Harper, P., Kettle, A., 2018.

Making leaders/curating maker cultures

Makers are perhaps not popularly considered the kinds of people who typically occupy spheres of leadership. Craft has been commonly associated with the romantic idea of the maker as a narrowly focussed specialist, perhaps somewhat inward-looking, deploying their skill through (what are imagined to be) relatively stable practices of production and consumption. This paper will assert an underexploited potential of craftspeople as leaders and the value of creative practices in developing qualities that contribute to good leadership, not just within the institutional art/craft world, but in wider work and social contexts. Our thesis is that makers might be uniquely adept creators of communities, organisations, cultures and institutions.