Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [49]
To judge from business books, the demands made on managers themselves penetrate the most deeply. Thus in Teambuilding That Gets Results we find an Alert! box that reads “Does your feedback on a particular situation have more to do with your own ego or being ‘right’? Think it through first. If you find your own ego lurking behind the feedback, put it to the side. . . .”2 Surveying the popular titles in a chain bookstore, it becomes clear that management books are a subcategory of self-help books, and that adopting them as one’s guide may lead one into “an inquisitorial morass of motive and self-accountability,” to borrow a phrase.3 Throughout this literature one finds an imperative for the manager to care, and to sincerely hold forth to his subordinates the possibility of personal transformation. He is not so much a boss as a life coach.
The contemporary office requires the development of a self that is ready for teamwork, rooted in shared habits of flexibility rather than strong individual character. I will be drawing some comparisons between the office and the job site, the team and the crew. At issue in the contrast between office work and the manual trades is the idea of individual responsibility, tied to the presence or absence of objective standards.
Indexing and Abstracting
After a one-year master’s degree program at the University of Chicago, I had to put philosophy on hold and go back to work (I would return a couple of years later to begin a Ph.D. program). Rather than go back to the electrical work I’d done after college, I wanted to put my new degree to use and claim my place in the sunny uplands of the meritocracy. This turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated. I landed a job as a clerk at a prestigious Palo Alto law firm, but the job paid only ten dollars an hour. So I worked there from eight to five, then taught SAT prep classes (for fifteen dollars an hour) farther up the peninsula after work, and often tutored in Marin after that. I was driving about a hundred miles a day (in a 1966 Malibu) in a three-bridge loop around San Francisco Bay before returning exhausted each night to my sublet in Berkeley. Then I was let go from the law firm. Shortly after that, the SAT prep company went bankrupt (I never saw the thousand dollars in back pay they owed me). At this juncture it would have made sense to chuck the “meritocracy” and go back to doing electrical work, for much better pay, but somehow I wasn’t able to see my situation clearly and take this step. I had a master’s degree, goddamit.
In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the expansion of higher education beyond labor market demand creates for white-collar workers “employment in substandard work or at wages below those of the better-paid manual workers.” What’s more, “it may create unemployability of a particularly disconcerting type. The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.”4
My self-regard as a Master of Arts was hard to sustain through the extended trauma of job hunting, with its desperate open-mindedness and rising sense of worthlessness. Finally I landed a job as an indexer and abstractor at Information Access Company, then a division of Ziff Communications, and stayed there for eleven months. I was excited about my first day on the job as I crested the high point of the San Mateo Bridge at 8:15 one bright morning in 1992, on a day windy enough to whitecap even the South Bay. My new job was to read articles in academic journals, index them under established categories, and write