I suspect that cubicles were more about social stratification than anything else. But cubicles were well out of fashion before I joined the work force, so that’s just speculation on my part.
The advantage of cubicles over offices is rearranging work groups on a semi-regular bases. You can create a new work group, assign a third of your employees to it, and then rearrange all of the cubes on the floor so that all of the work groups are together over a weekend.
Re-arranging cubicles at my office took a couple of people in the office a couple of hours to move a few cubicles around. Unplug the few cords going to the built-in power strips in the cubicles, unplug the cubicle switch, plug it all in at the new space. Cubicles snap apart and together without much effort.
Redoing walls requires paying architects to get plans, getting bids from contractors, getting approvals from building management and potentially opening our lease up to negotiations regarding tenant improvements, getting contractor's insurance vetted, getting walls demo'd, paying to get everything disposed of, paying for new materials and installation, repainting, getting electricians to redo electricity and lighting for the space, potentially doing new low voltage runs (don't want to run cat6 out the door) and getting proper permitting to do all of this.
I don't know how moving a cubicle gets to be more expensive when comparing how many more people are involved to rebuild and that one requires a couple of hours while the other takes days at best.
No attached cubicle furniture? No drops from the ceiling to install for network/power? No issues with tradesmen? No worries about injury or liability? Those cords- they just laying on the floor? That'd be a violation.
Sure you can horse some cubicles around in a tiny shop with no oversight. But to move a department on a floor is an extended effort either way - move out, teardown, rewiring, maintenance (cubicles wear out and parts are expensive), cleaning and reassembly including built-in furniture.
My point is simply, drywall is a tiny fraction of the cost of expensive portable reusable modular units. In an office movein I took part in, the drywall and doors took a week. Took longer to order, get delivery and drop power/network to the 4 cubicles in the back room later when we expanded there . And the cubicles cost as much for 4, as the entire buildout for the front 20 people.
The cubicles just branch off from a wall where they get their power and networking from. As long as one cubicle is close to another, all of them will have power and networking. All the parts of the cubicle are pretty light including the tabletops and cabinets so there wasn't much concern about injury and liability regarding handling those. Either way, furniture moving would be a concern with either move.
One way requires getting permits, bringing in tons of contractors, throws away a ton of old materials to be replaced with identical new materials, having insurance compared and validated, have new installations inspected and permitted by governments, and carries far more liability for the property management. One requires us to just unsnap some parts, carry over the light parts to another area, and snap it all together. Which seems like the obviously cheaper one?
Sure, I'll agree to some extent that upon an initial buildout the cost for individual offices versus high-end cubicle equipment may be a wash. However, the whole point of going with the cubicle equipment is that its then cheap to reconfigure. You don't need architects to draw plans to get certified by the city for how you snap together the cubicles. You do when you're making new offices.
Note: this is mostly about re-arranging in an already occupied space. Sure, if you're having to do a fresh build out where you're moving to things can definitely be up in the air. But I was just in an instance of re-arranging an existing space where we moved cubicles around and split offices with new walls/doors. Moving cubicles around was done in a couple of hours with $0 worth of new materials. Splitting the offices cost >$800/ea (not including employee productivity time towards managing this project) involving three different outside contractors, lease negotiations, permit requirements, and took a couple of weeks.
I knew a guy in college in the early '90s that had a summer job in the facilities department at State Farm's corporate headquarters. According to him, they would get work orders to upsize/downsize people's cubes overnight. He said that people would come in the next day either delighted or pissed. It sounds Orwellian enough to be true but I have no idea if it was.
Our teams are about the same size no matter what they are. You could have a standard “team area” template, say 8 offices and a collaboration area, repeated ad infinitum. In a re-org, just transplant teams to different team areas. The same layout still works.
