From Individual Coping to Collective Care Crafting: Reframing Job Crafting in Sexualized Workplaces

Jyawali, Harish (2026) From Individual Coping to Collective Care Crafting: Reframing Job Crafting in Sexualized Workplaces. Gender Work and Organization. ISSN 0968-6673

Abstract

This paper extends job crafting theory through a feminist lens by examining how women chefs respond to sexual harassment and gendered hostility in male-dominated kitchens. Drawing on narrative interviews with 21 female chefs across London restaurants, the study examines how women navigate workplace sexual violence through individual coping and, unevenly and contingently, through collectively enacted practices of care and solidarity. These collective practices emerge where organizational mechanisms for safety, protection, and accountability are insufficient. The findings make two interconnected contributions. First, it conceptualizes collective care crafting as a distinct form of job crafting through which women collectively reshape tasks, relationships, and meanings to sustain safety, dignity, and belonging, grounded in practices of care and solidarity. Second, it argues that organizational failure is a critical boundary condition shaping when and why collective care crafting emerges, repositioning such practices as responses to institutional inadequacy. Although collective care crafting enables women to create safer spaces and support one another, its necessity exposes structural inequalities and organizational failures that it cannot by itself resolve. The findings broaden understandings of job crafting beyond an emphasis on individual optimization and performance, advancing a feminist understanding of crafting as a relational and care-based practice shaped by gendered power relations and organizational conditions.

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