Call for Papers for a Special Issue on Organizational Creativity,Play and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School

Antonio Strati, University of Trento

Elke Weik, University of Leicester

Sarah Drakopoulou Dodd, University of Strathclyde

Deadline: November 30, 2015

Introduction

No longer – and digitalization plays a great role in this change – are we looking for creative individuals simply. Instead, collective and organizational creativity are needed. Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2006) and Crowdsourcing (Chanal, 2010) have made it more or less evident that heterogeneity and openness have big advantages when it comes to creativity and innovation. A perhaps more radical way of saying this is to place emphasis not so much upon what is in people, but rather what is in-between people. Not only is openness and heterogeneity more central in discussions on how to organize (creatively) for creativity, play, and entrepreneurship, but also the in-between, the entre-. As relation, this entre- represents interdisciplinary potential for new knowledge. It also indicates where movement can happen, and where space for play is incipient (Hjorth, 2005). Our interest in investigating the playful, creative and entrepreneurial sides of everyday organizing has also fuelled an urge to stay with practices, include the body, forces, and the sensorial in what we research. We have thus seen the emergence of an interdisciplinary study of art, aesthetics and organization (Strati, 2008; Guillet de Monthoux, 2004; Austin and Devin, 2003) where we are invited to learn how artful making and artful practices provide examples for those who want to learn how to enhance the organizational conditions for creativity, play and entrepreneurship.

In the present shift from a late-industrial into a postindustrial society and economy, organizational life changes rather drastically. Managerialism has sought to normalize the proposal that all of our organized life is subject to management and should (thus) be managed. Managers and management knowledge was central to organizing in the industrial era. The successful emergence of the business school has also assisted in making management knowledge into the lingua franca of the industrial and late-industrial society/economy (O’Connor, 2011; Gagliardi and Czarniawska, 2006). This is presently changing, and the story that seeks to explain the necessity of this change often refers to the consequences from integrating Asia into the world economy: we are now all pressed to become more creative and innovative. Since the 1980s, this has been interpreted as a call for entrepreneurship (Birch, 1979). One way to understand the relationships between creativity and entrepreneurship is to think entrepreneurship as the organization-creation that makes the new idea (the invention) become an innovation (a solution that generates users/customers). The virtually new becomes actually new through entrepreneurial actualization, understood as organization-creation (Hjorth, 2012).

How is this new creative, playful and entrepreneurial organizational life to be organized? What are the organizational conditions for creativity, play and entrepreneurship? Amabile has researched individual creativity, group- and team creativity, leadership for creativity and innovation, and her work suggests not only that everyday organizational life is changing due to work becoming gradually re-defined as creative and conducted for the purpose of contributing to innovation as output. It also suggests that creativity can be organized and led. At least that there are organizational conditions that help creativity on the way (Amabile and Khaire, 2008) and thus that one can indeed avoid killing creativity (Amabile, 1998). Is this so, or are organizational constraints thereby underestimated (Elke, 2011)? Is there a dynamics of aesthetics and everyday organizing of creativity, play and entrepreneurship that we are missing (Drakopoulou Dodd, 2014)?

Suspecting this might be so, we are eager to point out the importance of considering the ‘knowing-in-practice’ (Gherardi and Strati, 2012) that characterize the dynamics between entrepreneurship, play and creativity, grounded on and embodied in the materiality of the tacit, relational and aesthetic nature of everyday organizational life (Strati, 1999). The various forms of embodiment of organizational life (Special Issue, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 29(4), 2013) resound the aesthetic and intellectual richness of studies on managing creativity (Paris, 2007), aesthetics and entrepreneurship (Beyes, 2009), or work and play (Sørensen and Spoelstra, 2012).

The aim of this Special Issue of OS is to: (a) advance studies of creativity, play and entrepreneurship in organizations and in contexts of everyday life’s organized conditions; (b) stimulate innovative theorizing on creativity/play/entrepreneurship in a variety of organizational, spatial, and cultural settings; (c) facilitate discussion and connections with creativity/play/entrepreneurship studies from diverse disciplines; and (d) develop understandings of performative scholarship and possibilities for making a difference through creative/playful/entrepreneurial participation.

For that purpose, we welcome theoretical and empirical submissions from a variety of disciplines and perspectives (such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, aesthetics, management, cultural studies, political science) especially those with an interest in the contextual, practice-oriented aspects of organizational creativity, play and entrepreneurship. We also welcome submissions where this special issue topic is addressed performatively in artful, playful, creative and entrepreneurial ways. Finally, we also encourage submissions that acknowledge the historical, political and aesthetic nature of organisational creativity, play and entrepreneurship.

