White-collar sweatshops

Gottlieb traces how law firms in the 1980s abandoned partnership models for industrial efficiency, transforming professional work from craft to billable-hour production. The essay illuminates a broader pattern: how technology and financial pressure reshape knowledge work into something closer to manufacturing, despite the pretense of creative collaboration. For product directors this is essential context for understanding why so many organisations feel soulless despite good intentions — the structural forces that turn craft into process are stronger than individual choice. The analysis connects directly to Conway's Law and the library's work on how organisational structure shapes output, but from the worker experience rather than the systems perspective.