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 7-8 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Thinking as Doing”
In the penultimate chapter of his inquiry into the meaning and value of work, Crawford tackles the concept of true knowledge and how, and even where, it arises. He begins by focusing on firefighters, who often seem to instinctively know when to leave a burning building. If forced to define how they know, many firefighters call this a “sixth sense.” Crawford believes this knowledge deserves more credit than it currently gets in postindustrial society. He notes that this tacit or instinctual knowledge is what governs work in the trades as well.
As Crawford opines: “The current educational regime is based on a certain view about what kind of knowledge is important: ‘knowing that’ as opposed to ‘know how’” (161). It is “knowing how” that matters to mechanics, as Crawford demonstrates via an anecdote involving his former shop mate, Tommy. At his new place of employment, Pro Class Cycles, Tommy is forced to answer to the intellectual technology that tells him when there is a problem with an engine. As Crawford states, “computerized diagnostics don’t so much replace the mechanic’s judgment as add another layer to the work” (173). Tommy has to make sense of faulty computerized diagnostics and figure out what ambiguous readings are supposedly telling him. All this is necessary as these computerized diagnostics also hold his boss accountable. These diagnostics, in Crawford’s estimate, are completely different from the early service manuals “once written by people who worked on and lived with the machines they wrote about” (176). Now that job is done by technical writers who “know that” but don’t “know how.”
The knowledge of full, intimate engagement cannot be replaced by knowledge in the abstract, gleaned at a distance, or in theory only. Crawford disagrees with Daniel Bell, author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, who celebrates a society he imagines codifying all knowledge so that it can be centralized and mechanized. Crawford cites as an example the chess players who beat computers, able to outwit based on “knowledge from doing,” not just “knowing that” but also “knowing how” and drawing on instinctual knowledge.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Work, Leisure and Full Engagement”
In the final chapter of the book, Crawford pushes back on the assertion by Marx that we lose the value of our labor by having it taken away from us. Crawford argues instead that his greatest satisfaction in his work is seeing a motorcycle leave his shop in good working order, ready to be ridden and enjoyed. Crawford offers this as an example of the “full engagement” (180) that one can achieve via manual labor. Work that achieves a tangible outcome or product offers the individual a chance to connect with another human being, in real time and space.
Crawford also examines how we defines work and leisure and notes that for some, doing what they love and converting it into professional money-making scheme is satisfying. Just as often though, or perhaps even more often, making a hobby into a job sucks the true pleasure out of it. Crawford cites the example of children whose love of art leads them into competition for rewards and prizes. As Crawford observes that “the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it” (195). Crawford suggests that this happens to academics as well, that once an intellectual’s passion becomes professionalized, “this may lead him to stop thinking” (195). The key then is to strike a balance, to find work that is leads to full engagement, that is tangible enough to see one’s skills at work and offered to the world in a way that can be recognized and valued. Crawford maintains that this is what we as workers and human beings should want.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
In the final two chapters of the book, Crawford continues to make his pitch for manual work. Again, in part, the author steps outside of his own life experiences to draw on research and wider examples. And once again, Crawford demonstrates both what is to be gained and what could be lost if society reassessed the value placed on the practical arts of skilled laborers.
Crawford uses the experience of firefighters, who have an uncanny ability to get out of burning buildings just before collapse, to illustrate the power of instinctual knowledge. Instinctual knowledge, which is felt and intuited and refined by time, is also what Crawford believes chess players to be governed by. Knowledge is needed, beyond just knowledge of the game. Crawford refutes thinkers such as Daniel Bell who believe that knowledge can be coded into transmittable algorithms. Instinctual knowledge and knowledge by doing are gains we can make only if we work actively, with our minds and our hands.
Additionally, what we gain is purpose and a sense of a place in the work. Unlike vague corporate teams, laborers are joined together in a crew, whose efforts are each distinct but also interdependent. Crawford thinks that manual laborers also draw a sense of satisfaction by the way they continue to have face to face human interactions. These workers get to immediately and fully connect, seeing the impact of their efforts in the communities.
