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The article reviews the books, "Craft and the Creative Economy ," by Susan Luckman, "The Creativity Hoax: Precarious Work in the Gig Economy," by George Morgan and Pariece Nelligan.
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Over the last decade, firms positioning themselves as craft or artisanal have proliferated in the urban environments of the Global North. Selling themselves as community hubs, friendly neighbours, anticorporate crusaders, and environmental stewards, craft industries – craft breweries, artisanal bakeries, heritage clothing manufacturers, and the like – have effectively insulated themselves from critique. Hidden beneath this veneer, however, are the accounts of countless workers detailing experiences of harassment, overwork, low pay, and discrimination. Motivated by the methodological orientation of workers’ inquiry, this article recounts attitudes and experiences offered by craftworkers and craftspeople about their working conditions, motivations, and attempts to organize in craft industries, particularly craft brewing. Worker testimony reveals a profound disconnect between the optimistic industrial mythologies offered up by craft discourse and the rigid hierarchies, unequal division of labour, and toxic cultures many observed in their workplaces. Contrary to the pervasive artisanal allure that motivates many workers to seek out work in craft brewing and similar industries, the research presented here also suggests new levels of working-class consciousness and solidarity emerging in these industries and profiles attempts by craft brewery workers to organize their workplaces and fight to improve conditions.
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In the last decade, considerable attention has been paid to the category of craft. Within the disciplines, particularly in sociology and art theory, scholars like Richard Sennett, Susan Luckman, and Glenn Adamson have attempted to define, theorize and delineate the history of craft and its influence in contemporary capitalist culture. Popularly, books and television shows feature the work of makers and craftspeople, their popularity compounded by online crafting communities like Etsy. For all of this attention, considerably less has been paid to the labour that creates the craft products to begin with. This dissertation interrogates the category of craft from a critical labour studies perspective, first by analyzing its labour process, and, second, by amplifying the voices of workers in these industries in order to reflect the conditions they face, their attitudes about craft, and their reflections on class and organizing. In order to accomplish both, the dissertation reports on participant interviews and critically examines cultural artifacts concerning so-called making (typically understood as amateur or semi-professional small-scale production) and craft industrialism (used to define scalable industries that use craft branding and terminology). Its key case studies are making/makerspaces and craft brewing in the Cascadia region of North America, although it also visits the roasteries, bike shops, and bakeries that make up some of the other primary sites of the artisanal economy. This dissertation makes four primary contributions to the critical study of craft. First, it reorients the common approaches to craft, which either prioritize craft objects or individual maker activity. By redirecting attention to the social process of production, it avoids the object-orientation of many approaches as well as the maker-as-virtuoso narratives of popular accounts. By focusing on the social dynamics of craft, the dissertation transcends the singular craftsperson to make its second contribution: the reconceptualization of skill as social category rather than individual attribute. This social approach to skill paves the way toward the dissertation's third contribution: a dialectical consideration of the craftworker as distinct from but intrinsically related to the craftsperson. Analysis of cultural artifacts and discussions with workers highlighted the dependency of craftsmanship and support work. Finally, the dissertation distills maker and worker attitudes into a set of observations regarding the maker movement's narratives of emancipation through self-directed work as well as the potential of solidarity in craft industries.
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Explorations into today's labour context reveal a wide schism between those workers who live under conditions of precarity and contingency and those who seem to be living the dream - and not only in terms of wages. The standardized work day and Taylorized division of labour that characterized most of the industrial era has transitioned, at least in large part, into a regime of flexibility and insecurity that reconstitutes not only working but lifestyle conditions. This paper is intended as an initial conceptual investigation of a dual trend in the conditions of labour under digital capitalism: the rise of contractual contingency and insecurity and the introduction of fun and hipness into the office environment as a means of work intensification.
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