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

Make no mistake, this book is no easy read. It is a work of philosophy by a man who has a Ph.D. in the field. Still, anyone with even a basic familiarity with philosophy can read it with profit. If one lacked such preparation all they would need is a good dictionary. A friend of mine who is in a Ph.D. program recommended it to me when we were talking about my dream of restoring a muscle car on my own. What a great book! This work touches on many different areas: from education, to anthropology, to the nature of work itself. I found myself largely agreeing with it throughout, although I would quibble on a few of the details. For instance, if I am reading him correctly, the author seems to get the history of modern scientific method wrong, and seems ignorant of new work on the Middle Ages. For a philosopher this is problematic (how can a professional philosopher not thoroughly understand scholasticism and the history of monasticism?) but that is the state of the academy these days. I am no scholar, just a teacher with interests in music, history, theology, and philosophy. However, I recently had some life changing experiences that this book really speaks to. With our conversion to Catholicism, and the commensurate arrival of our third child, my wife informed me of the importance of her staying home with the children. She desired to home-school them to provide them with a classical education, and that meant changes in my life (I was a Catholic school teacher at the time). I had to leave my job in favor of public schools in order to make the necessary income for her to stay home, but that was only the first step. Expenses had to be cut, and drastically. I have had to find ways to save money and make it on one salary. The brakes were going on my car and I did NOT want to put the bill on my credit card. A guy at Church told me that disk brakes were easy. I should do them myself. I bought a couple of books, looked on-line for vehicle specific directions (Auto Zone has a GREAT website), bought a ratchet set and got to work. My friend was right. I replaced brakes and rotors and bought tools and books at it cost me less than it would have cost at a facility to get the brakes and rotors done for me. Plus, I was equipped to do it again and again. That was just the beginning. She wanted new cabinets in the kitchen. I had to build them. My mom's car needed new plugs and wires. I had to do it (she lives with us and is on a fixed income). I have had to make MAJOR changes, and the biggest one is that I rarely have the money to hire people. I am redoing the back porch. I have been amazed at how much I love the process of doing all this work myself. And, the thing is, I am truly happiest when I am doing this work. There is no time when I am more at peace than when I am trying to tackle a difficult new problem. My respect for the trades (and the men and women in them) has grown immensely. I am fortunate to love my job as well, but I really do believe that had I known what I know now about how fulfilling, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding the trades are, I might have skipped the four year degree and the masters, picked up automotive and electrical at the local community college, and saved myself and bundle and been just as fulfilled. This book put flesh on an idea and expressed competently knowledge that I had come across experientially. Had I the chance to do things differently I probably wouldn't, but if my son (or daughter) informs me that they love working on the car with me and would like to do it for a living, I will certainly encourage them in their vocation. Two years ago, my stupid snobbery might have prevented that. Also, this book clearly communicates why many of the electricians and mechanics I have met are some of the smartest people I have spoken to. In as much as I am in a position to do so, I will advocate from now on for a return of the manual crafts in the classroom. Any high school education that doesn't teach someone to work a little with wood, and little about their car, and a little about the plumbing in their house is really no education at all.

This book is primarily about restoring honor to the manual trades. Crawford writes about the “rich cognitive challenges and psychic nourishment” that come with “the experience of making things and fixing things.” It makes sense to start with some context about the author’s career path. “I started working as an electrician’s helper shortly before I turned fourteen… When I couldn’t get a job with my college degree in physics, I was glad to have something to fall back on, and went into business for myself.” Later, Crawford went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy. He took a job as executive director of a think tank, but he found the work dispiriting. “Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.” After only five months, he quit and opened a motorcycle repair shop. “Perhaps most surprising, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually.” “More than 90 percent of high school students ‘report that their guidance counselors encouraged them to go to college.’ … In this there is little accommodation of the diversity of dispositions, and of the fact that some very smart people are totally ill-suited both to higher education and to the kind of work you’re supposed to do once you have a degree. Further, funneling everyone into college creates certain perversities in the labor market.” “It was in the 1990s that shop class started to become a thing of the past, as educators prepared students to become ‘knowledge workers’ … Meanwhile, people in the trades are constantly howling about their inability to find workers.” Crawford writes about “the assembly line’s severing of the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution. Such a partition from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of white collar versus blue collar, corresponding to mental versus manual… Yet there is evidence to suggest that the new frontier of capitalism lies in doing to office work what was previously done to factory work: draining it of its cognitive elements.” A recurring theme is the “stupidification” of various things. “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet… Princeton economist Alan Binder… finds 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs to be potentially offshorable… MIT economist Frank Levy puts the issue not in terms of whether a service can be delivered electronically or not, but rather whether the service is itself rules-based or not.… Levy gestures toward an answer when he writes that ‘viewed from this rules-based perspective, creativity is knowing what to do when the rules run out or there are no rules in the first place. It is what a good auto mechanic does after his computerized test equipment says the car’s transmission is fine but the transmission continues to shift at the wrong engine speed.’” “The degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgments of practitioners with rule following… The crux of the idea of an intellectual technology is ‘the substitution of algorithms (problem-solving rules) for intuitive judgments.” “But, in fact, it is often the case that when things get really hairy, you want an experienced human being in control… An experienced mechanic can intuit what is wrong… The basic idea of tacit knowledge is that we know more than we can say, and certainly more than we can specify in a formulaic way.” “Some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.” “Often this sense making entails not so much problem solving as problem finding… The cognitive psychologists speak of ‘metacognition,’ which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate… The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.” “In the real world, problems do not present themselves unambiguously. 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.” “Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch. The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are expert, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way. This experience of failure tempers the conceit of mastery… Fixing things may be a cure for narcissism.” “Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility.” “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… On a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard among those who recognize one another as peers, even across disciplines… This is the basis of which his submission to judgments of a master feel ennobling rather than debasing… Clear standards provide the basis for the solidarity of the crew, as opposed to the manipulative social relations of the office ‘team.’” “Most people take pride in being good at something specific which happens through the accumulation of experience… You can’t buy entry to this world, you have to earn it” “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence [relieve man] of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on… His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous ‘self-esteem’ that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.” “It is common to locate one’s ‘true self’ in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursuing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful. The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest… On the other hand, there are vocations that seem to offer a tighter connection between life and livelihood.”

