I often wonder how it is that novels — the books I expect to tell me about life and what it is — say so little about the major portion of life: daily work.  There are exceptions.  My current Anna Karenina has long sections on the day-to-day rhythms and irritations of Levin’s work on the farm.  And Post Office that I read earlier this year is full of brilliant detail on sorting and delivering letters for the US Postal Service.  Crime novels of course are full of details about work, but how many of us spend our days as forensic pathologists?  No, I wonder where are the novels that express the experience of those in contemporary “cubicle life.”

“Cubicle life” is the subject of a promising-sounding non-fiction book with the unpromising title of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford.  It was recently reviewed in Slate magazine by Michael Agger. 

From the review it sounds like Crawford would answer my question by saying there’s something particularly enervating about contemporary jobs — the kind of jobs ‘with no discernible products or measurable results’ — that means the potential authors of any such novels would be too tired or brain dead from their day jobs to write them.  Or else, that the very last thing they’d want to write about, having scraped together the wherewithal, is the scene they’ve just escaped from.

After graduating from his US college with a PhD in political philosophy, Crawford went to work at a Washington think tank.  Agger quotes him, ‘I was always tired and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all.’  After five months he quit and started repairing motorbikes for a living instead.  And from the satisfactions of this trade and the comparisons with life in the cubicle, he develops a thesis that work needs to have at least three basic features:

• the worker is in charge of the job from start to finish
• the worker can imbue the job with a sense of craftsmanship
• the worker is producing something for an actual customer or client, a customer who probably wants it yesterday and doesn’t want to pay too much either.

The third feature is important to prevent us becoming ‘self-absorbed, even self-indulgent,’ by having to keep in mind the ‘wider world’.  The reviewer notes that ‘knowledge work’ lacks this consideration, and implies that it’s often about doing something merely for the sake of doing it.  And being one of those who has, time and time again, ended up in the kind of job Crawford talks about, no matter how often I’ve changed companies and roles, I can attest that the majority of tasks are done merely for the sake of doing them.

But it’s the first feature that’s the big one for me, and for Crawford too.  He sees little difference between the atomization of the assembly line that occurred in the early 1900s in manufacturing, ‘Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of the process,’ and the experience of most investment analysts, paralegals, marketing executives and sales associates, where:

… the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to the new class of workers – clerks – who replace the professionals.

As the reviewer says:

Look around the field in which you toil, be it advertising, finance, or consulting.  Who really gets to face new problems and make decisions based on their knowledge and instincts, and who is just another clerk, following instructions?

The remedy for all these dissatisfactions according to Crawford is to practice a trade, or in some other way ensure the three basic elements in one’s work.

Click on the following link to read the review of Crawford’s book.

http://www.slate.com/id/2218650/pagenum/all/

Images: photos taken on the road between Ballarat and Dunkeld, Victoria: at Skipton