Paper short abstract:

Spirituality in creative work: How craft entrepreneurs in Ghana cope with precarity Rufai Haruna Kilu, Mohammed-Aminu Sanda & Ana Alacovska University of Professional Studies, Accra. University of Ghana Business School, Accra, Ghana. Copenhagen Business School

Paper long abstract:

Spirituality in creative work:

How craft entrepreneurs in Ghana cope with precarity

Rufai Haruna Kilu a, Mohammed-Aminu Sanda b & Ana Alacovska c

a Department of Business Administration, University of Professional Studies, Accra, b University of Ghana Business School, Accra, Ghana, c Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how craft entrepreneurs in Africa cope with and navigate precarity widespread in the creative industries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with kente weavers, smock makers and potters in the Northern, Svanna and Ashanti regions of Ghana, we explore the role of spirituality as a significant, but highly ambivalent resource for coping with precarity. In doing so, we elucidate how craft entrepreneurs deploy spiritual narratives as simultaneously enabling and constraining coping mechanisms in profoundly precarious circumstances. On the basis of the analysis of our empirical material, we show how the deployment of spiritual narratives, including the invocation of God and divine spirits, enables craft entrepreneurs to maintain 1) an affirmative sense of purpose; 2) a therapeutic sense of connectedness to beneficent out-worldly powers, and 3) an invigorating sense of community, including care for a shared way of life. Yet, in highly precarious contexts, the mobilization of spiritual narratives, we argue, is also constraining as spiritual narratives help demarcate gender boundaries and exclude women from professionally engaging with craft entrepreneurship while locking craft entrepreneurs on the whole in immobility and dismal working conditions.

Keywords: craft entrepreneurs, spirituality, spiritual narratives, creative work, creative industries, precarity, precarious work, Africa, Ghana