Book Review: Shop Class as Soulcraft

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Books, 256 pages, ISBN-10: 0143117467, 2010

Overall impression
Ever wonder how engineers can be more educated, yet less experienced? Have you wondered what the value of hands-on experience is? Wonder how, when using the best model of engineering, a system can fail? In reading Matthew’s work, I quickly built up an understanding of why my intuition rebelled against prescriptive engineering models being useful for growing the next generation of experienced engineers. First, we’ll look at a key systemic leadership take away from having read this book, followed by an overall review of the book itself.

Key take away for Systemic Leadership
In analyzing his experiences in knowledge work, after achieving his PhD in Philosophy, he had a starveling observation: “if occasions for the exercise of judgment are diminished, the moral-cognitive virtue of attentiveness will atrophy.” Applied broadly from the systemic perspective, we have a situation in which prescriptive models of how to do work (formal systems engineering or software engineering models) actually counters our desire to develop experienced engineers. Essentially, detailed, solution-agnostic engineering checklists drive our engineers to be less attentiveness and have less detailed knowledge about what lies underneath. In other areas, he observes that knowledge work and education alone is insufficient to have people who have intuition to form a problem solving strategy when information is incomplete or imperfect. Ultimately, he also observes how the best minds and most motivated people will generally not choose to work in environments which are highly controlled by these intellectual models of what is to be done. This leads to “a vicious circle in which degraded work plays a pedagogical role, forming workers into material that is ill suited for anything by the over-determined world of careless labor.”

Book literature review – approachability, readability, etc.
Overall, “Shop craft as Soulcraft” was a easy read, very approachable, generally using personal narrative stories to illuminate broad areas of inquiry. Yes, there are portions that use precise, philosophical language, but those parts are generally the conclusions at the end of each chapter. If you are interested in the philosophical implications of the stories told in a chapter, this is great. If you aren’t, skip the last few chapters and you won’t miss too much.
The reader must understand that Matthew exposes quite a bit of bias against modern knowledge work, assuming that people want to understand the world around them. While this can be argued one way or the other or the general population, my interest in understanding engineers makes that assumption inherently valid (as the job of the engineer is to understand how something works). Ultimately, if you are disillusioned with “Office Space” type work, you’ll find this book provides some well-articulated discussion points for your use. On the other hand, if you understand the value to society and people of aggregating knowledge to decrease the expertise (and cost) needed to deliver products, you may have problems overcoming the personal experience biases that Matthew exposes.

Overall: I enjoyed this book, and the author was both approachable and capable of keeping my mental focus. Read More......