The Contradictions of the Cubicle

Crawford switches his focus from the shop to office politics to show the differences between an office team and a manual labor crew. In the end it basically comes down to the office being a place of subjective standards that are prone to frequent change, while in jobs of manual labor there are concrete standards. Oddly enough, this chapter closely paralleled my feelings toward college. I have always liked the sciences because science is ruled by concrete theories and laws. Granted, this is also why many people hate science, because it seems like a ton of memorization. It is similar to the apprentice who just imitates the teacher and after a lot of practice finally figures out why. The office is more like the Dialogue classes or any English class: it is graded by subjective standards. These subjective standards tend to stress me out, because whether it's right or not, grades have a lot to do with getting into graduate school.

In some sense, I thought that Crawford was a little hard on office workers. As much as I hate working in an office, it is important to recognize that there are many offices where people are allowed to think and contribute to the betterment of the company/consumers. These tend to be the smaller companies, because once a company gets too big the employers become more distant from upper management.

Crawford also touches on the fact that as college students or college graduates, we often feel like we are an elite class of people and therefore unwilling to do more menial work or manual labor. Unfortunately, it just sounds so much more prestigious to say you work for a company like Google than be a plumber. Until our society can consider plumbing as prestigious a job as the manager of some big company it is going to be hard to promote Crawford's idea that we don't all need to go to college to have a better life.