Search results

This volume brings together empirical and conceptual papers that investigate the challenges of organizing creativity in the innovation journey in and across different empirical contexts. Seen as the basis for innovating new products, processes or services, organizing creativity is studied as intentional efforts that occur in teams, organizations, and fields. What creativity is, how it is defined, negotiated and recognized is hereby co-constructed with different audiences and in different economic and societal spheres. The papers in this volume extend our understanding of these contextualized social dynamics of organizing creativity in four directions. The first direction sheds light on the temporal dynamics of organizing creativity in artistic fields. The second direction compares creative processes in arts and science, thereby examining tensions and uncertainties in the creative process unfolding in two distinctive contexts of creativity. The third direction examines identity struggles of creative agents in organizations with clashing roles, professional norms, and ambiguities in creativity assessment. The fourth and final direction unravels the communicative journey of ideas from pitching to feedback, revealing how ideas are challenged, enriched, and acquire meaning in communicative interaction. Overall, the papers in this volume contribute to a situated view of creative processes in innovation which goes beyond questions of idea generation to account for dynamics of idea development, judgment, and dissemination which involve identity struggles, evaluation, and communication – processes which are at the heart of organizing for innovation.

While audiences play a key role in the implementation and ultimate success of novel ideas, how audiences are reflected in negotiations about quality within the creative process remains undertheorized. We examine this question through a comparative ethnography of two settings where digital technology use magnifies the countless micro-decisions involved in producing a creative output and considerations of audience evaluation throughout the creative process – Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research. We find that actors encounter a fundamental tension between two competing standards of quality: the technically perfect, processed and ideal versus the empirically grounded, unprocessed and real. We show how actors navigate this tension vis-á-vis three different audiences – internal peers, extended community, and external reviewers – and how this manifests differently across audiences and the arts and sciences, depending on the audience’s expertise. Our study illuminates the tension between the “ideal versus real” in creative processes that is brought to the fore when creating with digital technology, extends extant research on audiences and organizing for creativity, and offers unique insights from our comparative ethnography across the arts and sciences.

Arts festivals use projects to showcase creative works, configuring a creative field, whether locally, regionally or internationally, by whom engages and attends to the arts festival: artists, funders, media and audiences. This study compares the Edinburgh and Berlin arts festivals founded after World War II. Each city began with a founding festival. Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama sought to reconcile and heal international relations whereas the Berlin International Film Festival sought to showcase free expression and democracy. Both founding festivals were internationally oriented, as seen in their names. Each city added festivals over time and engaged in distinct temporal strategies and configured different creative fields. Edinburgh’s additional festivals entrained to its founding festival, synchronizing in time and place five festivals which led to greater duration and intensity of the experience and configured an international creative field: artists, media, and audiences who attended and engaged with the city festivals. In contrast, Berlin’s founding Film festival, which was internationally oriented, was followed by festivals that were treated as distinct, scheduling each festival sequentially across a yearly calendar and configuring a creative field regionally oriented around Germanic language and culture. Thus, a city’s temporal strategies for arts festivals may configure international, regional and local creative fields, changing who comprises the field to interact.

The experience of “misfit” between individuals’ professional identities and their work roles or work contexts is common in career transitions. In contrast to extant literature that focuses on the identity struggle of these people, this study examines how problematic identity dynamics associated with misfit motivate the shift toward the development of positive identities and induce creativity in meaning-making and change-oriented actions. It builds on the insights of Mead (1934) and Joas (1996) who view creativity as the most significant aspect of human agency, and the identity work literature that highlights the agentic process in identity construction. The study looks at a group of “pracademics” whose career trajectories deviate from the prototypical patterns in academia. It examines the identity work strategies that these people undertake to overcome misfit and shows how identity work liberates them from the limits of a particular identity, and facilitates new activities that alter aspects of their work contexts. The study advances our understanding of identity work as a creative human endeavor and sheds new light on the change-oriented agency of misfits.

Conflicting theoretical perspectives present radical innovation as originating either from the core or the periphery of a system. Studies tend to bridge this divide by way of positions or roles. This paper proposes a process interface, where ideas from the core are radicalized on the periphery, inverting the established tendency of “tempering” of innovation. This approach realigns the primacy of the core in diffusing ideas and that of the periphery in reinforcing distinctiveness. Radicalization and tempering are interdependent, to the extent that the realization of one denotes other’s termination. Quantitative and qualitative evidence from the history of art lend support to the arguments, including breakthrough paintings, such as The Scream by Munch and Black Square by Malevitch. Radicalization is facilitated by simultaneously increasing differences and exchanges between core and periphery. The mobility of new ideas from the core to the periphery is likely to provoke resistance in a conservative environment. The collision of opposing social forces raises the stakes, making compromise less feasible or desirable.

This study explores the yet understudied productive aspects of uncertainty in the organization of creative collaboration and scrutinizes the practices that allow participants to fruitfully use it as a resource for the creation of novelty. In contrast to former conceptualizations of uncertainty as a quantity to be reduced through organizing, we apply a qualitative heuristic where uncertainty may shift different dimensions regarding participation (who?), procedure (how?) and content (what?). Based on eight creativity biographies in two creative fields, music production and pharmaceutical development, encompassing 36 semi-structured qualitative interviews, we identify embracing, ignoring, and fixing uncertainty as three distinct, yet interrelated practices to engage with uncertainty and thereby enable the emergence of valuable novelty in interaction. We further discover that the participants shift these practices between the different dimensions of uncertainty during the process of creative collaboration. Moreover, we argue that these shifts are necessary to maintain creativity in collaborative processes. Thereupon, we contribute insights to the so far enigmatic notion of organizing for collaborative creativity.

Uncertainty about Intellectual Property Regulations (IPR) is prevalent in today’s knowledge-based and creative industries. While prior literature indicates that regulatory uncertainty affects creative processes, studies that systematically analyze the effects of IPR on the experiencing of involved actors in creative processes across fields are rare. We ask how core professional actor groups including creators, legal professionals and managers involved in creative processes experience regulatory uncertainty in the fields of music and pharma. By studying practices of engaging with, circumventing and avoiding regulatory uncertainty about IPR, we show how creative processes in both the music and pharma fields are entrenched with emotional-cognitive experiences such as anxiety, indifference and hope that vary by professional group. Our findings point toward managers and legal professionals observing, exposing and cultivating emotions by ascribing experiences to other actor groups. We conclude that comparing regulation-related emotions of involved actors across fields helps to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamics of creative processes.

Research on creativity highlights feedback as an important driver of creative ideas. However, it advances a rather mechanistic understanding of communication, which obscures the specific practices in feedback interactions as well as their constitutive role in shaping creative ideas. In this paper, we advance conceptual arguments on how actors interact in communicative feedback processes on creative ideas. By drawing on the theory of communicative action by Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas’ theory of creative action, we develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of creativity as a phenomenon that is constituted in communication. These authors’ work draws conceptual attention to the practices through which actors negotiate the novelty and usefulness of creative ideas in communicative interactions, the important role of feedback givers as creative actors, and “spaces for play” as a communicative sphere that allows creativity to emerge. We extend the literature on creativity by introducing a theory of communicative and creative action that offers to unpack communicative interactions through which creativity does or does not come into being.