Speaker: Assoc Prof Innan Sasaki, Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick
Title: Bridging culture and commerce. The survival of technically obsolete skills in British heritage craft
Date: Thu, 20th Apr 2023
Time: 12pm – 2pm
Venue: Building 24, Copland, Seminar Room 1106
Dr EY Song is the host of this visit
ABSTRACT
Research in management seems to assume that, as technological change periodically upgrades our capacity to perform given tasks, skill obsolescence is inevitable. Past studies, therefore, largely focused on how workers cope with technological change by upgrading their skills or by replacing them and changing occupation. A tacit assumption informing this work is that skills are valuable primarily because of technical or economic reasons – that is because they enable to perform a productive task differently (and better) or more cheaply than alternatives. When technology development erodes the instrumental benefits a skill provides, market mechanisms and the search for efficiency will eventually cause this skill to be abandoned. Yet, researchers, policy makers and international institutions have recognized that some skills may be valuable in themselves because of the cultural traditions they embody and/or the symbolic function they perform – even after the task they perform or the objects they produce have largely lost their practical purposes. The preservation of obsolete skills, however, is difficult without market-based incentives. Traditional applications may face shrinking demand in the face of cheaper available alternatives or attractive substitutes. In the absence of a sizable market for their skills, skill-holders may eventually turn to other, more viable occupations, or struggle to attract and/or support new ‘apprentices’ who can then ensure the preservation of the skills after the current holders retire. In order to improve our understanding of how technically obsolete skills can survive, we conducted a study of so-called ‘heritage craft’ in the United Kingdom – a varied collection of traditional artisanal skills, ranging from basketry to sail making, from woodturning to fan making. Many of these heritage crafts enjoy a sufficient market share to remain healthy and viable, even in the presence of alternatives. Others are currently classified as ‘in danger’, that is at risk of falling entirely out of practice, as aging craftspeople retire with not apprentice to continue their trade; yet, even in this category, there are example of small firms and sole traders who manage to maintain and revive economically viable uses of skills, the traditional applications of which have otherwise been long replaced by cheaper or technically superior technologies. These economically viable activities were the focus of our study. Our study shows that, as technology developed and cheaper alternatives emerged, some traditional skills survived (or were revived) as their products were re-located away from a purely commercial domain into a space where technical and cultural considerations intertwined to determine the value of a product or service. We found three main pathways through which this occurred: skill repositioning, skill revitalization, and skill recovery. These three pathways seem to largely correspond to various stages of decline of the focal skills, reflected in the extent to which a set of skills are still practiced or remembered within a community.
BIO
Innan Sasaki is an associate professor in Organisation Studies at Warwick Business School since September, 2019. Previously she worked at Lancaster University Management School as a lecturer, and as guest research associate in University of Kyoto in Japan, and University of Turku in Finland.
She is an expert in collective memory and traditions in organizations and fields. Her research intersects sociology and management studies to unveil how social and organizational changes take place in the encounter of tradition vs. modernity. More specifically, she has studied long-living and heritage-based craft firms, refugees, and indigenous people to understand how they culturally survive in the changing institutional environment.
She teaches both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at WBS and have received recognitions for outstanding contributions.
She is one of the editors of an Organization Studies special issue on "Rediscovering and Theorizing Craft in Organization Studies" (deadline for submissions: 28th February 2022): https://journals.sagepub.com/page/oss/call-for-papers
Her work has received best paper awards and is published in leading peer-reviewed journals. She is a member of the Academy of Management and the European Group of Organization Studies and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK.