Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?

By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2009.

This innocence comes through, too, in how he thinks he will be viewed in relationship to his philosophical pedigree. Based just on his stance on education, most readers of Shop Class As Soul Craft are likely to think his ideas basically conservative. Yet Crawford's fear is that he will be cast as an apostate who has turned his back on his roots in the right.

Even Nathan Tarcov, Crawford's dissertation adviser at Chicago, sees followers of the Chicago school agreeing with Crawford. After all, Tarcov notes, Adam Smith, founder of the free-market capitalism that forms the basis of economic thought at Chicago, decried the kind of mind-numbing repetitive work Crawford prosecutes in his book -- once done on assembly lines, now in cubicles.

But Crawford does break with the right when, in promoting the course of the individual craftsman, he rejects the big-business model that has dominated American capitalism since Henry Ford. He points out that we have mechanisms in place to check political power, but "have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible."

And he makes his case in terms intended to cut deep amid our current economic woes, arguing, for example, that failing to regulate megacorporations has resulted in the satisfaction of the good life being "foreclosed" for many of us. He accuses bankers specifically of "the meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people's work."

Crawford is hopeful that in the aftermath of the financial sector's follies we will finally re-evaluate what kind of work is really valuable.

Now, he writes, "it becomes possible once again to think the thought, 'Let me make myself useful.' " Which is what Crawford is looking forward to doing after Shop Class goes to press. He has another book in the works, The Organ Maker's Shop, inspired by a month he spent at the factory of Staunton, Va., pipe-organ manufacturer Taylor and Boody while he was writing Shop Class. He had no particular interest in organs -- he has never been a member of any organized faith, so they do not conjure for him any personal religious experience. It's the work that moves him.

"It's the grooviest scene you could imagine. They're inheriting this tradition of making pipe organs, the best in the world, but they're also constantly innovating. I got completely pulled into their world." Crawford intended to devote a chapter of Shop Class to the organ shop, then realized it didn't quite fit.

Shop Class As Soulcraft, he says, leaning forward in one of the Roosevelt Hotel's plush sofas to flip through the manuscript, "is really not about making things -- it's about fixing things. Tradition doesn't appear in this book at all." At Taylor and Boody, which builds its organs to last 400 years, craft is "part of a larger narrative," says Crawford. It's also an example of cognitively rich manual work that also yields financial rewards.

"These people know what they're doing," he says. "They start with trees, they fell the trees, and they make everything from scratch. Their most-elaborate organs cost $2 million (Yale bought that one -- "an endowment helps," says Crawford), and business is good."

But before he gets down to another year of writing, Crawford wants to spend some time in his own shop. He picks up a printout of the Shop Class cover photo, the one of the red '67 BMW leaning against the shed. It just occurred to him that the bike pictured is actually a customer's, and the repair on it long overdue. "I've got to give that guy a call."

Click here to buy a copy of Shop Class As Soulcraft

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