Textual Analysis Of The Movie Office Space

Office Space I have often heard the movie Office Space called funny, albeit an exaggeration of the bureaucracy, particularly in America. While I have to agree that it is quite funny, I wouldn’t know what to make of it as a parody of the American bureaucracy. Though yes, the characteristics of Weber’s bureaucracy has been portrayed, along with Marx’s alienation. Most of what I’ve heard and read about why office space is a must watch film is because people can actually relate to the day-to-day agony of a “modern desk job”. I keep mum on this because I have yet to experience the agony of a modern desk job, and that is why I am going to offer an analysis on this film on a very academic level. The film cleverly utilizes humour to point out
the flaws of a highly bureaucratized work area. Office Space portrays the high level of specialization through the employees at Initech. Each employee had their own job to do; they had clear-cut duties and were specialists in their own field. However, despite the specialization of jobs among the employees, there remained a hierarchy of positions and some characters were actually ranked higher than the rest. Thus this type of arrangement actually breeds contempt, and grudges were held against higher ranked employees by those on the lower positions. Initech was also portrayed to be strict on rules and regulations to the extent that some policies seemed only to be employed purely as an example of how a bureaucratized organization is to function and obey rules and regulation. Going back to how Weber described bureaucracy, Initech thrived to function in a completely conventional fashion and used rules and regulations as a means to do so. In addition, beyond following the rules and regulations, a highly bureaucratized organization places importance on “technical competence”. This was accomplished in the movie through the employment of Bob and Bob who were hired by the organization to “measure and evaluate” the technical competency and efficiency of the workers. They conducted interviews from one person to another, trying to find the importance of each worker and determining their performance level. They wanted to find out what each of the employees contributed to the organization. However, as seen in the movie though they were interested in finding out the technical competency of each individual, the organization isn’t really interested in the employee as a person. Which leads me to the next recurring theme in the movie, that is impersonality. It was noticeable that the higher ups were not interested in making connections with the employees rather they favoured writing impersonal memos to them. It was fairly obvious that workers at Initech were treated uniformly, and that they were not really seen as individuals. Thus, because of all these factors it is possible that employees at Initech felt alienated by their work. Most likely they do not really feel the direct benefits of their labor. Consequently, there is no driving force or motivation for them to work harder. It was obvious that Initech employees felt “trapped” in their cubicles, and the only motivation that I think everyone was quite aware of, was to not get fired from their jobs. Although I find the movie peppered with cynicism and a bit extreme in some ways, it has presented the flaws of highly bureaucratized working environments in a simple way that even those outside the workforce (like me) are able to understand and analyze.