Artisans make mark in new economy
Global market opens up opportunities
If you think of artisans as the producers of handcrafted furniture and one-of-a-kind jewelry, raw-milk cheeses and small-batch whiskeys, think again.
With globalization and computerization upending many traditional workplaces, analysts predict successful 21st-century workers in all sorts of fields will have to summon their inner artisan. That includes not just the jewellers and cheese-makers but personal trainers, hairdressers and caregivers.
“The major shift that we’ve seen is the shift back towards artisans, in the sense that people now have to take responsibility for their careers, for their lives, more so than before, and they have to create value if they’re going to be successful,” said Steve King, who specializes in the future of work.
Harvard economist Larry Katz has become a guru of sorts of the new artisan economy. He argues that many well-paying jobs of the future will be in the service sector and will reward people whose skills and personal touch set them apart. One example he has offered is a well-educated caregiver able to engage with elderly clients as opposed to someone who approaches the work as drudgery.
“People will always need haircuts and health care,” he said, “and you can do that with low-wage labour or with people who acquire a lot of skills and pride and bring their imagination to do creative and customized things.”
King spelled out his vision of an emerging artisan class in a 2008 report for the Institute for the Future. “Like their medieval predecessors in pre-industrial Europe and Asia, these next-generation artisans will ply their trade outside the walls of big business, making a living with their craftsmanship and knowledge,” he said.
Many see this new world as one of unlimited potential, where technology allows small-scale manufacturers to reach previously unobtainable markets.
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, wrote of a new industrial revolution in which “anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop.”
He predicted that the “collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required.”
Charles Heying, a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, has studied the thriving artisan economy in his Oregon city. He believes the model that has produced thriving craft breweries, bike-frame manufacturers and fashion designers in Portland could have broad applications.
“What makes this possible is that we are now in a networked world. We have eliminated the purpose for hierarchies and large mass institutions,” he said. Sites like eBay and Etsy give small-scale producers unprecedented access to potential customers.
“The ability of people with finegrained interests to find each other is now so much enhanced. The ability of the networked world that we live in to create point-topoint interactions has essentially put everybody on Main Street,” he said.
The loss of traditional salaried jobs, accelerated by the recession, has forced more people to reinvent themselves as independent artisans. “We used to have this social contract that said work hard and you’ll have a job, you won’t be laid off and you’ll get benefits,” King said. “What’s gone on with the recession is that social contract has completely broken down, and the level of unhappiness working in corporations has gone up quite a bit.”
Numbers of self-employed workers — now about 17 per cent of the Canadian workforce and 10 per cent in the U.S. — will continue to grow, he predicted. “People who are most successful are the people who have the skills, background and education to provide some sort of specialized service,” he said.
“If you don’t have the right skills and abilities, it’s not good ... The genie’s out of the bottle. We’re not going back.”
“I think people way overplay the techno-utopian future where everyone sits in their basements or coffee shops tinkering away, and they can find their customers via the web,” said Raymond Fisman, a professor at Columbia University’s business school. He noted that the biggest corporations in the United States are growing at a faster rate than the population.
“Corporations are not going to be replaced by Internet technology. Most people will continue to toil away for a paycheque. That would be my guess.”
And for the artisans — whom he defines simply as people performing work that cannot be replicated by a computer and cannot be done from a distance — conditions could be less than rosy. He pointed to a recent New York Times article about the growth industry of personal trainers, where wages are relatively low and there is little job security. “There are a lot of people who are not going to be happy with taking a $17-an-hour personal trainer job, which also has a lot more financial uncertainty associated with it,” he said. He sees a need for unions or some other mechanism allowing the many artisans to bargain with the relatively few wealthy employers.
“It’s not obvious that market forces are going to mitigate widening inequality in this new artisan economy,” he said.
King agrees that measures will have to be taken to protect those who cannot find a place in the new economy. “We’re going to have to decide as a society how to make it easier for these people that don’t have the right skill sets and can’t easily thrive in this environment,” he said. “It’s going to be a big challenge.”
But he said people will also find there can be advantages to being a new artisan — he knows because he is one. He left an executive position with a tech company a decade ago, planning on a six-month break, and he has never gone back. He now works as a consultant, his firm’s two employees are himself and his wife, and there is no boss to frown when he feels like hitting the golf course on a sunny afternoon.
“We make less money than we would if we had corporate jobs, but it’s a trade-off we’re happy to make,” he said.