Theorizing Mentorship for Cultural Work

Know-how for Cultural Work

As a first step towards theorizing how mentorship is used to organize the passing on of know-how for cultural work, we turn to scholarship on craft. Definitions of craft vary wildly (Greenhalgh, 1997; Ravasi et al., 2025). The term can be used to distinguish the hand-made from the industrially manufactured (Pye, 1995 [1968]; Thompson, 1967). It is also used to distinguish amateur or folk cultural artefacts from those of professional or more artistic origins (Luckman, 2015). Scholarship on craft in the 21st century has recently hailed its reinvention (Adamson, 2019) or what Susan Luckman (2015: 18) refers to as a ‘third wave’ revival. Craft can refer to working conditions where ‘control over the conception, design and manufacture of a cultural good is possessed by individuals or small groups of workers, operating in close quarters in “workshop” conditions’ (Banks, 2007: 29), or to any ‘skilled work applied to practical ends’ (McCullough, 1996: 22) or even more simply to ‘personal know-how’ (Dormer, 1997: 139) that arises from experience of working with others. A long-standing tradition of scholarship on craft (Adamson, 2007; Baber et al., 2019; Dormer, 1997; Ingold, 2002; McCullough, 1996; Morris, 1888; Pye, 1995 [1968]; Sennett, 2008) links this know-how to a distinct attitude or set of values embodied in those who practise it that can be summed up as the patience and care needed for ‘a job done well’ (McRobbie, 2016: 131) or ‘the desire to do a job well for its own sake’ (Sennett, 2008: 9; see also Pye, 1995 [1968]: 136). It is through this attitude that craft practitioners strive for the same kind of autonomy, self-realization, and well-being that can make cultural work into ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011).

While not all cultural work qualifies as craft in the senses developed by the likes of Banks or McCullough cited earlier, all cultural work involves some level of craft know-how encompassing what has variously been defined as tacit knowledge (Collins, 2012; Dormer, 1997; Polanyi, 1966), situated practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and/or skill (Adamson, 2007; Ingold, 2002). It is no wonder then that mentorship, or what Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to as apprenticeships, as a social arrangement for sharing know-how (Chan, 2014), suits cultural work. At its core, mentorship is built around the social dyad of the mentor–mentee relationship (Dominguez and Kochan, 2020) in which the mentor passes their know-how to the mentee through a process of learning by doing (Gowlland, 2019). While the power dynamics between mentor and mentee can be more dynamic than the more traditionally familiar versions of mentorship (Dominguez and Kochan, 2020), the basic arrangement of learning by doing relies on physical co-presence. The shared space and time of this craftwork consists of a ‘task-orientation’ originally manifested in pre-industrial craft practices when ‘both work and time are intrinsic to the conduct of life itself and cannot be separated or abstracted from it’ (Ingold, 2002: 324). From this perspective, craft know-how cannot be passed on as written rules or an explicit set of prescribed procedures (Dormer, 1997; Ingold, 2013), it is only through task-oriented, co-present engagement with tools and materials that its tacit or embodied knowledge is shared.

The Precarity of Contemporary Cultural Work

Markets, competition and technological automation have historically been presented as anathema to craft (Ingold, 2002; Sennett, 2008) and by implication anathema to mentorship (Dormer, 1997). Drawing in part on Italian autonomist scholarship on immaterial labour (Gill and Pratt, 2008), critical scholarship of the last three decades has theorized the combination of increased abstraction, flexibilization and insecurity as precarity that threatens contemporary cultural work.

While some aspects of this ‘flexible exploitation’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011: 161) have arguably always been a part of cultural work, precarity serves as a useful conceptual backdrop for understanding the digital mediation of know-how for cultural work. The spatiotemporal rhythms of task-orientation have been considered under threat long before the advent of precarity at the end of the 20th century. As early as the 19th century, industrial clock-time for the manufacture of standardized goods (Ingold, 2002; Thompson, 1967) is said to decouple the working environment from everyday life, corrupting the natural production cycles that make craft possible. Despite such transformations, some craft practices persisted or were reinvented, thanks in part through the reorganization of work and the development of new tools (Adamson, 2019; McCullough, 1996). Precarity introduces a different dominant ‘temporal profile’ (see Adkins, 2013) for cultural work which aligns to the more pragmatist-inflected ‘event’ (Thrift, 2005) or ‘project’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Using a combination of abstracting management techniques and the affordances of information and communication technologies (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2005; Hardt and Negri, 2001; Virno, 2008), cultural work under conditions of precarity is reorganized into distributed networks of disposable labour that further undermine the sharing of know-how.

