Sennett—The Craftsman (iv)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

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Expertise
The Sociable and the Antisocial Expert

The danger to others posed by people driven by excellence crystallizes in the figure of the expert. He or she appears in two guises, sociable or antisocial. A well-crafted institution will favor the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is in trouble.

The expert's provenance and prestige are ancient, beginning with the civic honor of the demioergoi. The expert has since the Middle Ages figured as a master craftsman who is perforce a sociable expert. The civic and religious rituals that organized the guilds forged a social bond in which it was the master's duty to participate; the internal organization of each workshop, based on face-to-face authority and exercised within a small community, further cemented sociability. Closer to modern times, the amateur gradually lost ground, especially with the dawn of the Industrial Age—the amateur's foraging curiosity seeming of lesser value than specialized knowledge.

This is already getting too loose. "Amateur" or "professional" is one distinction, expert or novice is another, specialst or generalist is yet a third.

Yet the modern expert has few strong rituals to bind him or her to the larger community or indeed to colleagues.

So argues the sociologist Elliott Krause in The Death of the Guilds. His studies of engineers, lawyers, physicians, and academics show how the power of professional associations weakened in the last century under the pressures of an impersonal market and bureaucratic state even as the professions themselves became stricter, more expert disciplines. National or international professional organizations are of course far larger than were the urban guilds of the past, but their meetings have had, Krause believes, some of the same bonding, ritual character. The first modern usage of the term professional referred to people who saw themselves as something other than just employees. On balance, government and legal regulation has done more to constrict the professions than did the market; the law bureaucratized the

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very content of what professionals know. What went missing was community—a point also and first made by Robert Perrucci and Joel Gerst in their pioneering study Profession without Community.

The scholarly study of expertise has gone through three phases. At first, "the expert" was studied as a person who had developed analytic powers that could be applied to any field; a consultant roaming from corporate turf to turf figures as such an expert. Analysts of expertise then "discovered" that content mattered; the expert had to know a great deal about something in particular (the ten-thousand-hour rule derived from this discovery). Today, both concerns combine with the social explorations made by Perrucci, Gerstl, and Krause to frame a problem: How can an expert act sociably if he or she lacks a strong professional community, a strong guild? Can good work itself turn the expert outward?

Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elabodated in long-term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise.

Well yeah, but how would we know if that's really what's going on in the above study?

Craft experience of imperfect tools has also found its way into the

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understanding of sociable expertise. These tools obliged their users, as we have seen among seventeenth-century scientists, to be minded to fixing as well as making; repair is a fundamental category of craftsmanship; today again, an expert is seen as someone who can equally make and repair. We may recall the sociologist Douglas Harper's words: an expert is someone "with knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence . . . It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum."

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean..."

In Harper's study of small machine shops, the sociable experts tend to be good at explaining and giving advice to their customers. The sociable expert, that is, is comfortable with mentoring, the modern echo of medieval in loco parentis.

Finally, the sociable side of expertise addresses the issue of knowledge transfer posed in Stradivari's workshop. He could not pass on his experience, which had been become his own tacit knowledge. Too many modern experts imagine themselves in the Stradivari trap—indeed, we could call Stradivari Syndrome the conviction that one's expertise is ineffable.

Well, this also depends on how disciplinary boundaries are drawn. If your own practice of medicine is not recognized as "medicine" by all the other doctors, you are going to have a hard time passing it on by way of the existing mechanisms for doing so.

Since one's experiences are, dare I say, precisely ineffable vis-a-vis everyone else (didn't we just take a whole junket through this idea, complete with visits chez Smith and Hume?), one must believe the discipline in question to be wholly self-contained in precisely the way these passages argue against. Otherwise there is no way to believe that expertise can ever be fully communicated.

This syndrome appears among British doctors who have failed to discuss treatment options, to expose themselves to criticism, to unpack their tacit understandings with colleagues. As a result, their skills degrade over time in comparison with doctors who turn outward professionally. Local family doctors—those reassuring figures in medical romance—seem particularly to suffer from Stradivari Syndrome.

The GoodWork Project at Harvard University, led by Howard Gardner, has investigated various ways to surmount the problem of hoarding expertise. Researchers in the GoodWork Project have studied, for instance, a famous breakdown in standards at the New York Times at a moment when a few reporters became spectacularly corrupt. In the GoodWork Project's view, the fault lay with the institution. "We are the New York Times," ineffable, the Stradivari of news organizations. As a result, the paper didn't communicate its standards explicitly; this si-

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lence opened a gap for unscrupulous reporters to colonize the organization.

To Gardner, transparency can counter this danger, but transparency of a certain sort: the standards of good work must be clear to people who are not themselves experts. For Gardner and his colleagues, the effort to devise such a language jolts experts into working better as well as more honestly. Matthew Gill makes a similar analysis of accounting practices in London: the standard that makes sense to nonexperts — rather than self-referential rules and regulations — is what keeps accountants honest .

So, not all reporters are scrupulous and not all accountants are honest . But it's not their fault. No one told them not to lie, at least not explicitly , not during their long years of schooling and not even when they were hired. The rules and regulations they did learn about were merely self-referential . So who are you to judge them? If that's all you had to go on, you'd probably lie too.

But, if you are a nonexpert , then you do know what honesty is, unlike the experts, who have to be told. Your intuitive understanding of honesty refers to all sorts of real-people stuff, unlike the experts who forget everything else they've ever known or experienced as soon as they start learning about expert stuff. And that's just how it is.