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

This book will pose difficulties for most American readers outside acadaemia, because it represents a squaring of the circle on which most of us have been taught to plot "liberal" and "conservative". Crawford is neither liberal nor conservative by the standards of contemporary American political discourse. Instead, he draws on elements of classical Marxist and related social critique to reach conclusions that are not so different to those espoused by what Rod Dreher calls "Crunchy Conservatives". This is because Crawford, like Dreher's crunchy cons, espouses values that have been deliberately distorted or discarded in the rise of US-style corporate capitalism: the elevation of personal agency, responsibility, and work-identity over passive consumption, disengagement, and the destruction of responsibility through "flexibility". This is a curious result: Marxists and American conservatives in agreement about something. It is understandable, however, if we go "back to the roots" of both viewpoints. Like Marx, Crawford is essentially a conservative, backward-looking utopian in rebellion against the dominant political economy of his day. Marx admired the pre-industrial agrarian/craftsman ideal of the unification of producer and product; Crawford's vision is of a Jeffersonian post-agrarian yeomanship rooted in the Stoic consciousness supposedly produced by the mechanical trades. Crawford and Marx both believe (rightly, I think) that political consciousness is to a certain degree "determined" by material conditions, i.e. the physical and sociological conditions of daily work. Marx, Crawford, and (one suspects) most crunchy cons would admire a universe in which the radical commodification of all aspects of human existence characteristic of contemporary capitalism has been eradicated, replaced by one in which most people can choose their work and become experts in it because it pleases them. Concerning solutions, these utopian logics diverge. Marx's, famously, was to predict the intensification of worker alienation as a prelude to revolution and the magical reconstitution of society and economy; his followers (e.g. Lenin) perfected political means to help this "ineluctable" historical process along (a task whose irony was lost on most of them). Crawford recommends a deliberate re-valorisation of the manual trades (although he invariably means the mechanical trades) in both physical and philosophical terms. The "crunchy cons", on the other hand, have no obvious solution to embrace: simultaneously alienated and held captive by a system of commodity production and a political economy they don't fully understand, they retreat into wistfulness and boutique environmentalism. All three viewpoints run up against the hard facts of power, and the almost limitless capacity of the "ruling class" - i.e. those who benefit from the evolving status quo - to manipulate it to its advantage. Crunchy cons cannot grasp that the rootsy, organic, self-responsible world to which they aspire was deliberately destroyed by the very system that their conservative political ideology helps preserve. Marx did not foresee that new forms of class domination could lie on the other side of proletarian revolution. And Crawford struggles to accept that his idiosyncratic vision cannot be generally realised within our globalised, hyper-commodified, corporate-dominated political economy. The truth is that things won't really work out very well if everyone is trying to be a mechanical technician of some sort. Crawford admirably outlines the deliberate attempt, in the first half of the 20th century, to engineer the destruction of the craftsman-mechanic, but he doesn't really come to terms with the difficulties (economic or political) inherent in reversing it. Indeed, one suspects that Crawford's acknowledged omission of any serious economic interrogation of his thesis is due to the obvious contradictions of trying to do so. We can't all be motorcycle mechanics because the world is made up of much more than motorcycles - especially the vintage type that only aficionados can afford to maintain. HAVING SAID ALL THAT, this is an absolutely wonderful book - one of the most powerful and resonant American polemics written in the last 20 years. It is beautifully written and often hilariously ironic. It is inspiring - not because it offers a way out of the contradictions of our commodified, stratified existence, but because it suggests an entry point for those trying to find one: finding common ground between those on the right and left who are divided only by the demagoguery that passes for political discourse in the USA.

