Meaningful Work Through Craft: How workers in low-skilled roles engage in anomalous craft to gain autonomy and receive recognition
基于对法国一家模具公司的八个月民族志研究，揭示了低技能工人如何利用被忽视的手艺技能，在有限时间内从事异常手艺活动，从而获得自主性和同事、主管的认可，使工作更有意义。
Meaningful work is work that offers a degree of autonomy and the opportunity to receive recognition from others. It is traditionally associated with highly skilled jobs whereas low-skilled jobs are often equated with meaningless work. Previous research assumes that workers in low-skilled roles have little access to the autonomy or recognition characteristic of highly skilled labour. Rather it suggests that in their efforts to make their working lives more tolerable, such workers are limited to either discursively reframing the significance of their roles or engaging in acts of resistance against the organization. In this paper, based on an eight-month ethnographic study of a mould-producing company in France, we identify three processes through which workers in low-skilled roles find temporal opportunities to engage in anomalous craft where latent or underused craft skills and attitudes are utilized to enable them to work more autonomously and earn recognition from peers and supervisors, rendering their work more meaningful. Our work offers insights into how workers can use craft to activate or re-establish meaning in contexts where work has been stripped of significance.