I was most curious about the epistemic effects of filing cabinets, so I did wish that the book spoke more about cabinets of curiosities and adjacent institutions, like museums. They, and spatial techniques of memory, are outside the scope of The Filing Cabinet but felt like relevant context to explore.

The labour of clerks to follow ‘cabinet logic’ was streamlined with silent hinges, and in doing so, that work was externalised and made impersonal. The filing clerk was no longer a knowledge worker but an information worker. The files they sorted did not reflect them or their views, but fragmented data sourced from all over a company. This shift was supported by a constellation of office equipment. Tabs and visual index systems sorted index cards into alphabetical or decimal systems ‘at a glance’ while giving clerks a handle to pull files with. Manila folders, a product of US imperialism in the Philippines, structured collections of loose papers and made up for the lack of US paper standards in the early twentieth century. These tools all served the aims of ‘managerial capitalism’. With them, managers used written text to control workers as well as fuel their growing ‘documentary impulse’, as described in JoAnn Yates’s research.

The reclassification of knowledge work to information work was not an accident, Robertson argues. Through the filing cabinet, male office workers displaced their anxiety about the changing nature of the apprentice-like position of the clerk. As more women entered the workplace, managers coded them as more suited for working with files for their ‘nimble fingers’. Male executives, meanwhile, interpreted the information in those files. These assumptions are all baked into filing cabinet advertisements of the time. In image after image, women (or disembodied feminine hands) pull files; men read them.

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