Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [19]
Employees are encouraged to improve upon the company’s work processes and techniques in order to make the workplace more productive and enjoyable while increasing sales and profits. In many cases, a small change made on the salesroom floor—by a teenage sales rep re-conceiving a Vonage display or an immigrant salesperson acting on a thought to increase outreach, advertising, and service to non-English-speaking communities—has been implemented nationwide, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in added revenue.
The Vonage display isn’t merely altered, it is re-conceived. Whatever survives this onslaught of intellectual rigor by the teenage sales rep is put back on the sales floor. Its conceptual foundations clarified, the re-conceived Vonage display generates hundreds of millions of dollars in added revenue. Florida continues:
Best Buy’s Anderson . . . likes to say that the great promise of the creative era is that, for the first time in our history, the further development of our economic competitiveness hinges on the fuller development of human creative capabilities. In other words, our economic success increasingly turns on harnessing the creative talents of each and every human being. . . .15
Frank Levy, the MIT economist, responds to this by dryly noting that “where I live Best Buy seems to be starting people at about $8.00 an hour.”16
Florida is unimpressed by such facts. After all, the “stated mission” of Best Buy’s CEO is to provide a work environment designed to “unleash the power of all of our people as they have fun while being the best.” It seems the unleashed power of all those mavericks in the Best Buy creative sector is fully compatible with near-minimum wage. Bohemians live by a different set of rules; they aren’t money-grubbing proles. “They have fun while being the best,” these aristocrats of the spirit. Florida presents the image of an immigrant salesperson acting on a thought. Are we to believe these teenagers and immigrants working at Best Buy have reclaimed the unity of thought and action of the preindustrial craftsman, or of the gentleman inventor? Florida seems to suggest there has been a wholesale overthrow of the centralization of thinking that is the hallmark of industrial capitalism.
Robert Jackall offers a more plausible account of the role these teenaged and immigrant Einsteins are playing at Best Buy. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with corporate managers, he concludes that one of the principles of contemporary management is to “push details down and pull credit up.”17 That is, avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit. To this end, upper management deals only with abstractions, not operational details. If things go well: “Finding cross-marketing synergies in the telecommunications and consumer electronics divisions has improved our strategic outlook heading into the fourth quarter.” If things go badly: “Change the Vonage display? That was the kid’s idea. What’s his name, Bapu or something. Jeezus, these immigrants.” Where Jackall sees managerial ass covering, Florida sees a magical bubbling up of people power: “harnessing the creative talents of each and every human being.”
Florida writes, “the creative content of many working-class and service-class jobs is growing—a prime example being the continuous-improvement programs on many factory floors, which call on line workers to contribute ideas as well as their physical labor.”18 Braverman was familiar with this style of management, characterized by “a studied pretense of worker ‘par ticipation,’ a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb . . . and to have the illusion of making decisions by choosing among fixed and limited alternatives designed by a management which deliberately leaves