Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

by Matthew B. Crawford

Put more neutrally, the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it (kind of like origami). The factory service manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, but they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you have to develop your own decision tree for the particular circumstances. The problem is that at each node of this new tree, your own un quantifiable risk aversion introduces ambiguity. There comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt.

What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.

When you do the math problems at the back of a chapter in an algebra textbook, you are problem solving. If the chapter is entitled “Systems of two equations with two unknowns,” you know exactly which methods to use. In such a constrained situation, the pertinent context in which to view the problem has already been determined, so there is no effort of interpretation required. But in the real world, problems don’t present themselves in this predigested way; usually there is too much information, and it is difficult to know what is pertinent and what isn’t. Knowing what kind of problem you have on hand means knowing what features of the situation can be ignored.

I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our making.4 These limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that they are external to the self.

The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing. A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption. Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality.

The market ideal of Choice by an autonomous Self seems to act as a kind of narcotic that makes the displacing of embodied agency go smoothly, or precludes the development of such agency by providing easier satisfactions. The growing dependence of individuals in fact is accompanied by ever more shrill invocations of freedom in theory, that is, in the ideology of consumerism.

Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility.

Thirty years ago, Collins pointed out that higher education serves a signaling function: it rewards and certifies the display of middle-class self-discipline. But what sort of discipline is required of white-collar workers these days? Once upon a time, the passing of examinations, meeting of course deadlines, and disciplined study for the sake of mastering a body of knowledge broadcast a willingness to conform to organizational discipline, and displayed the dispositions needed to develop competence in a bureaucracy. But the new antibureaucratic ideal of the flexible organization puts quite different demands on people, requiring the cultivation of a different sort of self. As Brown and Scase point out, in the new dispensation the whole person is at issue; one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well-defined set of competencies tied to the fulfillment of specific organizational ends. What the recruiters are looking for is a manner of personal comportment, a collection of psychological and social aptitudes, that is difficult to codify. (This makes sense for a workplace that has little in the way of objective standards such as one finds in a machine shop.) Accordingly, the credentialism of higher education can continue its signaling function only if the official items appearing on a transcript are supplemented with extracurricular items that signal the possession of a complete personality package.22 Students and their parents seem to understand this. An importa...

The idea that culture can be managed entails a reversal of the usual idea of culture. “Culture, as social scientists use the term, is a mostly subterranean force, taken for granted, assumed, inarticulate. We are born into cultures, which teach us how to see, speak, and think. It is only through great effort that we can bring our own culture into view and then only partially. Corporate cultures, however, can be diagnosed, evaluated, and altered.”24 Managers needed to become anthropologists. But above all they needed to become founders of cultures, like a Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. That is, their anthropological finesse would not take the form of detached analysis, but rather of charismatic world making (with executive pay to match).

The analogy suggests that when the job changes in a way that makes it more odious, it is not due to decisions that have been made by somebody, it is due to inexorable laws of nature. The very idea of responsibility is shown to be untenable.

Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job—an autonomous good that is visible to all—then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter’s level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.

The educational goal of self-esteem seems to habituate young people to work that lacks objective standards and revolves instead around group dynamics. When self-esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments.

Our ability to make good judgments is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation.

The digital multimeter, together with the procedure in the book, present an image of precision and determinacy that is often false. What the procedure in fact demands of you is a real effort of interpretation, one that is nowhere acknowledged in the service manual.

Murray adds that “the responsibility of working there was too great . . . to be entrusted to people who weren’t painfully aware of how badly things can go wrong.”

The sense that your judgments are becoming truer is part of the experience of being fully engaged in what you are doing; it is a feeling of joining a world that is independent of yourself, with the help of another who is further along.