This is a history of craft in America that extends from colonial times until the present, even including some COVID-19 issues. It covers a lot of material and many of the common distinctions drawn that include the idea of craft, such as between hand-crafted and manufactured, handicrafts and factory goods, custom or bespoke versus mass production. Looking at US history as the march of progress, mass production and marketing, and the rise of consumerist society, one can see the general decline of “craft” related industries although there remains some residual aspects of craft even as modern society takes over. For example, the most mass produced goods and high volume technologies will display a custom made side to how the production environment is built and maintained. Cars are mass produced perhaps, but car factories are custom made and embody lots of craft knowledge. At one level, craft is an orientation towards production - does production proceed on a small batch basis, or is it oriented to large batch or continuing manufacturing. Lots of businesses shifted to mass production early whereas other (shipbuilding, leather making) did not adopt scale processes as easily. For some activities, it gets murky. For example, the most successful airplane production in WW2 was not on an assembly line (Ford) but in a large batch environment (GM).
Ideas of craft have long been associated with how work is organized in America and the credit/value/ or pay received on the basis of quality and skill credentials. As Adamson shows, these issues also readily run up against issues of race, gender, or other demographics in the workforce, including temporary or what we today call “precarious” workers and jobs. It is surprising how common it has been from craft distinctions to be wrapped up in broader political agendas.
There are other aspects of craft in Adamson’s book. These include “do it yourself” approaches to tasks as well as home products for hobbies or children’s schooling. Craft can also include a number of activities geared towards historical remembering, for example Civil War and Revolutionary War reenactments and historically based local museums, including “living history” sites. This can lead easily into various niches of the antiques business as well as variations of arts and crafts for homes.
If I have any misgivings about the book, they relate to the unbelievably broad range of meanings that have come to be associated with “craft”. I would have preferred more consideration of how craft ideas can inform our thinking about various services in businesses, even if they do not produce specific things. For example, the task of management could well be looked at as a craft and there are broad business areas such as consulting and related “advisory” services for which craft models make a good deal of sense, down to the training of apprentices. This would also include skilled work in the more traditional “professions” such as medicine, engineering, or even accounting.
But craft is not just a way of looking at how to produce something. Adamson argues that it is also a social construction that ties the history of a society into how tasks are organized. This is why crafts have frequently been political, even down to its importance in primary socialization organizations such as the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. But it is already complicated to see how different industries have been organized, whether on mass production or small batch production. Choices that are made at the beginnings of an industry can have strong influences deep into the future. It is hard to get ones hands around all the ways in which production choices come to be embedded in society. Maybe some disentangling would have been helpful.
Maybe that can be another book.