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Book part
Publication date: 8 July 2021

Colin M. Fisher, Ozumcan Demir-Caliskan, Mel Yingying Hua and Matthew A. Cronin

Organizational scholars have long been interested in how jazz musicians manage tensions between structure and freedom, plans and action, and familiarity and novelty. Although…

Abstract

Organizational scholars have long been interested in how jazz musicians manage tensions between structure and freedom, plans and action, and familiarity and novelty. Although improvisation has been conceptualized as a way of managing such paradoxes, the process of improvisation itself contains paradoxes. In this essay, we return to jazz improvisation to identify a new paradox of interest to organizational scholars: the paradox of intentionality. To improvise creatively, jazz musicians report that they must “try not to try,” or risk undermining the very spontaneity that is prized in jazz. Jazz improvisers must therefore control their ability to relinquish deliberate control of their actions. To accomplish this, they engage in three interdependent practices. Jazz musicians intentionally surrender their sense of active control (“letting go”) while creating a passive externalized role for this sense of active control (using a “third ear”). Letting go allows new and unexpected ideas to emerge, while the metaphorical third ear can identify promising ideas or problematic execution and, in doing so, re-engage active agency (“grabbing hold”). Examining the practices within creative improvisation reveals the complexity of the lived experience of the paradox, which we argue suggests further integration among organizational research on improvisation, creativity, and paradox.

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Interdisciplinary Dialogues on Organizational Paradox: Investigating Social Structures and Human Expression, Part B
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80117-187-8

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Book part
Publication date: 3 October 2006

Mary M. Crossan and David K. Hurst

Management theory has paid scant attention to the nature and reconciliation of the tension between exploration and exploitation, in spite of its central importance to strategic…

Abstract

Management theory has paid scant attention to the nature and reconciliation of the tension between exploration and exploitation, in spite of its central importance to strategic renewal. This paper uses Hurst's (1995) ecocycle to frame the tension and employs complexity theory to examine how the tension manifests itself across levels and time. Improvisation is advanced as a process to reconcile and manage the tension between exploration and exploitation.

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Ecology and Strategy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-435-5

Book part
Publication date: 19 August 2017

Victoria Choi Yue Woo, Richard J. Boland and David L. Cooperrider

As they say, “Change is the only constant.” Thriving and surviving during a period of extraordinary collision of technological advances, globalization, and climate change can be…

Abstract

As they say, “Change is the only constant.” Thriving and surviving during a period of extraordinary collision of technological advances, globalization, and climate change can be daunting. At any given point in one’s life, a transition can be interpreted in terms of the magnitude of change (how big or small) and the individual’s ontological experience of change (whether it disrupts an equilibrium or adapts an emergent way of life). These four quadrants represent different ways to live in a highly dynamic and complex world. We share the resulting four-quadrant framework from a quantitative and a mixed methods study to examine responses to various ways we respond to transitions. Contingent upon these two dimensions, one can use a four-quadrant framework to mobilize resources to design a response and hypothesize a desired outcome. Individuals may find themselves at various junctions of these quadrants over a lifespan. These four quadrants provide “requisite variety” to navigate individual ontology as they move into and out of fluid spaces we often call instability during a time of transition. In this chapter, we identified social, cognitive, psychological, and behavioral factors that contribute to thriving transition experiences, embracing dynamic stability. Two new constructs were developed, the first measures the receptivity to change, Transformation Quotient (TQ) and second measures the range of responses to transitions from surviving to thriving, Thriving Transitional Experiences (TTE). We hope our work will pave the way for Thriving to become a “normal” outcome of experiencing change by transforming the lexicon and expectation of engaging with transitions.

