Craft entrepreneurialism and sustainable scale: resistance to and disavowal of the creative industries as champions of capitalist growth

Establishing a Crafty Making Future: What Does a Career in Craft Look Like Today?

“…They also highlighted the passion that drives many makers to persist balancing these multiple roles. Thus, while few if any of our research participants would ever describe themselves as 'entrepreneurs' (see Luckman (2018)), Milanesi's definition of the 'passion entrepreneur' nonetheless seems to offer appropriate typologies to describe our research participants' creative enterprises without judgement on the income they generate through their practice. For what was evident through our research is that self-employment specifically, and by default the need to be enterprising or entrepreneurial within the creative sector, is an increasingly normalised social and economic assumption regardless of whether you are starting out on the creative career path upon exit from a higher education degree or entering as a 'career changer' (Fig.…”

“…1, indicate a snapshot of the diversity of motivations and modes of creative enterprise developed by our research participants. With such diversity, accordingly, there are also differing notions of what success looks like (see Luckman (2018)). What unites these diverse experiences, however, are relatively low levels of financial return for effort.…”

Creative Aspiration and the Betrayal of Promise? The Experience of New Creative Workers

“…The difficulties of self-employment are likely to feel even greater because the worker is alone. Research has found that many creative workers who start their own businesses do not plan to expand sufficiently to involve or employ others (Luckman 2018). Like a freelancer, the owner of a micro-enterprise therefore lacks an equivalent to the colleague relationships that can sustain conventional employees.…”

What Does ‘Handmade’ Mean Today?

“…Indeed, it will return in further interview excerpts in this chapter and is connected with another of the key findings from the study, namely, that the majority of craftspeople and designer makers we spoke with are reluctant entrepreneurs. Indeed, most eschewed any identification with entrepreneurialism at all (Luckman 2018).…”

“…As a result, many of those craftspeople and designer makers we spoke to who were in a position to scale-up their production while stepping back from the making themselves were reluctant to go down this path. Elsewhere we have explored these issues in terms of balancing making income with quality of life (Luckman 2015;Luckman and Andrew 2018), as well as in terms of the desire to be a maker, to be doing the creative work oneself, and thus not 'get too big' with the added pressures and responsibilities of being an employer (Luckman 2018). In this chapter, we home in more on what upscaling and outsourcing reveals about competing definitions of, and attitudes towards, the idea of 'the handmade'.…”