Reflecting on Matthew Crawford's "Shop class as soul craft"

Transcript

1. Pondering Matthew Crawford's "Shop class as soul craft" Reading/discussion club Siva Swaminathan 26 September 2020
3. Motivations
4. Sociological miasma Alienation, loneliness, "bullshit jobs", nihilism, etc.
5. Including nuggets of inspiration from… Bertrand Russell, Machines and emotions Jeff Goldschmidt, Disciplined minds Barry Schwartz, Self-determination: The tyranny of freedom Sheena Iyengar, The art of choosing Ivan Illich, Tools for conviviality David Edwards, The lab: Creativity & culture Robert Pirsig, Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow Martin Heidegger, Being and time Marshall McLuhan, The medium is the message …
6. I found it quite well-written. Many nice excerpts, but I'm quoting only a few.
7. The separation of thinking from doing
8. "Rational administration" Both Soviet & Western societies are organized according to similar principles (1950s sociological analysis; Herb Simon comment on aliens)
9. Taylorism Strip know-how and decision-making from workers, and concentrate it with the manager (What happened to manual work is being translated to knowledge work)
10. Cogs in a machine Not a science, but management (politics) masquerading as science Fungibility => commoditization (suppress bargaining power) The primary concern is not labor time, but labor cost
11. Whence ownership? Marxist notion of "abstract labor", and the resulting alienation "through work that we recognize our 'species character' […] we get alienated from ourselves when the product and the goals of our work are appropriated, since it is a manifestation of ones own most human possibilities."
12. Schooling as socialization Schooling as practice in separating thought from action Substituting intrinsic motivation with extrinsic incentives (Ivan Illich, Deschooling society)
13. "Irrational behavior" in early capitalism What happens when employers boost per-piece remuneration?
14. Difficulty hiring for early assembly-line jobs
15. Cognitive stratification From craft knowledge, to process engg. knowledge… (same is happening in white-collar work)
16. Standardized and fungible parts Push details down, and pull abstractions up
17. To be the master of one's own stuff
18. What is the point of work? Engage and enhance human faculties as thoroughly as possible (fundamentally incompatible with Taylorist principles)
19. What is creativity? \ (two incompatible formulations) Unleashing creativity through flexibility Cultivating competence through submission to a domain, resulting in creative skill
20. On autonomy
21. Submitting to a bureaucracy "The [automotive shop] service rep. reepresents not so much mechanical expertise as a position taken by an institution, and our spirited man is not sure he trusts this institution (mayve they want to sell him a new car). He hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something."
22. Rational activity choices "The idea of oportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once theya re reduced to their abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate"
23. Active involvement "Spiritedness is an assertion of one's own dignity, and to fix one's own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one's car, and of oneself."
24. Consumerism
25. Consumerism as the fix for drudgery The rise of "consumption engineers" in the early 20th century, for scientific management of desire by to create demand for industrial output
26. Consumerism to promote employability Boosting consumption is a great way to make people work harder Indebtedness and consumption as social signaling as being ready for assembly-line drudgery
27. Forces on the consumption side, parallelling those on the production side "…infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality." "There seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility […] appeal of freedomism, as a marketing hook […] points to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails being mastered by it." * "Recurring purchases, after all, may continue even when the alignment of interests between producer and consumer is only partial, or even accompanied by a felt antagonism [like MS Windows]."
28. What is an intuitive design? "[Indicates] minimal pschic friction between the user's intention and its realization. It is such resistance that makes one aware of reality as an independent thing […] limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that they are external to the self." An intuitive interface ensures that nothing disturbs a solipsistic self- containement.
29. Betty Crocker cake mix
30. Problem-solving, and tool-use are fundamental to human nature "…choosing is not creating, however much 'creativity' is invoked in such marketing."
31. Education of a gearhead (in two parts) More autobiographical, with evocative examples from automotive maintenance.
32. Contradictions of the cubicle
33. "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." (external reality, not arbitrarily imposed)
34. Schumpeter (1942): 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."
35. His experience of writing summary reports of research articles
36. Unavoidable moral property of the medium of office work "the job required both dumbing down and a bit of moral reeducation." (fundamental mismatch between intrinsic notion of quality, and the surplus maximized by a third party disintermediating the producer from the consumer.)
37. Without objective feedback from reality, a lot of modern work is basically managing relationships and reputations.
38. Problems with the escalating rhetoric of "postindustrial society" or "creative economy", and how everybody needs higher education (particularly hard on boys/men)
39. "dispensation of the whole person is at issue; one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well-defined set of competencies tied to the fulfilment of specific organizational ends […] a collection of psychological and social aptitudes, that is harder to codify […] personality package."
40. Identifying with corporate culture, and "buying in" to "the mission" as the primary indicators of professionalism
41. Thinking as doing
42. The current educational system assumes that "knowing that" is more important than "knowing how", corresponding roughly to universal knowledge versus the kind that comes from individual experience.
43. "Degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgement of practitioners with rule following, and codify knowledge into [symbols and processes] that stand in for situated knowledge."
44. Tacit knoweledge of the chess-master and the firefighter
45. Work, leisure, and full engagement
46. Instead of work & persnoal lives being distinct and transactional, integrate them into a coherent whole
47. Money reflects generic potency… good, but not intrinsically so. Using it to acquire specific goods is cannot imbue work itself with meaning, and is more likely to have the opposite effect of making us stand apart from the job.
48. National identity and/or class consciousness as a source of dignity "Those at the top of a food chain get a new identity in whcih to take pride: [multicultural] sushi-eating, Brazilian-girlfriend-having cosmopolitan. But what does the autoworker get as industries lose their national character? It is harder to take pride in one's work as 'a Rolls-Royce man', if the car is assembled from parts made from who knows where."
49. Any job that can be scaled up, depersonalized, and made to answer to forces remote from the scene of work is vulnerable to degradation (The trades, being inherently situated, better resist this externalization)
50. The importance of feedback, including the possiblilty of failure
51. Agency directed towards some end affirmed by the actor, but embedded in the context of an objective reality instead of merely subjective preferences.
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