White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The era of this old office was a long one; in the United States it did not really begin to change shape until the 'nineties. Since then, many and drastic changes have occurred, but unevenly: offices still exist that are basically not different from the old office, but other offices seemingly have little resemblance to the nineteenth-century structure. The unevenness is due to the fact that offices are attached to all forms of enterprise, many of which are small, many big. It is especially in the big offices of the ‘office industries' that the new type has emerged-the insurance, banking, and financial lines, for example. The later history of the office, as adapted from W. H. Leffingwell, may be described in terms of the following developments:

I. Under the impetus of concentrated enterprise and finance, when the office was enlarged during the first decade of the twentieth century, a need was felt for a systematic arrangement of business facts. The numerical file, with an alphabetical index, was devised and came into broad use. Alongside the bookkeeper and the stenographer, the clerk came to man often complicated ‘systems. ' As the army of clerks grew, they were divided into departments, specialized in function, and thus, before machines were introduced on any scale, socially rationalized. The work was reorganized in a systematic and divided manner.