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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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The Mind
At Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker by Mike Rose |
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Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Marginalized UCLA Professor Mike Rose, in his book The Mind
At Work, makes a strong case that blue collar workers have been
undervalued. His research shows how workers use cognitive ability in everyday
jobs, employing their minds to work successfully. Any reader who has thought
that some work is “mindless” will think again after reading The Mind
At Work. Rose goes easy on the academics behind this book, and uses
stories, including that of his mother, a former waitress, to prove his
theory. Here’s
an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 5, “Reflective Technique: Electrical Wiring and Construction,” pp. 100-108: For a very long time in
the West, there has been a tendency among intellectual elites to distinguish
between physical work and technical skill—labor, the mechanical arts, crafts
and trades—and deliberative and philosophical activity, which emerges from
leisure, or, at least, from a degree of distance from the world of work and
commerce. This distinction is related to another: between pursuits that are
ends in themselves and pursuits that are means to other ends, “pure” activity
and knowledge versus the instrumental, applied, and practical, which possess
less merit. These distinctions find early articulation in Classical Greece where
they were part of a comprehensive philosophical system that celebrated the
capacity of the human mind but that developed in a society reliant on slavery
and servile labor. One consequence was that entire social and occupational
groups were narrowly, and harshly, defined. In The Republic, Plato
mocks the craftsman who would pursue philosophy, for his soul is “warped and
maimed” by his work; such men are “incapable of culture.” And Aristotle in Politics
notes that “there is no element of virtue in any of the occupations in
which the multitude of artisans and market-people and the wage-earning class
take part.” Because such occupations are “ignoble and inimical to goodness,”
Aristotle further proposes that their practitioners be denied citizenship. To
be sure, the craftsperson—from cobbler to shipwright to potter—was essential
to Greek civilization, and his skill was praised, but, wrote Plutarch, “It
does not necessarily follow that if a work is delightful because of its
gracefulness, the man who made it is worthy of our serious regard.” Work of
body and hand, then, has limiting, even harmful, consequences for civic status
and engagement, for the ability to deliberate and interpret, for virtue. I am reading again what
the Greeks and others in the Classical tradition had to say about physical
work as I visit these classrooms and job sites where young people are
learning a trade. The distinctions between pure and applied, theoretical and
practical are deeply familiar to me, resonant from undergraduate courses in
philosophy and literature, from graduate study in education and psychology,
and from years of professional life in a research university, where a range
of institutional decisions and certifications— from course credit to
disciplinary definition—are made on the pivot of the pure-applied
differential. A lot of our schooling reinforces this way of thinking about
human activity. Though there certainly are dissenting voices in Western
intellectual history, from Yet, when you get in dose
to that activity, watch it unfold over time and get a sense of the thought
and motive that directs it, you gain continual evidence of many of the
qualities that the classical philosophical distinctions tend to diminish. The
work itself when seriously engaged—the traditions and values one acquires and
the complex knowledge and skills developed—gives rise to a virtue of
practice, an ethics and aesthetics, and a reflectiveness intermixed with technique.
Furthermore, as we’ve been seeing, all this becomes part of the construction
of one’s sense of self. There are many reasons
why physical work is perceived as it is in our time, reasons stemming from
our economic and social structure. But an element of our
perception—particularly in some intellectual communities and institutions—is
related to these longstanding distinctions, absorbed into new historical
contexts. I want to consider the way these distinctions restrict, even categorically
rule out, the possibility of the full expression of mind for whole groups of
people, contributing to a stereotypic opinion of blue-collar workers. To help
us arrive at a more philosophically generous view of mind and work, let me
bring together a series of further vignettes, some from settings we’ve
visited—Jon Guthier’s plumbers and Jerry Devries’s
woodshop—but most from other sites, particularly two involving electrical
wiring and construction. One early event that got
me to thinking about these issues occurred at a Habitat for Humanity
construction site. As we were traveling to the site, I listened to a boy
named Skip hold forth. Teen-magazine good looks, cocky, a mouth full of
trouble, he was needling another boy about his acne and declaring that he was
going to take care of someone else “for talking some shit about me.” By the
end of the ride, I found myself imagining the hell Skip creates for some of
his teachers and surely for his vulnerable classmates. He was quickly
becoming my least favorite kid. Then we pulled into the
job site. A cluster of house frames, stacks of lumber, young folks and old
securing joists, nailing plywood to rafters, installing windows. The
teacher, a skilled carpenter named Scott Butler, picked Skip and two other
boys to spend the day with him and learn how to install windows. I went with
them. And witnessed a remarkable transformation in Skip, almost from the
moment he put on his tool belt. His agitated arrogance
and the nasty streak disappeared. Instead, Skip was focused on the work,
thoughtful about it and considerate of those working with him—his language
inflected now with “yes sir” and “excuse me.” He attended to Mr. Butler as
the teacher guided the young crew through a range of activities: from tricks
for working in tight quarters, to modifying routines in order to solve
emerging problems, to thinking about the consequences of a particular repair
for subsequent construction. Skip’s one moment of disgruntlement—an
emotional peep when compared to the braying on the bus—came in response to a
poorly cut window frame left by a previous crew. “Oh man,” he said, shaking
his head, “measuring is one of the first things we learn how to do.” Skip’s transformation and
the connection to craft he displays call to mind a passage in Pedal to the
Metal, Lawrence Ouellet’s soiological
study of long-haul truck drivers. Himself a veteran trucker, Ouellet reflects on his and his buddies’ high school
disrespectful rebelliousness versus the ethic and “sense of honor” he encountered
as he entered the truck-driver’s community, the way the work of the road,
while allowing a countercultural bearing, brought with it certain codes of
conduct and standards of performance. To be sure, the codes of physical work
can incorporate cultural biases about race and gender, and about poverty
itself. And there can be a certain rigidity to some
craft values, a one-right-way absolutism that can blend with social
intolerance. We, of course, don’t know how Skip will turn out. But, for now,
getting the windows right makes its demands on his mind and manner. Something
in the techniques he’s learning and the traditions they embody, or the
occasion to display competence, or the relation the work affords with Mr.
