User:Luisa Moura/thematic/trimester III/Sennett: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 16:51, 10 April 2014

The craftsman, as defined by Sennett, works with engagement and in the pursuit of excellence regarding a certain skill; invests time and attention on details, working on a process of permanent research. Such attitude is subjective, leads to unpredictable results and is hard to judge (quality) or to quantify (efficiency). These are characteristics that don't fit contemporary market demands or institutional control and are therefore very inconvenient.

Detaching head and hand leads to impairment and impairment leads to demotivation. A demotivated worker eventually produces badly and indifferently, but it is easy to substitute him by someone new (the culture of perpetual internship / freelance labor)

In contemporary practice workers are often not rewarded or paid to have an overview on what is being produced or executed. It is mostly inconvenient that they would do so; they would question it and eventually try to act on their own behalf. Serial production and extensive use of machinery don't benefit the worker, once it permanently limits the exercise of their own capabilities leading to frustration; the system seems to be based on energy drainage and quick dismissal of human labor.

I wonder what did exactly happened with Nokia and Motorola, mentioned by Sennett. Did workers actually feel that they were engaging in the process? Did they actually have an overview and took the research in their own hands? Did the subtraction of hierarchy and permanent state of research lead to this great state of creative production by itself? Do we have any other cultural / historical motive for its success?

OFFICE | CORPORATION - Companies in countries with strict social and labor regulations try to engage their workers in a feeling of cooperation and friendliness, knowing that it is an important ingredient for a greater dedication, loyalty and productivity. But additionally a set of rewards should be given to employees in order to keep them playing the dedication-role: growing salaries, fair working hours, holidays, healthcare.

ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL - PORTO, the limitations of the craftsman's dream: the education of a legion of cheap, deeply engaged and utopian laborers. Positive side: The architectural exercise from a sensorial point of view. The mass of paper and drawing, sketch till exaustion; the model, the materiality of the walls, the respect for vernacular construction, the mechanisms of perception and its manipulation, the critical sense explored to its limit (choice of a default ideal); the concept as research tool and not as marketing narrative.

MANDATORY EDUCATION until adulthood: generic, abstract, mostly useless contents for great part of the students. Why not a greater attention to actual specialization within technical, manual or any other practical skills? (Stigmatization of the technical work)

CRAFT AND COLLECTIVITY - The craftsman seems to be a creature in deep need of protection. It seems important to notice that the craftsman needs a collectivity or a collective goal in order to pursuit safely his work and research. There must be a specific challenge and there must be a set of rules (limitation of tools or strategies among peers, a great ideal and a sort of protectionism status). The isolated craftsman has little power or value. If the craftsman is not aggregated to a bigger picture, if he is not serving a public goal and is not institutionally recognized, he has no chance to endure as such.

Medieval guilds: The craftsman didn't need an identity within his group. They had a sense of belonging regarding a specific city or village, their knowledge was shared and permanently improved and kept within the walls of the city. There was a code of honor regarding the secrets of their method, the prices of their produce and the transmission of their knowledge. They had enormous power and were in charge in many cities. The guilds represented the control of local labor, production and trade. It is a bit unclear in how far apprentices would be such all the time or would eventually reach the status of craftsmen themselves

WIKIPEDIA ON GUILDS

"European guilds imposed long standardized periods of apprenticeship, and made it difficult for those lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge, or to sell into certain markets, an area that equally dominated the guilds' concerns. These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise of classical economics"

"The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. They were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts"

"Guilds are sometimes said to be the precursors of modern trade unions, and also of some aspects of the modern corporation. Guilds, however, were groups of self-employed skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to produce their goods. Guilds were, in other words, small business associations and thus had very little in common with trade unions. Guilds were more like cartels than they were like trade unions (Olson 1982)"

PUPPET MAKING PRAGUE

The market value of craftsmanship as icon of authenticity: cultural meaning and collective desire.

(...)

