Craft Production

The concept of craft production refers to work processes resulting in products where the design and manufacture are conducted by the same person more or less concurrently. The arts and crafts movement in the United Kingdom in the mid- and late-nineteenth century appears as the first explicit use of the notion of crafts and craftsmanship as a social critique. These notions served John Ruskin and William Morris in their critique of industrial production. Scholars such as C. Wright Mills and recently Richard Sennett have refined this critique of the authority of the machine in commanding human actors and addressed the appreciation of skills, engagement with work, and commitment to good quality as general phenomena of human activity. Sennett views crafts as a merger of design and making and ultimately as a critique of duality of the mind and the body, according to which creative thinking is abstract and takes place without interference or active contribution of our physical being. The human actor that Sennett's analysis purports is an integrated body-mind engaged with materials in acts of making.

The concept of craft production is informed by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and manifest in the so-called practice turn (Schatzki et al. 2001). Crafts theorizing also resonates with the work of Nigel Thrift on performance and precognitive, tacit intelligence of the body-mind. Thrift's idea of performance indicates an emergent form of production that counters the idea of separate mind and body by suggesting that our ways of being in the physical space are always iterative and responsive. In his argument, precognitive bodily responses lay beyond, or before, management and control. Hence, they also constitute an alternative form of production. In organization and management studies, the scholars of organizational aesthetics such as Antonio Strati have made use of the notions of tacit and bodily knowledge and drawn on and further developed the idea of craftsmanship.

Craft production can also be understood as a particular set of products and production processes. In a narrow sense, craft production makes use of nonfabricated, “natural” materials such as clay, wood, and natural fibers. In a similar way, the acts of blacksmithing, weaving, and pottery making are central to the notion of crafts. Hence, craft products are frequently considered as traditional, authentic, and local, as opposed to industrial production. This selection of natural materials has also contributed to an understanding of crafts as being environmentally sustainable, in addition to a socially preferable form of organizing work.

Contemporary accounts tend to emphasize that craft production is sacred. Engagements with crafts are thought to provide authenticity, orientation, and order in a chaotic modern world. Craft production is thus also a ritual to be attended as a practitioner or admired and consumed as part of an audience. In the same vein, handicrafts are spectacular objects to be gazed at and seized in exotic destinations.

To uncoil these notions one can first note that because of their claimed authenticity, crafts form an important part of the tourist industry. Craft products are materializations of culture, and thus [Page 377]handicraft souvenirs enable cultural sampling. Craft items participate in a commerce of tourist arts that is important both for local producers as well as the tourist industry (Grabourn 1984). Given the importance of handicrafts in tourism, developers of new resorts and destinations are involved in establishing a craft “industry” (e.g., Moreno and Littrell 2001). Tourism thus constitutes processes in which the role and understanding of local, traditional crafts changes through both commodification and the establishment of new meanings. Paradoxically, however, handicraft products are also increasingly traded in the anonymizing international market. The objects of this international trade are curiously faceless and anonymous commodities that nevertheless bear marks of craftsmanship.

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