Call for Papers

This sub-theme explores the role of creativity for organizing from a performative and communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective. Specifically, it enquires into how creative forms of organizing, organization and organizationality take form and endure through communicative performativity. Creative work, in this sense, is not understood as fleeting moments of inspiration that have little long-term impact, but as anticipatory, (often) inventive and sustained efforts that vividly shape organizational and social life. Subsequently, we invite submissions that utilize theories of communication and performativity to explore the ways organizing assemblages come together, persist over time, because of, or despite their creative divergence.
 
Performative stances typically reject any distinctions between normative and descriptive agendas. Organizing, from this perspective, emerges from the practices and conjoined relations of human and non-human actors. Performative inquiry, therefore, holds the potential to surface, highlight and discuss how creativity is crucial to our understanding of how organizations and the organized attend to a world beset with environmental crises, scarcity of resources, geopolitical conflicts, persisting inequalities, social unrest and artificial intelligence paradoxes. Researchers working within this tradition may focus on how actors come to terms with what is of value to them, how they justify their actions or how they invoke external ideas and figures to legitimate preferred stances (Cabantous et al., 2016; Gond et al., 2016; Dobusch et al., 2019). Others may focus on communities of difference and explore ‘critical performativity’ (Spicer et al., 2009) or the performativity of alternative forms of organizing (Esper et al., 2017; Leca et al., 2014; Parker et al., 2014; Parker & Parker, 2017; Reedy et al., 2016).
 
CCO approaches to the challenge the sub-theme outlines can be combined with performative research (e.g., Hollis et al., 2021), or may be stand-alone studies that seek to discuss and explain how communication constitutes creative organizing. CCO-focused investigations may highlight how societies generate novel ideas, technological innovation and practices that promote environmental sustainability, social welfare, justice, and progress for the many. At the organizing, organization and organizationality levels (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2019), the focus could be how creativity stimulates different forms of organizing and how these are communicatively established and sustained in contexts such as networks, activist groups, online communities, values-led organizations or cooperatives. A CCO perspective offers a wealth of constructs and conceptualizations that can aid research in investigating the relationship between creativity and organizing for alternatives. Prominent among these are ventriloquism (Nathues et al., 2020; Wright et al., 2023), authority (Bourgoin et al., 2020; Kuhn, 2008), and CCO expositions of a relational ontology (Kuhn et al., 2017; Cooren, 2020).
 
Moreover, the sub-theme is interested in creatively merging theoretical approaches from other traditions within performative and CCO theorizing. For instance, CCO is sometimes criticized for not containing an explicit focus on power and how it is exercised during organizing. Therefore, we invite research that adopts a more critical stance that enriches the sub-theme by centering organizing and communicating as both political and powerful acts. Similarly, research in the field of open organizing (Splitter et al., 2023) fits well with the sub-theme’s call, as it encourages reflections on how creative and alternative forms of organizing, organization and organizationality can emerge outside of the usual and hierarchical forms of organizing. Work in this area may center how organizations can be creatively opened-up to become more democratic, inclusive and transparent (Dobusch & Dobusch, 2019).
 
Below is a list of suggestive, but not exhaustive, themes that can be addressed:

• How is creative organizing performatively accomplished?

• How do alternative organizational forms take hold?

• How is creative work established for the long term, ensuring that change is durable rather than transient?

• How is creative work communicatively constituted?

• How communication performs and sustains difference?

• How is power exercised when new forms of organizing, organization and organizationality unfold?

• How can the relationships between power and creativity be understood from a performative and/or CCO perspective?

• How can we conceptualize and distinguish creativity from other elements of performative praxis that is ontologically based on alteration and change?

• How organizational difference emerges outside of traditional hierarchies?

• How can organizations be opened-up and become more democratic, inclusive and transparent?

• What kinds of creativity are crucial for forms of alternative, inclusive or open organizing?

• What is the role of communication and performativity in constituting alternative organizing?

• What can we learn from alternative organizing forms that fail?