The following is a list of indicative, but not exhaustive, topic areas, all of which could be addressed:

How creativity, play and entrepreneurship are part of the postindustrial conditions of organization

Examinations of the novel relationships between management and entrepreneurship in the context of innovative work

Studies of how play and playfulness are related to creativity and entrepreneurship in organization

Examinations of the aesthetic dimension of organizational creativity, its beauty and its ugliness, its sensorial worlds.

Explorations of a philosophy of organizational creativity

Studies of how we can learn from art and artful practices in conceptualizing organizing and leading for creativity and entrepreneurship in organization

Explorations of how play and creativity are embodied in the entrepreneurial everyday organizational practices

Studies that draw on literature and literary studies to conceptualize creativity, play and entrepreneurship in the context of work organization

Studies of nascent forms of organization, emergent organizations, organization-in-creation

Papers that address the in-betweens as a source of creativity, play and entrepreneurship: interruptions, breaks, pauses, postponements, upsetting.

Examinations of the process of organizational creation, the dynamics of the virtual and actual

Studies of the role of fabulation, fiction, imagination for organizational creativity and entrepreneurship

Studies of creative/entrepreneurial leadership; leadership for creativity/entrepreneurship

Examinations of collective creativity; the social dynamics of play

Submissions

To be considered for publication, papers must be submitted via the OS website at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/orgstudies by November 30, 2015. There you can also find guidelines for submission and information on the review procedures. Please note that participation in the workshop is highly recommended (but not a prerequisite) if you intend to submit a paper to the Special Issue. You will be able to submit your paper for this Special Issue through SAGETrack between the 1^st and the 30^th of November 2015.

References

Amabile

(1998) “How to kill creativity,” Harvard Business Review, September, 77-87.

Amabile

Teresa M.

Khaire

Mukti

. “Creativity and the Role of the Leader.” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 10 (October 2008).

Austin

Devin

2003. Artful Making – what managers need to know about how artists work. London/New York: Prentice-Hall.

Beyes

(2009) “Spaces of intensity – urban entrepreneurship as redistribution of the sensible,” in Hjorth

Steyaert

(Eds.) The Politics and Aesthetics of Entrepreneurship, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 92-112.

Birch

(1979) The job generation process. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Chanal

(2010) “The difficulties involved in developing business models open to innovation communities: the case of a crowdsourcing platform,” M@n@gement, 13(4): 318-341.

Chesbrough

(2006) Open Business Model: How to thrive in the new innovation landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Drakopoulou Dodd

(2014) “Roots Radical – Place, Power and Practice in Punk Entrepreneurship,” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 26: 165-205.

Gagliardi

Czarniawska

(Eds.) (2006) Management Education and Humanities, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

10.

Gherardi

Strati

(2012) Learning and knowing in practice-based studies. Cheltenham, Gloss: Edward Elgar.

11.

Guillet de Monthoux

(2004) The Art Firm, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

12.

Hjorth

(2005) “Organizational Entrepreneurship: with de Certeau on Creating Heterotopias (or spaces for play)”, Journal of Management Inquiry, 14, No. 4, 386-398.

13.

Hjorth

(2012) “Organisational Entrepreneurship - An Art of the Weak?”, in Hjorth

(Ed.) Handbook on Organisational Entrepreneurship, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 169-192.

14.

O’Connor

E. S.

(2011) Creating New Knowledge in Management – appropriating the field’s lost foundations, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

15.

Paris

(2007), “Organization, processes and structures of creation,” Focuses on Cultural Topics, 5, pp. 2-16

16.

Sørensen

B. M.

Spoelstra

(2012). Play at work: continuation, intervention and usurpation. Organization, 19(1), 81-97.

17.

Strati

. (1999) Organization and Aesthetics. London: Sage.

18.

Strati

(2008) “Aesthetics in the study of organizational life” in Barry

Hansen

(Eds.) The SAGE handbook of new approaches in management and organization, London: Sage, p. 229-238.

19.

Special Issue on Body, Senses and Knowing in Organization, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 29 (4), 2013

20.

Weik

Elke

(2012): Introducing ‘The Creativity of Action’ Into Institutionalist Theory. M@n@gement, 15(5), 563-581.