Craft As A Creative Industry

Craft and the Creative Economy examines the place of craft and making in the contemporary cultural economy, with a distinctive focus on the ways in which this creative sector is growing exponentially as a result of online shopfronts and home-based micro-enterprise, 'mumpreneurialism' and downshifting, and renewed demand for the handmade.

Craft is resurgent. More people are buying craft; more money is being spent on craft products than ever before. This book centres craft as a creative industry, illuminating the experiences of those working in and around craft, particularly people from marginalised groups. Shining a light on inequalities around craft work, the author examines the lived experiences of women makers of colour in the professional craft sector. Experiences of racism and microaggressions at all stages of their craft career are analysed. The author draws on innovative empirical research carried out in the UK and Australia, two countries where the resurgence in craft is apparent, yet professional craft practice is dominated by the white and relatively privileged. In interrogating hierarchies of expertise and cultural value in craft, the author employs case studies from community crafts and social enterprises. The result is a book of interest to scholars at the intersections of the creative and cultural industries, the creative economy and inequalities at work.

This open access book explores the experience of working as a craftsperson or designer maker in the contemporary creative economy. The authors utilise evidence from the only major empirical study to explore the skills required and the challenges facing contemporary makers in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Drawing upon 180 interviews with peak organisations, established and emerging makers, and four years of fieldwork across Australia, this book offers a unique insight into the motivations informing those who seek to make an income from their craft or designer maker practice, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing them as they do so at this time of renewed interest internationally in the artisanal and handmade. Offering a rich and deep collection of real-life experiences, this book is aimed both at an academic and practitioner audience.

Craft Economies provides a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary craft production, situating practices of amateur and professional making within a wider creative economy. Contributors address a diverse range of practices, sites and forms of making in a wide range of regional and national contexts, from floristry to ceramics and from crochet to coding. The volume considers the role of digital practices of making and the impact of the maker's movement as part of larger trends around customisation, on-demand production, and the possibilities of 3D printing and digital manufacturing.

This special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy sets out to address two related questions. Firstly, how can cultural policy address the complexities of creative processes and people? Secondly, to what extent can cultural policy be seen as a 'creative' process and how might such an approach to cultural policy play out in practice? This book was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Given the multidisciplinary nature of our object of study, sustainability, we have divided this book into twelve chapters. In the first four, we cover the content required to learn how to start a business and create companies based on sustainability. The following chapters provide guidance to help translate sustainability strategies across cultures. These processes are analyzed through the Triple Bottom Line perspective, which effectively describes the primary objectives of sustainability. The last chapters analyze current trends in sustainable development, framing education as a powerful tool to facilitate the transition to more sustainable forms of development. Through these chapters, the understanding of the theoretical concepts is facilitated and examples of sustainable enterprises are made available to the reader that serves as a reference and that allow the development of practical activities.

In this exciting new book Angela McRobbie charts the‘euphoric’ moment of the new creative economy, as itrose to prominence in the UK during the Blair years, and considersit from the perspective of contemporary experience of economicausterity and uncertainty about work and employment. McRobbie makes some bold arguments about the staging of creativeeconomy as a mode of ‘labour reform’; she proposes thatthe dispositif of creativity is a fine-tuned instrument foracclimatising the expanded, youthful urban middle classes to afuture of work without the raft of entitlements and security whichprevious generations had struggled to win through the post-warperiod of social democratic government. Adopting a cultural studies perspective, McRobbie re-considersresistance as ‘line of flight’ and shows what is atstake in the new politics of culture and creativity. She incisivelyanalyses ‘project working’ as the embodiment of thefuture of work and poses the question as to how people who cometogether on this basis can envisage developing stronger and moreprotective organisations and associations. Scattered throughout thebook are excerpts from interviews with artists, stylists, fashiondesigners, policy-makers, and social entrepreneurs.

The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries is a reference work, bringing together many of the world's leading scholars in the application of creativity in economics, business and management, law, policy studies, organization studies, and psychology. Creative industries research has become a regular theme in academic journals and conferences across these subjects and is also an important agenda for governments throughout the world, while business people from established companies and entrepreneurs revaluate and innovate their models in creative industries. The Handbook is organized into four parts: Following the editors' introduction, Part One on Creativity includes individual creativity and how this scales up to teams, social networks, cities, and labour markets. Part Two addresses Generating and Appropriating Value from Creativity, as achieved by agents and organizations, such as entrepreneurs, stars and markets for symbolic goods, and considers how performance is measured in the creative industries. Part Three covers the mechanics of Managing and Organizing Creative Industries, with chapters on the role of brokerage and mediation in creative industry networks, disintermediation and glocalisation due to digital technology, the management of project-based organzations in creative industries, organizing events in creative fields, project ecologies, Global Production Networks, genres and classification and sunk costs and dynamics of creative industries. Part Four on Creative Industries, Culture and the Economy offers chapters on cultural change and entrepreneurship, on development, on copyright, economic spillovers and government policy. This authoritative collection is the most comprehensive source of the state of knowledge in the increasingly important field of creative industries research. Covering emerging economies and new technologies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of the arts, business, innovation, and policy.