TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Mind and Work  Chapter One: The Working Life of a Waitress   Chapter Two: Styling Hair   Chapter Three: The Intelligence of Plumbing   Chapter Four: A Vocabulary of Carpentry   Chapter Five: Reflective Technique: Electrical Wiring and Construction   Chapter Six: Two Lives: A Welder and a Foreman   Chapter Seven: Rethinking Hand and Brain   Chapter Eight: Hand and Brain in School: The Paradox of Vocational Education   Conclusion: Working Life   Afterword: On Method   Notes   Acknowledgments   INTRODUCTION: MIND AND WORK I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work. Such work put food on our table, gave shape to stories of affliction and ability, framed how I saw the world. I come from a family of immigrants who, with two exceptions, did not finish high school, and who worked in blue-collar or service jobs all their lives. I did not do so well in school myself, spent several years in the vocational track, and squeaked my way into a small college on probation—the first in the family to go beyond high school. Measures of intellectual ability and assumptions about it are woven throughout this history. So I've been thinking about this business of intelligence for a long time: the way we decide who's smart and who isn't, the way the work someone does feeds into that judgment, and the effect such judgment has on our sense of who we are and what we can do. It was tough work that my family did. I would later come to understand the dynamics of occupational status and social class, but I could sense early on how difficult the work was, and that without it, we'd starve. I also saw that people knew things through work. And they used what they learned. This experience was all very specific to me, not abstract, emerging from the lived moments of work I had witnessed, from all sorts of objects and images, from sound and smell, from rhythms of the body. These sensory particulars stay with me, resonant. There was a table covered with slick plastic in the center of my grandmother's kitchen. Anyone who visited drank a cup of coffee there, wooden chair turned sideways to talk to her as she cooked. All meals were eaten at this table. My uncle Frank, a welder for the Pennsylvania Railroad, has come in from work, soiled denim, the smell of machinist's oil in it, his face smeared with soot. He washes at the kitchen sink, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing his arms, full lather, angling them under the faucet. He settles in at the table; there's a radio at its edge, and he turns it on to hear the evening news. My grandmother sets a large plate of steaming macaroni before him, deep red sauce; there is a bowl of chops, cooked earlier, in the center of the table. Frank's hands are huge, and as he talks to us—a deep voice that can quickly rise in amazement—he tears off a big chunk of Italian bread and begins to eat with a focus and capacity that made its way into the comic tales told about him by his brothers, stories I would acquire through the hearing. After a while, he pushes the chair back, but not too far, unbuttons the top of his trousers, says he's eaten way too much, dear Lord, and reaches for a chop, or for that loaf of bread, and leans in again, a deep pleasure against the bitter cold and exhaustion of the roundhouse. Frank was a guy who made it a point to know things; he read a lot and inquired until he understood how something worked. It felt good to be with him. I remember him, his well-spoken voice, guiding me through the Railroader's Museum: cutaways of running gear; diagrams and technical information on steam, diesel, and electric locomotives; photos of wooden freight cars, cabooses, the interiors of luxury passenger cars; posed workmen; lots of repair equipment; an operational model railroad. I knew of Frank's many complaints about the railroad: layoffs and erratic scheduling, the brutal hours, the biting cold or sweltering heat, the burns over his arms and legs. But Frank also saw himself as a "railroad man," someone who had made his contribution to this major American industry. Doing a job well mattered. "Work hard," he wrote to his son, away in the army. "No one likes a half-assed man." One of the moments I remember from that day at the museum, a simple but lasting one, is Frank standing before a display case, pointing to some miniature assembly of cable and gear, explaining in detail how it worked, taking his time until I got it. Many testaments have been written, both in fiction and memoir, about the physical labor of our forebears: from accounts of the prairie farm, the mills, and the mines to tales of immigrant life—the Lower East Side to the agricultural fields of Central and Southern California. One of the most stirring moments in Mario Cuomo's keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention is the memory of his father working long and hard hours in the family grocery store, teaching the young Mario "all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example." Such invocation speaks powerfully to Americans, stirs things deep in our cultural and personal histories. How interesting it is, though, that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action. It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain. I find myself here wondering about Cuomo's father. I imagine the many decisions he had to make, the alternatives large and small he weighed, the moments when he had to think quickly through his fatigue. My mother shaped her adult identity in the restaurant business and, all the while I was growing up, worked as a waitress in coffee shops and family-style restaurants. My father and I would sometimes visit her at Coffee Dan's, waiting for her shift to end, riding the bus home together, her feet killing her. When she worked the counter and took cash, we would find two stools by the register; when she had the main room, we sat at the back booth where the waitresses took their break. We would pass the time with her once the lunch or dinner rush had faded. There wasn't much for a child to do, the hours stretched out, so I listened to the cooks and waitresses. They talked about the customers, or the boss, or each other; about the things going on at home with their kids; about how tired they were. And I watched what they did. I remember particular people, like my mother's coworker Rose Goldstein, a gentle woman whose house across town we visited, and Bobbi, the new hire just out of high school, on whom I had a desperate crush. And there was a cook whose name I've forgotten, but who would sit in the booth on break, smoking, solemn, food splattered all over his white uniform, down to the shoes. At the back booth, you would catch the thick smell of the grill and the whiff of stale food and cigarettes, scraped and dumped. These odors hung in my mother's uniform and hair. When things got busy, there was a heightened clatter of kitchen and dishwasher, and I could feel the rise in the pulse of the place: the cacophony of customers' voices; waitresses weaving in and out, warning "behind you" in a voice both impassive and urgent; all these people eating separately in one big public space. I remember the restaurant's lingo, remember liking the code of it. Tables were labeled by the number of chairs—and, thus, customers—around them: deuces, four-tops, six-tops. Areas of the restaurant had names: the racetrack was the speedy front section. Orders were abbreviated for the cook: fry four on two, my mother would call out as she clipped a check onto that little rotating wheel. To speak this language gave you a certain authority, signaled know-how. I have many images of my mother at work, distinct from the other domains of her life: her walking full-tilt with an armload of plates along one arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her other hand; her taking orders, pencil poised over pad; her flopping down in the booth by my father, the whoosh of the cushion; "I'm all in," she'd say, and whisper something quickly to us about a customer. She would stand before a table, her arm stacked with those plates, picking one order off for this person, then another, then another—always seeming to get it right, knowing who got the hamburger, who got the fried shrimp. She'd argue with the cook over a returned order; "he gave me lip," she'd tell us, rushing by. I remember her sitting sideways at the back booth, talking to us, her one hand gripping the outer edge of the table, watching the floor, and noting, in the flow of our conversation, who needed something, who was finishing up, whose order was taking longer to prepare than it should. What did I come to know about work like Frank's or my mother's, mechanical-industrial or life in the restaurant? Surely, that it was hard, physically taxing, dirty, injurious. I never knew my grandfather—he died of pneumonia before I was born—but I heard, with some frequency, a story about him losing his leg in the railroad stockyards, the same place where Frank worked. This was not the kind of work my parents and uncles and aunts wanted their kids to do. I knew, as well, that work was unsteady; you could lose your job, with disastrous consequences. Hard as it was, railed against as it occasionally was, work was coveted, for it was a stay against poverty. One reason my mother valued waitressing was that she knew she could always find work. I also got the clear sense from observing people in my family or in the neighborhood that having work, though you'd be wiped out at day's end, affected your overall mood, your bearing. The men in the neighborhood who were out of work were unhappily at loose ends, sitting around, listless, time on their hands. My mother bemoaned the physical punishment of her job, but she spoke as well about "being among the public." The phrase carried for her a claim of achievement. The Pennsylvania Railroad had Frank—had much of the town—in its grip, and he cursed it often. But he was, finally, a railroad man—hard work, masculine, with national consequence. The work that my uncle and my mother did affected their sense of who they were, and, though limiting in so many ways, it provided a means of doing something in the world. Doing something in the world. I couldn't have expressed it this way when I was growing up, but the work I saw connected in my mind with agency and competence—that's what being an adult meant to me, and it was intimately tied to physical work. And, as does any child, I craved competence. Special terminology caught my ear, the idiom of freight trains or food orders, because not everyone could speak it, especially speak it the right way, and it made things happen. Particular movements of the body