Even in the 19th century, workers were beginning to resent the grind of office life.
¡°You don¡¯t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief, day after day,¡± British essayist Charles Lamb wrote in a letter to poet William Wordsworth back in 1822, railing against his toil in the East India Company¡¯s office in Leadenhall Street, London.
For the last 17 months, however, Lamb¡¯s modern successors have mostly worked from home, liberated from what he termed ¡°official confinement.¡± Today¡¯s white-collar staff are living through a radical transformation of professional life, one that economists say is already beginning to jump-start economic productivity and accelerate innovation.
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