Kindred spirits: Doing family through craft entrepreneurship

Introduction

Entrepreneurial labour has been described as an expression of selfhood and individual identity (Bröckling, 2015) which is supported by a widely accepted ‘cultural myth’ that the domains of work and family are distinct and separate (Fitzgerald & Muske, 2002). However, as part of debates which have sought to challenge this dichotomous separation of work and non-work spheres (Land & Taylor, 2010; Smith Maguire, 2017), there has been a move to explore the ‘increasingly porous’ boundaries between the personal and professional lives of entrepreneurs (Wee & Brooks, 2012, p. 574) and to better understand the ways in which some occupational cultures ‘strongly value the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, and between friends and formal work relations’ (Cederholm & Åkerström, 2016, p. 751). Additionally, the resurgence of academic interest in the concept and practice of craftwork (e.g. Atkinson, 2013a; Luckman, 2015; Sennett, 2008) means that the now numerous examples of craft enterprises, which see an individual or small group of skilled workers involved in creating and selling handmade or small-batch product directly to consumers, represent a valuable opportunity to explore the changing meanings of work and workplace relationships. Because craftwork is by its nature an expressive and immersive activity (O’Connor, 2010), studies of craft enterprises are well placed to examine the ways in which craft entrepreneurs understand their own investment in their work and how such involves an intermingling of professional and personal identity.

This article adds to this recent drive to understand work and workplace relationships as important loci for the interconnection of work and non-work identities by drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with 20 craft drinks entrepreneurs in the UK. As many of these businesses are established and run in partnership between spouses, siblings or close friends, the article analyses craft enterprise not as a highly individualistic undertaking, but as a site in which occupational values, personal identity and interpersonal intimacies or, following Mason (2018), ‘affinities’, become animated. Thus, the article explores the performance of ‘familiness’ in such entrepreneurial contexts (Barros et al., 2017; Smith Maguire et al., 2013). This article therefore contributes to recent work which has foregrounded the negotiation of at times problematic interpersonal relationships both within the burgeoning craft drinks sector (Kuehn & Parker, 2018; Land et al., 2018) and in work more generally (Ekman, 2013; Gregg, 2013; Weeks, 2011). In doing so, it adds to the increasing body of literature that explores craft labour and creative economies (Atkinson, 2013a; Luckman, 2015), whilst also adding to debates about the nature of contemporary family and kinship (Finch, 2007; Smart, 2007).

The article is organised as follows. The next section highlights, first, a long-running tendency noted above for work and private life to be treated as ‘separate spheres’ and, second, a more recent willingness to examine the multiple ways in which the personal and the occupational transect and overlap. The concept of craftwork is further examined in order to demonstrate why the recent emergence of craft enterprises, such as the gin distilleries which are the subject of this research, affords useful insights into the nature of workplace relationships and affinities. Next, a methodological section outlines the use of qualitative interviews and gives further contextual detail relating to the recent emergence of craft enterprises such as artisan gin distilleries. This is followed by a findings section which includes subsections which first outline the variety of ways in which friends and family are involved in the craft distillery enterprises and then the ways in which the intersection of entrepreneurial and familial features of the craft businesses are experienced and negotiated. Final, a concluding discussion will explore how, for these craft entrepreneurs, family and kinship are experienced as part of their work and not separate to it, and how working together provides situations and experiences through which personal relationships with spouses and siblings become experienced and enriched, but also commodified as a resource within the operations of the enterprise.

Working lives and personal ties

Previously, the intersections of family structures and entrepreneurship within family businesses had received limited academic attention (Randerson et al., 2015), meaning that studies such as Mulholland’s (1997, 2003), which use family-run businesses to examine a range of issues relating to work and kinship and are concerned with the intersection of corporate and familial practices and identities, were notable for their scarcity. However, research on family business and entrepreneurship has expanded in recent years and there are now a number of academic journals dedicated to the subject including Family Business Review, Journal of Family Business Management and European Journal of Family Business. Within this subfield of business studies, there has been an expansion of the conceptual apparatus to illuminate and scrutinise the ways in which family and work are often ‘inextricably intertwined’ (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003; Fitzgerald & Muske, 2002; Welsh et al., 2013), which has enabled scholars to address the previously ‘limited understanding of how entrepreneurial cultures are transmitted and sustained’ within and between generations of family businesses (Cruz et al., 2012, p. 147).