made things happen, too, in the restaurant or the stockyard. And there was knowledge of tools and devices, wrenches and hacksaws and measures, but the cash register, too, and the whirring blender. Tied to this knowledge were tricks of the trade. And what a kick it was when one of my uncles or a cook or a waitress showed me how to do something a little more effectively, with a little less effort and a little more finesse. Hold it this way. Move it in, like this. See? I became the work's insider, if just for a moment. I have been a teacher for over thirty years in a wide range of settings: from kindergarten to adult literacy programs, and now in a research university's graduate school of education. Many of the populations I've taught and studied were considered to be educationally at-risk, and questions about intellectual capacity, either implied or explicit, were ever-present. And in a school of education, issues of ability, schooling, and work are part of the conceptual terrain. One thing I've learned from all this is the powerful effect our assumptions about intelligence have on the way people are defined and treated in the classroom, the workplace, and the public sphere. It seems fitting, therefore, to turn with the investigative tools I now have to the work represented by my forebears—factory work, skilled and semiskilled trades, and service occupations—with a focus on the mental processes involved in doing such work, the thought that enables it. To be sure, our view of occupations is shaped by the form of capitalism that has developed in the United States and by the social traditions that attend particular occupations. But running through this economic and cultural history are beliefs about mind. The Mind at Work, then, offers an analysis of physical work and intelligence and a reflection on how we might think more clearly and fairly about them. Labor, as a political and social force, has diminished in power and has less immediate grab on the national imagination. The work that currently captures our fancy involves high technology, electronic media, and "symbolic analysis." Trumpeted as an unprecedented kind of work, such "knowledge work" represents emerging opportunity. It is associated with advanced education, and there is no doubt that work of this type requires high levels of analytic skill. What concerns me, though, is the implication—evident in popular discourse about work—that so-called older types of work, like manufacturing or service work, are, by and large, mindless, "neck down" rather than "neck up." (There is, by the way, a degree of historical amnesia here: each industrial generation heralds the unprecedented intellectual demands of its work.) But, though identified with another era, work of body and hand continues to create the material web of daily life. As with any human achievement, such work merits our understanding; the way we talk about it matters. And the dimension of it that is least discussed and appreciated—and that we can continue to learn from—is the thought it takes to do it well. A related issue is the way we classify work itself. "Writers on work," notes sociologist Steven Peter Vallas, "routinely employ certain stock categories—'blue-' versus 'white-collar,' 'mental' versus 'manual' labor." Vallas acknowledges that these categories are sometimes useful, but we rely too heavily on them and fail "to observe subtle commonalities between apparently different forms of work." These limiting categories reaffirm longstanding biases about particular occupations and cause us to miss so much: The mental processes that enable service. The aesthetics of physical labor. The complex interplay of the social and the mechanical. The choreography of hand, eye, ear, brain. The everpresence of abstraction, planning, and problem solving in everyday work. More immediate policy deliberations about work—I write this, for example, during a period of economic downturn and a fragile "jobless recovery"—are focused on specific tangible remedies: economic stimuli, job creation, training programs, and the like. Tied to such discussions are assessments of the state of the workforce, the number unemployed, gross measures of skill level, breakouts by race and gender. And there is, as well, a broader assessment of the workforce that will be a central concern of this book: the general sense of what workers can do, their competence, their intellectual capacity. Such appraisals may well include specific measures—for example, high school graduation as an indicator of literacy and numeracy—but there is also a psychological and cultural dimension to this reckoning, just as there is, at least in some schools of thought, to assessments of the economy. Consider, then, an observation by labor journalist John P. Hoerr: "Since the early days of industrialization, a peculiar notion has gained ascendancy in the United States: that wage workers and their representatives lacked the competence to handle complex issues and problems that required abstract knowledge and analytical ability." This sense of deficiency is in our cultural bones, and it affects, and distorts, the specific economic responses we develop, from education and job training to the way work is organized. The nation is currently engaged in a discussion about the training of the workforce and about a range of educational experiments involving the integration of the academic and vocational curriculum and the transition from school to work. Yet the educational literature on these issues tends to be pretty thin on any close analysis of the cognitive dimension of physical work. This absence, I think, is rooted in the reductive notions the society carries about such work and the people who do it, notions that prove to be especially troubling as we try to rethink the connection between the schoolhouse and the workplace. I also believe that there are important social issues here. Judgments about intelligence carry great weight in our culture, and one of the ways we judge each other's intelligence is through the work we do. There are many distinctions that can be made among types of work, distinctions related to income, autonomy, cleanliness, physical risk, and so on. These have a harshly real material meaning, but carry symbolic meaning as well. There's a moral and characterological aura to occupational autonomy, income, cleanliness, leading us to slip from qualities of the work to qualities of the worker. This kind of generalizing, this slippage of assumptions, runs through our cultural history, from postRevolutionary War mechanics who were portrayed as illiterate and incapable of participating in government to the autoworkers I heard labeled by one supervisor as "a bunch of dummies." These generalizations about mind and work are intimately tied to the dynamics of social class and affect the way we think about each other and ourselves. One of the more striking things writer Barbara Ehrenreich found as she worked a series of low-wage jobs to write Nickel and Dimed was how invisible she became. The way work gets defined and the attributions we make about it affect more than occupational rank and income; these attributions color the kind of social and civic life we can imagine. Running through the upcoming chapters are several key terms, terms with such broad sweep, used in so many ways, that, as I begin to preview this book's contents, some defining is in order. First, intelligence, and the broader term cognition. Cognition refers to those mental processes involving perception, attention, memory, knowing, judging. These processes will be displayed throughout the work we're considering as the waitress prioritizes tasks during rush hour or the electrician troubleshoots a faulty circuit. Some researchers study cognition in laboratory settings and others in natural contexts. I will discuss more about method in the afterword, but here let me say that I draw on both kinds of studies to inform the argument of this book. The portraits of cognition you'll read, though, are for the most part developed from my studies of people at work. The busy restaurant, the job site, and the factory floor each present different tasks to be solved, calling forth different cognitive processes. Also, cognition is, I believe, intimately tied to motives and values, to long-range as well as immediate goals, and to one's life history. As a friend of mine so vividly put it, we're not just a brain in a bottle. We think in a material and social world. So when I can, I provide biographical information for the people we're observing, and I am able to provide much more of that kind of detail in the family sketches that run through these pages. It was, after all, through my family that I first saw work close at hand. Though a more specific term than cognition, intelligence is a much-debated concept. To get us started, I'll use a composite of the most familiar Western definitions of intelligence: it is the ability to learn and act on the environment, to apply knowledge to new situations, to reason, plan, and solve problems. Such definitions have a pervasive effect on educational policy and occupational classification—so they will prove useful to us, for they are the terms of our public discourse. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are aspects of human mental activity that are not captured in the standard definitions of intelligence. They will be evident, however, in the work settings we'll explore. Because intelligence is such a loaded term, let me sketch out a little more background and offer my own perspective. The way we think about intelligence in the United States has been shaped over the last century by the psychometric tradition, mental measurement, known to most of us through an intelligence test taken in school or in the military. This tradition has contributed—sometimes through misinterpretation—to a number of interconnected popular beliefs about intelligence: that it is a single and unitary quality (so if you're smart, you're smart across the board); that it's fixed, consistent (and this plays into further beliefs about the degree to which intelligence is inherited); that it can be accurately measured with an instrument like an intelligence test and represented numerically, typically through an IQ score; and that people's success in life, or more broadly, their place in the social order, is a reflection of their intelligence. This book is not the place to unpack the many arguments within education, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science about these claims. Suffice it to say that they—and other aspects of mental measurement, including the statistical procedures that are central to the field—are hotly contested, and, in fact, have been since the father of the modern intelligence test, Alfred Binet, himself raised concerns about the use and interpretation of his instrument. It is also important to note that within the West there are powerful research traditions that yield other conceptions of intelligence and other means to assess it. In various ways, these traditions posit, for example, that there are multiple components to intelligence, or even multiple intelligences; that intelligence is variable and dynamic; that social context is crucial to its emergence and display; that creativity, emotion, aesthetic response, and the use of the body—removed from traditional psychometric definitions and tests of intelligence—must be considered as aspects of intelligent behavior. And, finally, it is very important to note that any discussion of intelligence is culture-bound. Some aspects of what we consider intelligence might well overlap with definitions from other cultures, but many cultures posit a range of further or different attributes to intelligence, for example, the ability to live in harmony with others. It is undisputed that formal education will affect one's score on an intelligence test, since the tests tend to be heavy on verbal and numerical items. The big challenge to test designers, then, is to create at least a few components that, in theory, will not be affected by schooling, for example, identifying the missing element in a visual pattern. Though the success of this endeavor is (yet another) contested issue, it seems pretty clear that it is difficult—some say impossible—to tease out the effects of education (including a familiarity with and investment in tests like these) from the effect of "pure" intelligence. Here's what concerns me, given the spirit of this book. If one does well on an intelligence test, that clearly indicates some kind of cognitive competence. But if one doesn't do well—and, historically, poor performers would include low- income, working people—then the meaning of the score is much less clear. So, we have a measure that works only at the upper end of the scale. To do well tells us something about intelligence—and, usually, schooling—but not to do well provides much less information about intellectual capacity ... though that poor performance may speak volumes about educational opportunity. My worry is the ease with which poor performance gets interpreted as an accurate measure of intelligence, and the effect that interpretation has on the test-taker, both personally and societally. This is not a call for a simplified egalitarianism. I am not denying the obvious fact that people come to any pursuit with different interests, talents, knacks for things, motivations, capabilities. Nor am I claiming that all bodies of knowledge and expressions of mind are of the same level of cognitive complexity and social importance. All the cultures I'm familiar with make judgments about competence in the domains that matter to them. (Though ours is more obsessed than any I know with developing measures of the mind and schemes to rank them.) No, the distressing thing is that both in our institutional systems and in our informal talk we tend to label entire categories of work and the people associated with them in ways that generalize, erase cognitive variability, and diminish whole traditions of human activity. Attributions of merit and worth flow throughout the process. We order, we rank, we place at steps upon a ladder rather than appreciating an abundant and varied cognitive terrain. Skill. Let's begin with the American Heritage Dictionary. Skill is "proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience." In traditional usage, this proficiency would be related to the use of body or hand, though more recently, the word skill has come to apply to a wide range of activities. We talk, for example, of communication skills or general problem-solving skills. It is important to remember, however, that what gets defined as a skill is historically and culturally determined, and this process is of special significance in labeling kinds of work. The politics and power plays by which particular interest groups get one kind of work categorized as "skilled" and another as "semiskilled" or "unskilled" have significant economic and social consequences. Another historical phenomenon to note here is the increasing role school has played over the past century in developing and certifying skills that, in previous eras, would have been developed within the job setting itself. The value that a skill has is also determined by time and place. In the rhetoric of the "new economy," for example, communication skills or general problem-solving skills or the ability to work in teams are privileged, while more specific mechanical skills—associated with conventional blue-collar work—tend to be perceived as less valuable. All of these processes of definition and the status they confer involve attributions of cognition and intelligence, and thus play into the concerns of this book. Work. What our society defines as work also changes over time and place (consider the debates over how to classify domestic labor), and what gets classified as work in one setting (styling hair in a salon, repairing cars in a garage) would be labeled a hobby if done in another context. There is a fluid quality to this concept of work. For my purposes, I'll posit that work is purposeful, remunerated effort that provides goods or services for another. The majority of people in our society have to work for some significant portion of their lives. Work, any work, calls forth a range of human abilities, from the classifying of objects to the exerting of will. And work is freighted with meaning and moral judgment, by the society, by ourselves. "Work," writes occupational sociologist Everett Cherrington Hughes, "is one of the things by which [people] are judged, and certainly one of the more significant things by which [we] judge [ourselves]." People work for a number of reasons, survival foremost among them, but, depending on the person, the stage in his or her life, and the particular work being done, there can be a host of other reasons as well. For some, work provides structure to one's day. It can provide, as it did for my mother, social connection. It provides a means to buy goods and services. The work itself can have its own rewards, from intellectual to aesthetic to physical. It can make one feel a part of something bigger than oneself—as was the case with my uncle Frank and the railroad. And it can contribute to a sense of who one is. In this book we will meet people who are competent at what they do, experienced, adept, their competence recognized by themselves and others. They will enable us to observe mature practice—and often I will elicit their commentary (and that of others of similar qualification) as one source of insight into expertise. We will also meet people, usually younger, who are just entering a field, though some of them have already begun to identify with it—one high school student speaks of the integrity of working with wood. These less-experienced, even novice, practitioners will enable us to watch competence emerging and provide a developmental perspective on work and the thinking that accompanies it. I will be looking at examples of proficient work, either in its development or in its mature execution, for my intention is to explore some of the characteristics of common work when it is done well, and to find the right words, the right line of sight to depict the mind that enables that competence. As journalist John Hoerr's observation a few pages back suggests, this is not the way American workers are usually depicted. The Mind at Work offers an alternative story. But what about the times when work is mediocre, sloppy, or downright awful? We've all been on the receiving end of bad production or damaging service. There are multiple reasons for poor work—in any occupation, from hairstyling to surgery—reasons of training, or motivation, or characteristics of the workplace, or the twists and turns of a person's life. Though this book is not a study of occupational efficiency and outcomes, not a study of the quality of work produced by specific occupational groups as a whole, it will present along the way some of the factors that affect the quality of performance, particularly from the perspective of workers themselves. A good deal of modern work—blue-collar and service work especially—is characterized by working conditions that limit, often severely, the various forms of meaning one might gain from it. Social observers from Adam Smith and Karl Marx on down have described the de-skilling, routinizing, and regulating function of the factory. More recently, the office and the "electronic sweatshop" have been the focus of concern. These conditions are not experienced equally across society; in our country, the poor, immigrants, women, and people of color are disproportionately distributed there. And within those distributions there are further patterns of inequality, experienced, for example, by women or African Americans who have been excluded from entire categories of physical work and channeled into those with the lowest pay and the fewest opportunities for advancement. Such disadvantage runs throughout the history of modern work. We have to be careful, though, not to reduce the wide range of people who work in hard conditions to a single oppressed mass of humanity. In various ways—even as work threatens body and dignity—people tend to seek agency and meaning within the constraints placed on them. While it is clearly true that many working people would quit if they could, that does not mean that, on average, they cease to assert their presence in and through the workplace. During her investigation of routine and repetitious work, journalist Barbara Garson found ample evidence of boredom, resentment, and sabotage. "But the most dramatic thing I found," she writes, "was quite the opposite of noncooperation. People passionately want to work.... Whatever creativity goes into sabotage," she continues, "a more amazing ingenuity goes into manufacturing goals and satisfactions on jobs where measurable achievement has been all but rationalized out.... Almost everyone wants to feel she is getting something accomplished." A common theme in the social theory related to modern work concerns its detrimental effect on the consciousness of the worker. How does that theme square with a book on the intelligence found in common work? There is no doubt that a good deal of the work people do is repetitive, dumbed down, and, often, dangerous, and this surely can affect one's mood and sense