Call for Papers

Craft is now recognized within organization studies as a conceptual lens for understanding the significance of traditional making practices developed in the past and allowing novel and innovative forms of organizing to emerge in the future (Yamauchi & Hjorth, 2024; Gasparin & Neyland, 2022). Its importance is thereby acknowledged in engaging with economic, societal and ecological crises by creating the capacity for more enchanting and resilient practices of organizing (Nyfeler, 2024; Suddaby et al., 2017). These possibilities stem from the role of craft in imagining how society could be organized, opening up a range of ethical and political possibilities (Holt & Yamauchi, 2023; Bell et al., 2021). It is therefore timely and important to reflect on how craft practices and craft research can help us to organize imaginatively otherwise as an entryway for developing more diverse, inclusive, heterogeneous and multi-disciplinary conversations about organizing.
 
Imagining craft otherwise enables acknowledgement of the various forms of capitalism to which craft is linked, for example in many central and southern European countries, as well as Japan, where craft has endured in parallel with capitalist industrial frameworks. Longitudinal and historical perspectives enable comprehension of the evolutionary trajectory of craft that transcend its narrative construction as the ‘other’ to industrial organization (Adamson, 2018). Instead, craft emerges as a distinct mode of entrepreneurship and organization with creative, innovative and aesthetic features, often thriving in spatially organized clusters and districts.
 
Craft can also be understood as an alternative form of organizing or leading that builds on established traditions of localism, grassroots organization and community building which have disruptive, transformative potential. Collectivist notions of craft are often founded on everyday repetition and practices of embodied care in making which tend to be dismissed or overlooked. By taking modest craft practices seriously, we can come to better understand how creative, playful gestures are involved in challenging oppressive, exploitative power structures and organizing resistance.
 
Asking questions about who and what is marginalized and excluded is therefore an important part of thinking imaginatively otherwise about craft. Looking to a particular (his)story of the past as the source of craft tradition has meant that craft sometimes uses discourses that idealize hegemonic masculine norms (Ocejo, 2017). We therefore invite considerations of the role of craft in displacing the Eurocentric masculine craft subject from his traditionally elevated position over Other humans, animals, plants and the Earth. This creates possibilities for feminist, new materialist and posthumanist thinking (Barad, 2003; Braidotti, 2020) about craft (Gruwell, 2022; Bell & Vachhani, 2020).
 
Additionally, we invite contributions that critique colonizing tendencies within craft to position others as subjects or entities for consumption and provide alternative postcolonial and indigenous readings. We thereby seek to locate craft within a broader imperial and colonial past, based on theft, trade, and collection, which continues to appropriate and exoticize things made elsewhere by other bodies. Such treatments of craft objects can strip them of their cultural, sacred or supernatural meanings by assimilating them into institutional spaces, where they become ‘art’ or ‘cultural heritage’ or commodified on the basis of ‘authenticity’ as a status marker or form of cultural capital (Spivak, 1988).
 
Thinking imaginatively otherwise also raises ontological, epistemological and methodological questions about how we come to know and understand craft in organization studies. It encourages exploration of ways of knowing and understanding diverse forms of materiality not simply as the backcloth to human agency, but as entities that generate affects. Through this, craft presents a broad invitation to think more creatively about our research practices as organizational scholars, including the materials we consider as ‘data’, and the techniques or ‘methods’ we use to craft objects that we collectively understand as ‘knowledge’.
 
In imaginatively thinking otherwise about craft, the following list may provide a useful starting point:

• Embodiment, materiality and the more-than-human

• Cultural-historical and postcolonial analyses

• Craft as a means of alternative organization for sustainability

• Craft in community organizing and local-regional economies

• The role of digital technologies as nonhuman craft agents

• Intersections between leadership and craft

• Spaces, places and times of craft

• Crafting research – ontological, epistemological and methodological possibilities

• Varieties of capitalism and the future of skilled craft work

 
We also welcome other creative and diverse suggestions for how to think imaginatively otherwise about the organization of craft.

References

• Adamson, G. (2018): The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury.

• Barad, K. (2003): “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” Signs, 28 (3), 801–831.
• Bell, E., & Vachhani, S.J. (2020): “Relational encounters and vital materiality in the practice of craft work.” Organization Studies, 41 (5), 681–701.
• Bell, E., Dacin, M.T., & Toraldo, M.L. (2021): “Craft Imaginaries – Past, Present and Future.” Organization Theory, 2 (1); https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787721991141.
• Braidotti, R. (2020): “We are in this together, but we are not one and the same.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 17 (4), 465–469.
• Gasparin, M., & Neyland, D. (2022): “Organizing tekhnē: Configuring processes and politics through craft.” Organization Studies, 43 (7), 1137–1160.
• Gruwell, L. (2022:) Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics. Logan: Utah State University Press.
• Holt, R., & Yamauchi, Y. (2023) “Ethics, tradition and temporality in craft work: The case of Japanese Mingei.” Journal of Business Ethics, 188, 827-843.
• Nyfeler, J. (2024): “Social systems of flexible production: Organizational conditions for the future of craft.” Journal of Organizational Sociology, published online on July 12, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1515/joso-2023-0029.
• Ocejo, R.E. (2017): Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Spivak, G.C. (1988): “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In: C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 271–315.
• Suddaby, R., Ganzin, M., & Minkus, A. (2017): “Craft, magic and the re-enchantment of the world.” In: S. Siebert (ed.) Management Research: European Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 41–72.
• Yamauchi, Y., & Hjorth, D. (2024) “Tradition, entrepreneurship, and innovation: The craft of Japanese fine dining.” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, first published online on July 3, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1512.
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