Within sociology, however, there has long been a division between public work and private life, characteristically ‘public’ and ‘private’ respectively (Allen, 1996), as being the empirical and theoretical remit of either the sociology of work (Weeks, 2011) or the sociology of the family (Morgan, 1996) respectively. Thus, the ‘dominant assumption’ that ‘“work” and “life” are two discrete spheres’ (Land & Taylor, 2010, p. 396) has been challenged and criticised both in the past (Finch, 1983; Jarvis, 1999) and more recently by both theoretical and empirical examinations of the blurred but overlapping edges of occupational identities and private lives. Glucksmann (1995, p. 65), for instance, has long urged for a consideration of how ‘work is embedded in, entangled with, conducted and expressed through other activities and relations which may be social, political, kinship, sexual or familial’. Building on this, more recent work has shown how many features of modern work conspire to make such blurring of boundaries a necessary or, at least, unavoidable reality especially for workers in knowledge-based roles in the creative and cultural industries (Naudin & Patel, 2017). Gregg (2013, p. 15) describes how both the practicalities of contemporary working conditions and the wider ethos encourage a form of ‘presence bleed’, whereby ‘the location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with a “to do” list that seems forever out of control’. Meanwhile, Weeks (2011, p. 4) interrogates what she terms ‘work’s privatization’ resulting in a ‘tethering of work to the figure of the individual’. Rather than a separate sphere, work has become an arena to prove and fulfil oneself in. A common feature of much modern work, then, is the imperative to invest yourself, your personality and selfhood, into your work and thereby participate in a process by which ‘personal fantasies about existential potential’ are entangled with ‘corporate fantasies about economic potential’ (Ekman, 2013, p. 1161).

Meanwhile, other scholars have sought to illustrate how the blurring of workplace and non-workplace subjectivities is, for many, desirable and sought after. For example, Fincham (2008) has shown how work, labour, freedom, style and community attachment are inseparably bound up in the working lives of bicycle messengers, while my own study of ‘microbrewers’ examines how a personal enthusiasm for good beer is developed from an amateurish leisure pursuit into a holistic craft brewer identity based on skill, passion and the investment of oneself into one’s labour (Thurnell-Read, 2014). Similarly, Cederholm and Åkerström’s (2016, p. 755) research with Swedish equestrian entrepreneurs shows that indistinct work–life boundaries are a defining, and often desired, quality of the working experience that ‘both physically and symbolically blurs the boundaries between home and work, and between private and public, since the very foundation of the enterprise is the owners’ personal interests, lifestyle and residence’ (Cederholm & Åkerström, 2016, p. 755). Importantly, such studies show that ‘while often conceptualized as binary opposites, work and leisure are better understood as interrelated social phenomena’ (Smith Maguire, 2017, p. 420). Thus, riding bikes, racing horses or brewing beer are all activities that allow participants of these studies to wilfully engage aspects of selfhood that straddle the supposed working life–private life division.

Crafting the entrepreneurial self

A well-established cultural stereotype depicting entrepreneurs as highly autonomous, risk-taking individuals is upheld by politicians (Crang & Martin, 1991), academics (Bröckling, 2015), the mainstream media (Boyle, 2008), educational discourse (Morrin, 2018) and, not least, entrepreneurs themselves (e.g. Branson, 2008). However, recent empirical and conceptual work reveals the reality of entrepreneurial activity to be far more heterogeneous. The term entrepreneur is used in widely varied ways and might just as readily be used to describe the ‘disruption’-fixated tech ‘geeks’ of Silicon Valley (Hashemi, 2019), the committed individuals who build careers out of their immersion in highly specific subcultural scenes (Snyder, 2012) or the women who supplement or replace both paid and unpaid work with trading and reselling of hand-crafted or second-hand items through online platforms such as Etsy and eBay (Luckman, 2015; Waight, 2019). Most relevant to the present study, the craft drinks and artisanal food businesses which have proliferated in the UK, the US and beyond in recent years exhibit many quintessentially entrepreneurial qualities (Cope, 2014; Ocejo, 2017). Notably, such small-scale artisan production involves a close alignment of product and producer where success may depend on how clearly the identity of the maker can be performed and communicated to customers and, further, may deploy tropes of individualism, rebellion and authenticity at the heart of which is an invariably male heroic figure (Land et al., 2018; Thurnell-Read, in press).