of prospects. There is also research that demonstrates the negative effects of certain kinds of work on intellectual flexibility, as measured by interview questions and psychological tests. But I think we need to be cautious in assuming extensive and necessary effects of particular kinds of work on the thinking ability of the people who do them. Such analysis can obscure the nuance and variation in individual people's experience of work, as well as real differences in the physical and social environment of individual workplaces. The complexity of working life is thereby reduced. We can pinpoint the harmful effects of modern working conditions—the people in this book certainly do—without positing an automatic diminishment of a worker's awareness and capacity to reason. There are other tales to tell about mind and work, and my hope is that the ensuing pages contribute to the telling. In these chapters, I present a range of familiar occupations that involve body and hand, representative of the kinds of work many in America have done throughout the last century and into our own. All the chapters deal in some way with the cognitive dimension of these, and similar, occupations. Chapters 1 through 6 focus on particular kinds of work and the particular people doing them. Though some fundamental cognitive processes are evident throughout these chapters—for example, accessing a knowledge base, attending to the immediate environment, or following steps in a sequence—each chapter will, to some degree, feature certain aspects of mental activity in the workplace. So, for example, the first chapter on waitressing will emphasize the ability to think quickly in dynamic environments like the restaurant, while the fourth chapter on carpentry details some of the cognitive processes enabling that trade: calculating, planning, visual thinking, and so on. However, it's important to note that such emphasis does not mean exclusive treatment; cognition on the job is not so neatly segmented. Collectively, the first six chapters, with their different emphases and contexts, give a sense of the overall richness of the mind at work. Though they also contain individual portraits of people at work, chapters 7, 8, and the conclusion have a somewhat broader sweep. They draw on the themes raised in the preceding chapters to further analyze the consequential distinctions our society makes between kinds of work and the assumptions about intelligence embedded in those distinctions. In chapters 1, "The Working Life of a Waitress," and 2, "Styling Hair," I examine two types of service, two traditional occupational pathways for working-class and immigrant women. These two kinds of work are typically defined in light of the social and emotional needs they fulfill rather than in terms of the thinking involved in their execution. When we examine the work carefully, however, easy distinctions begin to blur. In the busy restaurant, physical and emotional need, rituals of service, memory, economy of movement, and the regulation of the flow of work all interact dynamically. As in subsequent chapters, we'll get a sense of such interaction through close observation of the work itself—taking orders, getting food to tables—and, as well, we'll get a sense of the way the structure and traditions of a particular workplace initiate the thought within it. My mother holds a central role in this first chapter. Her story serves as a reminder that work is both grounded on and shapes personal history, and thus reveals motives, desires, values, and one's sense of who one is. A working life is rich in meaning. The hair salon, like the restaurant, is a public space in which intimate things happen. Hair is invested with great personal and cultural significance, and clients enter the salon with variously articulated needs and desires. It is the stylist's job, through conversation and gesture, technique and aesthetic sense, to realize that desire. Both of these chapters involve people who are expert practitioners, fluid in their performance, so the focus is on competence fully expressed. In chapters 3 through 5, we shift to a developmental perspective as we consider three of the building trades, observing novice plumbers, carpenters, and electricians in educational settings as they think their way through the challenges of materials and structures, function and force. Observing students allows us to get in close to skill as it develops, to the basic kinesthetic and cognitive moves that emerge over time—a perspective that can help us enhance standard notions of intelligence. If we observe with a belief in the remarkable nature of common work, suspending, to the degree possible, the distinctions we habitually make, what might we come to appreciate? The questions I kept asking myself in these settings were: What is going on here? How is it learned? What enables it to happen? What in this moment does it mean to be smart? Chapter 3, "The Intelligence of Plumbing," provides the occasion to observe a teacher encouraging a problem-solving cast of mind among his students. His role is particularly important, for the students are in a juvenile justice diversion program and benefit especially from his mentoring style. But the interaction demonstrates, as well, the critical role of knowledgeable others in the development of systematic thinking. Furthermore, the teacher and the plumbing trade provide the opportunity for these young people to display intelligence so often missed, or misunderstood, in the typical classroom. A fundamental goal of this book is to help us think and talk differently about common work and the people who do it. This chapter and the next foreground that goal. "A Vocabulary of Carpentry," chapter 4, offers an extended stay in a high school wood construction class, which allows us to observe growth in skill and knowledge. When I was defining intelligence a few pages back, I wondered about the many manifestations of intelligence in the workplace that might fall outside our standard measures. As we watch the students in this chapter work with wood over time, we get a sense of some of the phenomena that might be included in a richer cognitive language of work, from the strategic use of tool and body, to the making of judgments from the feel of things, to the intricate interplay of the verbal and the technical in planning tasks and solving problems. In chapter 5, "Reflective Technique: Electrical Wiring and Construction," we again watch people learning a trade—in this case, the electrician's—to consider some long-standing distinctions made in the West about human activity. Since Classical Greece, Western culture has tended to oppose technical skill to reflection, applied or practical pursuits to theoretical or "pure" inquiry, the physical to the conceptual. These distinctions are not benign categories, are not neutral; in many contexts they carry significant differences in status and worth. As we get in close to students doing their work, however, we see how complicated these distinctions are: the technical gives rise to reflection, the physical and conceptual blend, and aesthetics and ethics emerge continually from practical activity. With chapter 6, "Two Lives: A Welder and a Foreman," we return to expert performance, but considered across the life span: a woman at midpoint in her career, a welder and a teacher of welding; and another of my uncles, a man who retired from the auto industry, having moved from assembly line to supervision. Both have gained multiple kinds of knowledge from their work. The chapter sketches their career trajectories, but with an eye toward the meaning work has had in their lives and the play of mind in that work. Cognitive biographies. Chapter 7, "Rethinking Hand and Brain," extends a theme running through the book: the liabilities of the body-mind, hand-brain dichotomy in our everyday discourse about work. This chapter provides the occasion to further analyze and unsettle the dichotomy through a reconsideration of a familiar portrait of an early-twentieth-century laborer; a comparative discussion of three kinds of higher-status professional work, including surgery and teaching; and a brief treatment of the process of occupational classification itself. Each of these sections encourages a reimagining of consequential occupational distinctions, and with that reimagining, a different line of sight on widely held beliefs about physical work. In chapter 8, "Hand and Brain in School: The Paradox of Vocational Education," we consider in more depth the negative institutional effects of one of the family of hand-brain distinctions—the separation of the vocational course of study from the academic in our schools. For close to a century, the academic-vocational divide has defined the high school experience for many young people. Here we consider the history and internal contradictions of vocational education, and the way it has undercut the cognitive possibilities of common work and of those who do it. We also consider current attempts at reform and, with them, basic questions about mind, work, and schooling in a democratic society. The conclusion, "Working Life," attempts a summing up of what those who populate this book have taught us about the mind at work, a synthesis of the book's themes and portraits with an eye toward a fuller and more fitting representation of the intelligence that sustains us day after day. We live in a time of much talk and judgment about intelligence. Some critics say we are obsessed with it to our detriment, from the way intellectual flash blinded us to the many weaknesses of the dot-com and Enron-style bubbles to the urgency with which we hurry our children through ever-higher levels of scholastic achievement. For all that, we operate with a fairly restricted notion of intelligence, one pretty much identified with the particular verbal and quantitative measures of the schoolhouse and the IQ test. And thus we undervalue, or can miss entirely, the many displays of what the mind does every day, all the time, right under our noses. It is not my intention to take anything away from the accomplishments of those whom the culture certifies as intelligent, but rather to widen our gaze enough to catch the presence of mind up and down the ladder of occupational status. My purpose in writing the book, then, is to provide an alternative lens on everyday work, to aid us in seeing the commonplace with greater precision. I believe that such a change in perception could contribute to a more accurate portrayal of the full world of work, and could help us think more effectively and humanely about education, job training, and the conditions in which so many people make a living.   

