A Company Town - Web Extra

BRIAN: We’re going to end the show today reflecting on how the workplace shapes America’s work ethic. Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara says many companies have structured their environments to make employees more productive. She told us about one trailblazing company with a workspace that’s gotten a lot of media attention over the years. In many ways, it’s changed the way Americans have thought about the work ethic.

Now, we’re not going to tell you which company. But if you listen to O’Mara’s description, a company by excerpts from a Harper’s Magazine profile The Workspace, you might be able to figure it out.

MARGARET O’MARA: It’s more than just a workplace. It’s like an entire city in one workplace campus.

MALE SPEAKER: “Indeed, a sight as rare as it is delightful. What might have been taken for a wealthy suburban town is given up to busy workers. And at the termination of long street’s, a pleasing view greets and relieves the eye– a bit of water, a stretch of meadow, a clump of trees, or even one of the large but neat workshops.”

MARGARET O’MARA: It’s a place where people go out to eat. You can play sports. You can go see musical performances.

MALE SPEAKER: “It pays also in another way. The wholesome, cheerful surroundings enable the men to work more constantly and more efficiently. The questions to be answered are these– is it worthy of imitation? Is it likely to inaugurate a new era in society?”

MARGARET O’MARA: It’s designed to be different than any type of workplace that’s been around before.

So the place I’ve been describing to you is built in the early 1880s outside Chicago– Pullman, Illinois, the company town of Pullman Palace Car Company. So if what I’ve been describing seems resonant to the Silicon Valley workplaces of today, you’re right. Today we have campuses like the headquarters of Google, known as the Googleplex, which, like Pullman, is a self-contained company town of sorts.

BRIAN: Yeah. Like Pullman in the 1880s, Google’s workspace has also gotten a lot of press. Just listen to this CBS report from 2013.

MALE SPEAKER: This campus in Mountain View, California, offers employees comforts, privileges, and perks that workers at most other companies can only envy. Google famously provides three meals a day plus of unlimited snacks. It gives workers their own garden space to grow vegetables.

ED: OK, so O’Mara is comparing the luxury campus at Google with the way George Pullman, the industrialist, built an attractive modern town to inspire a good work ethic in his factory employees. But there’s got to be differences here, right? Pullman was all about routinized factory work, and Google fashions itself as promoting creativity and innovation.

BRIAN: That’s right, Ed. But O’Mara says despite those differences, both Pullman and Google sought to model a productive environment for other companies.

MARGARET O’MARA: Because of the immense media attention that is given to these companies and the workplaces they create, they have a huge influence on other types of workplaces and on popular perceptions of what good work is and what a good job is.

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Technology companies have typically hewn to a cathedral model of creating campuses, self-contained total immersion environments. That the way to instill a great work ethic, to create the happiest and most productive workers is to sequester them from all of the hurly-burly of everything else. But if we look through the longer history of human innovation, we see that oftentimes it’s the bizarre, the hurly-burly places, the places where lots of different people are coming in contact with one another are the places where new ideas often emerge.

They’re crossroads. They’re trading ports. They’re literally bazaars, like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.

Whether it be a London coffee house in the 17th century, or it be a Seattle coffee house in the 21st century, that often times these places that are more open can be places where new ideas and new notions of what work is and what a work ethic is can emerge.

ED: That’s Margaret O’Mara. She’s a historian at the University of Washington and the author of Cities of Knowledge– Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley.

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PETER: We played a tape of O’Mara describing her comparison between cathedrals and bazaars to former employees of Google and Microsoft, and we received interesting reactions. We’ll post those interviews on our website backstoryradio.org.

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BRIAN: Ed, Peter, we’ve just done a whole show on the work ethic, but there’s one thing–

ED: Boy, and I’m tired, too.

BRIAN: Exactly. There’s one thing that keeps cropping up, and that’s how horrible it is in America to be lazy. So what do we make of this work ethic? We know it’s a bit of a myth, but what purposes does it serve? And why is it so terrible to be cast as lazy in America?

PETER: Well, I’d say, Brian, it’s the idea that you don’t have any self-respect. Because if you’re a good American, you have internalized these values and you will work hard, and that’s part of your sense of who you are. Other people impose it on you, that’s their sense of how they can take advantage of you.

ED: You know, one reason I think, guys, that the work ethic’s so strong in this country, there seems to be so much to work for. You know, for generation after generation, there was really not a horizon, a boundary, for how much you could accumulate in this country. And I think one reason that people worry about this so much now, maybe one reason we did a show about it, it’s not clear that the work ethic is going to bring the results that it did for earlier generations. So as you’re saying, we’ve internalized this ethic, but does it ever sort of turn on us?

PETER: Well, but it’s not just that we have to be good, hardworking citizens. The country has to be there for us to work in and on. And I think you’re right about the external idea of a great frontier. Those horizons that you were talking about, Ed. Without those horizons, I think the internal state projects an external reality that sometimes is just not there.

ED: So we’ve looked at the history of the work ethic. You know, it makes a lot of sense when you have a continent that needs to be, quote, “conquered” and you have so much social mobility, but today what’s a work ethic do in a cubicle or on an assembly line?

PETER: Well, we got the work ethic, but we don’t know where to go with it. And I think the future of work and the economy itself is the great big question. It’s not our willingness to work, because I think that willingness to work has been a big theme in American history, but why do we work? What’s the point of working?

BRIAN: Well, Peter, my assessment of history is that each time Americans have asked a version of the question you just asked, the answer has turned out to be a pretty positive one.

ED: Yeah, I think I kind of have to agree with Brian on this one, Peter.

BRIAN: Yes.

ED: You look back on the past, and this isn’t the first time that Americans have worried that the era of the work ethic and getting ahead was coming to an end. People really freaked out when they thought that the frontier had closed at the beginning of the 20th century, and that was really going to be the end of American democracy and of American prosperity. And yet, somehow, events come along, scramble the story, and my guess is that we’re going to see this happen again.

That something that we’re not predicting– say the rise of the personal computer– is going to come around and stir things up again. But, Peter, what do you think? Am I overly optimistic?

PETER: I think this is a tribute that both you guys are making to the work ethic itself pure and undiluted without any empirical support. And I’m all for it.

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ED: That’s going to do it for us today, but we’re always working hard online, so head to backstoryradio.org and let us know what you thought of the show today. And while you’re there, weigh in on our upcoming shows. We have one about the history of manufacturing, another on presidential debates, and a Halloween special covering the History of Horror. You’ll find it all at backstoryradio.org.

Or send email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

PETER: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Bridget McCarthy, Nina Ernest, Kelly Jones, Emily Gadek and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Melissa Gismondi is our researcher. We had help from Brandon Van Kannewurf. Special thanks this week to Brendan Wolfe.

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ED: And, you know, we’d like to give special thanks this week to Kelly Jones, who’s been a stalwart ally for a long time here at BackStory who’s going off to start her own exciting enterprise.

PETER: If you’d like to check out Kelly’s podcast on the strange terror of choice, check it out it dooverpodcast.com.

BRIAN: If it doesn’t work, try to get it.

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PETER: We’re going to miss you, Kelly.

ED: Good luck.

BRIAN: BackStory’s produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the Shiocan Foundation, The Naitonal Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onuf a Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond.

BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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ED: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.