The Case for Working with Your Hands, Or, Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good
It's time to rethink our attitudes to work. For too long we have convinced ourselves that the only jobs worth doing involve sitting at a desk. Generations of school-leavers head for university lacking the skills to fix or even understand the most basic technology. And yet many of us are not...
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It's time to rethink our attitudes to work. For too long we have convinced ourselves that the only jobs worth doing involve sitting at a desk. Generations of school-leavers head for university lacking the skills to fix or even understand the most basic technology. And yet many of us are not suited to office life, while skilled manual work provides one of the few and most rewarding paths to a secure living. Drawing on the work of our greatest thinkers, from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Karl Marx to Iris Murdoch, as well as on his own experiences as an electrician and motorcycle mechanic, Matthew Crawford's irreverent and inspiring manifesto will change the way you think about work forever.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780141047294 (0141047291)
Publish date: March 1st 2011
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 256
Edition language: English
While he values physical hand's on work more than computer based work, the answer surely is that people can only find value in themselves if they see value in their work. That many people's work has become depersonalised and there is an emphasis on interchangeability of working units. We have also...
This book irritated me to no end. Where one word would suffice, Two were used, and at least one would be a word chosen to impress the reader that this was no ordinary grease monkey, but some kind of warrior-poet....Or, a pretentious twit. In general the book attempts to make both a philosophical and...
This book is an interesting look at work in the 21st Century. Does every child need to go to college? What's the real value of learning a trade? What's the real cost of our throwaway society? Why don't Americans build anything again more. What's the psyche of cubicle workers. These are some o...
I had huge expectations for this book. After all, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is my all-time favorite read. Shop Class was a huge disappointment, probably due to my huge expectations. It reads with a mix of the stilted verbosity of academia and the incomprehensible (to me) vocabulary o...
excerpt at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?pagewanted=6&em