Workplaces in the Cinema

Representations of the workplace are an important aspect of popular culture. Genres from the thriller to the situation comedy are played out against a backdrop of offices, schools, hospitals, factories, police stations and other workplaces. Attention to the representation of the workplace is of central importance in the visual media, especially film and television, as they require either the construction of studio sets or the use of real locations. Such locations leave less to the imagination of the audience than is the case with non-visual media. In many cases the film and television sets form an unobtrusive background against which human drama can unfold. In a few cases the sets dominate the action; an example is Jacques Tati's Playtime of 1967 which has a minimal plot but used a specially constructed, and very expensive, set to convey an impression of a disorientating modernist business district (Neumann 1996). Whether the set dominates the plot or not the representation of the workplace in popular culture may provide a route for facilities management research to explore popular beliefs and understanding of the workplace, a realm that is not easy to enter through more conventional research approaches.