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

by Matthew B. Crawford

We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourse...

If different human types are attracted to different kinds of work, the converse is also true: the work a man does forms him.

I find the idea of “disposition” useful in thinking about the effect the work has had on me, and on other mechanics I have known. Or is it that people of a certain disposition are drawn to the work?

I spent about a week on the project, and only charged him for the materials, which came to fifty-six dollars. I remember the amount because I was embarrassed at how much it had added up to. Should I not charge for the jar of stain, since there was quite a bit of it left? I decided I would charge him for the whole jar, and felt a rush of boldness in making this decision. This wasn’t the commune, this was business, and that leftover stain was my profit.

The shoelace might well break before it comes undone. He was speaking of a mathematical string, which is an idealized shoelace, but the idealization seemed to have replaced any actual shoelace in his mind as he got wrapped up in some theoretical problem. As a teenager, this substitution wasn’t yet clear to me as such.

This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration .7 I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.

You can quadruple the amount of horsepower a VW engine makes, or even more, if you need it to last only for a single race and are willing to spend absurd amounts of time and money building it.

Scrawled above the dingy parts counter at Donsco was a slogan: “Speed costs. How fast do you want to spend?”

The sheer perversity of making a VW go fast attracts a different human type than the type who is attracted to cars that are supposed to go fast. Chas clearly had a kink in his soul, and suddenly the world was a less lonely place for me.

Match-porting is one small part of what is called “blue printing” an engine: by careful measuring and hand fitting, the motor can be brought to a higher level of precision than is achieved when you take for granted the fit of aftermarket parts—for example, these intake manifolds—where there is no consistent engineering intention among the various manufacturers. Someone building a high-performance motor combines parts from different makers, so he has to be something of an engineer himself, often modifying parts; there is nobody else in charge of making it all work together properly.

To actually reproduce the pattern of light hitting your eye with a pencil seems like it should be a straightforward matter, but it is extraordinarily difficult. It seems to require that you short-circuit your normal mode of perception, which is less data-driven than concept-driven. We have an idea of the thing that, in a sense, pre-constitutes the thing for us, prior to sensual experience.

The forensic efforts of a skilled engine builder are thus a kind of human archaeology.

the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.”

Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.

Stepping outside the intellectually serious circle of my teachers and friends at Chicago into the broader academic world, it struck me as an industry hostile to thinking.

I had an unspoken understanding with the resident janitor, Dwayne, based on my inexact accounting for the beer I kept under the stairway and his failure to notice the open container of highly inflammable solvent, next to the beer.

So I lie and tell people a job took ten hours when it might have taken twenty. To compensate, I also tell them my shop rate is forty dollars per hour, but it usually works out to more like twenty. I feel like an amateur, no less now than when I started, but through such devices I hope to appear like somebody who knows what he is doing, and bills accordingly.

The more breathing room I can get from the owner—the more I raise his expectations for the bill—the more discretion I have in dealing with the bike itself. When you are fixing bikes that are not worth the money it takes to get them running right, the tension I mentioned between your fiduciary responsibility to the bike owner and your metaphysical responsibility to the bike itself is especially acute.

It just seems flatly impossible. You persist only because you know it must have been put on at some point in the past, and in theory every sequence of moves ought to be reversible. But if you’re me, at least, eventually your mind starts to doubt even such unassailable logic, and you begin to entertain the idea of cutting the frame away and welding it back later. I get so focused on the problem at hand that, outside my tunnel vision, a wholesale insanity begins to sprout in support of my immediate goal.

At this point I’d exhausted my entire lexicon of “motherfucker” -based idioms, and was running perilously low on slurs against the Japanese.

In some journals, including Nature Genetics, articles begin with an abstract written by the author, but even in such cases I was to write my own. Nor was I simply to reword the author’s abstract, as I learned in my initial week of training. Rather, I was to read the entire article and distill it afresh. The rationale offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by IAC’s product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material.

I tried to absent myself, the better to meet my quota, but the writing of an abstract, unlike the pulling of levers on an assembly line, cannot be done mindlessly. The material I was reading was too demanding, and what it demanded was to be given its due. To not do justice to an author who had poured his life into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

My efforts to read, comprehend, and write abstracts of twenty-eight academic journal articles per day required me to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down.

The quota demanded that I suppress as well my sense of responsibility to others—not just the author of an article but also the hapless users of InfoTrac, who might naïvely suppose that ...

I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, internal to the abstract, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article. In this sense, I was not held to an external, objective standard.

