Craft Entrepreneurialism and Sustainable Scale

Resistance to and Disavowal of the Creative Industries as Champions of Capitalist Growth

Craft and design-led creative practices are enjoying a zeitgeist moment of popularity, driven by consumer demand for unique, innovative and handmade objects. However, despite the capacity to scale up, craftspeople and designer makers continue to challenge conventional capitalist ideas of what entrepreneurial 'success' looks like.

Drawing on data from a four-year study of Australian designer makers, this presentation problematises the growth and enterprise discourses at the heart of governmental desires for the creative economy. It examines how old understandings of artistic value and 'doing what you love' mingle with ethical consumption values, climate crisis awareness, non-urban creative practice, the gendered exclusions of the creative workforce, and human desires for 'good work'. It presents a more complex, socially embedded and potentially culturally transformative picture of the contemporary creative economy – one where the 'more-than-capitalism' values of the arts and cultural industries persist.

Image:Assorted Bright Brushes

Presenter

Professor Susan Luckman, Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, University of South Australia

Susan Luckman is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries in the School of Creative Industries and Research Director of the Creative Work Mobilities Research Node, Hawke EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. She is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar whose work is concerned with the intersections of creativity, place and technology. Her research explores these relationships in relation to work in the cultural and creative industries, digital media, and grassroots innovation, Susan is the author of Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), coeditor of The 'New Normal' of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment (Dynamics of Virtual Work Series, Palgrave 2018), Craft Economies (Bloomsbury 2018), and Craft Communities (Bloomsbury 2018).