Working Through Alienation? The Ambivalent Promise of Craft

Craft is re-emerging in debates on improving contemporary work. A recurring theme in research on craft is its potential to thwart alienation, which is considered one of the central pathologies of modern work. Through a case study of the Swedish craft beer community, we examine craft’s potential for de-alienating work. Drawing on Jaeggi’s conception of alienation as a relation of relationlessness, we show that craftworkers cultivate relations to themselves and to their material and social environments. These relations foster receptiveness and transformation, enabling experiences of work as unalienated. Yet, craft work also remains deeply ambivalent: to sustain unalienated experiences, craftworkers must accept several downsides of craft work. Our findings suggest that de-alienation in craft is best understood as a continuous process of negotiating alienation, which is constrained by the broader dynamics of capitalism.