I saw the book earlier this fall and I knew. I knew that I would need to read it, knew that it would be important to me and knew I should wait to read it for a while. The book in question: Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. The guy who wrote it has a Ph.D in political philosophy from Chicago and runs his own motorcycle repair shop. The book’s blurb: A philosopher/mechanic destroys the pretensions of the high-prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one’s hands. Yeah, I need encouragement to think that way like I need a hole in the head.
So I bought the book yesterday and plan to read it over Christmas. But I started it on the busride home yesterday, couldn’t resist.
I’ve struggled to figure out what it is that bugs me so much about my job. I’ve had plenty of boring or uncompelling or frustrating jobs, but this one gets to me like no other. Well, I didn’t make it through the introduction before I found my answer.
Crawford writes: “We want to feel like our world is intelligible, so we can take responsibility for it.” That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, but he goes on to elaborate:
“I would like to consider whether this poignant longing for responsibility that many people experience in their home lives may be (in part) a response to changes in the world of work, where the experience of individual agency has become elusive. Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches. Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to. The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, and affable complaisance.”
It ain’t me babe. Can I put that in my resignation letter?
