The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good

by Matthew Crawford

Why do some jobs offer fulfilment while others leave us frustrated? Why do we so often think of our working selves as separate from our 'true' selves?
Over the course of the twentieth century, we have separated mental work from manual labour, replacing the workshop with either the office cubicle or the factory line. In this inspiring and persuasive book, Matthew Crawford explores the dangers of this false distinction and presents instead the case for working with your hands. He brings to life the immense psychological and intellectual satisfactions of making and fixing things, explores the moral benefits of a technical education and, at a time when jobs are increasingly being outsourced over the internet, argues that the skilled manual trades may be one of the few sure paths to a good 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, Crawford delivers a radical, timely and extremely enjoyable re-evaluation of our attitudes to work.

• ISBN10: 0670918741
• ISBN13: 9780670918744
• Publish Date: 15 April 2010
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 13 December 2010
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Viking
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

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 raised less physical work to a stage where we no longer look for work that feeds our souls but for work that has societal cachet and this is what we also encourage our children to think.