The Craftsman

What an amazing book. I thought this might be dry, since the book is about craftsmanship. Sennett deals with craftsmanship in so many different realms, not just in terms of building physical objects but also social organizations such as businesses and governments. There is so much interesting information here that I will need to read this again just to get everything to soak in.

Oh, the irony! A book devoted to the subject of the craftsman is an exemplar of poor craftsmanship. Happily, this is true only of the apparent lack of proofreading--the content is indeed worth consideration. However, it *is* annoying to read a book that is studded with wrong words, missing words, and sentence fragments. The spell check is no substitute for careful review by a human being...and this was obviously lacking. Now that that's out of the way--this is a thoughtful and indeed philosophical consideration of what goes into craftsmanship. The author's thinking is buttressed by numerous historical examples of the workshop, the industrial plant, and kinds of materials worked. He examines all this not only for purposes of definition--what is a craftsman--but also to encourage the reader's reflection upon the fate of craft in a society of mass production and consumption. The issue is not only the matter of quality in finished goods, but also of the kind of society that is inevitably shaped by the character of our lives' labors. This is a book worth reading; just don't let the flagrant sloppiness of the (absent) editing get you down.

This was a very good, very flawed book. Sennet's ideas are extremely interesting but he is an deplorable writer. He rambles and mixes metaphors regularly, uses obscure anglicisms and archaisms and odd syntax with dismaying frequency. George Orwell he is not. He sites Hannah Arendt as one of his influences, and I seem to recall she was not the most readable writer either. Amusingly, he mentions that a work of handicraft should be rough, handmade looking... and his prose is all that! It seems to have been written on a tape recorder. He thanks his manuscript editor in the foreword, he should have fired her, there are sentences that make no sense at all, misspellings, and double entendres. Maybe he did some of this on purpose, like modern art, so the reader would have to slow down and parse every sentence, who knows? He's like an prophet, he needs someone to interpret him in a more accessible way. Anyway, I loved his ideas, and think this was a very meaningful book for me personally.

This is not your standard craft book. It is an insiteful analysis of craft as a social and human phenomenon. It explores all aspects of craft from the role of the hand to the historical divergence of craft and art.

Richard Sennett (professor of sociology at New York University and at The London School of Economics) is vitally concerned with the devaluation of human values within the context of the new economy. We live in an age where management decisions can be very remote, and where people's jobs are displaced wholesale, moved offshore, and where human lives are measured by the bottom-line accounting of large organisations. What Sennett does is put a stake in the ground by asking rhetorically whether our commitment to work - our craftsmanship - is merely about money, or about something deeper and more human. Of course, the answer is that work commitment - the skill, the care, the late nights, the problem solving and pride that go into our work is a LOT more than about money. In this book Sennett very clearly and thoughtfully dicusses the vital social currency of craftsmanship (and he uses the term in a modern sense - software programmers are craftspeople too.) The book is timely, especially in a donwturn economy, and it raises many questions about how we value the people in our society. Craftspeople have been devalued of late - how we celebrate the CEO titans! - but maybe the pendulum needs to swing back the other way. A worthwhile read for managers, for HR people, for craftspeople of all stripes - and for policy makers and economists. If our society is supposed to be more value-based these days (good corporate citizens, good global citizens) then The Craftsman urges us to look closer to home: at our own good people. Well recommended. See also: 1 The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism 2 Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization 3 The Fall of Public Man (Open Market Edition)