Organized meshwork: the (re)conceptualization of craft-based organizing in creative industries

This paper develops a conceptual framework that offers an alternative account of craft-based organizing in the creative industries. While extant research has convincingly demonstrated that craft-based work is embodied, material, and temporal, the dominant organizing metaphors and imaginaries used to conceptualize such work remain ill-suited to capturing these dynamics. Organizing imaginaries such as networks, ecosystems, and value chains tend to privilege actors, connectivity, and system-level coordination, thereby backgrounding how craft-based organizing unfolds through situated practices, material entanglements, and ongoing processes of formation. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s notion of lines and meshwork, we challenge these dominant organizing
imaginaries and develop the concept of organized meshwork as a corollary imaginary for theorizing craft-based organizing. We argue that prevailing imaginaries overemphasize the coordination and management of actors within bounded chains, networks, or systems, whereas organized meshwork affords a vocabulary for conceptualizing organizing as it emerges through interwoven lines of practice and the temporal rhythms along which these lines develop, endure, and unravel. By introducing the concept of organized meshwork, the paper contributes to the growing literature on craft as a distinctive mode of organizing. More broadly, it advances organization theory by re-signifying dominant organizing imaginaries and establishing an alternative conceptual ground for theorizing collective work in settings where materiality, temporality, and embodied practice are central to organizing.