• What is the dark side of alternative organizing?

• When does alternative organizing become affective mainstream organizing?

References

• Bourgoin, A., Bencherki, N., & Faraj, S. (2020): “’And who are you?’ A performative perspective on authority in organizations.” Academy of Management Journal, 63 (4), 1134–1165.

• Cabantous, L., Gond, J-P., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2016): “Critical essay: Reconsidering critical performativity.” Human Relations, 69 (2), 197–213.
• Cooren, F. (2020): “Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-)Materiality and Organization Studies.” Organization Theory, 1 (3); https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720954444.
• Dobusch, Laura, & Dobusch, Leonhard (2019): “The Relation between Openness and Closure in Open Strategy: Programmatic and Constitutive Approaches to Openness.” In: Seidl, D., Whittington, R., & von Krogh, G. (eds.): Cambridge Handbook on Open Strategy. Forms, Perspectives and Challenges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 330–340.
• Dobusch, L., Dobusch, L., & Müller-Seitz, G. (2019): “Closing for the benefit of openness? The case of Wikimedia’s open strategy process.” Organization Studies, 40 (3), 343–370.
• Dobusch, L., & Schoeneborn, D. (2015): Fluidity, identity, and organizationality: The communicative constitution of anonymous. Journal of Management Studies, 52 (8), 1005–1035.
• Esper, S., Cabantous, L., Barin Cruz, L., & Gond, J.-P. (2017): “Supporting alternative organizations? Exploring scholars’ involvement in the performativity of worker-recovered companies.” Organization, 24 (5), 671–699.
• Gond, J.-P., Cabantous, L., Harding, N., & Learmonth, M. (2016): “What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity.” International Journal of Management Reviews, 18 (4), 440–463.
• Hollis, D., Wright, A., Smolovich-Jones, O., & Smolovich-Jones, N. (2021): “From ‘pretty’ to ‘pretty powerful’: The communicatively constituted power of facial beauty’s performativity.” Organization Studies, 42 (12), 1885–1907.
• Kuhn, T. (2008): “A communicative theory of the firm: Developing an alternative perspective on intra-organizational power and stakeholder relationships.” Organization Studies, 29 (8 & 9), 1227–1254.
• Kuhn, T., Ashcraft, K.L., & Cooren, F. (2017):The Work of Communication. Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Routledge.
• Leca, B., Gond, J.-P., & Barin Cruz, L. (2014): “Building ‘critical performativity engines’ for deprived communities: The construction of popular cooperative incubators in Brazil.” Organization, 21 (5), 683–712.
• Nathues, E., van Vuuren, M., & Cooren, F. (2020): “Speaking about vision, talking in the name of so much more: A methodological framework for ventriloquial analyses in organization studies.” Organization Studies, 42 (9), 1457–1476.
• Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & Land, C. (eds.) (2014): The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization. London: Routledge.
• Parker, S., & Parker, M. (2017): “Antagonism, accommodation and agonism in critical management studies: Alternative organizations as allies.” Human Relations, 70 (11), 1366–1387.
• Reedy, P., King, D., & Coupland, C. (2016): “Organizing for individuation: Alternative organizing, politics and new identities.” Organization Studies, 37 (11), 1553–1573.
• Schoeneborn, D., Kuhn, T., & Kärreman, D. (2019): “The communicative constitution of organization, organizing, and organizationality.” Organization Studies, 40 (4), 475–496.
• Spicer, A., Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2009): “Critical performativity: The unfinished business of critical management studies.” Human Relations, 62 (4), 537–560.
• Splitter, V., Dobusch, L., von Krogh, G., Whittington, R., & Walgenbach, P. (2023): “Openness as organizing principle: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Organization Studies, 44 (1), 7–27.
• Wright, A., Kuhn, T., Michailova, S., & Hibbert, P. (2023): “Ventriloquial authority in management learning and education: A communication as constitutive of organization perspective.” Academy of Management Learning & Education, 22 (2), 312–330.
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