Shop Class as Soulcraft - Matthew B. Crawford.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261332-shop-class-as-soulcraft
Although there are a number of things I don't like about this book, there are some interesting points of views offered. He takes some of the ideas of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', the joy and value in fixing something yourself - how this gives a person what phenomenologists call agency and defines yourself in the world.
What he doesn't address is that we all can't just tinker and fix bikes for a living. Yes, it's important to have a craft that you can dig into, and it would be nice if we could all make a living at it, but his rose coloured glasses approaches definitely takes away some of the import of his message.
However, he gives a pretty good analysis of the corporate world in the chapter 'Contradictions of the Cubicle', and I must admit that I have more sympathy for middle managers than I did before. I was relating parts of this chapter to my final job in Higher Ed IT, and perhaps I now better understand the dynamics going on around me at that time. It also made me realize that I still have things to process from that time.
Crawford describes the role of managers and middle managers in bureaucracies as:
- 'managing what other people think of them'
- 'constantly vulnerable and anxious...' with the constant fear that an organisational upheaval could damage their careers.
- 'a constant interpretation ... of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone'
- 'mutually contradictory statements are made to cohere by sheer forcefulness of presentation allowing a manager to stake out a position on every side of an issue'
- 'the intent of this type of language is not to deceive, it is preserve one's interpretive latitude so that if the context changes, a new appropriate meaning can be attached to the language already used.'
- 'people are not held to their word, because it is generally understood that their word is always provisional'
(these insights he attributes to the sociologist Robert Jackall)
He goes on to describe 'that the world of managers resembles that of Soviet bureaucrats' who had to walk the line between living reality, but talking the party line. Sheesh, and I thought I had it tough. It sounds absolutely Kafkian.
I recall one of my first meetings where an external business consultant gave a presentation that was filled with business vision jargon that was absolutely Dilbertian. I was incredulous, and even more so when one of the project sponsors glowingly praised it. I probably should have walked out then, but I needed the job. It ended up that none of that stuff was ever implemented.
Back to the book, Crawford laments the loss of individual agency and responsibilities to the team approach. Not that there's anything wrong with teams, we can't do everything ourselves, but if the entire focus and importance is on team relationships, the actual work becomes secondary, and the product turns out to be the team and work relationships. The medium is the message, or in this case, product.
When I first started in IT in the 1980's there was a strong individual element to the job. This does not mean that people didn't work together well in groups and teams, but there was a very strong sense of individual responsibility of one's contribution.
Perhaps what I saw over my 30 years in IT was the eventual emergence of teams, management bureaucracy, and 'process as product' that Crawford describes in the book: the loss of the sense of personal accomplishment, the move to a more disinterested assembly of components, and the rise of non-technical people involved in projects and making technical decisions.
I'm thankful that I managed to maintain the 'individual as team member approach' for as long as I did, but I now realize that this approach was becoming obsolete as teams and process became more important than the individual, and I didn't (or wouldn't) keep up. And, there's no blame to be assigned. The culture and business practices changed everywhere. Managers are making the best of it themselves with pressures from below and above, and Kafkian jargon and targets to jump through.