We can't select for qualities like honesty and scrupulousness in new generations of reporters and accountants, though we'll surely be selecting for all kinds of other, more specific qualities and skills. We can't count on honesty from these carefully selected experts, but we can count on any and all nonexperts to know what is honest and what is not. Honesty is a standard that makes sense to nonexperts . All we have to do is ask them.

Turning outward, they hold themselves to account and can also see what the work means to others." Standards comprehensible to nonexperts raise quality in the organization as a whole. Sociable expertise doesn't create community in any self-conscious or ideological sense; it consists simply of good practices. The well-crafted organization will focus on whole human beings in time, it will encourage mentoring, and it will demand standards framed in language that any person in the organization might understand.

"Don't f*ing lie" seems like it would be very understandable. But it cannot possibly be specific enough. We have to be much more specific than this. But if we are too specific, we lapse into self-referentiality. Good luck everybody.

...

[265] In old English a "career" meant a well-laid road, whereas a "job" meant simply a lump of coal or pile of wood that could be moved around at will. The medieval goldsmith within a guild exemplified the roadway of "career" in work. His life path was well laid in time, the stages of his progress were clearly marked, even if the work itself was inexact. His was a linear story. As appeared in Chapter I, the "skills society" is bulldozing the career path; jobs in the old sense of random movement now prevail; people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well. Craftsmanship seems particularly vulnerable to this possibility, since craftsmanship is based on slow learning and on habit. His form of obsession—Len Greenham's—no longer seems to pay.

I'm not convinced that this is the craftsman's fated end. Schools

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and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take one concrete step to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job retraining. Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for such efforts. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers often don't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor, the Animal laborans of Arendt's imagination. But we've seen throughout this book that just the opposite is the case. For good craftsmen, routines are not static; they evolve, the craftsmen improve.

My note says:
p. 266—"artisinal craftsman" as "promising subjects" for "job retraining"
Connects to J. Jacobs' riff on entrepreneurs and artists. The artist actually has formed an identity around their work; not around their "craftsmanship" generically, which is the ground for retraining. Retraining in such cases in untenable because it threatens dissolution of the self. For many reasons of course it would be better, or so it often seems, if such artsy-fartsies could just Get Over Themselves. I would certainly like to be able to say I've achieved this. But also, I wonder if there are not, variously, unintended consequences, negative externalities, dark continents, etc., etc., lurking behind every corner therein.

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Ability

I've kept for the end of this book its most controversial proposal: that nearly anyone can become a good craftsman. The proposal is controversial because modern society sorts people along a strict gradient of ability. The better you are at something, the fewer of you there are. This view has been applied not only to innate intelligence but to the subsequent development of abilities: the further you get, the fewer of you there are.

Craftsmanship doesn't fit into this framework. As will appear in this chapter, the rhythm of routine in craftsmanship draws on childhood experience of play, and almost all children can play well. The dialogue with materials in craftsmanship is unlikely to be charted by intelligence tests; again, most people are able to reason well about their physical sensations. Craftwork embodies a great paradox in that a highly refined, complicated activity emerges from simple mental acts like specifying facts and then questioning them.

Now:
Nothing to disagree with here, only to add: there's a reason we distinguish between "art" and "craft." (Or is "specifying facts and then questioning them" a variable personality trait rather than a "simple mental act"?)

My note says:
p. 268—"...nearly anyone can become a good craftsman... Craftwork embodies a great paradox in that a highly refined, complicated activity emerges from simple mental acts."
Perhaps this begins to flesh out the Goodmans' Divided Economy proposal: the subsistence economy is an economy of craftspeople, whereas the luxury economy is an economy of unevenly distributed merit. This works well both practically and ontologically, which is unusual.
A complication: could some of us actually be incapable of "simple" mental acts, not out of a deficit of intelligence but rather a surplus?

[290] I recognize that the reader may balk at thinking of experience in terms of technique. But who we are arises directly from what our bodies can do. Social consequences are built into the structure and the functioning of the human body, as in the workings of the human hand. I argue no more and no less than that the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations. And if debatable, this viewpoint is not uniquely mine. One hallmark of the pragmatist movement has been to suppose a continuum between the organic and the social. Whereas some sociobiologists have argued that genetics dictates behavior, pragmatists like Hans Joas maintain that the body's own richness furnishes the materials for a wide variety of creative action. Craftsmanship shows the continuum between the organic and the social put in action.

An eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible. This is because the word carries too much Romantic baggage—the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius. I have sought to eliminate some of the mystery by showing how intuitive leaps happen, in the reflections people make on the actions of their own hands or in the use of tools. I have sought to draw craft and art together, because all techniques contain expressive implications. This is true of making a pot; it is also and equally true of raising a child.

But...the expressive implications are vastly different between pot and child!

My note says:
p. 290—"...the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible..."
The reasons given are fair enough in and of themselves, but no doubt they are quite incomplete. He could have just pointed out that "creativity" is nothing more than the agglomeration of many smaller acts; mostly craft-acts which, as he says, almost anyone can do. But almost no one can Agglomerate, even though the units of Agglomeration are usually comically simple. Something Else is at work here! Namely scope and scale. (Speed seems inessential but does come in handy, e.g. for "improvisors.") None of those are Craft values, and in some ways they are actually craft-opposing values.

Now:
Sometime soon I'll post some excerpts from Sacks, Musicophilia. There is a wonderful "both sides" moment where he concludes that "a sizeable minority, perhaps thirty percent" of adults have the ability to be "creative." That's a whole lot of people but not everybody/anybody.