Crafting organization

The recent shift in attention away from organization studies as science has allowed for the consideration of new ways of thinking about both organization and organizing. While the play of ideas on organization studies is often represented in terms of conflict and contestation, there has been a softening of disciplinary boundaries and, as a result, consideration of inquiries that draw on the analysis and forms of narrative, discourse, metaphor, theatre, music, art and aesthetics, among others. In this paper, we take seriously calls for organization to be represented as a creative process by considering organization as craft. First, we consider crafting as a provisional means of creating forms and their boundaries; as an aesthetic enterprise in which crafter and craft, human and non-human, are mutually entangled. Organisational craft, we argue, is attractive, accessible, malleable, reproducible, and marketable. In the crafting process, materials are used and re-used, imagination and experimentation are encouraged, new pieces are added, and offcuts are saved for later. Drawing on the hierarchy of distinctions among fine art, decorative art, and craft, we then discuss this consideration of crafting as one of several recent attempts to 'bring down* organizational theorizing. Craft, we argue, is a tangible way of considering organization studies with irreverence. Second, we turn our production inside out and shift our discussion from organizational craft to the crafting organization. Here we examine the shifting forms and contexts of an Australian craftworks and marketplace known as the 'Meat Market Craft Centre' and then, until its recent closure, as 'Metro!'. From its early days as Melbourne's wholesale meat market, the site has undergone several dramatic shifts in identity while continuing some material and relational connections with the past. We draw on the language of crafting to presen t some of the ways in which Metrol's form and space has been created and re-created. We suggest that this particular convergence of craft and organization makes a contribution both to understanding Metro! and to the texture and gui(l)ding of organization studies.