Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [50]
Foster City is a four-square-mile spit of landfill, a chunk of San Francisco Bay (once salt marsh tideland) that was essentially annexed by Silicon Valley in a kind of privateer action led by one T. Jack Foster to create a planned community for the post- industrial age. Anchoring the west end of the San Mateo Bridge, it was developed under a uniform aesthetic of business parks, marinas, and town houses that seem to share a common genetic code when viewed en masse from the apex of the bridge.
In the weeks between my interview and my first day on the job, the managers I had met had taken up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. Such imaginings eased my sense of isolation and inde terminacy, which had begun to make me feel almost unreal. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world—miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad—and reeled myself into its current. As I was shown to my cubicle by these same people, I felt a real sense of being honored. They had made a place for me. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts, and no longer as a private amusement tending toward alienation. Rather, these thoughts would be my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things; I felt enlarged by the largeness of it. I would wear a tie.
But the feel of the job changed as I settled into it, and to understand the shift it is necessary to say how the job was conceived and structured. Information Access Company’s (IAC) first product, in 1977, was Magazine Index, an index of about four hundred popular magazines. In 1980, IAC was acquired by Ziff, a publisher of magazines, and five years later Ziff merged IAC with another acquisition, Management Contents. Management Contents provided not only indexing but also abstracts of articles in management journals. So the introduction of abstracting to the company’s activities coincided with the introduction of serious-looking journals, with all the trappings of scholarship. I suspect the leap from indexing to abstracting, and from magazines to journals, went smoothly, indeed appeared as no leap at all, because of the peculiar content of management journals. Articles in management journals typically contain about one idea for every five bullet points, so writing an abstract for one is as easy as stringing together every fifth bullet point. But in 1991, shortly before I started, the company began providing abstracts of articles in a very different class of journals: titles in physical science, biological science, social science, law, philosophy, and the humanities. The difference between, for example, Marketing Today and Nature Genetics (one of the titles I was assigned) is categorical, yet distinctions of rigor have a hard time withstanding immersion in the solvent of mergers and acquisitions that would reduce knowledge to “information.” 5 Here is an excerpt from the “Letters” section of the current issue of Nature Genetics (as I write this in 2007):
We show that miR-214 is expressed during early segmentation stages in somites and that varying its expression alters the expression of genes regulated by Hedgehog signaling. Inhibition of miR-214 results in a reduction or loss of slow-muscle cell types. We show that su(fu) mRNA, encoding a negative regulator of Hedgehog signaling, is targeted by miR-214.
In some journals, including Nature Genetics, articles begin with an abstract