As with entrepreneurship, craftwork has been commonly framed by discourses which emphasise independence and autonomy (Dormer, 1994), knowledge and skills (Atkinson, 2013a, 2013b; O’Connor, 2005; Thurnell-Read, 2014) and a capacity for self-exploration and expression (Korn, 2013). However, few studies have examined the interpersonal relationships involved in craft entrepreneurship. This is of particular concern given that entrenched narratives of self-employment that valorise individualistic agency and personal autonomy (Warr & Inceoglu, 2018) are underpinned by the ‘everyday actions that symbolically and materially create situations as business and not business, family and not family, home and not home and work and not work’ (Bourne & Calás, 2013, p. 426).

Because both craftwork (Sennett, 2008; Thurnell-Read, 2014) and entrepreneurship (Morrin, 2018; Taylor, 2015) are underpinned by discourses of individualism and autonomy which are at odds with any attempt to empirically examine the nuances of the overlaps between work and non-working experiences and subjectivities, some of the recent research advanced in the sociology of families and personal life may be drawn on here. This shift, inspired by Morgan’s (1996) influential conception of family practices as ‘doing family’, foregrounds everyday practices and activities rather than either atomised individuals or reified family structures. It means that there has been an increased acknowledgement of ‘the notion that a specific and new form of intimacy is increasingly dominating personal and public life’ (Jamieson, 1998, p. 13) and involves far greater recognition of the ways in which ‘personal life is never still or stationary in the way that the old idea of “the family” appeared to be’ (Smart, 2007, p. 29). Because these developments reveal the meaningful ways in which personal identity and interpersonal relationships are animated in and through a variety of contexts, not limited to the discrete physical space of the family home, a more expansive understanding of the roles, practices and intimacies of family life (Jamieson et al., 2006) can here prompt an examination of the varied roles of peers and kin in craft enterprises.

Carrying on these themes, the following analysis will explore craft distillers’ accounts of the centrality of kinship to their experience and, further, how working together with intimate others both informs business practice and, in turn, shapes understandings of those relationships with partners, parents, siblings and close friends. This analysis therefore envisages the craft distillery as a place in which ‘doing family’ can be witnessed and analysed. As the following empirical data illustrate, craft entrepreneurship involves a blurring of personal and workplace identities and activities. In contrast to past tendencies to bifurcate work from non-work, interviewees are shown to be highly reflexive of the ways in which the two intersect. Further, the article seeks to show how the entrepreneurial self we encounter at work in the craft distillery is not a solely individualistic or autonomous entity. Rather, we see how affective practices and affinities (Gabb, 2008: Mason, 2008, 2018; Smart, 2007) are central to both the promises and challenges of craft entrepreneurship.

Methods and context

In the past decade there has been a surge in consumer interest in small batch spirits produced by independent ‘craft’ distillers, with gin in particular experiencing increased cultural visibility and an associated rapid increase in sales (Taylor, 2018). This sudden expansion was in large part made possible by legal changes in 2009 which, for the first time in several centuries, permitted distillation licences to be granted to operations with a production capacity smaller than 1800 litres. Since then, there has been a rapid growth in the number of small and independent distilleries operating in the UK (Marston, 2018). The number of distilleries has doubled in a five-year period to 2018, including 42 new gin distilleries opening in 2017 alone, and the value of gin sales reaching £1.5 billion in the 12 months to March 2018 (Dodd, 2018). At the time of writing, the Gin Guild lists 184 separate distilleries involved in making gin in the UK. Bound up with this account of shifting market trends are the experiences of the numerous people who have become involved in making and selling gin, often as part of a craft entrepreneurship model involving, at first, amateur experimentation progressively leading to small-scale business start-ups followed by, for many but not for all, expansion and increasing formalisation.

The research on which this article is based consisted of 20 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with UK-based craft distillery workers conducted between July 2017 and February 2018. Social backgrounds were diverse, with the majority of participants self-defining, when asked, as being working class or lower-middle class and roughly equal numbers reporting having or not having university level education. Five interviewees were female and the rest were male, and this was felt to reflect the general gender balance within the UK craft spirits sector and might be contrasted with a UK brewery sector dominated far more by male workers and male customers (Rydzik & Ellis-Vowles, 2019; Thurnell-Read, in press). Interviews were conducted in urban, suburban and rural locations from the far Southwest of England, across the Midlands and in Northern English cities. Interviewees were selected following initial analysis of a range of websites, business listings and promotional activities, including social media, with inclusion criteria being that businesses were independent and actively engaged in the production of the gin as opposed to relying on ‘contract distilling’ by another business. The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and two hours and were recorded with the consent of participants and then transcribed verbatim before being thematically analysed. Pseudonyms have been used throughout and identifying characteristics of distilleries, such as product names and business locations, have been avoided where possible.