These newly prevailing spatiotemporal conditions involve a flexible time for experimentation and exploration moving towards a ‘crunch time’ (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2005) where the focus shifts to the execution of deliverables. Maintaining a traditional career becomes difficult under these flexibly exploitative conditions (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Sennett, 2006; Taylor and Luckman, 2018), pushing cultural workers toward self-employment and putting under increasing strain their ability to develop meanings socially, politically and culturally (Gill, 2013; McRobbie, 2016). Richard Sennett (2006, 2008) argues that such insecurity undermines the possibility for practitioners to develop a sense of self through work because precarity undermines the desire to do a job well for its own sake, thereby undermining the development of what we refer to here as know-how. Furthermore, the kinds of tasks involved in cultural work also become more varied. Individuated cultural workers increasingly need to develop know-how not directly related to their craft, like finance and marketing, as a greater number of requirements and expectations are offloaded onto individuals. Meanwhile, workers seek out new sources to improve their ability to practise cultural work: from search engines to professional training, from formal to informal mentorships (Luckman and Andrew, 2020).

As presented in this section, the way in which precarity undermines the spatiotemporal conditions required for people to sustain individual careers raises questions as to whether and how these same people are able to engage in mentoring. How can experienced practitioners pass on their personal know-how to others if cultural work is organized in such a way that they cannot develop a sense of self through their work? Rather than assume the outright impossibility of the mentor–mentee dyad or assume that it can only be enacted in pre-industrial contexts or at an individual scale, we propose retheorizing the organization of mentorship by disentangling one of the key factors in the way cultural work is organized – specifically how information and communication technologies mediate, and are mediated by, culture work – which, in turn, shapes the way in which know-how is shared.

The Deep Mediatization of Cultural Work – From Co-presence to Connected Presence

According to Paul Dormer (1997), technological mediation undermines craft know-how because it structures craft into distributed knowledge; ‘technology [that] has embedded within it knowledge that is not and cannot be ours to possess’ (1997: 140). Dormer attributes the origins of distributed knowledge to two factors. The first is that society is increasingly characterized by a ‘coming-together of a variety of disciplines and industries’ which spreads the knowledge required to create anything over ‘many systems of production and thought’ (Dormer, 1997: 139). The second factor is that digital tools and artefacts like application software, ‘allow us to make things without ourselves possessing the know-how to make them’ (Dormer, 1997: 139); similar to what Ingold (2002) terms the technological ‘externalisation’ of know-how and to what Kroezen et al. (2021) refer to as the ‘human–machine duality’. What this means for the organization of knowledge sharing is that: ‘In technology, knowledge is distributed especially among systems of people and hardware; in craft, knowledge is also distributed but through people alone’ (Dormer, 1997: 149).

Dormer’s perspective on technology shares many similarities with those of precarity as discussed in the preceding section. The problem with this drastic dichotomy between technology and craft, however, is that it does not leave any room for theorizing the interplay between know-how and distributed knowledge, suggesting that mentorship is impractical (if not impossible) in any highly technologically mediated society. At its most fundamental level, the dichotomy rests on an assumption that the know-how that is shared through co-presence is ‘possessed’ within the body of the mentor. And it also overlooks the possibility that distributed knowledge about work can be woven into experiential and affective dimensions for sharing know-how (Fuller, 2013).

To begin to address these issues, we turn to Couldry and Hepp’s work on ‘deep mediatization’ and figuration to reconceptualize distributed knowledge and the way contemporary mentorship enables people to share know-how for cultural work.

According to Couldry and Hepp (2016; see also Hepp, 2020) waves of mediatization from ever-increasingly complex media environments have developed into a phenomenon called ‘deep mediatization’. Deep mediatization is a manifold, ‘large “universe” of variously connected digital media through which [. . .] we actualize social relations’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 34–35) that makes social domains more interconnected and multifaceted. For Couldry and Hepp, the implications of deep mediatization for work is that new kinds of working collectivities can be created with the help of digital media without the need for co-presence. Such a transformation, nevertheless, touches a long-standing concern of social theory that collectivization without community could be used to undermine or exploit workers by limiting their possibility to interact with each other (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 168–189).

