Craft Micro-Enterprise, Gender and Work-Life Relationships

Abstract

Online craft shop-fronts, as we have seen, represent an explosion of micro-entrepreneurial home-based craft labour. As a significant part of this larger work-life picture, digital technology is clearly enabling a different kind of workplace, one that allows a wider array of mobile work locations. As a flexible, frequently home-based production economy, contemporary post-Etsy craft work models resonate with wider debates about engaging in self-actualising cultural work within the cultural economy. This is in addition to the more traditional attraction of self-employment as enabling choice and the capacity to be ‘one’s own boss’ (Wajcman and Probert 1988). The fact that communications and other digital technologies are now taken for granted as quotidian devices means they play a determining role in normalising the home office and home studio, further collapsing the already porous relationship between work and other aspects of life. So while home working has long been identified as a gendered phenomenon (Jurik 1998, p. 8), working from home today is a particularly attractive option for women accustomed to paid work, but now also finding themselves with caring responsibilities within the household. Thus as more women in the global West graduate from higher education and/ or have a career outside the home prior, or concurrently, to having children, the networked home is fast becoming a normalised middle- class paid work location (Wajcman and Probert 1988).