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Human Capital and Assets in the Networked World
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-828-4

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Book part
Publication date: 17 July 2011

Ethan S. Bernstein and Frank J. Barrett

How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities…

Abstract

How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities of the organization? This chapter explores the organizational decisions and practices leaders can initiate to extend, strengthen, or transform “ordinary capabilities” (Winter, 2003) into enhanced improvisational competence and dynamic capabilities. We call this leadership logic the “jazz mindset.” We draw upon seven characteristics of jazz bands as outlined by Barrett (1998) to show that strategic leaders of business organizations can enhance dynamic capabilities by strengthening practices observed in improvising jazz bands.

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Research in Organizational Change and Development
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78052-022-3

Book part
Publication date: 26 July 2005

Carrie Lobman

This chapter briefly discusses the postmodern critique of developmental psychology and then presents a Vygotskian-influenced alternative understanding of development as a…

Abstract

This chapter briefly discusses the postmodern critique of developmental psychology and then presents a Vygotskian-influenced alternative understanding of development as a non-linear, relational, improvised activity engaged in by groupings of people. This reconstruction of development was the basis of a professional development project in which early childhood teachers participated in a 6-week improv workshop. The goal of the project was to reconnect the teachers with their ability to improvise or to participate in process-oriented, meaning-making activity. The project was based on the hypothesis that developing teachers’ ability to improvise would give them an alternative to relating to children as being on, or off, a developmental trajectory.

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Practical Transformations and Transformational Practices: Globalization, Postmodernism, and Early Childhood Education
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-364-8

Book part
Publication date: 14 November 2022

Geoff Bright and Anton Hunter

The Noise Upstairs (NU) is a monthly freely improvised (‘free improv’) music night with a home above a café bar in a mixed/student suburb of Manchester. This chapter uses the…

Abstract

The Noise Upstairs (NU) is a monthly freely improvised (‘free improv’) music night with a home above a café bar in a mixed/student suburb of Manchester. This chapter uses the perspective of critical improvisation studies to reflect on aspects of a performance ethnography carried out by the authors, both of whom are performers and one of whom (Hunter) curates the NU night for the NU collective. Free improv is a post-1960s set of meta-musical practices related to but contesting both ‘jazz’, ‘free jazz’, ‘new music’ and ‘experimental’ music. In it, real-time co-creation and negotiation of social-and-musical relationships are paramount. Consequently, the question of whether a politics of sorts is enacted in the dialogic and multilateral socialities generated in free improv is a substantive one. In addressing it, the authors deploy some concepts from the ‘affective turn’ in social theory to review how the general milieu and out-of-the-hat ensemble-formation approach adopted at NU in fact enables a ‘minor’ micro-political practice of participating differently to be established there. Arising from that discussion, and in line with a key theme of the wider PARTISPACE study, the authors then discuss whether that politics might meaningfully (and usefully) be articulated in terms of ‘democracy’.

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Reshaping Youth Participation: Manchester in a European Gaze
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80043-358-8

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Book part
Publication date: 9 August 2022

Beitske Boonstra

The practice of ‘city-making’ – a civic-led form of urban development – is currently gaining attention from urban professionals and scholars across Europe. Whereas scholars have…

Abstract

The practice of ‘city-making’ – a civic-led form of urban development – is currently gaining attention from urban professionals and scholars across Europe. Whereas scholars have so far focused mostly on the conditions that make such civic-led urban development possible, little research has been dedicated to the skills and capacities of city-makers. This challenge is taken up in this chapter. Interviews with city-makers across Europe reveal that whereas knowledge of socio-spatial processes and process competences are important, city-makers also deploy a third set of skills, including the ability to act in the moment, adapt to contingencies and connect personal drivers to city-wide processes. This third set of skills is further conceptualised, by drawing out an analogy with Deleuzian-Guattarian lines of flight and modern dance improvisation techniques. Four dance improvisation techniques are discussed more in detail and compared with the practices described by the city-makers interviewed for this study. The concluding section of this chapter speculates on how the notion of improvisation could be adopted within wider practices of spatial planning and urban governance as well.

