Meaningful work through craft: how workers in low-skilled roles engage in anomalous craft to gain autonomy and receive recognition

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 work 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 organisation. 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 utilised 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.