Office Spacedecide your own - Essay Example

Marx’s alienation of workers has four kinds which are Alienation of the worker from the work — from the worker’s product of his labor, alienation of the worker from working — from the act of producing, alienation of the worker from himself, as a producer and alienation of the worker from other workers. The first kind of alienation was the inability of the Peter Gibbons, Michael Bolton, Samir Nagheenanajar and Milton Waddams to appreciate the fruits of their labor because they cannot concretely connect how their jobs contribute to the software they are creating that made that Peter to stare at his computer all day.

They despised their work and this alienates them from it. As a result of the alienation from work, Peter et al felt alienated from themselves because they feel that their jobs are sucking the life out of them with Peter Gibbons remarking “We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day”. . And being a mere factor in a capitalist mode of production, the personhood of the worker is alienated because he is not treated as a person but rather an instrument of the capitalist’s profit motive.

The alienation of the workers – from the work itself, to the product of his labor to his coworkers and ultimately to himself is a result of the bureaucratic nature of the organization which reduces the workers as a mere component of production as Weber and Marx have theorized. Workers fall into place of what they do by specialization and caged into formal offices and the rational legal authority vested to its bosses which in the movie Office Space case was Bill Lumbergh whom the protagonist workers hated because he represent all that is “soulless and wrong”.

It is important to stress that despite Peter, Milton, Michael and Samir loathe of Bill, Bill still continue to lord over them as Vice President because the structure of the organization provided him the legal authority to be the boss no matter how hated he was. This set up is what Weber called to be the iron cage of bureaucracy that employees are still in the organization even if it is spent in Gibbons terms “filling out useless forms.and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements” because they needed the job.

In plain language, the job may suck but they have to be there to make a living because there are bills and mortgages to pay. There may be no prison bars but certainly, the formal offices which Weber described as the place they do their specialized skills and reason to be in the organization also felt like a prison cell. Thus, the person in the organization is diminished and turned into