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Moving Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3

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Book part
Publication date: 26 October 2005

Shifra Schonmann

The point that I wish to make is that we must be constantly aware of Shakespeare's “whining school-boy”, employ our pedagogy in the framework of its power, and be very humble…

Abstract

The point that I wish to make is that we must be constantly aware of Shakespeare's “whining school-boy”, employ our pedagogy in the framework of its power, and be very humble while preaching our ideas, hoping to find the right way to bring a smile to the faces of our children. It is in this context that I wish to suggest a theatrical framework for teacher training, that is to say – theatrical representations of teaching as performance.

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Learning from Research on Teaching: Perspective, Methodology, and Representation
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-254-2

Book part
Publication date: 12 August 2014

Scott Currie

From the pioneering work of Howard Becker (1982) on jazz scenes as art worlds, to the influence of Erving Goffman (1967) on Ingrid Monson’s (1996) foundational framework for jazz…

Abstract

From the pioneering work of Howard Becker (1982) on jazz scenes as art worlds, to the influence of Erving Goffman (1967) on Ingrid Monson’s (1996) foundational framework for jazz ethnography, symbolic interactionist premises have already had a powerful impact on the study of jazz and popular music. Nonetheless, they still have much to contribute toward a richer and more nuanced understanding of how jazz musicians jointly improvise meaningful musical discourses. Building upon these earlier precedents, I propose that further critical elaboration of symbolic interactionist notions – including social worlds, generalized others, and facework – could hold the key to a hermeneutics of musical meaning premised upon improvisational interplay. Specifically, I propose that the internal structure of local jazz worlds or scenes, arising from distinctive modes of meaning production, gives rise to particular types of generalized other, which in turn structures the development of artists’ professional selves or personae through the dialogic internalization of durable aesthetic predispositions. From this perspective, the common stylistic commitments that make group improvisation possible and productive may begin with widely acclaimed paradigmatic performances, whose import is then encapsulated in the shared technical conceptions of artist peer circles, broadened through articulation with the consensus aesthetic principles of culture industries, and deepened by investment with the normative beliefs associated with audience identification and consumption. Ultimately, through improvisational interaction predicated on such shared paradigms, conceptions, principles, and beliefs, jazz musicians construct and project mutually compatible creative selves, whose onstage encounters with one another suggest dramaturgical processes of meaning production, which endow the interplay of their spontaneous aesthetic gestures with narrative significance.

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Revisiting Symbolic Interaction in Music Studies and New Interpretive Works
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78350-838-9

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Book part
Publication date: 10 December 2018

David M. Boje and Mike Bonifer

This chapter is about quantum storytelling and improvisation and how to use quantum storytelling as an improv theater for social change. Quantum storytelling, in its fore-caring…

Abstract

This chapter is about quantum storytelling and improvisation and how to use quantum storytelling as an improv theater for social change. Quantum storytelling, in its fore-caring, is about producing an ethics of care where none exists. In the quantum storytelling theater for change, we envision a stage with human and non-human actors (animals, plants, quantum wave/particles) and ways to collapse waves of quantum potentiality into new possibilities for human survival, for posthumanist survival.

We will assert that this happens through improvisation: something called “quantum storytelling with improv.” Our example for this chapter is a theater company we created in Las Cruces, NM, called “Veterans Theater” in which improv is the performance approach. Boje teaches in the belly of the beast (the Business College) at New Mexico State University, a course called “Leadership Is Theater in Society” that uses improv. It is not only about improv but it is also based on Theater of the Oppressed (Boal, 1979, 2002) and Improvisation for the Theater (Spolin, 1983); it also draws from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970) and Rules for Radicals (Alinsky, 1971), both of which call on improv as a process for social change. Improv is a vital leadership skill in complex polycultural systems, which is the future of business. Leadership theory is dead. Get over it! Or, resurrect it with improv!

Details

The Emerald Handbook of Quantum Storytelling Consulting
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-671-0

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