Becoming and Working: Learning to Craft, Navigating Work

• In Event: 1184 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 02. Identity and Labor Process

Abstract

This paper begins by understanding the processes of becoming a craftsperson. It accomplishes this through two primary modes: learning to craft and determining to craft as a business. Learning to craft highlights early exposure (predominately via family) and later exposure (predominately via friendship) as ways of developing both interest and ability in craft. Determining to craft as a business highlights how, what most often began as a hobby, becomes a route for occupational self-determination. Together, these two facets, learning to craft and determining to craft as a business, bring focus to the ways in which learning, identity, and the maintenance of a self are participatory in foundations of entrepreneurial cultural endeavors, especially at a scale regularly ignored by organizational studies and the predominate focusing on the firm.

Author

• Paul James Morgan, California State University-Stanislaus