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Mind and Work

Chapter One: The Working Life of a Waitress

Chapter Two: Styling Hair

Chapter Three: The Intelligence of Plumbing

Chapter Four: A Vocabulary of Carpentry

Chapter Five: Reflective Technique: Electrical Wiring and Construction

Chapter Six: Two Lives: A Welder and a Foreman

Chapter Seven: Rethinking Hand and Brain

Chapter Eight: Hand and Brain in School: The Paradox of Vocational Education

Conclusion: Working Life

Afterword: On Method

Notes

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: MIND AND WORK

I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work. Such work put food on our table, gave shape to stories of affliction and ability, framed how I saw the world. I come from a family of immigrants who, with two exceptions, did not finish high school, and who worked in blue-collar or service jobs all their lives. I did not do so well in school myself, spent several years in the vocational track, and squeaked my way into a small college on probation—the first in the family to go beyond high school. Measures of intellectual ability and assumptions about it are woven throughout this history. So I've been thinking about this business of intelligence for a long time: the way we decide who's smart and who isn't, the way the work someone does feeds into that judgment, and the effect such judgment has on our sense of who we are and what we can do.

It was tough work that my family did. I would later come to understand the dynamics of occupational status and social class, but I could sense early on how difficult the work was, and that without it, we'd starve. I also saw that people knew things through work. And they used what they learned. This experience was all very specific to me, not abstract, emerging from the lived moments of work I had witnessed, from all sorts of objects and images, from sound and smell, from rhythms of the body. These sensory particulars stay with me, resonant.

There was a table covered with slick plastic in the center of my grandmother's kitchen. Anyone who visited drank a cup of coffee there, wooden chair turned sideways to talk to her as she cooked. All meals were eaten at this table. My uncle Frank, a welder for the Pennsylvania Railroad, has come in from work, soiled denim, the smell of machinist's oil in it, his face smeared with soot. He washes at the kitchen sink, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing his arms, full lather, angling them under the faucet. He settles in at the table; there's a radio at its edge, and he turns it on to hear the evening news. My grandmother sets a large plate of steaming macaroni before him, deep red sauce; there is a bowl of chops, cooked earlier, in the center of the table. Frank's hands are huge, and as he talks to us—a deep voice that can quickly rise in amazement—he tears off a big chunk of Italian bread and begins to eat with a focus and capacity that made its way into the comic tales told about him by his brothers, stories I would acquire through the hearing. After a while, he pushes the chair back, but not too far, unbuttons the top of his trousers, says he's eaten way too much, dear Lord, and reaches for a chop, or for that loaf of bread, and leans in again, a deep pleasure against the bitter cold and exhaustion of the roundhouse.

Frank was a guy who made it a point to know things; he read a lot and inquired until he understood how something worked. It felt good to be with him. I remember him, his well-spoken voice, guiding me through the Railroader's Museum: cutaways of running gear; diagrams and technical information on steam, diesel, and electric locomotives; photos of wooden freight cars, cabooses, the interiors of luxury passenger cars; posed workmen; lots of repair equipment; an operational model railroad. I knew of Frank's many complaints about the railroad: layoffs and erratic scheduling, the brutal hours, the biting cold or sweltering heat, the burns over his arms and legs. But Frank also saw himself as a "railroad man," someone who had made his contribution to this major American industry. Doing a job well mattered. "Work hard," he wrote to his son, away in the army. "No one likes a half-assed man." One of the moments I remember from that day at the museum, a simple but lasting one, is Frank standing before a display case, pointing to some miniature assembly of cable and gear, explaining in detail how it worked, taking his time until I got it.

Many testaments have been written, both in fiction and memoir, about the physical labor of our forebears: from accounts of the prairie farm, the mills, and the mines to tales of immigrant life—the Lower East Side to the agricultural fields of Central and Southern California. One of the most stirring moments in Mario Cuomo's keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention is the memory of his father working long and hard hours in the family grocery store, teaching the young Mario "all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example." Such invocation speaks powerfully to Americans, stirs things deep in our cultural and personal histories. How interesting it is, though, that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action.

It is as though in our cultural iconography we are given the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain. I find myself here wondering about Cuomo's father. I imagine the many decisions he had to make, the alternatives large and small he weighed, the moments when he had to think quickly through his fatigue.

My mother shaped her adult identity in the restaurant business and, all the while I was growing up, worked as a waitress in coffee shops and family-style restaurants. My father and I would sometimes visit her at Coffee Dan's, waiting for her shift to end, riding the bus home together, her feet killing her. When she worked the counter and took cash, we would find two stools by the register; when she had the main room, we sat at the back booth where the waitresses took their break. We would pass the time with her once the lunch or dinner rush had faded. There wasn't much for a child to do, the hours stretched out, so I listened to the cooks and waitresses. They talked about the customers, or the boss, or each other; about the things going on at home with their kids; about how tired they were. And I watched what they did.

I remember particular people, like my mother's coworker Rose Goldstein, a gentle woman whose house across town we visited, and Bobbi, the new hire just out of high school, on whom I had a desperate crush. And there was a cook whose name I've forgotten, but who would sit in the booth on break, smoking, solemn, food splattered all over his white uniform, down to the shoes. At the back booth, you would catch the thick smell of the grill and the whiff of stale food and cigarettes, scraped and dumped. These odors hung in my mother's uniform and hair. When things got busy, there was a heightened clatter of kitchen and dishwasher, and I could feel the rise in the pulse of the place: the cacophony of customers' voices; waitresses weaving in and out, warning "behind you" in a voice both impassive and urgent; all these people eating separately in one big public space.

I remember the restaurant's lingo, remember liking the code of it. Tables were labeled by the number of chairs—and, thus, customers—around them: deuces, four-tops, six-tops. Areas of the restaurant had names: the racetrack was the speedy front section. Orders were abbreviated for the cook: fry four on two, my mother would call out as she clipped a check onto that little rotating wheel. To speak this language gave you a certain authority, signaled know-how.

I have many images of my mother at work, distinct from the other domains of her life: her walking full-tilt with an armload of plates along one arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her other hand; her taking orders, pencil poised over pad; her flopping down in the booth by my father, the whoosh of the cushion; "I'm all in," she'd say, and whisper something quickly to us about a customer. She would stand before a table, her arm stacked with those plates, picking one order off for this person, then another, then another—always seeming to get it right, knowing who got the hamburger, who got the fried shrimp. She'd argue with the cook over a returned order; "he gave me lip," she'd tell us, rushing by. I remember her sitting sideways at the back booth, talking to us, her one hand gripping the outer edge of the table, watching the floor, and noting, in the flow of our conversation, who needed something, who was finishing up, whose order was taking longer to prepare than it should.

What did I come to know about work like Frank's or my mother's, mechanical-industrial or life in the restaurant? Surely, that it was hard, physically taxing, dirty, injurious. I never knew my grandfather—he died of pneumonia before I was born—but I heard, with some frequency, a story about him losing his leg in the railroad stockyards, the same place where Frank worked. This was not the kind of work my parents and uncles and aunts wanted their kids to do. I knew, as well, that work was unsteady; you could lose your job, with disastrous consequences. Hard as it was, railed against as it occasionally was, work was coveted, for it was a stay against poverty. One reason my mother valued waitressing was that she knew she could always find work. I also got the clear sense from observing people in my family or in the neighborhood that having work, though you'd be wiped out at day's end, affected your overall mood, your bearing. The men in the neighborhood who were out of work were unhappily at loose ends, sitting around, listless, time on their hands. My mother bemoaned the physical punishment of her job, but she spoke as well about "being among the public." The phrase carried for her a claim of achievement. The Pennsylvania Railroad had Frank—had much of the town—in its grip, and he cursed it often. But he was, finally, a railroad man—hard work, masculine, with national consequence. The work that my uncle and my mother did affected their sense of who they were, and, though limiting in so many ways, it provided a means of doing something in the world.

