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Yesterday was something of a busy day, involving getting Sherwood Cottage back together from the week with company and the weekend away. It also saw me head up to the library at the school where I work, where I took care of some paperwork that needed doing. I also took the chance to look myself up online, using a computer not already habituated to me from being mine. As I did, I also stumbled across a few other things to read, one of which was Judith Sherven's 5 July 2015 LinkedIN article, "What Does Your Desk/Office Say about You?" In the piece, Sherven gestures towards the idea that the décor of a workspace is revelatory of the persona of the person who occupies the workspace. In the gesture, she relates an anecdote about her dissertation before posing a series of questions to her readers. The short piece ends with calling "attention to the power of [personal decorative] choices," marking it as more of a note that such details are telling than as a guideline to effective professional self-presentation--which might work better for the more junior professionals on LinkedIN than what is presented.

Even though the article is perhaps not as helpful to its primary audience as could be hoped, it does make good points--which I know are good because I have addressed them before. In the December 2014 issue of CCC, I have a short piece titled "Where Writes Me." In that piece, I interrogate the décor I had put into the office I had at the time (I have suffered some reversals since), questioning whether it depicts me as a young but accomplished professional (given the awards and degrees festooning the walls, as well as portions of my nascent scholarly apparatus) or as insecure of myself and my station (given that such things could function more as security blanket). Since the students I taught in my earlier position were as they were, I had to question whether the second was more true than the first. Even in my current position, taken after "Where Writes Me" was accepted for publication and its text finalized, with such décor on the walls near my desk in the office pool to which I am currently assigned, with a student body much more traditional and at an institution much more "normal" than that where I worked in The City, I have to wonder how much of the décor is an attempt to assert my validity as a scholar rather than a celebration of what I have done.

I suppose, then, that the thing Sherven misses most in her brief online treatment (and I would love to read the dissertation, actually) is that, in addition to offering room for interpretation of the worker who works in the workspace, the décor of a workspace offers room for multiple interpretations, possibly conflicting with one another. It is only one of a number of such things that can do so, only one of a number of areas in which some people focus to great effect as others neglect them and likely have their prospects curtailed therefore...