Masters of Craft

In todays new economyin which good jobs are typically knowledge or technology basedmany well-educated and culturally savvy young people are instead choosing to pursue traditionally low-status manual labor occupations as careers. Masters of Craft looks at the renaissance of four such trades: bartending, distilling, barbering, and butchering. In this engaging book, Richard Ocejo takes you into the lives and workplaces of these people to examine how they are transforming once-undesirable jobs into cool and highly specialized upscale occupations. He shows how they find meaning in these jobs by enacting a set of cultural repertoires, resulting in a new form of elite taste-making. Focusing on cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole-animal butcher shop workers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and upstate New York, Masters of Craft provides new insights into the stratification of taste, the spread of gentrification, and the evolving labor market in todays postindustrial city.