Masters of Craft: Outdated Jobs within the New City Financial system

How educated and culturally savvy younger individuals are remodeling historically low-status handbook labor jobs into elite taste-making occupations

In immediately’s new financial system―wherein “good” jobs are sometimes information or expertise based mostly―many well-educated and culturally savvy younger males are as an alternative selecting to pursue historically low-status handbook labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft appears on the renaissance of 4 such trades: bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering.

On this in-depth and fascinating e book, Richard Ocejo takes you into the lives and workplaces of those folks to look at how they’re remodeling these once-undesirable jobs into “cool” and extremely specialised upscale occupational niches―and within the course of complicating our notions about upward and downward mobility by means of work. He exhibits how they discover which means in these jobs by enacting a set of “cultural repertoires,” which embody technical expertise based mostly on a renewed sense of craft and craftsmanship and a capability to grasp and talk that information to others, leading to a brand new type of elite taste-making. Ocejo describes the paths folks take to those jobs, how they be taught their chosen trades, how they imbue their work practices with craftsmanship, and the way they educate a way of style to their customers.

Specializing in cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale males’s barbers, and whole-animal butcher store employees in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Masters of Craft offers new insights into the stratification of style, gentrification, and the evolving labor market in immediately’s postindustrial metropolis.