It takes a village: Craft, tradition work, and family entrepreneurship in Javanese batik villages, Indonesia

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How does a craft tradition survive when families cannot carry it forward? Studying three batik villages in Java, we introduce tradition work, through which households and village collectives transmit skills beyond kin, uphold the artisans, valorise the cloth, and adapt it to the market.

Family business research locates the preservation of tradition in the family and explains it largely through family commitment. In the batik villages of Java, that commitment is no longer enough. As elders age out and heirs take salaried jobs, the number of active artisans fell by about three-quarters between 2020 and 2023. Yet the craft continues. This paper asks how a craft tradition can be sustained when families alone can no longer carry it forward.

We draw on observations and 33 semi-structured interviews with elder artisans, young successors, and the chairs of village collectives in Giriloyo, Jarum, and Kauman, which were analysed using the Gioia methodology. Four dimensions emerge through which the craft is kept alive. We call the labour that runs through them tradition work, made up of four practices. Households and collectives transmit skill to newcomers beyond kin, uphold the artisans through income and standing, valorise the cloth for buyers, and adapt it to the market while arguing over what may change.

The findings show that sustaining a tradition is distributed across households, village collectives, and the state. Where kinship no longer supplies artisans, collectives recruit, train, and equip new artisans, and the same collectives decide who reaches buyers and state support. Recruitment and exclusion, therefore, sit in one organisation, much as they did in the craft guilds. Families remain central because they supply co-presence and the ownership stake that turns a practitioner into a proprietor.