The inherent tensions in the post-capitalist ethos of neo-craft entrepreneurs

Richard Sennet (2008, p. 108) said that ‘by the mid-nineteenth century, [...] the enlightened hope dimmed that artisans could find an honoured place in the industrial order’. Still, the advent of the twenty-first century seems to have given back to artisans their honoured place back in post-industrial society (Kroezen et al., 2021), particularly in the heart and palate of consumers. Jobs like the bartender, the street food vendor, the tailor, and the glassblower, have all become part of what Chris Land (2018) defines as the ‘neo-craft industries’, i.e. alternative configurations of work combining manual skills and the preservation of traditional craft imaginary with innovative, skilful manufacturing of high-quality products. They are labelled as ‘neo’ because they do not embody a simple return to the past. They mythicise the pre-industrial past, but are well embedded in the post-Fordist, neo-liberal economy, and some of them even wish to go beyond it envisioning a post-capitalist entrepreneurial ethos. In the words of Richard E. Ocejo (2017), neo-craft industries consist of old jobs reinvented and transformed in the new urban economy. Based on a corpus of 40 semi-structured interviews with neo-craft entrepreneurs conducted for the author’s doctoral dissertation, this contribution illustrates some key contributions from a forthcoming book titled ‘The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism’. In particular, by analysing neo-craft entrepreneurs in their role as cultural intermediaries (Smith Maguire & Matthews, 2012) and taste dealers (Gerosa, 2021), it will explore how they constitute a potential alternative model of entrepreneurship, framing themselves as social agents of change. Through their distinctive entrepreneurial action, they aim to reach meaningfulness for themselves, provide authentic life experiences to their customers, and realise a more ethical market economy detached from a purely capitalist logic of profit accumulation. By doing so, they adhere, manipulate and circulate a shared ‘neo-craft economic imaginary of consumption’, based on the polar star of authenticity. Nevertheless, the ambiguous status of authenticity, at the centre of both projects of liberation from industrial and capitalist alienation and of co-optation by large capitalist companies, introduces challenges and potential contradictions in the neo-craft post-capitalist entrepreneurial ethos.