20190417.0430

In one of the articles LinkedIn has recommended to me, Karl Roessner's 10 April 2019 "Promoting Diversity of Thought," the comment is made that "open floor plans...encourage interaction and frank discussion, while easily allowing for multiple parties in a discussion." The comment is made in a context that suggests the author believes, or wants to be perceived as believing, that having and employing access to multiple viewpoints is a good thing; the view is a good one, in itself. (Whether I am convinced that the author is sincere is another matter entirely.) But the specifics are somewhat questionable; I do not know that I agree with the stated value of the open floor plan. Indeed, I think it works to other ends entirely than those Roessner purports; they are not tools to open matters, but rather more vectors of control.
Office pools and open floors do allow line-of-sight among employees, certainly. They can also help to minimize inappropriate conduct on the part of those in authority; there is less privacy to hide misdeeds, and those who will do wrong deliberately will often try to do so clandestinely, so the relative lack of privacy is a benefit in that regard. I am sure there are other benefits, too, though none occur to me at the moment.
That open offices can allow for collaboration is not a guarantee that the employees will confer. In one in which I worked, my coworkers and I did not talk to one another; we worried that we would be seen talking to each other and that such speech would be regarded not as fruitful consultation, but as idleness and wastefulness. We were there, and we were reminded more than once that we were there, to make sure that the company made money--which meant, in practice that we were servants to the company owner's pocketbook. We were all of us told, explicitly and implicitly and often, that only the owner had ideas worth hearing, and we were all of us micromanaged. The open floor in the office, then, was a means for the owner to oversee us and loom over us.
Even if Roessner is sincere, I think the model under which I worked is more normally the case than the free and collaborative idea he extols. Academic office pools in which I have worked have not always or often been accommodating; much of the work of academe benefits from privacy (not least because of applicable laws), and not having it made getting done the work that needed doing harder than it needed to be. Too, the more open plan still made oversight and interference with the work and The Work easier to do, and not all academic administration is as academic as might be hoped; power-plays and bullying suffuse most organizations and all fields of endeavor, and the preoccupation of academe with doing original work makes the ability to look over people's shoulders more problematic than it would otherwise be.
In the end, in my experience, open offices are more trouble than they're worth.