Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [57]
Thirty years ago, Collins pointed out that higher education serves a signaling function: it rewards and certifies the display of middle-class self-discipline. But what sort of discipline is required of white-collar workers these days? Once upon a time, the passing of examinations, meeting of course deadlines, and disciplined study for the sake of mastering a body of knowledge broadcast a willingness to conform to organizational discipline, and displayed the dispositions needed to develop competence in a bureaucracy. But the new antibureaucratic ideal of the flexible organization puts quite different demands on people, requiring the cultivation of a different sort of self. As Brown and Scase point out, in the new dispensation the whole person is at issue; one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well-defined set of competencies tied to the fulfillment of specific organizational ends. What the recruiters are looking for is a manner of personal comportment, a collection of psychological and social aptitudes, that is difficult to codify. (This makes sense for a workplace that has little in the way of objective standards such as one finds in a machine shop.) Accordingly, the credentialism of higher education can continue its signaling function only if the official items appearing on a transcript are supplemented with extracurricular items that signal the possession of a complete personality package.22 Students and their parents seem to understand this. An important part of the package is that one be a joiner, as this signals the possession of a self that is ready for “teamwork.”
Teamwork
The rise of teamwork coincides with the discovery of “corporate culture” by management theorists in the late 1970s. The term was no longer meant as a sneering condemnation of the man in the gray flannel suit, but as a new realm of possibility. David Franz writes that “the expectation that corporate culture could be managed was both central to its appeal and its crucial conceptual innovation.”23 The idea that culture can be managed entails a reversal of the usual idea of culture. “Culture, as social scientists use the term, is a mostly subterranean force, taken for granted, assumed, inarticulate. We are born into cultures, which teach us how to see, speak, and think. It is only through great effort that we can bring our own culture into view and then only partially. Corporate cultures, however, can be diagnosed, evaluated, and altered.”24 Managers needed to become anthropologists. But above all they needed to become founders of cultures, like a Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad. That is, their anthropological finesse would not take the form of detached analysis, but rather of charismatic world making (with executive pay to match). The discovery of corporate culture opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation in the office.
Through the exercise of charismatic authority, the manager unsettles others, shaking them out of their cramped views and stale habits, thereby unleashing the creativity of all workers. This is a charismatic leader of a new kind, a sort of radical democrat. He does not seek followers; he seeks to make every man a leader of himself. Authority itself disappears as he turns work into play. He erects Nerf basketball hoops; he announces pajama day. The creative class expands.
Such innovations arose in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of hopes for the transformation of work through technology. In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote that the ideal character type of the coming age will be “a man of leisure, released by technology from the regimental discipline of work so as to secure his well-being in highly refined alloplastic ways.”25 It would not have surprised Rieff that “leisure” can become “play,” and then absorbed into work. The self overflows the “regimental discipline of work,” but such overflowing may take the form of longer hours in the office.
Workers must identify with the corporate