Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman defines craftsmanship as the desire to do a job well for its own sake — and insists this is not a temperament but a practice, available to anyone willing to stay with a problem past the point of first competence.1
Two notes for the clinic. First, Sennett’s distinction between repair that restores a thing to what it was and repair that changes the thing to make it work — dentistry does both, and confusing them is where overtreatment begins. A joint that functions is not obliged to look like the textbook.
Second, his observation that the craftsman’s workshop teaches through resistance: the material pushes back, and skill is the record of that negotiation. Patients push back too — schedules, fears, physiology. The clinician who treats resistance as information rather than obstruction is doing craft; the one who treats it as noncompliance is doing throughput.
- Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (2008).