PhD students on the academic job market
The following Cambridge Judge Business School PhD students are currently seeking academic positions. Similar recent PhD graduates have taken postdoctoral or faculty positions at leading research institutions such as Erasmus, IESE Business School, London Business School, Warwick Business School, Imperial College Business School, University College London and INSEAD Asia.
Monika Żebrowska
Monika is a PhD graduate whose research seeks to advance more human-centric perspectives on work, organising, and institutional dynamics. She is interested in exploring how humans relate to their work, organisations, and institutions, how they derive meanings and value from them, and conversely, how such engagements and motivations shape institutional and organisational processes. In relation to this, her research predominantly focuses on craft and community organising to explore the resilience, continuity, and complexity of cherished social structures.
Before her PhD at Cambridge Judge Business School, Monika earned an MPhil in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation at the University of Cambridge and a BA in Business and Management from Durham University.
Job market paper
“Hooked on a thread: meaningful craft livelihoods as a pathway to craft resilience.”
Recent research on craft suggests it is resurging and thriving. We argue instead that craft practice is naturally fragile and difficult to sustain in modern society. While previous research has explored tensions related to craft’s fragility, we lack understanding of how practitioners navigate such tensions in ways that enable them to sustain their commitment to craft in the face of growing technological affordances and changing meanings. We explore this issue by studying a community of 500+ lacemakers in rural Poland who have continued their craft across generations. We find that craft resilience depends on the ability of practitioners to nurture meaningful craft livelihoods over time. Such livelihoods depend on the attachment of multiplex meanings to craft practice, which is sustained by 2 mechanisms: protecting community ownership over craft practice and cultivating respect for craft practice. Our study adds to the growing literature on craft by drawing attention to its inherent fragility in post-industrial society and by theorising how craft practices are made resilient through the protection of ‘purity’ and adaptation to changing conditions. We point to avenues for further cross-fertilisation between the craft and practice literature.