35 pages • 1 hour read
Matthew B. CrawfordShop Class as Soulcraft
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Education of a Gearhead”
Crawford begins the chapter by noting that different work draws on different dispositions. He compares the commanding disposition of a dog trainer to the careful disposition of a diamond cutter. Yet, Crawford argues, disposition rarely factors into the education individuals are given in school or the career paths they are pointed towards after graduation: “We are preoccupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores” (72). However, Crawford believes that individuals are drawn towards certain kinds of work and that performing these kinds of work mold the individual. Therefore, steering everyone into academics does a great disservice to many and to those of a certain disposition that would be best served by work in a trade.
Crawford then describes the learning experiences he gained from two seminal teachers—Lance and Chas. Lance was the first person to employ Crawford as a mechanic when Crawford was just a teenager. Crawford dreamed of working on Porsches but found that being an apprentice in Lance’s shop meant he first had to do a lot of cleaning and observing before he was allowed to step into a vehicle or work under the hood of one. From Lance, Crawford learns the virtue of patience and submitting to tasks that feel menial and unsatisfying but are ultimately vital.
After some time working for Lance, Crawford begins to undertake some autodidactic mechanic’s training by fixing his own 1963 VW Bug. He is occasionally offered little tidbits of wisdom from his father, a mathematical physicist: “But it began to dawn on me that my father’s habits of mind, as a mathematical physicist, were ill suited to the reality I was dealing with in an old Volkswagen” (79). Crawford draws on the ideas of Aristotle to make sense of the difference in mental habits between himself and his father (and those of his father’s ilk). Specifically, Crawford references the idea of “stochastic arts” (81), meaning those that do not produce but promote. A mechanic, in Crawford’s estimate, is a stochastic artist because he does not create the design of the vehicle but like a doctor must work to promote health and fend off failure. Still, failure is inevitable, and in the writer’s opinion, “[t]his experience of failure tempters the conceit of mastery” (81). Thus, “fixing things may be a cure for narcissism” (82) in that fixing makes us step outside of ourselves to identity and remedy a problem.
The next seminal teacher the Crawford notes is Chas, an ex-hippie turned reactionary and “gun freak” (84) in leftist Berkley who helps the author install a new motor on his VW Bug. Nothing goes according to specs: “Chas agreed to let me ‘help’ him build the motor, that is, to stand around and get in the way, mostly, while he taught me things” (87). From Chas, Crawford learned to be more perceptive, to pay attention to the “raw sensual data” (91) that was right in front of him, rather than missing vital clues by clinging to what he thought were established facts.
Another important moment in Crawford’s gearhead education occurs when he is in a mechanical drawing class being taught by Tommy, a friend and fellow mechanic. One assignment is to draw a human skeleton from a model Tommy provides. Crawford finds it difficult to draw anything more than a “Halloween” (91) sketch, until Tommy changes the perspective, displaying the skeleton on its end. This reframing of the situation shakes the author’s mind out of himself—out of his preconceived notions—and allows him to truly see. This, to Crawford’s mind, is what is often missing in education and professional workplaces today.
What education needs more of, Crawford argues, is “metacognition” (99). Seeing clearly, Crawford asserts, means seeing unselfishly. He posits that we need to work harder to step outside our view of the world to see the world as it really is. He notes the origins of the word “idiot,” which means private, not stupid. But this privacy is a kind of solipsism, a privacy in which the individual’s perspective alone matters and blinds the individual to a larger truth, the kind one needs to find in order to effectively practice the stochastic arts.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional”
After getting his degree, Crawford continues working on cars and motorcycles even as he continues further in academia. His academic work leads him to a well-paid job at a think tank where he is asked to churn out conclusions on global warming that coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies. Crawford decides that this kind of work is metaphysically unsatisfying to him and endeavors to carve out a different path for himself.
This path takes him to meet Fred, an older mechanic who gave Crawford “a succinct dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of these Honda starter motor brushings of the mid-seventies. Here was a real scholar” (108). Crawford admires Fred not just for his considerable stock of knowledge but also for the way he tackles problems—in a way that involves constant “unselfing” (103), or stepping outside of the self to find a new answer.
