Enskiled coping : exploring the process of becoming skilled in and through the practice of craft

Abstract

Becoming skilled is often portrayed through linear trajectories and stepwise models that reduce the complexity of lived experience. In turn, these models restrict the possibilities for going on by suggesting that what we do, and how we know, unfolds in a unidirectional and predetermined manner. This thesis addresses this problem by exploring the process of becoming skilled over time. It traces the author’s own becoming a potter through apprenticeship in the practice of craft. Based on this rich empirical data three contributions are made to process studies in management and organisation. Firstly, this thesis illuminates a multi-directional, two-phased ‘pattern of enskilment’ through which practitioners develop the necessary foundational skills to grasp the underlying logic of practice and reveal new ways of going on. Secondly, patterns of enskilment are shown to unfold in the forces and flows of the wider institutional arrangements as practitioners both follow and orchestrate the rhythms of practice. In turn, the emergent and potent forces that shape the course of ongoing becoming are revealed. In so doing, form-imposing structures, such as rules, judgments and intentions are shown to be ongoing and emergent forces that are generated in and through process, as it unfolds against a background of practice. Finally, apprenticeship is presented as means of understanding becoming through the process of becoming itself. Herein researcher and researched are reunited in the synchronous weaving together of simultaneous lines of becoming as they traverse overlapping practice(s). To this end, what we know and what we do are inherently entangled in who we are.