The Craftsmanship Revival We Kept Predicting Might Finally Be Real

In 2019, I published a book whose English title would be something like "From Graft to Craft." I argued that craftsmanship isn't a sector but a model of work that could in principle apply to any job. The distinction I built the book around was between graft (fragmented, deskilled, industrialized toil) and craft (a finished piece of work to which you can put your name). To work as a craftsperson means autonomy, responsibility, creativity and mastery of a result you can be proud of. A developer, a nurse or a consultant should all be able to work that way. Instead, too many of us are handed the deskilled version and feel alienated or bored.

A Fascination That Never Quite Matched Reality
For years, the story of graduate-degree holders walking away from b.s. jobs to become bakers, cheesemakers, brewers, restaurateurs kept coming back in the media. These reinventions fascinate everyone, journalists first of all, forever hunting for seductive stories about rediscovered meaning, hands deep in the grease. But our collective fascination always said more than the phenomenon warranted. The neo-artisans were, statistically, a rounding error, a marginal trend inflated into a movement because it flattered a widely shared dream as well as nostalgia for a wholeness of work that probably never existed in the first place.

We've Been Here Before
All of this was already in the air more than 15 years ago. Matthew Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft" (2009) made the philosophical case. The former think tank director who quit to fix motorcycles argued that manual work demands real intelligence and offers a psychic wholeness that knowledge work, for all its prestige, often does not. The cultural craze was real. It even reached software, where "software craftsmanship" became a movement with a manifesto, a way for developers to insist their work was a craft and not an assembly line.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.