Where is the soul of research?
May 26th, 2010 at 12:47 pm (Books, Philosophy)
I recently finished reading “Shop Class as Soul Craft,” by Matthew Crawford (see my review). He argues for the merits of trade or craft worker, such as that of plumbers and mechanics and (some) doctors and carpenters and so on. These occupations share a fundamental connection to the real world and a dedication to improving it in some particular way. (Crawford has an odd tendency to also refer to these jobs as the “stochastic arts”. Here he seems to use “stochastic” to mean “trying to fix a system that you didn’t design and therefore cannot fully control”, which is rather a departure from the typical meaning of the word.)
In Crawford’s view, the opposite of a trade worker is a “knowledge worker,” someone who manipulates abstract bits of knowledge, often using a computer. This is the occupation family to which many are urged these days, freeing workers from a specific place of business (“work from home!”) and often from specific tangible output (“I developed a template for a work process for the development of websites to stimulate creativity!”).
Knowledge work gets a bad rap in this book. As a knowledge worker myself, I can see and agree with the problems Crawford points out. Number one is the lack of a specific result, or at least a meaningful specific result. A mechanic can point at a car that now runs. There’s no obvious way for me to measure productivity and success in my job that translates so directly into helping others, or reducing entropy, or any other self-evident good. Instead my productivity, at the rare times when any attempt is made to quantify it, is measured via indirect quantities like the number of papers published or the number of grant dollars won. These are so far removed from actual significance or impact that it’s hard to feel genuine pride or accomplishment if they go up, or genuine lack if they go down. I think this is why I find volunteering at the library ultimately more satisfying; although I’m engaged at a “lower” or more “simplistic” level, in the end I can actually count how many books I’ve shelved or patrons I’ve helped or donations I’ve sorted. The result of my work is self-evident. I agree with Crawford that there’s something good for the soul in being able to see the fruits of your labor like this.
Crawford also argues that a benefit of craft or trade work is that it forces us to submit ourselves to an external order. Either the plumbing leaks or it doesn’t. This is dictated by the constraints of physics, in terms of how water flows and whether there’s a gap in the fittings. You can’t redefine the rules or wish the problem away; instead, you work within those constraints to fix the problem. He sees this as a good prescription for avoiding narcissism. I can definitely see this, too. In research, it is easy to redefine the evaluation metric, or experimental methodology, and totally change the outcome, because you have control over the rules of the world.
For these two reasons (lack of meaningful metrics, and the ability to redefine the constraints at will), it is supremely hard to know whether you are actually good at such a job, and whether you ever improve. In a statement that perhaps stuck with me the most, Crawford writes, “To be capable of sustaining our interest, a job has to have room for progress in excellence.” Stated that way, it seems obvious that a job with nebulous and shifting measurements of output would ultimately lack motivation. And so the question arises, for me personally: Where is the “soul” in research? How can I find concrete ways that the work to which I devote most of my waking hours actually matters? How will I ever know whether I’m getting better at what I do? Is this gap due to a lack of imagination on my part, or a fundamental problem with the type of work itself? Would my energies be better spent doing something else?
I recommend the book to anyone interested in these same questions.
Susan said,
May 27, 2010 at 9:06 am
Hmmm. (I’m integrating your GoodReads review into this response :).)
So, if Crawford’s complaint is about work that has no concrete metrics, outputs, and impact, then I’m more sympathetic to his premise. I spent a lot of my career in Computer Science, as I think I mentioned over coffee at some point, thinking that I could be perfectly happy with an interesting problem, no matter what the context. I got so unhappy that I started planning to change fields. Then I got this job and discovered that the context DOES matter. In addition to interesting problems to solve, visible impact from my work is a huge contributor to my job satisfaction. I need to do work that matters to somebody. Who knew?
But I would say that there are plenty of “knowledge work” pursuits that have metrics, output, and impact. I write software. I can talk to my users, find out what they need, and write code that makes their lives better. There are plenty of metrics I can use to measure my own improvement. Meanwhile, I can’t imagine every physical pursuit, including every position on every manufacturing assembly line, gives a sense of purpose. I think the issue might be that he’s comparing apples to oranges. My job might be analogous to his bicycle shop (though I’m both designing and building my “bicycles”), while his example office drone is analogous to the interchangeable support staff for many physical professions.
That said, I do think the “soul” of research is an interesting case. From my position in essentially research support staff, the soul seems obvious. Research is the very beginning of the process of all of society making our lives better. Without your ideas and initial exploration of them, most of our wheels of self-improvement grind to a halt. But it’s true that the role of intellectual explorer is necessarily unfocused for most individuals. Also, as I see the struggles of many researchers within their own community, sometimes I think the joy of the world as your playground gets squashed way too quickly.
wkiri said,
May 27, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Thanks for your great comments! Yeah, you and I have already had some good conversations about this. :) With respect to this book, I think Crawford does come down heavily in favor of tangible output, and against any kind of knowledge work — but he’s biased based on his experience first as a technical writer of abstracts for a research-paper-abstracting company, and later as a Ph.D. in charge of a think tank. Both of those experiences were both negative and empty for him. It doesn’t sound like he’s ever had the “bug” for research that some of us do, the joy of problem-solving for its own sake (which also appears in a lot of other “knowledge work”, including your own). I don’t deny that fun aspect of this kind of work, and it’s what always attracted me to research. Maybe I’m just losing that critical sense of context that you highlight — it really does matter!
Crawford specifically argues against assembly-line work, even if it is physical/tangible — the kind of “trade” he promotes is instead very individual and relies on individual expertise. He decries the assembly line (and its knowledge-work kin, “scientific management”, which was a new concept to me) as specifically eroding that connection between expertise and action, replacing them with rote actions and, inevitably, a lack of investment by the worker in his work.
If this interests you further, and you end up reading the book, I’d love to hear what you think! I might not be representing all of his concepts exactly the way he would. :)