Crafting professionals: entrepreneurial strategies for making a living through passionate work

Abstract

Early-career crafts graduates often face a perceived dilemma, that of balancing passionate work with their need to make a living. This paper explores the negotiation undertaken by early-career crafts graduates and the entrepreneurial strategies they adopted which variably combine the logics of passion and economics. The paper draws on qualitative interviews with 25 early career crafts graduates in England conducted in 2018. Five strategies -support, streams, synthesis, segment and synergy – are identified, including the different income generation and creative production models they represent. The challenges associated with particular strategies are also considered. The identification of these strategies provides a more nuanced understanding of the organisation and management of craft practices, particularly during the early career period, that goes beyond the acknowledgement of portfolio working as prominent feature of creative work. The paper contributes to the literatures on the organisation of craft work and creative entrepreneurship by identifying ways in which craft practitioners structure and manage their work to sustain and develop their practice. It argues that the positioning of craft micro enterprises as hybrid organisational forms provides an opportunity to redress the binary opposition between passion and work in the creative economy in favour of a more balanced approach. A call for further research on craft production at the micro-enterprise and sole trader level is made to develop new knowledge and recommendations to support the growth and sustainability of the craft sector.