Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
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A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands “This is a deep exploration of craftsmanship by someone with real, hands-on knowledge. The book is also quirky, surprising, and sometimes quite moving.” —Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman Called “the sleeper hit of the publishing season” by The Boston Globe, Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a “knowledge worker,” based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world. Read more
Publisher : Penguin Books
Publication date : April 27, 2010
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 246 pages
ISBN-10 : 0143117467
ISBN-13 : 69
Item Weight : 6.4 ounces
Reading age : 18 years and up
Dimensions : 7.66 x 5.3 x 0.69 inches
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Top Amazon Reviews
President Obama is on board with the idea that everyone should go to college. For someone who teaches college, that should be welcome news. I'm not so sure. I worry about whether the jobs they were hoping to get will be there when they get out. I also worry about all the "conventional wisdom" they get that will harm their career chances. Matthew Crawford begins his book decrying the disappearance of shop classes in the public schools as emblematic of a culture that seeks to "hide the works" or become detached from the operation and maintenance of the world of things on which we rely. He cites cars with electronic monitoring systems rather than oil level dipsticks and where the engine components are hidden under sheaths. It raises the issue in my mind that a country that disparages practical and essential work will get the plumbing, auto reliability, and electricity it deserves. Do we really want Moe, Larry, or Curly as plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics? It is the final stage in which much of the industrial capacity of the U.S. has moved off shore and jobs are disappearing. So, schools and colleges are preparing their students to become knowledge workers....oh, but wait....aren't those jobs being sent to India where they are also preparing their students to become computer programmers, accountants, call center debuggers; at much lower wages. I'll bet those Indian students are a lot better at math than ours. Matthew Crawford wryly notes that doctors, dentists, and motorcycle mechanic's jobs can't be moved off shore because of the need for face to face contact. So not only are the assembly line jobs going overseas but so are the "Dilbert" jobs. What's next? Perhaps, according to Crawford, it's time to take a second look at the Arts & Crafts movement of 100 years ago. Once again, we should return to work that is satisfying as well as securely situated. This was part of the progressive movement against modernism, according to Crawford. (I think the Progressive movement was motivated by revulsion against the corrupt excesses of Gilded age politics.) Crawford also outlines the various business workplace movements such as the older Fredrick Taylor's Scientific Management and the newer "team building" approach to supervision. He describes the modern workplace as becoming a psychological minefield, with no objective standards of performance. He also talks about corporate efforts to take the real decision making out of the work and putting in fake or cosmetic choice making. His arguments on these issues resonate with my experience and what my friends tell me. Part of the appeal of this book, for me, is the very eclectic life and childhood of Matthew Crawford. He was raised in a commune in Berkeley in the late 60's. While there, was taught to be an electrician as a child. As a teen, he became a mostly self taught mechanic working on his own Volkswagen in the back of Berkeley speed shops. He received a BS in Physics and a PhD. in Political Philosophy. He worked for a Washington D.C. think tank and grew disillusioned with his work. His current business is a kind of marginal business fixing very distressed motorcycles. My background and childhood was eclectic too although not quite that eclectic. I've always been drawn to people who were able to survive on the margins. A successful but marginal business I remember fondly was Don Brown's Jazz Man Record Shop in Santa Monica, California. He sold used 78 records, mostly Jazz, Swing, Blues, and Country. He conducted auction newsletters as well as selling them in his store. He also sold 33 1/3 LP reissue records of music from that era. He was able to pay the bills and live a modest middle class life style. He also had a radio program called the Cobweb Corner on KCRW at Santa Monica College. Don had mail order customers from all around the world in those days before the internet. Jazz Man Record Shop was a great gathering place for 78 collectors like the Speed Shops that Crawford talks about in his Volkswagen days in Berkeley. People on the margins are more interesting than most businesses, which if successful, are usually boring. What is essential to any business, more than anything else is profit. Without a sufficient profit, the business dies. Unfortunately, Don's business was more interesting than profitable and when the demand for commercial rents soared in the 1980's in the West L.A. Santa Monica area, he was in trouble. When his lease ran out he was outbid by a Greek Restaurant. Whether or not greed is good is not the issue; not enough profit, no business. I think the Shop Class as Soulcraft falters somewhat toward the end. Crawford calls for "progressive republicanism" as a solution to avoiding the actual "Dilbert" workplace and having your job outsourced. I can only guess at what he means. He worries about corporate power but has little to say about government power. He may see government as a counter balance to corporate power but doesn't explicitly say so. I think the issue of corporate power is irrelevant to his or Don Brown's situation. Crawford's motorcycles are the ones the dealers don't want to fix; Don Brown's record buyers weren't even on the record companies radar. Government regulatory power does not help small businesses, and often actually does great harm. I don't know about Berkeley, but in coastal Southern California, the California clean air act put the speed shops out of business in the late 1970's-early 1980's. Most of the performance equipment became illegal to sell in California. The auto manufacturers had the money and resources to get their cars certified in California but the small manufacturers of the speed equipment did not. The Air Quality Management Board threatened to shut down all of the small barbecue rib joints in South Central Los Angeles because their smoke was a violation of the pollution standards. It was a real threat until one of the oil companies stepped in and either paid their pollution credits or donated scrubber technology (I have forgotten which.) When government regulates business, big, profitable businesses usually have the money