Craft Work: Making Form in a Broken World

How can human flourishing arise from what the poet Mary Oliver called 'good work/ongoing'? In its attentiveness to the material, form and purpose of distinct, well-made things, craft epitomizes good work. In its disciplined, quiet giving over to the repetitions of tradition, craft is ongoing. Perhaps more than any other practice, craft work reveals the intimacy between a manifest sense of self and the imperative of its common expression. In a world broken into shuttered units, each separated from the other for the purpose of measured comparison and control, Robin Holt argues that craft work can produce the unassigned remainder that refuses being broken up: it generates its own sufficiency and joy.

Robin Holt is Professor of Strategy and Aesthetics at the University of Bristol, and Adjunct Professor at the Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, from where he investigates the nature of organizational form. Working in Scandinavia, the UK and Japan, he has studied the emergence of new organizations like entrepreneurial ventures; the shaping of organizations through strategic practice; and in this, his latest work, the intimacy between organizational form, work practice, ethics and aesthetics. He has written and edited 10 books, including The Poverty of Strategy with Mike Zundel (Cambridge, 2023) and Strategy Without Design with Robert Chia (Cambridge, 2009), and Organization as Time with François-Xavier de Vaujany and Albane Grandazzi (Cambridge, 2023).