Butler—who knows exactly what—creates for this boy at this juncture in his
development the opportunity to act with deliberation and civility, experiment
with alternative ways of being in the world. I was writing this book
during a time of anguished national conversation about young people—about
their popular culture, their goals and values, and, with the shock of
schoolyard murders, their internal torments and disconnection from the social
fabric. Against this backdrop, I was reading about virtue, right action, and
finding illustration of it in unexpected places, unexpected given our intellectual
traditions and common biases. Now, I certainly witnessed peer insult,
distorted masculinity, virtual and real violence. We just got a dose of it
all from Skip. But young people’s lives have many dimensions to them, and,
thus, I also witnessed behaviors that are dearly sought in our national
assays of adolescent experience. It is as if our collective anxiety is
leading us to look in the wrong places, to seek pathology, and, as a result,
to miss whole categories of activities that are
principled and contribute to the social good. During my visits I heard
continual expression of—and saw material evidence to support—a desire to do
a job correctly, not to rush it, to make something work well. Take, as illustration,
Nancy, who, with another student in her automotive technology class, is
replacing the brake pads on her sister’s car. She works through the class
period and into lunch. As she is finishing up, tightening wheel nuts with a
pneumatic wrench, she talks about the importance of good brakes, how she is
“really picky about brakes,” how they can make the crucial difference in
protecting both life and property. Or watch Peter repairing
the sinks in a women’s shelter. He works with Joe, a retired plumber
volunteering his time. Peter works hard and fast, says he enjoys getting this
experience with a seasoned plumber, and is curious about the function of
things. He’ll ask Joe to repeat a task or manipulate a device so he can see
how something works. At this moment, they’re replacing the faucets on a
bathroom sink, and are about to fit the sink back into its cabinet. Peter
takes a quick look at the drainpipe and p-trap, running his finger inside
the trap. “Oh, look at this!” he says to Joe. The trap is corroded, and if
you squat down, you can see the buildup of rust and debris. “We’ve gotta change this,” he says, “we can’t put it back
together like this.” The schedule for the day specifies faucets only, so
Peter goes in search of his instructor, wanting to get approval for a new
p-trap that he will then have to find in the crew’s supplies. Peter’s
curiosity and his desire to do good work combine here toward action that both
satisfies his sense of workmanship and yields benefit to others. Nancy and Peter are
meticulous about the work they do, aware of its consequences, exhibiting both
pride in and commitment to doing a good job. There are social and ethical
ramifications here. And as we’ve been seeing throughout this book, these
craft values emerge from and contribute to a sense of who one is, principled
action and identity intertwined, which, it seems to me, provides a good
foundation for virtue. Consider Rudolfo and
Charles. Rudolfo is sanding a bookcase, showing me a
small flaw along the base. Under a strip of oak that both decorates and
reinforces the base—in a place that no one will be able to see once the
bookcase is upright—Rudolfo points to a tiny gap in
the otherwise flawless seam where strip and base join together. The gap is
between one-sixteenth and one thirty-second of an inch wide. Wood inevitably
warps, and, as Rudolfo explains, he placed his
finishing nails “too high on the strip,” thus not correcting for a small
irregularity in the oak. Next time, he notes, he’ll place the nails lower,
checking the seam more carefully. Now, though, he’s going to fill the gap
with putty and sand it. “No one can see it,” he explains, “but I want it to
be right.” Charles is volunteering
at a Habitat for Humanity site and is assembling the frames for the walls of
one of the bedrooms. These frames consist of two long, horizontal two-by-four
boards with six shorter two-by-fours, called studs, nailed vertically in
place sixteen inches apart. Charles begins by measuring and marking the
sixteen-inch increments on the horizontal boards, and then lays out the
vertical studs accordingly. He measures again. Then he begins nailing the
studs in place, driving one nail, then another, stopping occasionally to
check with his eye or a framing square the trueness of the frame. I ask
Charles about this precision. He says that when the frame is finished, “I
know it’s going to be straight and well done.” He pauses and adds: “That’s
the way I am.” Charles’s values motivate and guide his action: measuring
twice, positioning his body, eyeballing the frame. The emerging frame, in
turn, embodies those values, manifests them back to Charles, confirming his
sense of himself. “Hey, Justin, that’s
pretty!” Jim Padilla yells to the boy on the ladder, under the eaves,
affixing the last fastening strap around a long stretch of electrical
conduit. Mr. Padilla pulls two other boys over, pointing up. The sun is
behind us, warm and bright on the stucco of the new house. “Look,” Mr.
