Jan
Craft as Slow mode of organising
ABC Centre Seminar with Associate Prof. Marta Gasparin, Copenhagen Business School, Head of the Hephaestus Horizon Europe program.
Seminar with Associate Prof. Marta Gasparin, Copenhagen Business School, Head of the Hephaestus Horizon Europe program.
Hephaestus Horizon Europe – hephaestuscraft.eu
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the study of alternative organizations by theorizing the emerging concept of slow organizations. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in Dals Långed, Sweden, we explore how a community of craft makers reshapes public spaces to create common value through practices rooted in craft. Positioned as a material counter-narrative to dominant AI discourses, craft embodies a development logic that values resilience, sustainability, and creativity over acceleration and accumulation.
We argue that craft not only serves as an alternative mode of production, emphasizing quality, tradition, and community, but also as a prefigurative social movement fostering care for the environment and society. In Dals Långed, craft-making emerges as a form of resistance to fast-paced capitalism, aligning with seasonal rhythms and embracing a slow approach to organizing. Through vignettes that reflect the temporal and spatial dynamics of these practices, we analyze the interplay of craft, community, and nature in shaping public spaces and alternative organizational forms.
Our contributions are threefold. First, we introduce the concept of slow organizations as a form of alternative organizational practice. Second, we theorize a shift from public value to common good, underpinned by aesthetic practices of care and solidarity. Third, we propose craft ethnography as a creative and embodied methodological approach for social sciences. This work highlights the potential of slow practices to foster existential sustainability, challenging dominant growth-driven capitalist models and advancing a more-than-human perspective in organizational studies.
About ABC
The Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity (ABC) is a centre that loves its periphery-pulling forces. It wants to extend the research-basis for understanding and practicing organizational creativity in pursuit of values that enhance our quality of life, as citizens and consumers.
ABC aims to push the boundaries by engaging across diverse disciplines, such as art history, performance research, literary composition and cultural studies. By becoming a dynamic hub that blends ethics, aesthethics and business creativity, it will continue to inspire new ways of thinking and doing.
About the event
Location:
ABC-centre, Alfa 1, Ground Floor, Main Seminar Rooom
Contact:
abc [at] ehl [dot] lu [dot] se