the ideal of liberating software code from the corporate ownership laws, could be used, and I believe it has been used, to implement an external perpetual learning and assessment mechanism. An extreme version of what Deleuze had imagined in ‘Postscript on control societies’.
The open-source software development has caused a huge proliferation in the possibilities of developing code that is way beyond the learning ability of individuals. An employee has to constantly learn new programming languages, libraries etc. creating an integrated school-work environment.
As most of the companies either have released their software with open source license, or encourage employees to work on open source projects that could be used by the company, a modularization of work into personal achievement has been created. The employee receives the consequences of the success of the project more directly than the bonus mechanism and obviously it is more cost effective for the company.
Taking all of these into account, we can imagine in the information technology industry, not only the infrastructure, but the work-space itself, is gradually being moved into the clouds.
