The craft of playful work: A path toward fairer creative economies?

This paper contributes to debates on work fairness and meaningfulness (Laaser & Karlsson, 2021; Deery, Kolar & Walsh, 2019) in the creative industries, inspired by the call to reach standards of ‘creative justice’ (Banks, 2017). We do so by envisioning an alternative model of ‘playful work’ emerging from the new wave of craft work (Land, 2018; Ocejo, 2017), and reflecting a post-neoliberal work ethos for the wider creative economies. The paper draws on 40 original qualitative interviews with artisans, mobile street food retailers and bar owners located in the city of Milan, Italy. To enlighten alternative models of creative work, we read their accounts by combining relevant theorizations from thinkers such as Fourier, Benjamin and Marcuse, the growing literature on passionate work (Borghi & Murgia, 2019; McRobbie, 2016), and recent interest in the politics and value of care (The Care Collective, 2020). The research highlights that craft entrepreneurs blend play and work, with passion and care forming the connecting tissue between these two otherwise antagonistic concepts. First, we define the new model of playful work that emerges from the process of blending play and work through the process of “hobbyfying” one’s occupation. Second, we disentangle how passion and care underpin this new model. Passion is the bridging value that enables the fusion between work and play to emerge. Care builds upon the foundations laid by passion and is expressed in a fourfold way: toward the neo-crafter self, toward their craft product, toward their consumers, and toward the aestheticized artisan mission that is undertaken, thus, helping to determine how this model manifests an emergent, post-capitalist ethics of care that is multi-layered and multi-directional. Finally, the paper discusses the new model of playful work in the wider context of the creative economies. This discussion includes the fundamental traits distinguishing the new model from corporate attempts to gamify workplaces, how the model enables a new vision for post-neoliberal creative economies as well as its potential limits and contradictions. These contributions are significant, as they illuminate alternative micro-entrepreneurship models that are capable of establishing fairer, more inclusive notions and practices of creative work, and the importance of play, passion and care in enabling the ongoing striving for the antique myth and goal of playful work; that is, the imagined emancipation from alienation and the transformative organising of work as a liberatory and meaningful practice.