(2009-06-30) Crawford Shop Class Soulcraft

A review of Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work ISBN:1594202230 - Robert Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, Richard Sennett, The Craft, SmallWorld, etc. Crawford's book arrives just as a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the demands and rewards of the modern economy (New Economy) is coalescing into something like a Movement.

In 1998, the sociologist Richard Sennett published "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism," in which he saw soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits--endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens. Last year, in "The Craftsman" (Yale; $18), Sennett suggested that skilled labor could be a way to resist corporate mediocrity. The environmentalist writer Bill Mc Kibben proposed something similar in "DeepEconomy," which condemned the ruinous effects of endless economic expansion and urged readers to live smaller, simpler, more local lives. This artisanal revival has been particularly pronounced among foodies, thanks in part to the writer Michael Pollan, who helped popularize an American variant of the Italian culinary-agrarian movement known as Slow Food... After a few unhappy months at a Washington think tank, he quit to start his repair shop, Shockoe Moto, which is, these days, his most important credential. He writes about fixing motorcycles as an extension of philosophical investigation, a form of problem-solving that helps him understand Heidegger's theory of skillful coping. He says, too, that fixing bikes has given him "a place in society," as well as an "economically viable" job that won't evaporate or get moved overseas. He more or less promises that if you get trained in skilled labor--as a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter--you, too, can have all that. In his view, a cluster of cultural prejudices have steered many potential tradesmen into college, and then toward stultifying office jobs, which provide less satisfaction and less security than skilled manual labor, and sometimes less money... For him, the solution to big business is small business; he pits the work ethic and scrappy spirit of "small commercial enterprise" against the "softly despotic tendencies" of "outsized corporations."... The Victorian sage John Ruskin helped invent the modern cult of the craftsman: he was both an idealist and an aesthete, and he argued that miserable workers produced miserable work, and vice versa... The book is, in large part, a treatise on the joys and frustrations of manliness in a post-manly age. For Crawford, offices are profoundly feminized places. Reading a study about the sneaky ways in which managers assert their authority, he compares office life to "being part of a clique of girls," with a brutal hierarchy hidden beneath "the forms and manners of sisterhood." (Women)

But he can't feign much enthusiasm for, say, jobs in the health-care sector, no matter how satisfying or useful or plentiful those jobs might be. Really, he likes engines and building things and fixing things; his dedication to his shop is rooted in his admiration for his clients and for what he calls the "kingly sport" of motorcycle riding. In other words, his work is "useful" only insofar as it enables men to ride motorcycles--an activity that might fairly be described as useless. Crawford may have set out to write a book about work, but the book he actually wrote is about consumption... This nostalgic tribute is, of course, proof positive that hard jobs get much easier to love as soon as they start to disappear. If Crawford is correct about the decline of America's information economy, we should brace ourselves for a series of mournful, indignant books that eulogize the modern office--a highly networked, quasi-social, semi-autonomous refuge, where turn-of-the-century workers spent their pleasant days solving problems, exploring the limits of cooeperation, and wasting valuable company time on the Internet... In fact, such a book exists already. Alain De Botton shares Crawford's enthusiasm for skilled labor, but for him it's a much more flexible category. In "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" (Pantheon; $26), de Botton conducts a charming and unapologetically scattershot tour of global capitalism... Crawford's brief for skilled manual labor is rooted in firsthand experience: repairing motorcycles fills him with a "sense of agency and competence." But what would he say to the accountants in de Botton's book, who express "earnest pride in their Mastery of a labyrinthine craft"? Crawford decries our "ignorance of the world of artifacts," and mourns "the disappearance of tools from our common education." But he never quite gets around to explaining what counts as a tool, and why. The New Economy theorist Richard Florida once praised the innovative practices of Best Buy, the electronics retailer, by noting that, after a sales associate made a small but effective improvement to a display rack, the corporation implemented the change nationwide. Crawford finds the whole thing risible, but why shouldn't a retail display rack count as a tool, in Crawford's sense of the word?

Excerpt of Crawford's book.