The dedicated efforts of Couldry and Hepp to articulate mediatization help us refine Dormer’s first factor for distributed knowledge. They provide a more nuanced framework for considering how knowledge is technologically distributed ranging from a macro to micro level:

• (1) media environment: ‘the totality of communications media available at one point in space-time’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 39);
• (2) media ensemble: ‘the array of media that are used within a particular social domain of a collectivity or organization’ (Hepp, 2020: 89);
• (3) media repertoire: ‘an individual’s selection from the media manifold as they use and appropriate media as part of their everyday practices’ (Hepp, 2020: 92).

This phenomenological ‘nesting dolls’ framework suggests that different kinds of distributed knowledge are unevenly distributed as well as more or less available to groups and/or individuals depending on the media ensembles and repertoires they can access.

Before reconceptualizing Dormer’s second factor using deep mediatization, we need to return to the dichotomy he identifies as mentioned earlier. For Dormer, the embodiment of know-how is equated with a form of tacit, human ‘possession’, whereas technologies like software mediate know-how into distributed knowledge without access to such possession. Dormer’s dichotomy relies in part on Pye’s (1995 [1968]) classic distinction between craft as a ‘workmanship of risk’, wherein the individual practitioner’s performance of tasks with tools ‘hold the key to success’ (Dormer, 1997: 138), and a ‘workmanship of certainty’, which organizes work into a technologically mediated system geared towards mass manufacture. This dichotomy encounters problems when extended to digital technologies.

Cultural work throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st has undeniably undergone a process of transformation wherein many of the activities involved in the production, circulation and appreciation of cultural artefacts are mediated by digital technologies (Lesage and Terren, 2024; Poell et al., 2021). Although many of these creative tools and platforms may be individually designed to privilege the kind of certainty that is anathema to a workmanship of risk, some have been designed to be more responsive to the needs and desires of cultural workers (Forsler and Velkova, 2018). Just as importantly, given the sheer variety of tools and platforms and the complexity of their interconnections through deep mediatization, it seems unlikely that any and all of their combinations through work qualifies as a system for producing ‘workmanship of certainty’. This complexity therefore opens up the possibility that practitioners have developed a certain kind of know-how for choosing, accessing, and using digital technologies as distributed knowledge. This requires us to re-conceptualize the social relationships that enable and constrain the interplay between know-how and distributed knowledge.

To meet this last challenge, we return to Couldry and Hepp (2016) and their claim that any enactment of relations within the complexities of deep mediatization necessarily implies a kind of ‘intermeshing’ on the part of social actors. They propose figuration as a means of understanding such intermeshing. Figuration has been applied in a range of sociological approaches (Haraway, 1997; Lury et al., 2022; Suchman, 2007) to investigate technological mediation. In this article, we use it to describe how practitioners engage in a complex interweaving of know-how and distributed knowledge for cultural work facing the transformations brought about by deep mediatization. When understood as a figuration, mentorship remains a dyadic relation (Hepp, 2020) between mentor and mentee, but one that is re-constituted through three facets: (1) constellations of actors, (2) frames of relevance and (3) communicative practice. Conceptualizing mentorship as figuration helps us trace how practitioners pass on knowledge within dynamically scaled media environments despite conditions of precarity. For Couldry and Hepp, figurations do not eliminate the possibility of the kinds of face-to-face, synchronous engagements required to share know-how:The point is not that the face to face becomes less important, but that in order to sustain its primacy (for example, the importance of family meal times) we now require continuous mediated coordination, within processes of ‘connected presence’ that enable us to coordinate the possibility of that face-to-face situation. (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 29)

Extended to the mentor–mentee dyad, the foregoing quotation implies that maintaining the primacy of face-to-face engagement as a means of sharing personal know-how for cultural work requires the development of a certain kind of ‘connected presence’, one that relies on distributed knowledge for its coordination. This connected presence would enable mentorship where ‘[e]ach individual lives at the intersection of the different figurations in which he or she is involved and develops an identity through the subjective narration of the self on the basis of his or her involvements.’ (Hepp, 2020: 102–103) As we intend to demonstrate in the following section, figuration as an analytic device is suited to investigating mentorships within conditions of precarity because it allows us to conceptualize mediated social relationships between people with heterogeneous experiences and commitments whose engagements are contingent and overlapping.