Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13457 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With this volume, author and sociologist Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism) launches a three-book examination of "material culture," asking "what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves." Taking in everything from Pandora and Hephaestus to Linux programmers, Sennett posits that the spirit of craftsmanship-an "enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake"-is tragically lacking in many areas of the industrialized world. Craftsmanship, by combining skill, commitment and judgment, establishes a close relationship between head and hand, man and machine, that Sennett asserts is vital to physical, mental and societal well-being; the symptoms of craftsmanship-deficiency can be found in worker demoralization, inefficiency and waning loyalty from both employees and employers, as well as other (largely institutional) effects. Sennett looks at the evolution of craftsmanship and the historical forces which have stultified it, how it's learned in the areas it still thrives (among scientists, artists, cooks, computer programmers and others), and issues of quality and ability (skill, not talent, makes a craftsman). Sennett's learned but inclusive prose proves entirely readable, and the breadth of his curiosity-delving into the minds behind the Manhattan project, touring Soviet suburbs, examining the methods of Julia Childs-take him in a number of fascinating directions.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Sennett considers an array of artisans across different periods, from ancient Chinese chefs to contemporary mobile-phone designers, in this powerful meditation on the "skill of making things well." The template of craftsmanship, he finds, combines a "material consciousness" with a willingness to put in years of practice (a common estimate of the time required to master a craft is ten thousand hours) and a strategic acceptance of ambiguity, rather than an obsessive perfectionism. Sennett’s aim is to make us rethink the notion that society benefits most from a workforce trained to respond to the metamorphoses of a global economy. Ultimately, he writes, the difficulties and possibilities of craft can teach "techniques of experience" that help us relate to others, and lead to an "ethically satisfying" pride in one’s work.
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Review
"As Richard Sennett makes clear in this lucid and compelling book, craftsmanship once connected people to their work by conferring pride and meaning. The loss of craftsmanship-and of a society that values it-has impoverished us in ways we have long forgotten but Sennett helps us understand."-Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley, and author of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Robert B. Reich )

"Eloquent and persuasive."-Scott Nesbit, Culture (Scott Nesbit Culture )

"In The Craftsman [Sennett] compellingly explores the universe of skilled work, where ''the desire to do a job well done for its own sake'' still flourishes."-Brian C. Anderson, Wall Street Journal (Brian C. Anderson Wall Street Journal )

"An inquiring, intelligent look at how the work of the hand informs the work of the mind."-New York Times Book Review (Editors'' Choice) (New York Times Book Review )

Customer Reviews

Signifigance of Craft
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.

What happened to editors?
While I found the contents of Sennett's book interesting and even, at times, uniquely thought-provoking, reading the book left me bewildered and dismayed: How could a book extolling the virtues of quality in craftsmanship be so poorly edited? Is the manner in which the book is published a purposeful counterpoint to Sennett's basic argument? Without exaggeration, almost every page in the book held one or more instances of unaddressed typographical oversight. In truth, the book read like a poor translation from another language possessing idioms and phraseology totally foreign to English. If this is the best that Yale University Press can do, I will certainly question any future purchases bearing that name. For the prospective buyer, be prepared for a disruptive read.

Too much theory, too little fact
There is quite a bit of sociological theory in this book, but that's been discussed by other reviewers, so I'll not go into detail here, but I'll just discuss my gripe: data.

I expected to see some real data to corroborate Sennett's beliefs, but he offers mainly anecdotes, with lots of literary references (e.g. Homer and Wittgenstein). I can't shake the feeling that the author just used any odd example that popped into his head: he talks about conversations with his teacher, tours his friends gave him of bad Soviet architecture, a badly designed conference center he visited in Atlanta, his experiences learning to play music, and so on. The author just doesn't strike me as being very systematic, his examples seem like they were chosen more because they were convenient than because they were representative. Maybe this is standard practice for sociology books (I don't read too many from this genre) but The Craftsman certainly presents an unfavourable comparison to "Bowling Alone" by Putnam, which is a sociological text that makes an absolutely masterly use of data.

As I said, Sennett's inability or unwillingness to confront data is my biggest gripe with the book. I cannot remember any point at which Sennett had a piece of information that was hard to square with his beliefs; anything contradictory seems to have been ignored. Even when Sennet does mention any data, it is done in little snippets, and it is often wrong. In chapter one alone, Sennet claims that Wikipedia is a Linux application (?), that the British National Health Service spends about 2/3 as much as the US (in fact, the British spend less than half as much as a % of GDP, and even less than that in absolute terms), and that US median earnings rose only 4% between 1973 and 2003 (in fact median real gdp per capita is up about 20% over that time period).

There are other problems (and some good points) but for me the big let-down of the book was that it felt too much like an informal chat (albeit with a very intelligent man). Maybe I just went in with the wrong expectations, but if I could read it again, I wouldn't.