cottage industry

cottage industry

1. A small-scale industry carried out by people in their own homes. When my grandmother was a girl, she was part of a cottage industry that made textiles, along with the rest of her family.
2. A small (and often loosely organized) network or business. It looks like you guys have a nice little cottage industry raking leaves.
3. An area of study pursued by a few passionate people. I understand that not everyone is interested in tracing minute details in modernist texts, but it's a cottage industry for a few people in the Master's program, like myself!
See also: cottage, industry
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • cottage
  • That’s show business
  • That’s show business for you
  • that's show biz (for you)
  • that's show business
  • that's show business (for you)
  • the girls
  • girl
  • in microcosm
  • meeting of (the) minds
References in periodicals archive
In a bid to boost the capacity of cottage industry in the country, the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) has reaffirmed it's commitment to ensuring that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMES) are given the necessary assistance to grow and impact more significantly on the Nigerian economy.
The term small-scale industry "originally referred to home workers who are engaged in a task such as sewing, lace-making, wood carving or household manufacturing which can be carried at home by family members using their own tools and materials" (Definition of Cottage Industry).
Pakistan is ready to extend its technical expertise in the handloom cottage industry to Sri Lanka through imparting training and capacity building programmes.
"Products of genuine brands are bought and then adorned in this apparent cottage industry.
In the present state of India of course even widespread cottage industry can raise standards considerably above the existing level.
Norton, 2001) he predicted that given developments of the World Wide Web, book publishing will become "once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative autonomous units" divested of "such vestigial publishing work as marketing, sales, shipping, and warehousing together with their bureaucracies and inefficiencies...." (p.
In the early 1950s, it was declared a cottage industry and more than 50 per cent of its units still fall in this category.
Desire for ever-greater utility has created a cottage industry in storage space, third-row seating, and dual-use vehicles that never see a dirt road much less a mountain trail.
And the cottage industry of talks and workshops that developed in churches of every Christian denomination as an outgrowth of The Da Vinci Code book might well be poised for a second act, or, at least, a curtain call.
The heart of the problem is that the health care industry is so fragmented and in some ways, still a cottage industry, said Gail Boudreaux, president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.
But there seems to have sprung up a cottage industry, especially among the landfill contingent, trying to say that this ADC product is no good.
This was first in the cottage industry - the whole family being involved in weaving cloth at home - and then later as employees at one of the local mills.
Reformers may want to read the book just to remind themselves that there really is a cottage industry of thinkers who believe that ideas like "competition," "choice," and "efficiency" are mortal threats to our kids and our way of life.
We've made quite a cottage industry here of trolling 'zines for comics.
Wind power is no longer a quaint, modest cottage industry, and it's not just some futuristic pipe dream, either.