While the role of family, kinship and friendship was not an initial ‘sensitizing concept’ (Charmaz, 2006) at the outset of the research, it quickly became apparent that such personal relationships required further exploration and analysis. To this end, the flexibility afforded by semi-structured interviews (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2018) allowed questions about working practices and work–life balance to readily flow into discussions of private lives and personal relationships and their role in the businesses formation and continued activity. Of the 20 interviewees, it was possible to establish that 11 involved direct kinship ties in their business organisation (seven as spouse or cohabiting partner, three with siblings and one with offspring) and that a further four involved some form of significant friendship that pre-existed the creation of the distillery. Amongst the remaining interviewees, of whom three ran their distilleries singlehandedly and two worked in salaried roles, all five spoke at length about the social nature of their work meaning that the social, relational and interpersonal elements of their work featured prominently in their narratives.

‘It was me, a few close friends and a table full of booze’: Familiness at work in craft enterprise

In contrast to the wider cultural stereotype of the entrepreneur as an autonomous individualist (Bröckling, 2015), the narratives offered during interviews involved rich accounts of the meaningful role of family and friends in the experiences of entrepreneurial labour. It became clear that, for many, this involvement of family members in varied tasks across the business meant an enactment of ‘familiness’ that proved to be a valuable resource used within a firm (Barros et al., 2017; Smith Maguire et al., 2013). Thus, many craft distillers recalled how they drew on family and friends as a source of informal ad hoc labour where, as Austin explained, ‘you find mum, dad, an uncle, or whoever really, are willing to lend a hand partly in the hope of getting some nice free gin to drink at the end of the day’. Such is akin to the ‘helping hands’ identified by Cederholm and Åkerström (2016), where the intersection of gift and market economies becomes visible through the assistance and mutual support offered by friends and family. A significant number of the distilleries studied developed in this way, with family and friends being the tasters whose positive response would then provide the confidence to take the first steps in commercial enterprise. For instance, Terry spoke of a ‘sort of summit’ he held over ‘a gloriously fun and boozy weekend’ where ‘it was me, a few close friends and a table full of booze’. By bringing together trusted friends, as well as his brother and his aunt, to taste variations of his own home-distilled gin, Terry was able to cultivate his motivation by ‘feeding off the buzz’ generated by his close friends and family to signal a transition from being an amateur home-distiller to a professional craft entrepreneur.

Notably, several businesses, such as Paul’s, ‘grew out of the home’ and were winning awards and securing significant contracts well before they moved to business premises external to the family residence. Likewise, Felix, a former property development manager in his late twenties who had set up a distillery with his fiancé, spoke of their humble beginnings where ‘we set the business up, we bought a 60 litre still . . . and the only space in the only room we could afford was our dining room’. Tellingly, from their initial meeting, where he recalled that they ‘fell in love [by] spending far too long drinking gin’, through their first business successes whilst still operating within the domestic space of their shared rented apartment, to their current expansion and their planned wedding for which they would be distilling a limited edition run of ‘wedding gin’ to be served at the reception and gifted to guests, Felix offered an extended account of how his relationship with his girlfriend had been interweaved with the development of their gin distillery business. Thus, the story of their business is also that of their relationship, such that both were recounted during the interview as well as being told as part of the brand story on their website and again in local news coverage. Notably, such accounts that emphasise intimate personal ties serve to foreground many of the values of authenticity, creativity and passion which are widely valued by consumers of craft drinks and artisanal foods (Cope, 2014; Thurnell-Read, 2019) and may be used by producers to differentiate ‘from the large-scale brands against which they compete, and may be more likely to yield resonant – and lucrative – quality claims’ (Smith Maguire, 2013, p. 372). Further still, they clearly draw on discourses of appropriate and desirable coupledom and thereby imbue their brand with value underpinned by wider structures of heteronormativity.

