Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [60]
The Crew versus the Team
Tocqueville foresaw a “soft despotism” in which Americans would increasingly seek their security in, and become dependent upon, the state. His analysis must be extended in our time: the softly despotic tendencies of a nanny state are found in the large commercial enterprise as well, and indeed a case could be made that it is now outsized corporations, more than government, that exercise this peculiarly enervating form of authority in our lives, through work.
Tocqueville also saw a remedy for this evil, however: the small commercial enterprise, in which Americans reason together to solve some practical problem among themselves. I believe this remedy remains valid, especially if the enterprise provides a good or service with objective standards, as these may serve as the basis for social relations within the enterprise that are nonmanipulative in character.
One way of getting at this possibility is to ask: How is being part of a crew different than being part of a “team” in the new mode of office work? The answer must lie, in part, in the ambiguous character of the thing produced in the latter. Say it is a marketing team at Apple. The success of the iPod, as a product, can’t be specified in narrow engineering terms. Its success is due to the production of a new kind of behavior in consumers; we listen to music in a new way. The team’s job is part of a large and complex enterprise, the object of which is to produce culture, and it is hard to get metrics of individual contributions to such an effort. Because of the scale and complexity of the undertaking, responsibility for success and failure are difficult to trace. There are no objective performance criteria to hold up before workers, but management still has to do something , so it directs its gaze to workers’ mentalities, speaks of higher purpose, and brings in industrial psychologists to track various personality measures. For his part, the team member has no solid ground on which he can make a stand against this kind of moral training. He can’t say, as the carpenter can to the foreman, “it’s plumb and level—check it yourself.” His only defense is a kind of self-division—he armors himself with the self-referential irony supplied to him by pop culture, pinning Dilbert cartoons to his cubicle wall and watching The Office every Thursday night.
There is pride of accomplishment in the performance of whole tasks that can be held in the mind all at once, and contemplated as whole once finished. In most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. The individual feels that, alone, he is without any effect. His education prepares him for this; it is an education for working in a large organization, and he has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise. This predisposes him to be deferential to the authority exercised in the organization (however tinged with irony this deference may be), since the organization is that which gives meaning to his work.
Working in construction, one is similarly a part. Say you are an electrician. Your work of running circuits, then installing lights and switches and other devices, has no meaning outside the context of a whole building, with its walls built by the framers, its pipes and fixtures installed by a plumber, its foundation, roof, and all the rest. Taken separately, these trades are pointless; together you make accommodations for someone to live in. The difference is that on such a crew, you have grounds for knowing your own worth independently