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

by Matthew B. Crawford

While manufacturing jobs have certainly left our shores to a disturbing degree, the manual trades have not. If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help. Because they are in China.

The wad of cash in my pants feels different than the checks I cashed in my previous job. Following a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, I took a job as executive director of a Washington “think tank.” I was always tired, and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all—what tangible goods or useful services was I providing to anyone? This sense of uselessness was dispiriting. The pay was good, but it truly felt like compensation,

As a rough working formula, we might say that craftsmanship, as an ideal, provides the standards, but that in a mass-market economy such as ours, it is the tradesman who exemplifies an economically viable way of life, one that is broadly available and provides many of the same satisfactions we associate with craftsmanship.

We often hear of the need for an “upskilling” of the workforce, to keep up with technological change. I find the more pertinent issue to be: What sort of personality does one need to have, as a twenty-first-century mechanic, to tolerate the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines?

Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches.

The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.

This seems to capture the kind of iterated self-criticism, in light of some ideal that is never quite attained, whereby the craftsman advances in his art. You give it your best, learn from your mistakes, and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head.

I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in an industrial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.

the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.

I once built a mahogany coffee table on which I spared no expense of effort. At that time I had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet I imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s work. I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life, the defects in its execution as well as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface textured enough that memory and sentiment might cling to it, in unnoticed accretions.

The repairman has to begin each job by getting outside his own head and noticing things; he has to look carefully and listen to the ailing machine.

Street-level work that disrupts the infrastructure (the sewer system below or the electrical grid above) brings our shared dependence into view. People may inhabit very different worlds even in the same city, according to their wealth or poverty. Yet we all live in the same physical reality, ultimately, and owe a common debt to the world.

The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new.

Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the artisan, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good.

Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, and with the educational regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers—pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills.

The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined.

In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future.

Through pragmatic engagement, the carpenter learns the different species of wood, their fitness for such needs as load bearing and water holding, their dimensional stability with changes in the weather, and their varying resistance to rot and insects.

The surgeon’s judgment is simultaneously technical and deliberative, and that mix is the source of its power.”13 This could be said of any manual skill that is diagnostic, including motorcycle repair.

This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure.

You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. If the motorcycle is thirty years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business twenty years ago, its proclivities are known mostly through lore.

The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch, if each of ten screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments can cloud your thinking. 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).

Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. 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.

“think tank” is an answer that, at best, buys you a few seconds when someone asks what you do and you try to figure out what it is that you in fact do,

The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not.

Frank Levy makes a complementary argument. He puts the issue not in terms of whether a service can be delivered electronically or not, but rather whether the service is itself rules-based or not. Until recently, he writes, you could make a decent living doing a job that required you to carefully follow instructions, such as preparing tax returns. But such work is subject to attack on two fronts—some of it goes to offshore accountants and some of it is done by tax preparation software, such as TurboTax. The result is downward pressure on wages for jobs based on rules.

The central culprit in Braverman’s account is “scientific management,” which “enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.”

A man whose needs are limited will find the least noxious livelihood and work in a subsistence mode,

trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking.

Standardized tests remove a teacher’s discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.

It seems to be our liberal political instincts that push us in this direction of centralizing authority; we distrust authority in the hands of individuals. With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility.

Robert Jackall offers a more plausible account of the role these teenaged and immigrant Einsteins are playing at Best Buy. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with corporate managers, he concludes that one of the principles of contemporary management is to “push details down and pull credit up.”17 That is, avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit. To this end, upper management deals only with abstractions, not operational details. If things go well: “Finding cross-marketing synergies in the telecommunications and consumer electronics divisions has improved our strategic outlook heading into the fourth quarter.” If things go badly: “Change the Vonage display? That was the kid’s idea. What’s his name, Bapu or something. Jeezus, these immigrants.”

According to this hippie theory, the personal grooming habits of Albert Einstein are highly significant—how else does one identify a “bizarre maverick operating at the bohemian fringe”?

creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra).

So what advice should one give to a young person? If you have a natural bent for scholarship; if you are attracted to the most difficult books out of an urgent need, and can spare four years to devote yourself to them, go to college.

Consider the case of a man who is told his car is not worth fixing. He is told this not by a mechanic but by a clipboard-wielding “service representative” at the dealership. Here is a layer of bureaucracy that makes impossible a conversation about the nitty-gritty of the situation. This man would gladly hover around the mechanic’s bay and be educated about his car, but this is not allowed. The service representative represents not so much mechanical expertise as a position taken by an institution, and our spirited man is not sure he trusts this institution

he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging. Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry , through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff—he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them—and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him.

Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle?

It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.

Logic, like physics, is something hard and unyielding. The interface is meant to be “intuitive,” meaning that it introduces as little psychic friction as possible between the user’s intention and its realization. It is such resistance that makes one aware of reality as an independent thing.

There are now layers of collectivized, absentee interest in your motor’s oil level, and no single person is responsible for it.

This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Master the Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system. Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.

One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what? To her teacher, perhaps, but this is incidental rather than primary—there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music that can be expressed mathematically.

In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian, one submits to things that have their own intractable ways.

The point is to sell a line of accessories, which can be combined in so many ways that one such combination is sure to capture “your unique personality.” Notice the elision from agency (dude with welding helmet) to Personality, that is, the expressive Self, whose autonomy is realized in, indeed simply is, the array of Choice that lies open before him or her. But choosing is not creating, however much “creativity” is invoked in such marketing.

In picking out your bear’s features, or the options for your Warrior or Scion, you choose among the predetermined alternatives. Each of these alternatives offers itself as good. A judgment of its goodness has already been made by some dimly grasped others, otherwise it wouldn’t be offered as an option in the catalogue. The consumer is disburdened not only of the fabrication, but of a basic evaluative activity.

A good diamond cutter has a different disposition than a good dog trainer. The one is careful, the other commanding. Different kinds of work attract different human types, and we are lucky if we find work that is fitting.

There is much talk of “diversity” in education, but not much accommodation of the kind we have in mind when we speak about the quality of a man, or woman: the diversity of dispositions.