Another area where ‘familiness’ is drawn upon to explain and support the activities of the distillery is invocation of family legacies. Jacqueline, for example, said that hers was ‘a family distillery, it was started by my parents’ and explained that whilst ‘both my brother and I went off and had completely independent careers, doing totally different things’, they had taken on the business in 2006 when ‘Mum and Dad realized they wanted to retire’ and called ‘a massive family conference’ to discuss the future of the business. A number of others spoke of inheriting craft skills and entrepreneurial dispositions from their parents and other relatives or from the context of their upbringing. Hamish spoke of a long history of home brewing in his family and of learning to brew and distill whilst still a teenager and Danny referred to a Grandfather who worked at a iconic local brewery. For Rowena, being raised by parents who ran a brewery meant that she and her siblings had acquired an ‘entrepreneurial mentality’ through helping out at the brewery on the weekend as teenagers. This upbringing, where she ‘knew that it wasn’t ok to be watching TV on a Saturday’, was identified by Rowena as inspiring her own entrepreneurial work ethic and resonates with earlier accounts of how entrepreneurial dispositions may be transmitted from parents to their daughters and sons (Bennett & Dann, 2000).

For those distilleries with an intergenerational history, such as Jacqueline’s, there was a sense of inherited reputation, where such connections have been forged over time between family identity, company identity and the reputation of the product (Mulholland, 1997, p. 698). She described her parents’ decision to hand the business on to her and her brother as ‘a remarkable act of trust on their part’ and then emphasised that with the business came ‘a reputation for making really good quality things to drink’ that both her and her brother felt ‘duty bound to uphold’. Jacqueline and Chris emphasised this sense of legacy and inheritance, or following Welsh et al. (2013) ‘stewardship’, as follows:

We 100% own it, and we’re in a position where we inherited it from our parents. My kids are now older teenagers. I think, you know, I want them both to go off and have their own careers, but I also would like to be able to think that, if they wanted to, that the business would eventually be handed on to them.

I got the family involved because the kids have all got their own businesses and it was quite nice to involve them. So my son does all the branding, that sort of thing. We’ve tried to keep it within the family environment, something I’ve actually grown up with . . . it’s been nice to involve them because they are now at the right age to get involved.

Such comments clearly illustrate the ways in which thinking about the past, present and future of both work and family was, for many of these interviewees, intertwined in profound ways.

The above analysis demonstrates that personal relationships, frequently those that involve intimacy with kin and close friendship, are a palpable aspect of the craft distiller’s working life. Importantly, these connections go beyond simple pragmatic arrangements used during the earlier stages of entrepreneurial activity. Rather, what this section has outlined is closer to a form of affective labour based on relations and interactions similar to the ‘affinities’ described by Mason (2018, p. 2) as being highly potent connections that are ‘lived through multidimensional encounters and sensations in personal life’. We see how the support of family and friends charges some distillers with an emotive energy that appears used as a resource from which to draw confidence in their work and products or, as with Rowena and Danny, to locate their activity as resonant of qualities and aptitudes transmitted from parents and grandparents (Cruz et al., 2012). As the following section will explore, these familial relationships and associated affective connections require negotiation and narration but, in doing so, provide a means by which craftwork appears to illuminate the performance of partnership and kinship.

Concluding discussion

The findings outlined above have explored the ways in which entrepreneurial activity and personal relationships are intertwined. In contrast to the traditional casting of public work and private domestic life as separate spheres, interviewees who worked with partners, siblings and friends foregrounded such social connections as being fundamental to the character of their businesses and the quality of their work. The analysis has therefore shown that routines of intimacies are not easily separated out from entrepreneurial activities in working life (Land & Taylor, 2010) and are, in fact, central to the envisioning of a lifestyle which is both familial and entrepreneurial. That many interviewees invoke an image of their work at the distillery as being a culmination of various aspects of their personal life – their interests and passions, their rejection of previous occupations or career paths, their establishment of relationships and families – attests to the considerable blurring of work, leisure and lifestyle (Smith Maguire, 2017). Further, whilst both public and academic discourses of craft have long emphasised independence and autonomy (Dormer, 1994) and ascribed significance to craft practice as a means of self-exploration and expression (Korn, 2013), craft distillers here appear to encourage and value the intermixing of public entrepreneurship and private life and the interplay of work activities with non-work activities and relations. Thus, building a craft enterprise jointly run by spouses or intimate partners, where the text, images and narratives used to promote the product incorporate themes of family identity, is an example of ‘displaying’ family (Finch, 2007). Those craft entrepreneurs who incorporate familial and other intimate relationships into their brand are ‘doing’ (Morgan, 1996) and ‘performing’ (Finch, 2007) family and kinship through their work in a particular kind of way. Familiness is therefore a resource that is used and worked upon and with during craft enterprise but also a series of ‘affinities’ providing meaningful moments of connection (Mason, 2018) and intimacy (Jamieson, 1998).

