Best Paper in CIM 2025 - An awarded paper by Anne-Sophie Radermecker

An article from GRESAC won the Best Paper Award in Creativity and Innovation Management in 2025.

About the paper

“Visual Artist, Craftsperson, Entrepreneur or … All in One? Identity Struggles and Juggles in Creative Crafts” by Anne-Sophie Radermecker (Co-director of GRESAC).

Social identity theories explain how identities intertwine with individuals' choices and behaviours. Simultaneously, an institutional context imposes constraints on people's agency due to the norms, habits and expectations it engrains. This is the case in the artistic realm, where numerous categorization norms remain implicit. In the present paper, we examine the links between identity and professional activities in the creative crafts sector, which exhibits characteristics of both contemporary arts and traditional crafts. Employing a mixed methodology that combines survey data and a focus group, we explore the ways in which different identities and professional activities within the market for creative crafts are interconnected. We show ‘how’ creative crafts practitioners self-identify (as an artist, craftsman [artisan], designer, maître d'art and creative entrepreneur) and reveal contradictions between—what we label—individuals' self-attributed identity (self-identification) and positioned social identity (the categorization by others).

Notably, the identity of the ‘artist’ emerges as the most prominently promoted one, while that of the craftsperson is found to be more comfortable. Specific instances of identity struggles and juggles are identified. To explain the identity positioning issues faced in this sector, we invoke the nomenclative habits and market activities that prevail in creative crafts. Our empirical data allow us to disentangle two distinct identity strategies, which we label ‘rooted identity strategy’ and ‘floating identity strategy’. Our contributions lie in a more in-depth exploration of identity perceptions within cultural and creative industries, by showing how creative people deal with multiple, sometimes conflicting, identities and discussing how this can affect careers.

CIM Editorial Community commentaries
 

• This paper addresses a highly original and under-researched topic. The creative crafts sector has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, despite sitting at a fascinating intersection of art, craftsmanship, and entrepreneurship. In this regard, this work opens up an important and fresh area for creativity and innovation research.
• The notions of identity struggles and juggles, as well as rooted and floating identity strategies, offer a compelling vocabulary for understanding how practitioners navigate multiple and sometimes conflicting role identities. These concepts capture something meaningful and have the potential to travel beyond the immediate empirical context.
• By combining survey data with rich focus group material, the paper offers both analytical structure and interpretive depth. The qualitative insights, in particular, bring the lived experiences of practitioners vividly to life.
• Importantly, the paper moves beyond a simple art-versus-commerce dichotomy and shows how individuals in creative crafts actively navigate these tensions in practice. This makes the contribution theoretically meaningful while also highly relevant for practitioners, educators, and policymakers.
• By taking identity-related strain and well-being seriously, the study adds a layer of depth that is often missing in management research, while remaining engaging and highly readable throughout.

Full article

Read the full article here

Many thanks to the entire Editorial Board, together with the Editors-in-Chief, Associate Editors, and Senior Advisors, who have voted and selected this paper.