When Crawford opens his own motorcycle shop, he comes to see just how much more work he needs to put into “unselfing.” He finds himself to be a perfectionist in his work, which is not a virtue so much as it is a time waster. He accuses himself of losing track of time, money, and the needs of the customer as his work becomes almost metaphysical for him. He chides himself for being a person “who sees only his own goal” and notes that “[a] lot of academic work has this quality of curiosity without circumspection” (124). Crawford finds this self-indulgent, the opposite of necessary “unselfing,” and a habit he must unlearn.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Contradictions of the Cubicle”
Crawford details his experiences during the year between completing his master’s degree and pursuing his doctorate, a year he mostly spent writing abstracts for a company called Info Trac. The job was difficult to locate, and he was distressed to find that his master’s degree did not carry the weight he had hoped it would outside the university setting. Before he took the job writing a dizzying number of abstracts per day, he worked for just above minimum wage at a law office, also doing SAT tutoring at night.
At first, he delights in having his own desk and own office. He feels assured that he will be performing true knowledge work. He is excited to encounter insights in the essays he is charged with creating abstracts from, but this excitement proves short lasting: “My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract there is a method that merely needs to be applied and that this does not require understanding […] I was actually told this by the trainer” (133). Rather than performing actual knowledge work, Crawford is fully immersed in clerkdom, required to churn out 28 abstracts per day (a production number that was low compared to his coworkers). He learned, in fact, to pay little attention to the complex ideas of the pieces he was abstracting as “[t]his can only slow you down […][so] the job required both dumbing down and a bit of moral reeducation” (134).
During his time at this company, Crawford was afforded a new view on the corporate idea of “teamwork,” which the author asserts is the main focus on management now that companies do not actual produce finished, tangible things. In this so-called “postindustrial society,” managers are asked to be “charismatic leaders” and even “anthropologists” of their supposed unique corporate culture. As Crawford notes, “workers must identify with the corporate culture and exhibit a high level of ‘buy in’ to ‘the mission.’” (149). Therefore, the work of team-building and the building of self-esteem, to accentuate the positive in each worker and help them carve out a unique work identity, fills the manager’s day.
Crawford sees the teams of corporate culture as different from the crews on a construction site or in a manual labor setting. A crew of electricians reports to a boss who can quickly gauge failure or success at a completed task:“On a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard among those who recognize one another as peers” (159). An electrician and a plumber may share space on a crew as laborers whose different skill sets are both vital in completing a project. The place of the boss is also distinct. As the author states of the boss in a crew: “He does the same work as the apprentice, only better” (159). Crawford finds this clarity productive, in that it gives each worker a place and a sense of self-worth that is not generated by team-building games but by having a clearly articulated end goal that can be assessed.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
In these chapters, the author uses his own profession experiences to demonstrate the conclusions he’s reached about manual labor and corporate “knowledge work.” He talks first about how he acquired a job and skills working on cars. He compares these experiences with those during his time working at a political think tank and at a company that produces abstracts of scholarly articles. For Crawford, the time spent working on cars and motorcycles in infinitely more rewarding.
Crawford admits that his career in mechanics begins on a banal, even demoralizing, note. He is thrilled when Lance hires him to work in his shop and imagines spending his time inside Porsches, but Lance has other plans for him, namely paying his dues doing grunt work and then getting dirty learning the cars inside and out. From his time in Lance’s employment, Crawford gains an intimate view of what the life of a mechanic is really like.
Under Chas’s unlikely tutelage, Crawford learns even more. He learns about engines and the skills needed to effectively work on engines. But more than that, he learns about problem solving. He learns about ways to catalog one’s thinking and challenge simplistic conclusions. He learns to trust intuitive knowledge and knowledge gleaned from life experience more than instructions recorded in a book.
Still, as a person with an advanced degree, Crawford feels compelled to take white collar work. He is initially optimistic, but overall, his experience churning out abstracts according to a formula makes him feel less skilled and less creative than working under a car’s hood. Crawford reports not feeling surprised when a co-worker admits to doing a lot of heroin on the job. The supposed “knowledge work” of writing abstracts is deadening, with employees needing a jolt to still feel alive.
