Group spaces are quite prevalent in Germany from what I can tell. It makes total sense, in Germany. There is a bit of a difference in the USA though, where employers think you get productivity out of surveillance. We are not a very deeply thinking society, so it makes sense on the face of it that if you can see people working they are being productive. What we miss though, is that all the surveillance and lack of protections and benefits leads to massive amounts of squandered energies and effort on busy work. Busy work is work that is noise which serves a couple different types of purposes. It can make you look like you are working because you are working on something; whether it is relevant, important, or useful is totally irrelevant though. It can serve to make the system as inefficient as possible in order to assure job security. There are other purposes but those are some of the most prevalent.
At the core of the problem lies a misunderstanding of the problem that open plans are/were meant to address and can also be tied back to our problem with management models and incentives in our corporations and society.
It's a complicated matter that I can't do justice here, but if you have incompetent management trying to satisfy abusive demands from "investors" aka Wall Street, incompetent management leads to believe the problem of gaining ever more "productivity" out of a corporation and workers is solved by squeezing ever harder to get that last drop out. Which incompetent management and incentives lead them to believe can be done by putting everyone in a big open space so they feel surveilled and monitored and will do what they can to appear like a good worker by doing busy work and staying longer doing. This is largely all due to a system without employee protections where anyone in the 99% can be fired at a moment's notice because some executive screwed up or needs to be paid more.
It's more obviously presented as exercise metaphor, but the following post about "Why Productive People Always have Time to Exercise"http://riskology.co/sharpen-the-saw/ also applies to these types of circumstances.
On a side note: Why the hell doesn't HN support markdown? The site's already kind of embarrassingly styled, it's shameful that you can't even link somehow.