Matthew Crawford, “The Case for Working With Your Hands”
Noreen Malone, “The Age of Anti-Ambition”
In “The Case for Working With Your Hands,” Matthew Crawford is critical of the way that most discussions about work ignore its “character” or intrinsic
nature (10). Crawford, who describes himself as an independent entrepreneur, says, “on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic
paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences” (10). Noreen Malone in “The Age of Anti-Ambition” focuses on
how the meaning of work is tied to its external conditions: “Even on a day when nothing much happened professionally, there was the feeling of having
worked, of playing your part in an ecosystem” (2). She investigates how workers’ perceptions of the meaning of work changed when those conditions were
transformed by the pandemic to emphasize other externals like financial compensation and more accommodating workplace policies.
Your assignment, using these two readings as the starting point for your discussion but going beyond them, is to investigate the character of work: How
important is the internal “character” of a job to the individual who does it and to the society as a whole? What other aspects of work need consideration?
Explain your answers.
A word whose meaning seems obvious can vary in specific contexts. In setting up the discussion, explain what Crawford means by “character.” His use is
specific to the “nature” of a job—what workers actually do—as he discusses the different characteristics of the jobs, good and bad, he has experienced. Your
own idea of character may develop or extend or question or complicate the authors’ ideas. Just be sure to clarify and explain their and your thinking.
