Search results

Handicraft entrepreneurship is an old form of entrepreneurship and recently has received increased interest due to more people becoming interested in handmade products. The aim of this chapter is to describe different types of handicrafts including (1) textile based handicrafts, (2) wood, metal, clay, glass and stone made handicrafts, (3) handicrafts using paper or canvas, (4) plant based handicrafts and (5) other types of handicrafts such as cakes and candles. This enables a holistic understanding about the nature of handicrafts in society. Thereby making a contribution to the development of the literature on handicrafts and how they incorporate entrepreneurial elements. Theoretical and practical implications are stated that highlight the need for further understanding about the nature of handicraft entrepreneurship. Future research suggestions are also stated that stress the interesting nature of this field.

This study examines the internationalization process within the textiles and apparel industry in two countries: Lithuania and Moldova. In particular, this study shows how the evolution by an industry toward greater internationalization is intricately linked to its ability to move up its specific value chain. This analysis compares and contrasts the ability of this industry in a Western European (Lithuania) and a nonaccession Eastern European country (Moldova) to move up the textiles and apparel value chain and so achieve higher levels of internationalization. In examining and relating the relevant factors, this analysis provides insights into – and suggests important modifications to – important concepts and themes such as the stage theory of internationalization, the role of “inward-outward” linkages in the value creation process, the mechanism of the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises, and the part played by the European Union in the internationalization (and thus globalization) process.

This chapter relates Bunker's innovative view of nature, raw materials and political economy to the “global commodity chains” (GCCs) approach. The chapter contends that his view of the importance of primary material extraction, shipping, and energy used in various “transformations” of these crucial products can be fruitfully married to a GCCs perspective.

The health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic affected worldwide communities and public social spaces. Mandatory at-home isolation for 2 years, followed by libraries reopening after demanded security adjustments, changed Brazilian public libraries’ workplace dynamics, which now rely mainly on labor and engagement via social networks. Remarkably, a hybrid quality emerged and became the norm in everyday professional practices, generating a new ethos in the epistemic construction of the field of public librarianship. In this chapter, the authors aim to review the concept of the public library and its workplace dynamics after the changes triggered by a new post-pandemic environment, searching for answers to the following question: Have Brazilian public libraries become more or less inhabited as the result of the pandemic crisis? Applying a social and descriptive approach to examine the idea that bonding relationships with public social spaces contribute to building groups’ and communities’ identity, enhancing their history, relations, and memory, the authors debate if public libraries are anthropological inhabited places or non-places, proposing a perspective that connects the public library to the development of the individual and helps to understand space-time appropriation, focusing on identity construction. Exploring this framework, the authors identify the need to review the concept of the public library to represent its contemporaneous aspects of time, space, and collectivity and to include the many creative, affective, and symbolic dimensions embodied by all the individuals the library serves, based on the new experiences driven by disuse or resumption of use due to the pandemic.

Organizational literatures stress the empowering effects of worker participation programs. The case of a Mexican garment factory is used to examine the contradictory location of women in self-managed teams. While self-managed teams require independent and assertive workers, women workers are hired specifically for their docility. I argue that managers provide the tools and mechanisms for workers to be autonomous decision-makers, while at the same time they gender teams in ways that assure continued female disadvantage. Placed in this contradictory location, women workers both reproduce and resist gender subordination by carving out spaces of independent action, using the language of traditional womanhood.

Purpose – The chapter looks at the way a group of Cook Islands women in South Auckland used neoliberal-inspired community funding to fulfil the criteria of the funders as well as their own noncapitalist aims.Methodology/approach – The chapter draws upon a combination of original ethnographic fieldwork and literature pertaining to the production and use of tivaivai in South Auckland and neoliberal policy in New Zealand.Findings – The chapter analyzes the cultural context of value creation that the production and use of tivaivai constitutes for Cook Islanders in South Auckland. The production of tivaivai as a “commercial” derivative of these elite social textiles saw the group of Cook Islands women operating in a “human economy” (Graeber, 2012), despite the neoliberal agenda of the funding.Originality/value – As a group, Cook Islanders are marginalized in New Zealand, but the outcome of this funding in the details of how the women recipients managed the use of the money, and how and what they produced, tells a different story about how Cook Islanders engage with capitalism via the “human economy.” Such an analysis adds considerable complexity to the understandings of the way women make and use tivaivai in New Zealand, as well as the ways Cook Islanders do economics in an expanded notion of economy. This sheds light on the subaltern strategies that Cook Islanders create in response to the opportunities and hegemonic forces that exist in the global capitalist economy, and the way they engage with capitalism in the context of the New Zealand political economy.

In my article, I put forward the thesis that today's consumer attitudes promoted and practiced as the pursuit of sustainable development have their genealogy in the everyday life of Polish women and their savings and inventiveness resulting from living conditions in a socialist state. Polish women's life stories under communism, which I conducted as a part of international research project, contain a kind of instructions on how to use modest resources frugally, inventively, and creatively to ensure a decent life for yourself and your family. What's more, many resource-saving practices developed by our generational grandmothers and mothers are experiencing a renaissance, such as the production of organic food at home or the re-circulation and remaking of second-hand clothes. So, when it comes to sustainable development, old everyday practices of saving resources through their ingenious and creative use are returning to favor. With the awareness of contemporary civilization threats, their usefulness may once again turn out to be salutary for humanity.