Call for Papers

Universities have historically been important sites of both knowledge production, conservation and diffusion. Governments all over the world have put considerable resources into institutions of higher education and research. After the breakdown of the East Bloc in the early 1990s, investments in academia even appeared as the new defense policy. The aim was to challenge other countries by brainpower rather than military power.
 
Obviously, the measures taken by the Russian President Vladimir Putin from 24 February 2022 and onwards radically changed the situation. Universities thereby must face a tougher competition for resources, which in turn may limit their opportunities to be creative. In what follows, we identify other serious challenges to the creative “thinking outside the box” mission attained in varying degrees by universities worldwide. All these challenges may differently affect universities, according to their missions (more research versus education-oriented), their strategies (from local to international), their status (public versus private) and their dependence on state control or on their stakeholders, their expected roles in the national society where they are located… So, we expect varying situations to have varying effects on creativity, whatever the definition that can be adopted for this term.
 
First, academic freedom challenges are on the rise throughout much of the world (Lerch et al., 2023; Börzel, 2023). These challenges question university authority regarding who gets employed and what gets taught. These challenges are evident not only in countries with autocratic regimes, Hungary and Turkey, for example, but also in those with democratic legacies, Australia and the Unites States, for instance. Academic freedom challenges stifle creativity and promote conformity to the demands of external forces, be these state agencies or social movements. These demands can invoke the national interest or cultural heritage to undercut academic innovations such as gender, ethnic, or environmental issues in research and teaching. They can also emphasize “relevance” to reward some forms of scholarship while sanctioning more creative and explorative lines of inquiry (March, 1991).
 
The growing bureaucratization of universities and the technologies underpinning it pose related challenges to creativity. The increasing use of metrics to ascertain quality foments standardization regarding research strategies and outlets, and teaching programs. However, in fact, some of the most interesting developments in scientific research involved countering and overturing dominant paradigms, as depicted by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In organizational studies, creative endeavors moved the field away from the once dominant understanding of organizations as rational closed systems structures to broader perspectives emphasizing the institutions and networks that influence organizations. Creative endeavors are less likely to flourish if state agencies, university administrators through central command structures or external stakeholders discourage experimental with ideas and methods that press against canonical knowledge, research design boundaries, teaching programs and pedagogy. They might also be reduced by the exploding use of technologies in teaching methods, student monitoring, research process.
 
Other developments pose both challenges and opportunities. In some universities, a focus on solving real world problems has led to creating multidisciplinary institutes and schools, the School of Sustainability at Stanford University, for example. This development has raised questions about whether disciplines are silos curbing creativity. The same questions can be raised as regards discipline-based journals or teaching programs. Whether multidisciplinarity is the wave of the future enhancing creativity or just another fad leading to intellectual chaos remains to be seen (Abbott, 2001; Jacobs, 2013).
 
Another development with ambiguous impacts on university creativity is the rise and expansion of alternative knowledge productions sites and their interrelationship with universities. University links with industry have been both critiqued as academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhodes, 2004) but also praised as in the celebration of entrepreneurial universities (Clark, 1998) that fill the needs for graduates in the economic sphere. At a time of diminishing state support for universities, will resources from industry increase university flexibility unleashing creative potential? Alternatively, will these ties constitute a new external force with creativity curbing demands? In concrete terms, will the new resources steer students, research and publication to STEM to the detriment of the humanities and arts? Or instead, will multiple sources of funding give universities more leverage in encouraging creativity across the board?
 
Against the above backdrop, the sub-theme aims to invite contributions that shed light on the challenges of university creativity. Both conceptual and empirical papers are invited. We, particularly but not only, welcome submissions that examine the following aspects:

• Organizing universities for creativity

• The role of public funding for university creativity

• Academic leadership and creativity

• Academic freedom and creativity

• Quality control vs. creativity

• Incentives for academic creativity

References

• Abbott, A.D. (2001): Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Börzel, T. (2023): The Globalization of Academic Freedom. Working Paper, Free University of Berlin.
• Clark, B. (1998): Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. Oxford: Pergamon.
• Jacobs, J.A. (2013): In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kuhn, T.S. (1962): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Lerch, J.C., Frank, D.J., & Schofer, E. (2024): “The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022.” American Sociological Review, 89 (1), 88–125.
• March, J.G. (1991): “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning.” Organization Science, 2 (1), 71−87.
• Park, M., Leahey, E., & Funk, R.J. (2023): “Papers and Patents are Becoming Less Disruptive over Time.” Nature, 613 (7942), 138−144.
• Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004): Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Thompson, V.A. (1965): “Bureaucracy and innovation.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 10 (1), 1−20.
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