A good part of the job, then, consists of “a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especially oneself,” according to Calhoun. This gives rise to the art of talking in circles. Mutually contradictory statements are made to cohere by sheer forcefulness of presentation, allowing a manager to “stake out a position on every side of an issue.

Such concerns can be rendered appropriate, and higher-level management support secured, only by demonstrating how they contribute to profits. Not because the higher-level managers are heartless, but because such a demonstration provides everyone needed cover. In fact, a lower-level manager may need only to put on a performance of hardheadedness before her superiors, and produce the stage props of a profit-maximizing calculation (graphs, charts, and so on). Unless she has these skills of the corporate dramatist, she is unlikely to get the official cover she needs to do the right thing by her workers.

the diversity of dispositions,

What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?

The irrelevance of what you actually learn (or don’t) in school for job performance is hard to square with a technocratic view of the economy, which is invariably coupled with a sunny presumption of meritocracy.

Workers must identify with the corporate culture, and exhibit a high level of “buy-in” to “the mission.”

The division between private life and work life is eroded, and accordingly the whole person is at issue in job performance evaluations.

The author says her “favorite” moment is when “the group becomes paralyzed. No one person wants to be the person to come off contact—so they don’t take risks.” Having induced this group paralysis, she then sets out to re-create the spirit of innovation and charismatic rule breaking, now as a function of the Team. The most innovative groups question the “standing” starting point of the exercise. They notice that it’s hard to make the switch from standing to the kneeling position that is required to make the last move to the floor and keep in contact with the dowel. So they ask if they can start from a kneeling position. I generally approve this as I feel that the group is learning and questioning some unspoken rules.28 So here is a group of people on their knees, finally. It was their own idea, erupting from the collective genius of the Team. Together, these mavericks develop the force of personality to “question some unspoken rules”—for example, that old canard that it’s better to stand on your own two feet.

Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us.

authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative a...

For his part, the team member has no solid ground on which he can make a stand against this kind of moral training. He can’t say, as the carpenter can to the foreman, “it’s plumb and level—check it yourself.” His only defense is a kind of self-division—he armors himself with the self-referential irony supplied to him by pop culture, pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.

In most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect. His education prepares him for this; it is an education for working in a large organization, and he has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise. This predisposes him to be deferential to the authority exercised in the organization (however tinged with irony this deference may be), since the organization is that which gives meaning to his work.

The difference is that on such a crew, you have grounds for knowing your own worth independently of others, and it is the same grounds on which others will make their judgments. Either you can bend conduit or you can’t, and this is plain. So there is less reason to manage appearances. There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.

Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character.

The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it.

On a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard among those who recognize one another as peers, even across disciplines.

There is a sort of friendship or solidarity that becomes possible at work when people are open about differences of rank, and there are clear standards.

The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: “knowing that,” as opposed to “knowing how.”

We take a very partial view of knowledge when we regard it as the sort of thing that can be gotten while suspended aloft in a basket. This is to separate knowing from doing,

The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice.

Ohm’s law is something explicit and rulelike, and is true in the way that propositions are true. Its utter simplicity makes it beautiful; a mind in possession of this equation is charmed with a sense of its own competence. We feel we have access to something universal, and this affords a pleasure that is quasi-religious, perhaps. But this charm of competence can get in the way of noticing things; it can displace, or perhaps hamper the development of, a different kind of knowledge that may be difficult to bring to explicit awareness, but is superior as a practical matter. Its superiority lies in the fact that it begins with the typical rather than the universal, so it goes more rapidly and directly to particular causes, the kind that actually tend to cause ignition problems.

Bad argument

Such a cognitive theory, if sound, would justify the alienation of judgment from skilled professionals when things get too complex. But, in fact, it is often the case that when things get really hairy, you want an experienced human being in control.

sometimes the system gives the wrong trouble code. Being off by one digit might give a diagnosis of “System fuel too lean on bank one” (P0171), that is, an air-fuel mixture that is too much air and not enough fuel on the first bank of cylinders, when in fact the problem is “System fuel too rich on bank two” (P0172). An experienced mechanic can tell too lean from too rich by looking at the spark plugs; they will look blanched white in the first case and sooty in the second. Representing states of the world in a merely formal way, as “information” of the sort that can be coded, allows them to be entered into a logical syllogism of the sort that computerized diagnostics can solve. But this is to treat states of the world in isolation from the context in which their meaning arises, so such representations are especially liable to nonsense.

Computerized diagnostics don’t so much replace the mechanic’s judgment as add another layer to the work, one that requires a different sort of cognitive disposition.