That the likes of Danny and Jacqueline invoke family histories in framing their present work, and others such as Chris speak of a future in which their children will become increasingly involved in running the business, attests to the importance of traditions, memory and imagination in our understanding of familial identities (Smart, 2007). Whilst such can be seen to add value to their products (Smith Maguire et al., 2013), the analysis has also shown how the past, present and future configurations of family imaginaries are often present in accounts of current entrepreneurial activities. To further this analysis, it is useful to follow Atkinson’s (2013b) interesting observation of craftwork which takes place in ‘small places’ – in glass blowing studios or, as here, gin distilleries – where, nonetheless ‘the smallest, most local phenomena can thus, be developed into a wide set of conceptual, formal ideas’ (Atkinson, 2013b, p. 62). The interviews reveal a willingness on the part of participants to talk about a wider range of issues than just the act of making and selling gin. We see how relationships between family members and intimate partners lies at the heart of these craft enterprises and, from that, can draw insights into workplace subjectivities, personal identity, lifestyle aspirations and intimate relationships.

While many craft enterprises are often vocally opposed to corporate rationality emblematic in the business actions of sector dominators (Thurnell-Read, 2019), the discourses of entrepreneurship notably fail to challenge the ‘productivist’ ethos which the likes of Weeks (2011) have sought to problematise. Further, upholding craft entrepreneurship as a solution to the lack of family-friendly working conditions in the modern neoliberal economy risks furthering an increasingly widespread discourse that posits the development of ‘entrepreneurial character’ as the sole appropriate personal response to structural inequality and uncertainty (Morrin, 2018). Indeed, in the accounts of participants we see palpable examples of the seductive appeal of commitment to idealised images of fulfilling and meaningful creative work (Ekman, 2013). These can be striking in their expansiveness; as Austin lamented, the craft enterprise could become something ‘all encompassing’ with ‘no off switch’ because it involves both him and his partner and so readily blurs their public and private lives. In addition to any commitment of money, time and effort, many of the craft enterprises examined here entail huge investments of emotion and identity whereby the success of the business will not just be measured in sales, turnover and profit but in personal fulfilment, interpersonal affinities and both present and potential familial contentment. Such is clearly viewed positively by most participants. In contrast to the imperatives to invest oneself into one’s work in more corporate settings (Ekman, 2013; Gregg, 2013), there was a strong sense that interviewees felt themselves and their businesses to be the primary beneficiaries of their investment of selfhood into their work.

The implications of this research encourage a loosening of the grip of images of entrepreneurial work as sealed off from the social world of emotions and intimacy and to give due regard to ties of friendship, kin and family and to explore how they become animated in both the strategic decisions and the everyday affective practices of family enterprises. As Glucksmann (2005, p. 22) warns, ‘the organisation and distribution of work cannot be explained solely from within work’. How work is organised and the form these businesses take are influenced by decisions relating to familial priorities and aspirations, to intergenerational affinities and obligations and to both personal and interpersonal identity formations. We might again draw on Atkinson (2013a), who refers to ‘the choreography of making’ to describe the postures, positioning and feelings of bodies at work in the craft studio but, in our case, expand on this by suggesting that this choreography goes beyond just the act of making but applies to the wider work of striving to ensure that the circumstances in which the craft enterprise takes place accord to a range of values held by individuals and negotiated between intimate partners. Thus, many of the individuals interviewed are actively engaged in an act of choreographing the spheres of family and work, and the expressions of private and public self, in ways which are more closely aligned than other forms of employment might afford.

Whilst interviewees frequently communicated about their work organisation via positive frames of personal choice, complementarity and shared passion, it remains unclear how far these discourses might serve to occlude power differentials between family members. Given that Mulholland (2003) has illustrated how women become increasingly marginalised within family enterprises as corporate leadership structures become formalised with company growth and expansion, further longitudinal research of some of the numerous emerging craft enterprises may prove valuable in revealing the interweaving of work and private family life over time as upheavals in either spheres, such as business failure or family breakdown or estrangement, impact upon and reshape the realities of daily life represented by the at times idealistic narratives offered here. Longitudinal research might also fill out initial observations made here in relation to the ambitions to a form of ‘involved’ fatherhood described by several of the male participants (Dermott & Miller, 2015) and to unpick any discrepancies between stated and actual conduct in relation to gendered divisions of labour and the shifting balances of power within a growing or, possibly failing, enterprise. With this in mind, the growing number of enterprises across the craft sectors and creative economies require ongoing research to further evaluate the interplay of personal relationships and working life in a way that allows their entanglement to be examined and explained.