ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore the relationship between the labor process in bureaucratized organization and the physical space in which this labor is transacted and workers housed in the office buildings, retail places, and manufacturing plants in which they work and the homes in which they live. Individualization is also evidenced in the physical distribution of offices in bureaucracy, wherein offices are insulated one from another by walls, doors, and so on. A building is a concrete social artifact, for unlike a kinship pattern or status hierarchy, its corporal form possibly exists regardless of the continued existence of its creators or those following; the same physical structure may remain through fully different culture systems. Family living is prohibited, with even visits strictly limited, all enforced at the cost of unemployment. The "nuclear" family living alone and transacting its relationships largely autonomously, as this concept is enacted in the contemporary West, has no distinct meaning in this context.