and the power to shape the regulations. They can hire the lawyers either from the agency or from the congressional staffs who wrote the legislation. They can remind their representatives in Congress that the regulations might result in the loss of 10,000 jobs. That usually gets attention. "Too big to fail", becomes the cry. In a more recent example, when the government bailed out Chrysler and GM (it was really the UAW that was bailed out), it was the small town car dealers who took the hit. They were left naked by the government. We've had 100 years of Progressive era political reform, which I believe has ended with McCain's Presidential campaign. He followed the McCain-Feingold law, and Obama said that he would and then did not. The issue was of no consequence to the voters. In any event, the Progressive reforms have largely failed in taking money and corporate power out of politics. Crawford doesn't address another problem: runaway legalism. Runaway legalism is sucking the guts out of our civic institutions. Girls are getting kicked out of school for having an aspirin in their purse. A little boy brings a cub scout knife to school (to eat his lunch) gets sent to reform school. Zero tolerance programs take decision making out of the hands of employees and the source is not corporate power but trying to solve every problem with a judicial sledgehammer. That said, if Crawford actually means a return just to the Arts and Crafts elements of the Progressive movement, I think that is a good idea right now. Much like Matthew Crawford's father and his mathematical formula for getting a knot out of a shoelace, our neo-Keynesians are applying their abstract macroeconomic mathematical tools to the economy and it doesn't seem to be getting down to you and me. That was also my experience in the 1970's. Therefore, we will need the mental tools of the Arts and Crafts movement to follow Justice Brandeis's advice and "tend to our own garden" (as quoted from Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man.) This review is too long, but the book left me full of many more things to write about. I gave it five stars not because I agree with everything he said but because it caused me to think about many things in the world of work I hadn't thought about in some time.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2009 by Richard M. Rollo
This could easily be the most important book a parent or young adult reads this year. Matt Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft touched a chord with me. Both his life and his book are a rebuke to the assumptions which govern modern ideas about work, economics, self-worth, and happiness. Crawford would seem to have lived the American Dream right into his twenties. He finished his formal education (which, to judge by the breadth of references to literature and philosophy in the book, wasn't shabby) and was quickly hired by a Washington "think tank". Any young, aggressive climber would recognize this as a coveted place from which to launch of career. But where others would see a rapid ascent up the social pyramid, Crawford sensed emptiness. He left to work in a motorcycle repair shop, where he got his hands dirty, fixed bikes, and used his brain. Where others might see "mere" manual labor, he learned the value of a tangible skill. He now shares with readers his thoughts on this value, how it is vanishing from modern society, and the implications for us as a people. Crawford traces the evolution of shop class, its intended and unintended consequences, and its subsequent rapid retreat from our schools. He lays out the historical transition from individual craftsman to interchangeable piece of a human assembly line during the industrial revolution. Much more frighteningly, he reviews how the same approach is well underway in the "white collar" information economy. Whether one has lived the absurdities of cubicle farms first hand or only through Dilbert, it is not hard to see how the modern, homogenized college prep education and liberal arts degree leaves a modern worker predisposed to try to fit as a cog in a modern information assembly line. Crawford taps a fundamental part of the psyche as he reminds us of the inherent pride in being able to say "I fix bikes" when asked what he does for a living. Does a country really need every high school student to strive to attend college? Crawford makes the case that for many this will not only be a waste of time and money, but will ultimately land them in careers in which they have trouble seeing the value of what they do. Too many will, in the words my son once used to describe my job, "type on the computer and answer the phone". This advice may be coming at a perfect time. Although he claims it is not his goal to discuss the economics of working with one's hands, Crawford still makes a compelling case. As anyone who has called tech support can vouch, it is easy to transfer information economy jobs overseas. Helping someone deal with computer software can be done from India or the Philippines, but you can't hammer a nail over the internet. Crawford builds his case with anecdote, WSJ articles, and quotes from professors of economics. We may all make jokes about droopy overalls and plumber's crack, but there's a good chance that that plumber has better job prospects than many in the graduating college class of 2009. Plumbing may not be totally recession-proof, but there will always be a demand for a person who can fix a plugged drain. Still, the best parts of the book are where Crawford talks about what working with the hands can do for a person's mind and soul. When he describes the satisfaction of hearing the roar of a motorcycle leaving his shop, knowing that it arrived in the bed of a truck, it is clearly heartfelt. His desire to share that experience with others is palpable. Well, maybe that not exactly it. More the desire to say "there is another path" to the members of our society, in particular those about to shuffle off to college because that's simple what one does after high school. To them I would say: read his book, and consider how your brain might be engaged by the thoughtful application of experience and labor in a trade. Decide if the potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of college and years of debt really return enough value to your life to make college worthwhile. For the rest of us, now past that decision point, consider Crawford's thoughts on freedom and specialization. Maybe it _does_ make financial sense to contract out our projects and repairs, but does that necessarily make it wrong to try to fix things ourselves? Are we truly free if so much of the technology we depend on is beyond our ability to repair it? Perhaps Crawford has a point, that there is more to work than simple money and time. Maybe dirty hands will be good for our souls. "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlein
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Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2009 by David McCune