Crafting, following to recent research (Kroezen, Ravasi, Sasaki, Zebrowska & Suddaby, 2021) is a distinct approach to work and organizing. When we think of work as crafting, we look at how people make work meaningful through human engagement. Examples often include stereotypical images of carpenters, watchmakers, beer brewers or other people that have specific manual skills. The following example of sociologist Sennett (2008: 19) illustrates this beautifully:
Peering through a window into a carpenter’s shop, you see inside an elderly man surrounded by his apprentices and his tools. Order reigns within, parts of chairs are clamped neatly together, the fresh smell of wood shavings fills the room, the carpenter bends over his bench to make a fine incision for marquetry.
While indeed crafting often involves a detailed understanding of materials and training of specific skills, it is more than ‘handicraft’, ‘manual work’ or ‘DIY-projects’. What Sennett shows us in his book entitled “The Craftsmen” is that crafting is about showing up in your work with a certain commitment. An openness to give yourself to the job you do. Displaying a willingness to learn, to train new skills. To experiment, make mistakes, and moreover, falling in love with your job again and again.
It demands discipline, dedication and drive to apply a crafting approach to your job. This is hard when you do not connect with your job. Before learning new skills and become a master in your craft, it is important to ask yourself the question: “why are you involved in doing this work at all?”; “what does this job bring you, personally and professionally?”; “what makes you love this job and want to commit to it, everyday again?” Once we know the bigger purpose of doing something, it gets easier to cope with adversity, change and periods of downfall. But once we lost this connection, work can become energy-draining and at worst frustrating.
Work vs. Labor
What I think is so beautiful of this understanding of crafting, is that it makes you think beyond work as labor. It allows you to think of work as an excercise in meaning-fullness. Work as something that expands you rather than restricts you. Labor, in contrary, is about doing tasks. It is about learning sufficient knowledge to do your job well, collecting income and doing this over and over again. Labor involves more routines than rituals. (Fayard, 2021; Arendt, 1958/1998)
Labor is anchored in efficiency approaches to work. In this paradigm, work is seen as a carefully managed and coordinated process which is about turning efforts into a certain outcome - often with monetary value. Rather than celebrating the efforts put into work, it is about saving time, costs and materials. The focus is more on how work can be done smoother and faster rather than it is about creating meaningful connection.
From this approach, tasks can be simply replaced with machinery or robotics. In the end, automation can make work processes more efficient. Yet, taking seriously the crafting approach to work, we learn that work is not just about executing a job. It is about personal growth, affection, dedication and community. Not all work can be simply replaced, because people will feel replaced. Their connection with work will change radically and as a consequence they might loose motivation.
For example, in my doctoral research on designers it became clear that it was hard for designers to change their work. They felt this urge to make things, like prototypes, design tools and share knowledge with their peers. As their work was becoming more abstract, shifting from the space of products to the spaces of services and strategies, the designers missed ‘tinkering’, playing with materials. They could not prevent themselves from engaging in making activities, even though this was not needed for the success of the design project and sometimes even led to delays in the collaboration with each other and clients.
What we can learn from this, is that it is not simple to just change work - even if they seem trivial tasks. Our connection with work is sometimes not always clear-cut to us, because it is embodied. It is part of our everyday behavior and it is normalized.
A crafting approach to the debate on ‘humans vs. machines’
“The nature of work has changed and is likely to continue to do so as we move further into the 21st century”, writes organizational scholar Fayard (2021: 207) in her article on the meaning of work. Recent debates evolve much around the question of replacing humans with machines, algorithms, and other forms of automation. Following the crafting approach to work, it is important not to treat work as labor - in which tasks can be ‘replaced’, ‘changed’ and ‘recontextualized’. Instead, when speaking about changing work, it is important to take into account how people relate to their work.
Questions like these need to be at the center stage of organizational change projects: How do people organize their work? How do people relate to their work? For example, do they see their work as an exercise of meaningfulness? And if so, how does this manifests itself? Do workers relate to their work through ‘making things’, like the designers in my own doctoral studies did, through telling stories or through writing? Or, do people see their work (or some elements of it) as labor? Moreover, how can we take better account of people’s relationships to work when shaping organizational realities? How can we shape organizations around meaningfulness rather than around technical possibilities?
In the realm of organizational change and innovation we often think of ‘what is possible’ instead of what is socially desirable. The crafting approach - a deep investigation in what drives people at work - can offer an opportunity to craft organizational realities to which people want to belong and commit. Social research, especially anthropological fieldwork which pays attention to conscious and more unconscious behaviors, is relevant in gaining knowledge about people’s relationship with work, technology and each other.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1998)
Fayard, A. L. (2021). Notes on the meaning of work: Labor, work, and action in the 21st century. Journal of Management Inquiry, 30(2), 207-220.
Kroezen, J., Ravasi, D., Sasaki, I., Żebrowska, M., & Suddaby, R. (2021). Configurations of craft: Alternative models for organizing work. Academy of Management Annals, 15(2), 502-536.
Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. Yale University Press. Chicago
Crafting
Thoughtful and thought-provoking post. Thank you. My takeaways:
We prefer craft to labour. One engrosses, elevates and enriches; the other demands, demeans, diminishes.
We have a desire to make, to tinker. We rebel against the mindless by marrying thought and practice.
We can improve society by understanding the difference between craft and labour.
An anthropological approach using listening, close attention, observation can help us understand ourselves and our society.