Crawford, himself college-educated and over-educated, made the explicit choice of leaving the white collar world to work with his hands. This book explains that choice as a fulfilling new direction in his career, when so many might dismiss it as failure to come to terms with the modern business world. This sprawling essay touches on many points. Among other things, Crawford notes that many jobs inherently resist outsourcing - anything that requires physical interaction with a physical object, whether carpentry, cuisine, motorcycle repair, surgery, or any of many other skilled activities. These are essential trades and professions, and it makes no sense at all to rely on them every day and still revile them as "mere labor." He also notes that the current direction of American education is to prepare every student for college. That model simply doesn't work for large numbers of people, whose abilities and inclinations direct them more to physical than intellectual activity. Since schooling in today's prevailing model meets their needs so badly, it shouldn't surprise anyone that many students drop out. Their needs and abilities are ignored, so the educational system simply brushes them off. At the same time, the demand for all kinds of physical work, some of it highly technical, continues to grow, even though students aren't being prepared to fulfill it. The education system fails not only those students, but also the society that could have valued them as skilled tradesmen and women. Mostly, however, Crawford tries to explain the inexplicable joy and challenge of dealing with the physical world. Theory deals in universal truths, but the reality of each balky motorcycle demands a fresh look and new interpretation. Even "identical" objects differ, and dealing with those differences is a skill in itself. Then there's the satisfaction of seeing the work completed: the machine works, the building stands up, and the job speaks for itself. You can't argue leaky plumbing into working right, and you can't argue that it is right. You have to make it right - and then the fact that it is right can not be denied. Perhaps it's humbling to approach a mechanical problem on its home turf, but the satisfaction in defeating that problem can't be taken away with a few words or the stroke of a pen. Despite the many good points Crawford makes, his screed against cubicle work (my work, I have to say) seems one-sided. He presents his own experience in the white collar equivalent of a piece-work sweatshop with impossible deadlines and quotas. That's valid, and a real representation of what many cube-farm denizens experience daily. And no, the office isn't the place for everyone, and doesn't need to be, and can't be. But, it can offer satisfactions of its own, and can afford its citizens the means and leisure to enjoy the kind of hands-on work that Crawford describes. Although this offers many solid points and constructive critiques of current education, weaknesses detract enough that I can't give this my highest recommendation. -- wiredweird

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.

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.

Great book! I had to carry a dictionary with me!

This book is well worth the effort needed to read it. It is not a lightweight holiday read... Early on the book is a little heavy but develops well and puts into perspective our industrial development. It shows how Henry Ford destroyed craftsmanship by separating thinking from doing; how his engineering of the production process was balanced by the engineering of consumption and easy credit to enslave workers to a life of unsatisfying work. Wind forward in time and see how the same creeping separation of thinking from doing is undermining the professional occupations, where graduates find themselves doing unsatisfying work in modern production-line offices. Individual flair, decisiveness and accountability is undermined by endless meetings where everyone is responsible and no one is responsible. Crawford points out the disconnects between modern life and the real world and shows how and why people can regain some meaning in their lives by working with their hands. If you want to read something that will make you think and re-evaluate how you spend your working life... Do yourself a favour, get yourself a copy, read it and think about the messages it contains. Who was it that said "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Incidentally, the book has nudged me into making a decision to change my job... by pursuing an aspect of my of my profession as a mechanical engineer which I have in the past enjoyed for its creativity. Need I say more..?

Extremely interesting book. It makes you think seriously about our hyper-sophisticated civilization, which is actually so fragile and prone to fail thanks to the gradual loss of knowledge.

Matthew Crawford obviously wants to warrant his life choices, not much else is going on.

Il fallait que je le lise depuis le temps que MB Crawford est LA ref de toutes les discussions sur le retour au réél, à l'artisanat, bref combien il préfigure (le bouquin a 15 ans) le mouvement de bascule des diplomés vers l'artisanat pour y trouver sens et réalisation de soi. Très intéressant, juste et le bon témoignage d'une époque

I really enjoyed this book. I am an Electrician by trade, and now teach at a College. Leaving the trade to start a new career as an educator has been a difficult transition for me. I also worked in the corporate world for some time. I identify with the comparisons the author makes with "The Crew versus the Team" When a tradesperson joins the ranks of academics it can be intimidating. The way the author explains philosphy and relates it to trades is very interesting. He convinces the reader that working with your hands and appling a skill is highly cognitative. The best quote in the book is " If you don't vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit" I recomend this book highly to anyone who teaches trades or shop related classes. It is also a good read for Managers to get inside the head of your subordinates and understand how to manage effectively.