The Artisan Economy and the New Spirit of Capitalism (original) (raw)
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Autonomy and Creativity in the Artisan Economy and the New Spirit of Capitalism
Review of Radical Political Economics, 2017
Small artisan businesses have been promoted as a liberatory alternative to large-scale enterprise. We analyze advice manuals for aspiring artisan entrepreneurs by extending Boltanski and Chiapello's framework. While they analyze the transformation of large firms, we show the same themes have been adopted by small businesses. Focusing on themes of autonomy and creativity, we reveal that the artisan economy promoted by these texts represents a further evolution in capitalism's co-option of the artistic critique.
Technology, class relationships, and artisanal creative work: Against 'the halo of reverent awe'
This paper argues that Marxian perspective on class can help us analyse highly fragmented and autonomous forms of work organisation, taking 'artisanal creative work' as a test case. It surveys the difficulties of applying class categories to this group, while focusing attention on how the interaction between work organisation and technology change may catalyse the creation of new class relationships. It offers a Marxian alternative for theorising class among artisanal creative workers, centralising control over the 'means of exchange' and 'means of evaluation'. This theorisation leads to four hypotheses concerning the future direction of artisanal creative work: 1) technology enables new ways in which capital can profit through controlling market access, intensifying competitive pressures on workers 2) it extends the effectiveness of the 'reserve army' mechanism by blurring amateur-professional boundaries 3) it creates new ways of evaluating creative outputs and introducing greater comparability between them 4) it strips away the 'halo' of CCI workers, raising the prospect of new forms of contestation more oriented towards collective material interests.
Disrupting Business: Art & Activism in Times of Financial Crisis
Disrupting Business explores some of the interconnections between art, activism and the business concept of disruptive innovation. With a backdrop of the crisis in financial capitalism and austerity cuts in the cultural sphere, the idea is to focus on potential art strategies in relation to a broken economy. In a perverse way, we ask whether this presents new opportunities for cultural producers to achieve more autonomy over their production process. If it is indeed possible, or desirable, what alternative business models emerge? This book is concerned broadly with business as material for reinvention, including critical writing and examples of art/activist projects. Contributors include Saul Albert, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heath Bunting, Paolo Cirio, Baruch Gottlieb, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink, Dmytri Kleiner, Georgios Papadopolous, Soren Bro Pold, Oliver Ressler, Kate Rich, Renée Ridgway, Guido Segni, Stevphen Shukaitis, Nathaniel Tkacz, and Marina Vishmidt.
Artisan entrepreneurship: a question of personality structure
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Praktyka Teoretyczna, Nr 1(27)/2018 ISSN 2081-8130, str. 194 - 223, 2018
In this paper I trace the contradictions embedded in global artistic circulation, which is dialectically analysed as a nexus of exploitation and a site where the commons can be instituted. To enable this argument, I synthesise the methodologies of dialectical materialism, the sociology of art and action research, supplementing a theoretical overview of systemic pressures with a keen observation of the social practices that emerge in critical response to it. Basing my analysis on empirical evidence, I examine social conflicts, triggered by the extracting value from the distributed labour of artistic networks, as political opportunities to be seized by progressive art workers. Thus, I propose a new perspective on current processes of incorporating contemporary art into the late-capitalist cycles of accumulation and modes of establishing and reproducing social distinctions. Instead of mourning for-presumably lost but still positively valorised-artistic autonomy, I argue for a revamping of the apparatuses regulating artistic circulation for the sake of the labouring multitudes.
Lisa Balzarin and Monica Calcagno Traces of entrepreneurship in the artistic context
The interplay between the world of arts and that of business is at the centre of the present paper, where the processes of artistic entrepreneurship are investigated through the observation of a group of artists living the experience of founding their own cultural enterprises in the specific context of performing arts. The result is a picture of what the contemporary artists-entrepreneurs are: they act entrepreneurially guided by the respect of the integrity of the Art and assume the role of gatekeepers of the quality of their product, playing in the business world and challenging its logics and structures.
ON THE MARKET: The Rise of Artisanal Fashion
Fashion and Contemporaneity: Realms of the Visible
The recognition that small-scale entrepreneurs have emerged, survived and even thrived within the current global creative economy1 has seen growth in artisanally produced products including craft beer, wood-fired bread and custom made clothing. The rise of artisanal fashion forms a part of this current trend and can be attributed to several effects of the globalised creative economy. These include opportunities and challenges in the small-scale fashion business sector through the development of communication technology as well as changed consumer preferences. The motivations of practitioners themselves have also fuelled this trend, revealing fashion designers' interest in seeking autonomy and flexibility as well as a more creatively fulfilling career. The use of the term artisanal has been associated with a move away from automated manufacture and towards products that are hand-crafted and somehow imbued with care. The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of what defines artisanal fashion, how the contemporary artisanal studio has emerged, and if this is a subset of small-scale fashion design that represents innovation in fashion design entrepreneurship. This study introduces the practices of four small-scale fashion designers working locally in Brisbane, Australia. The investigation is based on journalists' reports and the social media blogs of the designers and others. The aim of the study is to uncover activities and strategies that differ from mainstream processes, to determine how both designers and intermediaries (bloggers) define artisanal fashion. While these small-scale fashion designers have opportunities and challenges in common, an understanding of the combination of process, entrepreneurship, philosophy and aesthetics appears to differentiate artisanal fashion from other independent fashion design. This study suggests that 'artisanal fashion' can indeed be defined as a subset of small-scale fashion design and entrepreneurship and therefore, represents a new fashion category in the current creative economy.
The artisan economy and post-industrial regeneration in the US
The 2009 Great Recession adversely impacted the post-industrial built landscape in the US. Globalization and international wage inequality also led to the closure and abandonment of numerous historic industrial districts. However, another more positive outcome came from the last economic crisis ‒ the rise of the artisan-based economy, which values highly crafted specialized goods and blends old manufacturing techniques with new digital technologies. Small companies producing high quality products are providing an alternative to American consumption based culture. This paper will present the current state of post-industrial regeneration in the US and discuss how the artisan-based economy is regenerating American post-industrial urban districts.
Artisan Entrepreneurship: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda
International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, 2019
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the extant body of literature on artisan entrepreneurship and to develop a research agenda for future studies based on the identified trends and themes. Design/methodology/approach – A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was undertaken across 96 journals ranked by the Association of Business Schools. The initial search yielded 86 papers. Further scrutiny of these studies led to the development of exclusion criteria, resulting in a refined list of 32 articles which advance understanding of artisan entrepreneurship. Using an open coding approach, this SLR then identified seven core themes and 16 sub-themes which the extant literature examines. Findings – This SLR finds that artisan entrepreneurship research contributes to understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour, context, motivation, development, resources, diversity and classification. It provides timely insights into coopetition practices, the reciprocal relationship between place and entrepreneurship and the coexistence of social and economic goals. It also reveals characteristics which facilitate venture development, discovers the mutability of various forms of capital, highlights the necessity of studying diverse experiences and identifies benefits and limits of typologies. Main elements of the resulting research agenda include calls for more quantitative research, further attention to context and more holistic treatment of a wider variety of stories. Originality/value – This paper presents the first systematic literature review of craft and artisan entrepreneurship research. It not only identifies, analyses and critiques the main streams in the literature, therefore providing an overview of the state of the field, but also highlights areas where this scholarship contributes to understanding of entrepreneurship and upon which future research can build. Artisan entrepreneurship is thus established as worthy of investigation in its own right and as an appropriate context in which to explore entrepreneurial processes. Furthermore, this SLR presents an agenda for future research to advance understanding of artisan entrepreneurship.