This paper explores what really matters for the longevity of craft-businesses that operate in resource-constrained contexts and deliberately reject growth-oriented logics. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of 24 craft-entrepreneurs in small towns in northeastern France, the findings suggest that business-level success is anchored in what we call a craft affectio societatis (CAS), a shared set of existential conventions that functions as a necessary relational grounding for sustaining a craft-business. CAS becomes meaningful only when enacted through relationships, and the analysis identifies four conventions that together form a sufficient configuration for sustaining longevity, namely, a sense of belonging to a sustainable CAS, exclusivity and recognition within it, moving beyond transactions toward mutuality, and co-preserving shared conventions. This framework enriches contextual and relational understandings of entrepreneurship and offers insights for entrepreneurs seeking to sustain their craft-businesses over decades despite operating in resource-constrained contexts.
Boughattas et al. (Thu,) studied this question.