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Kindred spirits: Doing family through craft entrepreneurship

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posted on 2020-05-01, 11:10 authored by Thomas Thurnell-ReadThomas Thurnell-Read
While there is a tradition of viewing both craftwork and entrepreneurship as characteristically individualistic and autonomous activities, this article examines the way in which social ties of family and kinship are often integral to many entrepreneurial ventures. Instead of a neat divide between ‘separate spheres’, work and home permeate each other in meaningful ways. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 workers from UK craft gin distilleries, this article explores how kinship and intimacy are put to work in craft enterprises. Findings show that the involvement of family and kin is vital to the operations of many craft businesses. Working together with spouses and siblings brings benefits and challenges and involves negotiating task and role allocation, often through invoking heteronormative notions of suitability and complementarity. Such concerns are bound up with how family and kin are understood by participants. Their reflections on entrepreneurial kinship involve both narratives of work and visions of a lifestyle which are both familial and entrepreneurial.

History

Published in

The Sociological Review

Volume

69

Issue

1

Pages

37 - 52

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© The author

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal The Sociological Review and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120916131 Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission.

Publication date

2020-04-21

ISSN

0038-0261

eISSN

1467-954X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Thomas Thurnell-Read. Deposit date: 29 April 2020

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