Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy

This book is the culmination of four years of research undertaken across Australia into the experience of running a craft or design craft microenterprise. In many ways it, and the study it is based on, is the logical follow-up to the earlier book Craft and the Creative Economy (Luckman 2015a), which sought to capture and understand on a more theoretical level why we were witnessing rising interest across the Global North in craft and the handmade and what is at stake in terms of craft’s location within larger debates around what counts in the cultural and creative industries. Within this larger scholarly and practice context, that book also started to ask questions about what kinds of new work patterns and identities were emerging for creative workers—craftspeople in particular—in the face of the perfect storm of increasing casualisation, expectations of self-enterprise, portfolio careers, the rise of social media and internet ‘long tail’ distribution and desires for ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011).