Shop Class and Craftwork

I just finished reading Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford, a philosopher and mechanic who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop. How he ended up in motorcycle repair is an interesting story. While he does go into specific details about engines and bike parts, what I found most interesting are his observations about education and craftsmanship. The book is aptly subtitled An Inquiry into the Value of Work.

The book begins by extolling the values of the “useful arts” which involve manual work with one’s own hands. Crawford discusses the psychic satisfaction and the cognitive demands when problem solving, contrasting the work of the craftsman-artist with the assembly-line worker. The latter is characterized as degrading, mindless and lacking in pleasure. Crawford makes a connection between the Smith-Hughes Act (1917) and the rise of vocational education to the “error” of separating blue-collar and white-collar work into the mindless and mental respectively. Children with stronger academic capabilities (often correlated with higher socio-economic status) were tracked away from the “lower” trades and into the “higher” educational track – College.

This “separation of thinking and doing” (the title of Chapter 2 in Crawford’s book) traces the degradation of blue-collar work to the rise of “scientific management” popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 20^th century. Once the worker’s tasks have been decomposed into parts, the most efficient sequence of motions can be optimized thereby turning assembly line workers into the first robots. Here Crawford argues is where “the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy.” I always wondered why the word compensation was used for “extra administrative tasks” in the workplace. Given my dislike of being a mindless paper-pushing cog in the administrative complex, I now see that this compensates for the less-than-satisfying work.

Crawford makes the very good point that the same thing is happening in white-collar work. The popularity of the comic strip Dilbert is a testament to the degradation of the office worker in his or her cubicle. In the quest for efficiency, automization, “cover-your-butt” bureaucracy, “best practices”, we have gone down the same robotic road. Crawford quotes Barbara Garson describing how “extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity”. The title of Garson’s book is The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past. Crawford writes that “genuine knowledge work comes to be concentrated in an ever-smaller elite… we must take a cold-eyed view of knowledge work… reject the image that [it] lifts all boats… more likely [leads to] a rising sea of clerkdom.” I think of the vast complexity of a university, the constant hiring of more staff to do the ever-increasing clerical work, and it seems a tad ironic that the university is in the “knowledge” business.

Crawford’s critique of corporate culture is stinging when it comes to the rise of “teamwork”. Why are there “managers”? Because they are there to manage corporate culture, using “anthropological finesse, not [taking] the form of detached analysis, but rather of charismatic world making (with executive pay to match).” This matches very well to the pronouncements of the gurus in the tech world and the innovators and disruptors of the higher education world. “Buying-in” to “the mission” of the organization becomes paramount. Teambuilding activities are all the rage. Everyone in the team is a valuable contributor and undergoes “360 review” as the hierarchy is supposedly flattened. I couldn’t quite articulate why these things irked me until Crawford laid it out in his plain and direct prose. The scary thing is that to some extent I have imbibed part of corporate culture and I occasionally find myself using similar strategies to motivate others.

Should we go back to the craftsman apprenticeship model of the middle ages? I don’t think so. Living in an information-rich era has changed the way we learn and we need to find ways to retain the “craft” nature of work instead of allowing the modern industrial complex to lead us to ever-increasing mindlessness. Maximizing efficiency and profits should not be the goal of mankind. We should be more homo sapiens than homo economicus optimus. Crawford does not articulate a religious point of view, but some of his points come remarkably close to some Christian notions of how the “ideal work” of mankind should be characterized.

Reading Crawford’s book made me want to sign up for a shop class. I never took one in school, having been shunted into the “white collar work” stream of classes. There’s a reason I’m a theoretical chemist – I have lousy hands in lab. But on the rare occasion that I “fix” something in the house (and my abilities are very limited), I do feel a sense of accomplishment and well-being! Thanks to internet videos, I can actually do some of these things without being an apprentice craftsman. A couple of days after reading the book, the local community college system sent its list of classes. Usually I just recycle the booklet, but this time I perused the list. I could learn automotive repair, plumbing, metal sheet work, and more. Then I thought about all my daytime “knowledge work” and I just wasn’t sufficiently motivated to sign up for a night class. But I’m pleased to say that I do view teaching as a craft, and find it exciting, creative and fun! It’s indeed a blessing to enjoy one’s vocation.