I studied people who gave up their flourishing careers for craft jobs. Here’s what I found

Long coveted by job centres and PowerPoint presenters, the old image of moving up the career ladder makes less and less sense by the day. In France and other Western societies, it is increasingly common to see interior designers become bakers, ex-bankers opening up cheese shops and marketing officers taking up electricians’ tools.

In January 2022, 21% of French working people were in the course of changing career, while 26% were reported to be considering a career switch in the long term. As part of this trend, executives or the highly educated are increasingly drawn to the world of craft. The practice is sometimes referred to as downshifting in English, which, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “the practice of leaving a job that is well paid and difficult in order to do something that gives you more time and satisfaction but less money”.

These career changes are a puzzle for sociologists, who have traditionally sought to understand the factors driving upward mobility, class reproduction or social downgrading. These days, the latter can be observed on an intergenerational scale, with children increasingly occupying lower positions in the social hierarchy than their parents’, but also on an intragenerational scale, with individuals carrying out jobs for which they are overqualified. In both cases, the...

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