Call for Papers

A broad array of modern occupations, such as web, fashion and product design, video game development, cinematography, photography, architecture, and many scientific disciplines, increasingly harness digital technologies for creative endeavors. For example, animators and film editors leverage digital technology to create and manipulate millions of pixels as they develop animated movies (Catmull, 2014; Mannucci, 2017) and utilize CGI to advance previously impossible projects (Whissel, 2014); musicians harness pre-recorded digital tracks to explore creative possibilities (Mixerman, 2014) and share music files across the globe to spur asynchronous co-creation; scientists engage in high-throughput data analysis to advance scientific discovery (Dougherty & Dunne, 2012; Drews, 2000); and creatives across industries utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to springboard idea generation (Amabile, 2019). Digital technology increasingly permeates the broad spectrum of activities comprising creative work (Harrison et al., 2022); it both enhances and complicates individual (Jia et al., 2024) and collective creativity (Bruns & Long Lingo, 2023).
 
Scholars often herald digital technology’s opportunities for rapid and unlimited experimentation, iteration, and recombination with seemingly little effort and at little or no cost (Austin, 2016; Sapsed & Tschang, 2014) and the innovation it can foster across creative fields (Boland et al., 2007). Digital technologies “augment the creative abilities of people and organizations and make new and valuable forms of innovation possible” (Austin, 2016: 2) by offering limitless experimentation in any stage of the creative process (Sapsed & Tschang, 2014). While scholars typically highlight the benefits of digital technology for creativity, a burgeoning set of studies suggests that it may complicate and present unique challenges to collective creative endeavors. Digital technology has been found to undermine effective prototype evaluation (Bailey et al., 2012), change existing work roles, relations, and processes (Dougherty & Dunne, 2012; Marion & Fixson, 2021), promote excessive iterations, suboptimal solutions, and delayed design decisions (Fixson & Marion, 2012), and amplify the tedious work involved in creative work (Bruns & Long Lingo, 2023). Given these ambiguous and inconsistent findings, and the stark increase of digital technology in creative work across the broadest spectrum of industries, research that interrogates and illuminates the digitalized future of creative work is urgently needed.
 
This sub-theme seeks to bring together scholars studying practices, processes, and work associated with digital creativity both on the individual and collective level. Following Tilson et al. (2010: 749), we “distinguish … digitizing – a technical process – from digitalization – a sociotechnical process of applying digitizing techniques to broader social and institutional contexts that render digital technologies infrastructural” and expressly include both in our call.
 
We welcome papers that are motivated by the following and similar questions:

• How does digital creativity compare to creativity in a non-digital context, and what does this mean for our understanding of creativity?

• How does digitization and digitalization shape the way creative outcomes are imagined, produced and disseminated?

• How do creative workers leverage digital technology (including AI) over the course of creative projects? What are the unanticipated, hidden downsides of working with digital technology at different points in the creative process?

• What does creative ownership and identity look like in the context of digital technology and AI?

• How does digitization and digitalization shape careers and change career trajectories in creative professions?

• What is different or similar in digital creative ecosystems? What are the emerging roles, contractual relations, and gatekeepers?

• What is the role of relationality in digital creative contexts?

• What are the emerging critical skills – such as prompt engineering – needed to master creativity in the digital age? How do professionals acquire these?

• What are the necessary skills for digital creativity management and leaders working with creatives utilizing digital technology/AI?

References

• Amabile, T.M. (2019): “Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and a World of Surprises.” Academy of Management Discoveries, 6 (3), 351–354.

• Austin, R.D. (2016): Unleashing Creativity with Digital Technology. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 2016.
• Bailey, D., Leonardi, P., & Barley, S. (2012): “The Lure of The Virtual.” Organization Science, 23 (5), 1485–1504.
• Boland, R.J., Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2007): “Wakes of Innovation in Project Networks: The Case of Digital 3-D Representations in Architecture, Engineering, And Construction.” Organization Science, 18 (4), 631–647.
• Bruns, H.C., & Long Lingo, E. (2024): “Tedious Work: Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization in the Arts and Sciences.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 69 (1), 39–79.
• Catmull, E. (2014): Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. New York: Random House.
• Dougherty, D., & Dunne, D. (2012): “Digital Science and Knowledge Boundaries In Complex Innovation.” Organization Science, 23 (5), 1467–1484.
• Drews, J. (2000): “Drug Discovery: A Historical Perspective.” Science, 287 (5460), 1960–1964.
• Fixson, S., & Marion, T. (2012): “Back-Loading: A Potential Side Effect of Employing Digital Design Tools in New Product Development.” The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29, 140.
• Harrison, S.H., Rouse, E.D., Fisher, C.M., & Amabile, T. M. (2022): “The Turn Toward Creative Work.” Academy of Management Collections, 1 (1), 1–15.
• Jia, N., Luo, X., Fang, Z., & Liao, C. (2024): “When and How Artificial Intelligence Augments Employee Creativity.” Academy of Management Journal, 67 (1), 5–32.
• Mannucci, P. (2017): “Drawing Snow White and Animating Buzz Lightyear: Technological Toolkit Characteristics and Creativity in Cross-Disciplinary Teams.” Organization Science, 28 (4), 711–728.
• Marion, T.J., & Fixson, S.K. (2021): “The Transformation of the Innovation Process: How Digital Tools Are Changing Work, Collaboration, and Organizations in New Product Development.” The Journal of Product Innovation Management, 38 (1), 192–215.
• Mixerman (2014): Zen and the Art of Mixing (2 ed.). Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Books.
• Sapsed, J., & Tschang, F.T. (2014): “Art Is Long, Innovation Is Short: Lessons From The Renaissance and The Digital Age.” Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 83 (1), 127–141.
• Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K., & Sørensen, C. (2010): “Research Commentary – Digital Infrastructures: The Missing IS Research Agenda.” Information Systems Research, 21, 748–759.
• Whissel, K. (2014): Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.
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