Doing something in the world. I couldn't have expressed it this way when I was growing up, but the work I saw connected in my mind with agency and competence—that's what being an adult meant to me, and it was intimately tied to physical work. And, as does any child, I craved competence. Special terminology caught my ear, the idiom of freight trains or food orders, because not everyone could speak it, especially speak it the right way, and it made things happen. Particular movements of the body made things happen, too, in the restaurant or the stockyard. And there was knowledge of tools and devices, wrenches and hacksaws and measures, but the cash register, too, and the whirring blender. Tied to this knowledge were tricks of the trade. And what a kick it was when one of my uncles or a cook or a waitress showed me how to do something a little more effectively, with a little less effort and a little more finesse. Hold it this way. Move it in, like this. See? I became the work's insider, if just for a moment.

I have been a teacher for over thirty years in a wide range of settings: from kindergarten to adult literacy programs, and now in a research university's graduate school of education. Many of the populations I've taught and studied were considered to be educationally at-risk, and questions about intellectual capacity, either implied or explicit, were ever-present. And in a school of education, issues of ability, schooling, and work are part of the conceptual terrain. One thing I've learned from all this is the powerful effect our assumptions about intelligence have on the way people are defined and treated in the classroom, the workplace, and the public sphere. It seems fitting, therefore, to turn with the investigative tools I now have to the work represented by my forebears—factory work, skilled and semiskilled trades, and service occupations—with a focus on the mental processes involved in doing such work, the thought that enables it. To be sure, our view of occupations is shaped by the form of capitalism that has developed in the United States and by the social traditions that attend particular occupations. But running through this economic and cultural history are beliefs about mind. The Mind at Work, then, offers an analysis of physical work and intelligence and a reflection on how we might think more clearly and fairly about them.

Labor, as a political and social force, has diminished in power and has less immediate grab on the national imagination. The work that currently captures our fancy involves high technology, electronic media, and "symbolic analysis." Trumpeted as an unprecedented kind of work, such "knowledge work" represents emerging opportunity. It is associated with advanced education, and there is no doubt that work of this type requires high levels of analytic skill. What concerns me, though, is the implication—evident in popular discourse about work—that so-called older types of work, like manufacturing or service work, are, by and large, mindless, "neck down" rather than "neck up." (There is, by the way, a degree of historical amnesia here: each industrial generation heralds the unprecedented intellectual demands of its work.) But, though identified with another era, work of body and hand continues to create the material web of daily life. As with any human achievement, such work merits our understanding; the way we talk about it matters. And the dimension of it that is least discussed and appreciated—and that we can continue to learn from—is the thought it takes to do it well.

A related issue is the way we classify work itself. "Writers on work," notes sociologist Steven Peter Vallas, "routinely employ certain stock categories—'blue-' versus 'white-collar,' 'mental' versus 'manual' labor." Vallas acknowledges that these categories are sometimes useful, but we rely too heavily on them and fail "to observe subtle commonalities between apparently different forms of work." These limiting categories reaffirm longstanding biases about particular occupations and cause us to miss so much: The mental processes that enable service. The aesthetics of physical labor. The complex interplay of the social and the mechanical. The choreography of hand, eye, ear, brain. The everpresence of abstraction, planning, and problem solving in everyday work.

More immediate policy deliberations about work—I write this, for example, during a period of economic downturn and a fragile "jobless recovery"—are focused on specific tangible remedies: economic stimuli, job creation, training programs, and the like. Tied to such discussions are assessments of the state of the workforce, the number unemployed, gross measures of skill level, breakouts by race and gender. And there is, as well, a broader assessment of the workforce that will be a central concern of this book: the general sense of what workers can do, their competence, their intellectual capacity. Such appraisals may well include specific measures—for example, high school graduation as an indicator of literacy and numeracy—but there is also a psychological and cultural dimension to this reckoning, just as there is, at least in some schools of thought, to assessments of the economy. Consider, then, an observation by labor journalist John P. Hoerr: "Since the early days of industrialization, a peculiar notion has gained ascendancy in the United States: that wage workers and their representatives lacked the competence to handle complex issues and problems that required abstract knowledge and analytical ability." This sense of deficiency is in our cultural bones, and it affects, and distorts, the specific economic responses we develop, from education and job training to the way work is organized.

The nation is currently engaged in a discussion about the training of the workforce and about a range of educational experiments involving the integration of the academic and vocational curriculum and the transition from school to work. Yet the educational literature on these issues tends to be pretty thin on any close analysis of the cognitive dimension of physical work. This absence, I think, is rooted in the reductive notions the society carries about such work and the people who do it, notions that prove to be especially troubling as we try to rethink the connection between the schoolhouse and the workplace.

I also believe that there are important social issues here. Judgments about intelligence carry great weight in our culture, and one of the ways we judge each other's intelligence is through the work we do. There are many distinctions that can be made among types of work, distinctions related to income, autonomy, cleanliness, physical risk, and so on. These have a harshly real material meaning, but carry symbolic meaning as well. There's a moral and characterological aura to occupational autonomy, income, cleanliness, leading us to slip from qualities of the work to qualities of the worker. This kind of generalizing, this slippage of assumptions, runs through our cultural history, from postRevolutionary War mechanics who were portrayed as illiterate and incapable of participating in government to the autoworkers I heard labeled by one supervisor as "a bunch of dummies." These generalizations about mind and work are intimately tied to the dynamics of social class and affect the way we think about each other and ourselves. One of the more striking things writer Barbara Ehrenreich found as she worked a series of low-wage jobs to write Nickel and Dimed was how invisible she became. The way work gets defined and the attributions we make about it affect more than occupational rank and income; these attributions color the kind of social and civic life we can imagine.

Running through the upcoming chapters are several key terms, terms with such broad sweep, used in so many ways, that, as I begin to preview this book's contents, some defining is in order.

First, intelligence, and the broader term cognition. Cognition refers to those mental processes involving perception, attention, memory, knowing, judging. These processes will be displayed throughout the work we're considering as the waitress prioritizes tasks during rush hour or the electrician troubleshoots a faulty circuit. Some researchers study cognition in laboratory settings and others in natural contexts. I will discuss more about method in the afterword, but here let me say that I draw on both kinds of studies to inform the argument of this book. The portraits of cognition you'll read, though, are for the most part developed from my studies of people at work. The busy restaurant, the job site, and the factory floor each present different tasks to be solved, calling forth different cognitive processes. Also, cognition is, I believe, intimately tied to motives and values, to long-range as well as immediate goals, and to one's life history. As a friend of mine so vividly put it, we're not just a brain in a bottle. We think in a material and social world. So when I can, I provide biographical information for the people we're observing, and I am able to provide much more of that kind of detail in the family sketches that run through these pages. It was, after all, through my family that I first saw work close at hand.

Though a more specific term than cognition, intelligence is a much-debated concept. To get us started, I'll use a composite of the most familiar Western definitions of intelligence: it is the ability to learn and act on the environment, to apply knowledge to new situations, to reason, plan, and solve problems. Such definitions have a pervasive effect on educational policy and occupational classification—so they will prove useful to us, for they are the terms of our public discourse. We need to keep in mind, though, that there are aspects of human mental activity that are not captured in the standard definitions of intelligence. They will be evident, however, in the work settings we'll explore.

Because intelligence is such a loaded term, let me sketch out a little more background and offer my own perspective. The way we think about intelligence in the United States has been shaped over the last century by the psychometric tradition, mental measurement, known to most of us through an intelligence test taken in school or in the military. This tradition has contributed—sometimes through misinterpretation—to a number of interconnected popular beliefs about intelligence: that it is a single and unitary quality (so if you're smart, you're smart across the board); that it's fixed, consistent (and this plays into further beliefs about the degree to which intelligence is inherited); that it can be accurately measured with an instrument like an intelligence test and represented numerically, typically through an IQ score; and that people's success in life, or more broadly, their place in the social order, is a reflection of their intelligence. This book is not the place to unpack the many arguments within education, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science about these claims. Suffice it to say that they—and other aspects of mental measurement, including the statistical procedures that are central to the field—are hotly contested, and, in fact, have been since the father of the modern intelligence test, Alfred Binet, himself raised concerns about the use and interpretation of his instrument.