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-The Craftsman - Richard Senett
+The craftsman, as defined by Sennett, works with engagement and in the pursuit of excellence regarding a certain skill; invests time and attention on details, working on a process of permanent research. Such attitude is subjective, leads to unpredictable results and is hard to judge (quality) or to quantify (efficiency). These are characteristics that don't fit contemporary market demands or institutional control and are therefore very inconvenient.
+Detaching head and hand leads to impairment and impairment leads to demotivation. A demotivated worker eventually produces badly and indifferently, but it is easy to substitute him by someone new (the culture of perpetual internship / freelance labor)
+In contemporary practice workers are often not rewarded or paid to have an overview on what is being produced or executed. It is mostly inconvenient that they would do so; they would question it and eventually try to act on their own behalf. Serial production and extensive use of machinery don't benefit the worker, once it permanently limits the exercise of their own capabilities leading to frustration; the system seems to be based on energy drainage and quick dismissal of human labor.
-CHAPTER I
+I wonder what did exactly happened with Nokia and Motorola, mentioned by Sennett. Did workers actually feel that they were engaging in the process? Did they actually have an overview and took the research in their own hands? Did the subtraction of hierarchy and permanent state of research lead to this great state of creative production by itself? Do we have any other cultural / historical motive for its success?
-THE TROUBLED CRAFTSMAN
+OFFICE | CORPORATION - Companies in countries with strict social and labor regulations try to engage their workers in a feeling of cooperation and friendliness, knowing that it is an important ingredient for a greater dedication, loyalty and productivity. But additionally a set of rewards should be given to employees in order to keep them playing the dedication-role: growing salaries, fair working hours, holidays, healthcare.
+ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL - PORTO, the limitations of the craftsman's dream: the education of a legion of cheap, deeply engaged and utopian laborers.
+Positive side: The architectural exercise from a sensorial point of view. The mass of paper and drawing, sketch till exaustion; the model, the materiality of the walls, the respect for vernacular construction, the mechanisms of perception and its manipulation, the critical sense explored to its limit (choice of a default ideal); the concept as research tool and not as marketing narrative.
+MANDATORY EDUCATION until adulthood: generic, abstract, mostly useless contents for great part of the students. Why not a greater attention to actual specialization within technical, manual or any other practical skills? (Stigmatization of the technical work)
-all craftsmen (...) are dedicated to good work for its own sake.
+CRAFT AND COLLECTIVITY - The craftsman seems to be a creature in deep need of protection. It seems important to notice that the craftsman needs a collectivity or a collective goal in order to pursuit safely his work and research. There must be a specific challenge and there must be a set of rules (limitation of tools or strategies among peers, a great ideal and a sort of protectionism status). The isolated craftsman has little power or value. If the craftsman is not aggregated to a bigger picture, if he is not serving a public goal and is not institutionally recognized, he has no chance to endure as such.
-The craftsman represents the special human condition of being ENGAGED.
+Medieval guilds: The craftsman didn't need an identity within his group. They had a sense of belonging regarding a specific city or village, their knowledge was shared and permanently improved and kept within the walls of the city. There was a code of honor regarding the secrets of their method, the prices of their produce and the transmission of their knowledge. They had enormous power and were in charge in many cities. The guilds represented the control of local labor, production and trade. It is a bit unclear in how far apprentices would be such all the time or would eventually reach the status of craftsmen themselves
-(...) explore what happens when hand and head, technique and science, art and craft are separated. I will show how the head then suffers; both understanding and expression are impaired.
+WIKIPEDIA ON GUILDS
+"European guilds imposed long standardized periods of apprenticeship, and made it difficult for those lacking the capital to set up for themselves or without the approval of their peers to gain access to materials or knowledge, or to sell into certain markets, an area that equally dominated the guilds' concerns. These are defining characteristics of mercantilism in economics, which dominated most European thinking about political economy until the rise of classical economics"
+"The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. They were believed to oppose free trade and hinder technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasingly involved in simple territorial struggles against each other and against free practitioners of their arts"
-THE MODERN HEPHAESTUS - ANCIENT WEAVERS AND LINUX PROGRAMMERS
+"Guilds are sometimes said to be the precursors of modern trade unions, and also of some aspects of the modern corporation. Guilds, however, were groups of self-employed skilled craftsmen with ownership and control over the materials and tools they needed to produce their goods. Guilds were, in other words, small business associations and thus had very little in common with trade unions. Guilds were more like cartels than they were like trade unions (Olson 1982)"
+PUPPET MAKING PRAGUE
+The market value of craftsmanship as icon of authenticity: cultural meaning and collective desire.
-Linux and Eric Raymond LOOK UP
+(...)
-(...) realm of Linux programming. Its members are grappling with a structural problem: how can quality of knowledge coexist with free and equal exchange in a community?
-the demioergoi were frequently addressed in public by the names of their profession. All craftsmanship, indeed, has something of this impersonal character.
-(Mills) the worker can control his or her own actions at work; skill develops within the work process; work is connected to the freedom to experiment; finally, family, community, and politics are measured by the standards of inner satisfaction, coherence, and experiment in craft labor.
