Creativity within Constraint: Time Horizons and Meaning Making for Contemporary Violinmakers

In this paper, I study meaning-making in craft fields by synthesizing in-depth interviews conducted with fifteen full-time violinmakers based in Europe and the US. Sociologists have studied the meaning of work within other arts and sciences, but violinmaking is a particularly interesting lens through which to investigate how meaning is made because violins are extremely constrained: arguably, the most beautiful and well-functioning violin was made 300 years ago, so most skilled violinmakers today work within a narrow set of parameters. Despite being so constrained, violins are associated with artistic production, and thus violin making could be understood as creative work. I assess the utility of the word "creative" in my interviews, which I do not define for interviewees. I find that some of them experience their craft as creative, even within these narrow parameters, while others discount the term's utility. Furthermore, the former group tends to think on the scale of the process involved in making a single instrument; they situate their work within a relatively short temporal context. The temporal horizon that the latter group situates their work within, however, is comparatively long: they tend to think in terms of progress made over the space of a career. I conclude that my subjects orient their work towards different time horizons, defining problems to solve at differing levels of abstraction, which guides how they make meaning of their work. These data demonstrate that people in the same sociological position who are working within similar constraints nonetheless vary in their understandings of the meaning of their work. Further research could investigate whether time horizons again come into play in meaning making in other crafts.