It is also important to note that within the West there are powerful research traditions that yield other conceptions of intelligence and other means to assess it. In various ways, these traditions posit, for example, that there are multiple components to intelligence, or even multiple intelligences; that intelligence is variable and dynamic; that social context is crucial to its emergence and display; that creativity, emotion, aesthetic response, and the use of the body—removed from traditional psychometric definitions and tests of intelligence—must be considered as aspects of intelligent behavior. And, finally, it is very important to note that any discussion of intelligence is culture-bound. Some aspects of what we consider intelligence might well overlap with definitions from other cultures, but many cultures posit a range of further or different attributes to intelligence, for example, the ability to live in harmony with others.

It is undisputed that formal education will affect one's score on an intelligence test, since the tests tend to be heavy on verbal and numerical items. The big challenge to test designers, then, is to create at least a few components that, in theory, will not be affected by schooling, for example, identifying the missing element in a visual pattern. Though the success of this endeavor is (yet another) contested issue, it seems pretty clear that it is difficult—some say impossible—to tease out the effects of education (including a familiarity with and investment in tests like these) from the effect of "pure" intelligence. Here's what concerns me, given the spirit of this book. If one does well on an intelligence test, that clearly indicates some kind of cognitive competence. But if one doesn't do well—and, historically, poor performers would include low- income, working people—then the meaning of the score is much less clear. So, we have a measure that works only at the upper end of the scale. To do well tells us something about intelligence—and, usually, schooling—but not to do well provides much less information about intellectual capacity ... though that poor performance may speak volumes about educational opportunity. My worry is the ease with which poor performance gets interpreted as an accurate measure of intelligence, and the effect that interpretation has on the test-taker, both personally and societally.

This is not a call for a simplified egalitarianism. I am not denying the obvious fact that people come to any pursuit with different interests, talents, knacks for things, motivations, capabilities. Nor am I claiming that all bodies of knowledge and expressions of mind are of the same level of cognitive complexity and social importance. All the cultures I'm familiar with make judgments about competence in the domains that matter to them. (Though ours is more obsessed than any I know with developing measures of the mind and schemes to rank them.) No, the distressing thing is that both in our institutional systems and in our informal talk we tend to label entire categories of work and the people associated with them in ways that generalize, erase cognitive variability, and diminish whole traditions of human activity. Attributions of merit and worth flow throughout the process. We order, we rank, we place at steps upon a ladder rather than appreciating an abundant and varied cognitive terrain.

Skill. Let's begin with the American Heritage Dictionary. Skill is "proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience." In traditional usage, this proficiency would be related to the use of body or hand, though more recently, the word skill has come to apply to a wide range of activities. We talk, for example, of communication skills or general problem-solving skills.

It is important to remember, however, that what gets defined as a skill is historically and culturally determined, and this process is of special significance in labeling kinds of work. The politics and power plays by which particular interest groups get one kind of work categorized as "skilled" and another as "semiskilled" or "unskilled" have significant economic and social consequences. Another historical phenomenon to note here is the increasing role school has played over the past century in developing and certifying skills that, in previous eras, would have been developed within the job setting itself. The value that a skill has is also determined by time and place. In the rhetoric of the "new economy," for example, communication skills or general problem-solving skills or the ability to work in teams are privileged, while more specific mechanical skills—associated with conventional blue-collar work—tend to be perceived as less valuable. All of these processes of definition and the status they confer involve attributions of cognition and intelligence, and thus play into the concerns of this book.

Work. What our society defines as work also changes over time and place (consider the debates over how to classify domestic labor), and what gets classified as work in one setting (styling hair in a salon, repairing cars in a garage) would be labeled a hobby if done in another context. There is a fluid quality to this concept of work. For my purposes, I'll posit that work is purposeful, remunerated effort that provides goods or services for another. The majority of people in our society have to work for some significant portion of their lives. Work, any work, calls forth a range of human abilities, from the classifying of objects to the exerting of will. And work is freighted with meaning and moral judgment, by the society, by ourselves. "Work," writes occupational sociologist Everett Cherrington Hughes, "is one of the things by which [people] are judged, and certainly one of the more significant things by which [we] judge [ourselves]."

People work for a number of reasons, survival foremost among them, but, depending on the person, the stage in his or her life, and the particular work being done, there can be a host of other reasons as well. For some, work provides structure to one's day. It can provide, as it did for my mother, social connection. It provides a means to buy goods and services. The work itself can have its own rewards, from intellectual to aesthetic to physical. It can make one feel a part of something bigger than oneself—as was the case with my uncle Frank and the railroad. And it can contribute to a sense of who one is.

In this book we will meet people who are competent at what they do, experienced, adept, their competence recognized by themselves and others. They will enable us to observe mature practice—and often I will elicit their commentary (and that of others of similar qualification) as one source of insight into expertise. We will also meet people, usually younger, who are just entering a field, though some of them have already begun to identify with it—one high school student speaks of the integrity of working with wood. These less-experienced, even novice, practitioners will enable us to watch competence emerging and provide a developmental perspective on work and the thinking that accompanies it.

I will be looking at examples of proficient work, either in its development or in its mature execution, for my intention is to explore some of the characteristics of common work when it is done well, and to find the right words, the right line of sight to depict the mind that enables that competence. As journalist John Hoerr's observation a few pages back suggests, this is not the way American workers are usually depicted. The Mind at Work offers an alternative story.

But what about the times when work is mediocre, sloppy, or downright awful? We've all been on the receiving end of bad production or damaging service. There are multiple reasons for poor work—in any occupation, from hairstyling to surgery—reasons of training, or motivation, or characteristics of the workplace, or the twists and turns of a person's life. Though this book is not a study of occupational efficiency and outcomes, not a study of the quality of work produced by specific occupational groups as a whole, it will present along the way some of the factors that affect the quality of performance, particularly from the perspective of workers themselves.

A good deal of modern work—blue-collar and service work especially—is characterized by working conditions that limit, often severely, the various forms of meaning one might gain from it. Social observers from Adam Smith and Karl Marx on down have described the de-skilling, routinizing, and regulating function of the factory. More recently, the office and the "electronic sweatshop" have been the focus of concern. These conditions are not experienced equally across society; in our country, the poor, immigrants, women, and people of color are disproportionately distributed there. And within those distributions there are further patterns of inequality, experienced, for example, by women or African Americans who have been excluded from entire categories of physical work and channeled into those with the lowest pay and the fewest opportunities for advancement. Such disadvantage runs throughout the history of modern work.

We have to be careful, though, not to reduce the wide range of people who work in hard conditions to a single oppressed mass of humanity. In various ways—even as work threatens body and dignity—people tend to seek agency and meaning within the constraints placed on them. While it is clearly true that many working people would quit if they could, that does not mean that, on average, they cease to assert their presence in and through the workplace. During her investigation of routine and repetitious work, journalist Barbara Garson found ample evidence of boredom, resentment, and sabotage. "But the most dramatic thing I found," she writes, "was quite the opposite of noncooperation. People passionately want to work.... Whatever creativity goes into sabotage," she continues, "a more amazing ingenuity goes into manufacturing goals and satisfactions on jobs where measurable achievement has been all but rationalized out.... Almost everyone wants to feel she is getting something accomplished."