-WEAKENED MOTIVATION - WORKERS DEMORALIZED BY COMMAND AND BY COMPETITION
-The modern world has two recipes for arousing the desire to work hard and well. One is the moral imperative to do work for the sake of the community. The other recipe invokes competition: it supposes that competing against others stimulates the desire to perform well, and in place of communal cohesion, it promises individual rewards. Both recipes have proved troubled. Neither has—in naked form—served the craftsman’s aspiration for quality.
-(suburbs moscow 50's onwards) Poor craftsmanship was a barometer of other forms of material indifference.
-equally demoralized workers at many British building sites. The construction industry in free-market Britain suffers from low productivity; its craft workers are treated badly or indifferently; onsite initiative is discouraged.
-Engineers, like musicians, are intensely competitive creatures; the issue for both is what happens when a compensating cooperation vanishes: the work degrades
-In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation but (...) these principles are often a charade (34)
-But craft does not protect them. In today’s globalized marketplace, middle-level skilled workers risk the prospect of losing employment to a peer in India or China who has the same skills but works for lower pay; job loss is no longer merely a working-class problem.(35)
-although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished ‘‘social capital,’’ in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people’s experiences at work.
-The forms of collective communication in Japanese auto plants and the practices of cooperation in firms like Nokia and Motorola have made them profitable. In other realms of the new economy, however, competition has disabled and disheartened workers, and the craftsman’s ethos of doing good work for its own sake is unrewarded or invisible.
-FRACTURED SKILLS - HAND AND HEAD DIVIDED
-We should be suspicious of claims for innate, untrained talent. ‘‘I could write a good novel if only I had the time’’ or ‘‘if only I could pull myself together’’ is usually a narcissist’s fantasy. Going over an action 38 craftsmen again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.
-(Isaac Stern) the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored
-(but) When practice is organized as a means to a fixed end, then the problems of the closed system reappear; the person in training will meet a fixed target but won’t progress further.
-Skill opens up (...) only because the rhythm of solving and opening up occurs again and again. These precepts about building skill through practice encounter a great obstacle in modern society (...) The smart machine can separate human mental understanding from repetitive, instructive, hands-on learning. When this occurs, conceptual human powers suffer.
-the machine has seemed to threaten the work of artisan-craftsmen. The threat appeared physical; industrial machines never tired, they did the same
-work hour after hour without complaining. The modern machine’s threat to developing skill has a different character.
-(autocad and the threat that it possibly represents) As in other visual practices, architectural sketches are often pictures of possibility; in the process of crystallizing and refining them by hand, the designer proceeds just as a tennis player or musician does, gets deeply involved in it, matures thinking about it. The site, as this architect observes, ‘‘becomes ingrained in the mind.’’ ... ‘‘This is very typical of the craftsman’s approach. You think and you do at the same time. You draw and you make. Drawing . . . is revisited. You do it, you redo it, and you redo it again.’’≤∫ This attaching, circular metamorphosis can be aborted by CAD (...) ‘‘When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don’t think you understand the answer (...) the architect Elliot Felix observes, ‘‘each action is less consequent than it would be [on] paper . . . each will be less carefully considered.’’(41)
-Drawing in bricks by hand, tedious though the process is, prompts the designer to think about their materiality, to engage with their solidity as against the blank, unmarked space on paper of a window. Computer-assisted design also impedes the designer in thinking about scale, as opposed to sheer size
-(...) what appears on-screen is impossibly coherent, framed in a unified way that physical sight never is.
-(...) The large issue here is that simulation can be a poor substitute for tactile experience (...) Overdetermined design rules out the crinkled fabric of buildings that allow little start-up businesses, and so communities, to grow and vibrate. This texture results from underdetermined structures that permit uses to abort, swerve, and evolve.
-(...) The difficult and the incomplete should be positive events in our understanding; they should stimulate us as simulation and facile manipulation of complete objects cannot.
-Bearers of embodied knowledge but mere manual laborers, they were not accorded that privilege. This is the sharp edge in the problem of skill; the head and the hand are not simply separated intellectually but socially.
-CONFLICTING STANDARDS - CORRECT VERSUS PRACTICAL
-What do we mean by good-quality work? One answer is how something should be done, the other is getting it to work. This is a difference between correctness and functionality. Ideally, there should be no conflict; in the real world, there is (...) To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a prescription for failure.
-(Healthcare and the measure of efficiency) Researchers in western Europe widely report that practitioners believe that their craft skills in dealing with patients are being frustrated by the push for institutional standards. (46)
-(question marks)
-- collective purposes not always seem to work in the pursuit of excelency, as the socialist experiments had proven. In other hand, the technological develpment in Japanese factories proved teh contrary. These were the firms in western society that manage to generate the higher level of development and efficiency.
-- developing skill? skills comes out of practise and the use of the machine deprives the individual from an essencial repetition-learning process.
-- conflict on measuring quality standards.institutional standards versus embedded practice
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-NEXT CHAPTERS: LOOKING UP HISTORY, WORKSHOP AS SOCIAL INSTIUTION, THE ENLIGHTENMENT (MACHINE AND SKILL), CONSCIOUNSNESS ON CRAFTING