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
I like this work, don't have any problems with the author's literary style or his philosophical meanderings and mostly agree with him. One area I didn't understand or couldn't agree with him is his approach of contrasting between shop works vs "new economy", experience vs knowledge arrived at through other means and so on. One could get the same level of intrinsic satisfaction - that the author gets through metal work - in any area of choosing. As an example, I've worked with people who run small boutique software development firms who spend inordinate amounts of time optimizing and finetuning their output and watch with spark in his eyes as the system stands up to a massive load test. Granted, most developers--at least in the geographic market I work--don't have any idea about the relation of their code with the machine that it runs on, let alone understand its relation to the 'world around us', but that, I believe, would be true of assembly line workers as well. Universal vs particular, Ohm's law vs the quirks in the real world - can you really knife it that way? both aspects of knowledge (empirical and deductive) feed each other to arrive closer to what we consider to be the truth. The supporting argument/example that the steam engines were built around the time the caloric theory of heat hit a dead end doesn't give any validity to that style of thinking. Another point where I cannot agree with the author is when he talks about how modern corporations "celebrate potential" rather than "accomplishments" while hiring graduates out of college. I don't see anything wrong with that. If the author is hiring someone for his shop, would he prefer someone who is smart, flexible and able to quickly learn the idiosyncrasies of different bikes, or would he go with someone who knows Honda in and out, but relatively slow to pick up things? Sure, it's a context dependent decision, but it's easy to see as much value in the former profile as in the latter, if not more. Note that in the "New Economy", the life span of a particular skillset is much smaller than what used to be; so a generalist (with a sound knowledge of universals) who can quickly take a deep dive into a particular speciality, and come back up again to do it all over again would certainly be in demand. This is not to say that there is no role for specialists; there very much is. There are multiple themes running through this book: it talks about the beauty of doing things with your own hand, about the ills of consumerism, globalization, credential focussed learning, managerial culture, multi-culturalism and so on. Valid points and I found myself nodding in agreement to many of them. Since the author is seemingly an out-and-out empiricist, he has explained it within the context of what he has experienced, but what applies to shopcraft applies to other areas as well, new economy included.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2011 by Rajeev Pokkyarath