Padilla says in his earnest, rolling voice, “you can barely see the conduit.
Nice, huh? You always want to preserve the beauty of the home.” Jim Padilla, a stocky man
with thick black hair and a full mustache, is the teacher of this crew of
fledgling electricians, fifteen or so boys, high school juniors and seniors
out of the classroom on their first job site, a modest tract house in need of
outdoor lights and receptacles. Mr. Padilla moves on, his arms angling out
from his chest as he walks, and stops at another ladder to talk to another
boy fastening conduit under the eaves. “Hey, Mundo,”
he hollers up, “come down here a minute, por
favor. I wanna show you something.” Mundo makes his way down, rung after rung, setting foot
alongside Mr. Padilla. The teacher points up to one of the straps on the
underside of the roof. It is off-center. “Look, Mundo,”
says Mr. Padilla, “see, all the other straps are in the middle. That’s good.
Fix this one, OK? If the strap’s in the middle it’s stronger, and it looks
better.” Mundo nods and starts back up the ladder.
Mr. Padilla places his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He’s not done yet. “We try
hard not to show our straps, Mundo. We want to show
as little evidence of the electrician’s being here as possible.” The snug attachment of a
conduit, the neat bend in it as it connects to a receptacle, the exact
placement of a fastening strap where few will see-there is functional purpose
to all this, but an aesthetic motive, too. (“What looks well works well,”
says one of the carpenters in Tracy Kidder’s House.) To Jim Padilla’s
eye, such work is pleasant to behold, is “pretty,” and he tries to train the
eye of his students to see it as pretty, too. Being on a job site with Jim
Padilla is like being in an artisan’s studio, surrounded with evaluative
craft-talk. Over time, the students acquire it, and the acquisition
re-creates tradition in this time and place. A boy next to me stands back
from his work, looks at it quietly, then turns to me and says, “That’s nice,
isn’t it?” The look of the work becomes a mark of one’s identity as an
electrician. Showing a group of students the wiring in the electrical panel
alongside the house, Mt Padilla tells them: “Here’s the thing, guys. Make it
as neat as possible. Your signature is on this.” But it is an unusual
signature, and an unusual aesthetic, given the aesthetic of display that so
permeates both our popular and highbrow culture. Part of the appeal here is
the care put into embedding one’s work in the context of the house, out of
view, even hidden. An experienced electrician I visited had removed a section
of drywall and was commenting on a cluster of wires running along the frame.
The braid was perfect, he said approvingly. That makes it easier, he
explained, to single out a particular wire—the functional value-but also, it
just looks good. The previous electrician’s signature is woven into the
braid, but anonymously so, and completely out of sight, seen, if at all, by
another electrician, carpenter, or plumber over the life of the house. If there is an aspect of
Western intellectual history that diminishes the thought and virtue in
physical work, there is, as well, a tendency to limit the meaning and
occasion of aesthetic response. I am reminded of something one of Jerry
Devries’s students said in an English class. The teacher was introducing a
list of vocabulary words, drawn from an essay they were reading. Aesthetic
was one of them. After a few minutes of discussion, this boy, one of
Jerry’s more able students, raised his hand and respectfully suggested to
his teacher that the word “doesn’t have anything to do with us.” His comment
reveals the power of some traditional, and widespread, approaches to
aesthetics, that it is a particular kind of response to “high art.” Such
definition is unfortunate here, for it compromises the student’s
understanding of his own activity. Of course, there is a
range of opinion in Western aesthetics about the nature and function of art,
but what strikes me as I read in that literature is the immense intellectual
effort put into differentiating that which is marked as art from other forms
of human artifice. Tolstoy put it nicely: “[A] certain class of works which
for some reason please a certain class of people is accepted as being art,
and a definition of art is then devised to cover all these productions.” And
these definitions are often wrought comparatively: art is contrasted
with other activity (for example, craft) and judged to be of a
different, and superior, order. I am not suggesting that Felipe’s cabinet or
Justin’s neat conduit is the cognitive or imaginative equivalent of The
Starry Night or “Mood Indigo.” What is worth considering, though, is the
way the process of defining art tends to diminish other realms of artful
behavior. Mike Rose attacks cultural stereotyping
and makes a case for respecting the way the minds of workers are engaged in
the workplace, no matter what some observers and bosses may think. The Mind
At Work may encourage some managers to change the way they interact with
workers. Steve Hopkins,
December 20, 2004 |
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ă 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Mind At Work.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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