A common theme in the social theory related to modern work concerns its detrimental effect on the consciousness of the worker. How does that theme square with a book on the intelligence found in common work? There is no doubt that a good deal of the work people do is repetitive, dumbed down, and, often, dangerous, and this surely can affect one's mood and sense of prospects. There is also research that demonstrates the negative effects of certain kinds of work on intellectual flexibility, as measured by interview questions and psychological tests. But I think we need to be cautious in assuming extensive and necessary effects of particular kinds of work on the thinking ability of the people who do them. Such analysis can obscure the nuance and variation in individual people's experience of work, as well as real differences in the physical and social environment of individual workplaces. The complexity of working life is thereby reduced. We can pinpoint the harmful effects of modern working conditions—the people in this book certainly do—without positing an automatic diminishment of a worker's awareness and capacity to reason.

There are other tales to tell about mind and work, and my hope is that the ensuing pages contribute to the telling. In these chapters, I present a range of familiar occupations that involve body and hand, representative of the kinds of work many in America have done throughout the last century and into our own. All the chapters deal in some way with the cognitive dimension of these, and similar, occupations. Chapters 1 through 6 focus on particular kinds of work and the particular people doing them. Though some fundamental cognitive processes are evident throughout these chapters—for example, accessing a knowledge base, attending to the immediate environment, or following steps in a sequence—each chapter will, to some degree, feature certain aspects of mental activity in the workplace. So, for example, the first chapter on waitressing will emphasize the ability to think quickly in dynamic environments like the restaurant, while the fourth chapter on carpentry details some of the cognitive processes enabling that trade: calculating, planning, visual thinking, and so on. However, it's important to note that such emphasis does not mean exclusive treatment; cognition on the job is not so neatly segmented. Collectively, the first six chapters, with their different emphases and contexts, give a sense of the overall richness of the mind at work. Though they also contain individual portraits of people at work, chapters 7, 8, and the conclusion have a somewhat broader sweep. They draw on the themes raised in the preceding chapters to further analyze the consequential distinctions our society makes between kinds of work and the assumptions about intelligence embedded in those distinctions.

In chapters 1, "The Working Life of a Waitress," and 2, "Styling Hair," I examine two types of service, two traditional occupational pathways for working-class and immigrant women. These two kinds of work are typically defined in light of the social and emotional needs they fulfill rather than in terms of the thinking involved in their execution. When we examine the work carefully, however, easy distinctions begin to blur.

In the busy restaurant, physical and emotional need, rituals of service, memory, economy of movement, and the regulation of the flow of work all interact dynamically. As in subsequent chapters, we'll get a sense of such interaction through close observation of the work itself—taking orders, getting food to tables—and, as well, we'll get a sense of the way the structure and traditions of a particular workplace initiate the thought within it. My mother holds a central role in this first chapter. Her story serves as a reminder that work is both grounded on and shapes personal history, and thus reveals motives, desires, values, and one's sense of who one is. A working life is rich in meaning.

The hair salon, like the restaurant, is a public space in which intimate things happen. Hair is invested with great personal and cultural significance, and clients enter the salon with variously articulated needs and desires. It is the stylist's job, through conversation and gesture, technique and aesthetic sense, to realize that desire.

Both of these chapters involve people who are expert practitioners, fluid in their performance, so the focus is on competence fully expressed. In chapters 3 through 5, we shift to a developmental perspective as we consider three of the building trades, observing novice plumbers, carpenters, and electricians in educational settings as they think their way through the challenges of materials and structures, function and force. Observing students allows us to get in close to skill as it develops, to the basic kinesthetic and cognitive moves that emerge over time—a perspective that can help us enhance standard notions of intelligence. If we observe with a belief in the remarkable nature of common work, suspending, to the degree possible, the distinctions we habitually make, what might we come to appreciate? The questions I kept asking myself in these settings were: What is going on here? How is it learned? What enables it to happen? What in this moment does it mean to be smart?

Chapter 3, "The Intelligence of Plumbing," provides the occasion to observe a teacher encouraging a problem-solving cast of mind among his students. His role is particularly important, for the students are in a juvenile justice diversion program and benefit especially from his mentoring style. But the interaction demonstrates, as well, the critical role of knowledgeable others in the development of systematic thinking. Furthermore, the teacher and the plumbing trade provide the opportunity for these young people to display intelligence so often missed, or misunderstood, in the typical classroom. A fundamental goal of this book is to help us think and talk differently about common work and the people who do it. This chapter and the next foreground that goal.

"A Vocabulary of Carpentry," chapter 4, offers an extended stay in a high school wood construction class, which allows us to observe growth in skill and knowledge. When I was defining intelligence a few pages back, I wondered about the many manifestations of intelligence in the workplace that might fall outside our standard measures. As we watch the students in this chapter work with wood over time, we get a sense of some of the phenomena that might be included in a richer cognitive language of work, from the strategic use of tool and body, to the making of judgments from the feel of things, to the intricate interplay of the verbal and the technical in planning tasks and solving problems.

In chapter 5, "Reflective Technique: Electrical Wiring and Construction," we again watch people learning a trade—in this case, the electrician's—to consider some long-standing distinctions made in the West about human activity. Since Classical Greece, Western culture has tended to oppose technical skill to reflection, applied or practical pursuits to theoretical or "pure" inquiry, the physical to the conceptual. These distinctions are not benign categories, are not neutral; in many contexts they carry significant differences in status and worth. As we get in close to students doing their work, however, we see how complicated these distinctions are: the technical gives rise to reflection, the physical and conceptual blend, and aesthetics and ethics emerge continually from practical activity.

With chapter 6, "Two Lives: A Welder and a Foreman," we return to expert performance, but considered across the life span: a woman at midpoint in her career, a welder and a teacher of welding; and another of my uncles, a man who retired from the auto industry, having moved from assembly line to supervision. Both have gained multiple kinds of knowledge from their work. The chapter sketches their career trajectories, but with an eye toward the meaning work has had in their lives and the play of mind in that work. Cognitive biographies.

Chapter 7, "Rethinking Hand and Brain," extends a theme running through the book: the liabilities of the body-mind, hand-brain dichotomy in our everyday discourse about work. This chapter provides the occasion to further analyze and unsettle the dichotomy through a reconsideration of a familiar portrait of an early-twentieth-century laborer; a comparative discussion of three kinds of higher-status professional work, including surgery and teaching; and a brief treatment of the process of occupational classification itself. Each of these sections encourages a reimagining of consequential occupational distinctions, and with that reimagining, a different line of sight on widely held beliefs about physical work.

In chapter 8, "Hand and Brain in School: The Paradox of Vocational Education," we consider in more depth the negative institutional effects of one of the family of hand-brain distinctions—the separation of the vocational course of study from the academic in our schools. For close to a century, the academic-vocational divide has defined the high school experience for many young people. Here we consider the history and internal contradictions of vocational education, and the way it has undercut the cognitive possibilities of common work and of those who do it. We also consider current attempts at reform and, with them, basic questions about mind, work, and schooling in a democratic society.

The conclusion, "Working Life," attempts a summing up of what those who populate this book have taught us about the mind at work, a synthesis of the book's themes and portraits with an eye toward a fuller and more fitting representation of the intelligence that sustains us day after day.

We live in a time of much talk and judgment about intelligence. Some critics say we are obsessed with it to our detriment, from the way intellectual flash blinded us to the many weaknesses of the dot-com and Enron-style bubbles to the urgency with which we hurry our children through ever-higher levels of scholastic achievement. For all that, we operate with a fairly restricted notion of intelligence, one pretty much identified with the particular verbal and quantitative measures of the schoolhouse and the IQ test. And thus we undervalue, or can miss entirely, the many displays of what the mind does every day, all the time, right under our noses. It is not my intention to take anything away from the accomplishments of those whom the culture certifies as intelligent, but rather to widen our gaze enough to catch the presence of mind up and down the ladder of occupational status.

My purpose in writing the book, then, is to provide an alternative lens on everyday work, to aid us in seeing the commonplace with greater precision. I believe that such a change in perception could contribute to a more accurate portrayal of the full world of work, and could help us think more effectively and humanely about education, job training, and the conditions in which so many people make a living.