?
«Оттолкнулись от дна и пошли дальше»: стратегии совладания с кризисом крафтовых предпринимателей Санкт-Петербурга
The сraft economy is part of the dynamically developing megapolis creative economy. It includes hand-crafted production and services with a high importance of cultural and value-based entrepreneurship, confronting mass production and focusing on an authentic individual product, as well as creating a special milieu. Research shows that this field has recently become increasingly attractive to young entrepreneurs, providing opportunities for realization, "passionate work" and self-identification, often requiring minimal capital for start-up and development. Implementing a lifestyle entrepreneurship project, young craftpeople are guided not only by economic rationality, seeking not so much to achieve economic success as to build "their" business according to certain values. However, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this lack of capital has made young craft entrepreneurs particularly vulnerable at the market. The article analyzes the challenges that young craft entrepreneurs of St. Petersburg faced in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the coping strategies they used. This article is based on a study conducted in 2021. The empirical data included 52 leitmotif biographical interviews. The study found that despite the retrospective rhetoric of normalization of the crisis present in most interviews, informants noted that the pandemic had radically transformed the entrepreneurial infrastructure, disrupting established supply and sales patterns and limiting access to workplaces and production. Combined with the decline in demand, these changes gave informants the challenge of overcoming the crisis and finding different ways to cope with the problems. The analysis identifies 4 coping strategies, which were actualized in the COVID-19 pandemic: "play ahead", "put on pause", "work for the future" and " manage the stress". If the last three, despite their effectiveness in terms of keeping the business, can be considered rather passive, the first one is an example of redefining the "weak" economic position by actively creating their own "game rules".