The Colonial Gaze of Neo-craft Research

<span>This paper interrogates the epistemological and political assumptions that underpin the growing body of “neo-craft” research in organisation studies. While neo-craft has been convincingly described as a contemporary response to post-industrial disenchantment—foregrounding autonomy, affect, authenticity, and meaningful work—we argue that scholarship has increasingly elevated these features into a normative and universalising ontology of craft. Through a close reading of recurring tropes in the literature—slowness, relationality, care/affect, aesthetics, and nostalgia—we show how neo-craft research tends to detach making from labour relations, political economy, and the uneven historical conditions that shape craft’s reproduction. We conceptualise this detachment as a “colonial gaze”: not an explicit repetition of colonial discourse, but an epistemic structure inherited from colonial modernity that privileges unmarked Euro-Northern moral-aesthetic categories while rendering other craft realities less legible. The paper then traces the consequences of this gaze across three dynamics: the erasure of colonial craft histories; the idealisation of the craftsperson as an innocent ethical subject; and the flattening of capitalism into a monolithic adversary, obscuring institutional diversity and the systemic embedding of craft in contexts such as Southern European production regimes and postcolonial craft economies (e.g., Indian handloom). We conclude by outlining a decolonial research programme that provincialises neo-craft categories, recentres craft as labour, embraces epistemic pluralism, and mobilises comparative political economy to pluralise both “craft” and “capitalism” as situated, historically produced formations.</span>