Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [48]
The metaphysician often takes a dim view of economic exchange. It is the realm of mere agreement and conventional valuations, rather than intrinsic qualities. But agreement and convention, if consulted, provide a helpful check on your own subjectivity—they offer proof that you are not insane, or at least a more robust presumption to that effect. Some of us need such proof more than others, and getting paid for what you love to do can provide it. Going into business is good therapy for the feeling that there is something arbitrary and idiosyncratic in your grasp of the world, and therefore that your actions within it are unjustified.
The oil seal turned out to be one that, of course, could be replaced only from the inside—a huge job. I ended up pulling the final drive unit (the Magna is shaft-driven) and the swing arm to replace that oil seal. Doing so gave me great satisfaction. But like that of the fornicator, this pleasure brought a surge of bad conscience in its wake. In the end I knocked the labor bill from $2,200 down to $1,500. This entailed a belated recognition that the quality of being wide-awake, of being a clear-sighted person who looks around and sees the whole situation, isn’t something I can take for granted in myself. It is something that needs to be achieved on a moment-to-moment basis. The presence of others in a shared world makes this both possible and necessary.
6
The Contradictions of the Cubicle
The popularity of Dilbert, The Office, and any number of other pop-culture windows on cubicle life attests to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar work. Absurdity is good for comedy, but bad as a way of life. It usually indicates that somewhere beneath the threshold of official notice fester contradictions that, if commonly admitted, would bring on some kind of crisis. What sort of contradictions might these be? To begin with, we are accustomed to think of the business world as ruled by an amoral bottom-line mentality, but in fact it is impossible to make sense of the office without noticing that it has become a place of moral education, where souls are formed and a particular ideal of what it means to be a good person is urged upon us.
This contradiction is perhaps rooted in a more basic one. Corporations portray themselves as results-based and performance-oriented. But where there isn’t anything material being produced, objective standards for job performance are hard to come by. What is a manager to do? He is encouraged to direct his attention to the states of minds of workers, and become a sort of therapist.
By way of contrast, consider the relationship between a machinist and his shop boss. The machinist makes his part, then hands it to the boss. Let us imagine the boss pulls his micrometer out of his breast pocket, and either finds the part within spec or doesn’t. If he doesn’t, he looks at the worker with displeasure, or maybe curses him, because either he failed to read the drawing correctly, failed to clamp it properly in the machine, spaced out while cutting, or doesn’t know how to use his own micrometer. Whatever the cause, the worker’s failing is sitting on the bench, staring both parties in the face, and this object is likely to be the focal point of the conversation. But in the last thirty years American businesses have shifted their focus from the production of goods (now done elsewhere) to the projection of brands, that is, states of mind in the consumer, and this shift finds its correlate in the production of mentalities in workers. Process becomes more important than product, and is to be optimized through management techniques that work on a deeper level than the curses of a foreman. Further, though the demands made on workers are invariably justified in terms of their contribution to the bottom line, in fact such calculations are difficult to make; the chain of means-ends reasoning becomes opaque, and this opens the way for work to become a rather moralistic place. James Poulos writes that in the office, “mutual respect and enthusiasm