Call for Papers

“A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.”
Mark Rothko [added emphasis]

Creativity is one of those iridescent phenomena that organizations must have at their disposal, but which no organization can really dispose of. Creativity arises (or not), but it obviously cannot be ordered or even simply commanded into existence (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Creative action eludes any simple instrumentalization and requires its own mode and rationality of action, which focuses on aesthetics and aesthetic experiences (Joas, 2005; Strati, 1992; Strati & de Monthoux, 2002). Emmeshed in contexts where artificial intelligence, algorithms, and other advanced forms of technology are becoming increasingly commonplace, organizations in late modern society nevertheless must and want to be creative. Consequently, they must unfold this creativity dispositif (Reckwitz, 2017), and to instrumentalize something that is essentially not instrumental and not intentional, but autotelic and emergent.
 
For a long time, organizational research on creativity only addressed the associated tensions in a one-sided way and treated creativity as another production factor (and thus as a means to an end) or as an end in itself whose contextual factors and antecedents need to be determined and causally understood (Woodman et al., 1993; Amabile, 1996; George, 2007). Only recently, and in the course of more philosophically and sociologically informed research on creativity (Hjorth et al., 2018; Ingold, 2022), has the non-teleological and emergent character of creativity increasingly come to the fore. With it the fundamental question of how organizational creativity can be understood beyond means and ends, but rather as something that occurs and happens in organizations (Austin et al., 2018; Koch et al., 2018).
 
In the context of organizational strategy research, two perspectives are of particular importance, which view creativity primarily from a practice and/or a process perspective. Both perspectives are characterized by taking social reality as emerging, that is, social phenomena only come into existence because of the activity that constitute them (Bergson, 1913; Rescher, 1996, 2000; Whitehead, 1926/85, 1929; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). This basic point of departure has informed research in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Strategy has seen this develop into strategy-in-practices (Chia & Mackay, 2023; MacKay et al., 2021), arguing that organizational outcomes are realized because of a multitude of coping, albeit within predispositions that make this activity congeal into a pattern that is the apparent strategy (cf. Mintzberg & Waters, 1985). Such “indirect” strategic action has been dubbed amongst others as emergent strategy (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), as autonomous strategic action (Burgelman, 2002), as ‘wayfinding’ (Chia & Holt, 2009), or as effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2009, 2001), to provide alternative perspectives to the dominant strategy as deliberate planning approach.
 
A similar argument has been made for innovation (Garud et al., 2016; Garud et al., 2018), seeing the process as a constant arranging and re-arranging of patterned activity into temporary settlements. The emergence of novelty is presented as performative, as activity constantly constituting and changing common practices. There is something inherently creative to notions like practical coping, performativity, and effectuation, with people expected to act in a constant flow of situations as these appear as similar at best yet not equivalent to what they experienced before.
 
The sub-theme invites submissions from scholars in creativity, strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship who seek to understand creativity as autotelic/open-ended and emerging from and with the patterning of activity by which organizational outcomes, novelty, and new business are realized. More particularly, we are interested in research on playfulness, serendipity, indirect action, coincidence, improvisation, and unanticipated outcomes, among other concerns, which appreciate management and organization as contributing to a creativity journey rather than delivering on pre-defined outcomes. Process approaches also tend to question the extent to which agency attributed to an individual strategist, entrepreneur, innovator contributes to the process; favoring an assemblage of individual, social, and material actors (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Papers can draw on a variety of process theories and practice approaches. Recognizing that such research poses significant challenges, particularly when empirically studying the Aristotelian autotelic open-ended flows of process, we are also interested in new methodological approaches that do justice to a process ontology. We are equally interested in conceptual explorations.
 
As such, this sub-theme hopes to both instigate and facilitate lively academic debate and fruitful dialogue on the value of strong process-philosophical approaches to enrich our understanding of creativity. Some of the questions the sub-theme could entertain include:

• How can a “non-instrumental instrumentalization” of creativity in organizations be conceived of and conceptually framed?

• How can we appreciate the creative contribution of a strategist, innovator, entrepreneur in the assemblage of human and non-human actors?

• What is the role of non-human actors for unfolding the non-instrumentalization of creativity in organizations?

• What is the relation in organizations between the telos to create something new and useful and the autotelos to create?

• How can spaces for autotelic creativity be created in organizations?

• Are there incommensurable forms of creativity in organizations that resist any instrumentalization and, if so, what impact do they have on the creation of something new and useful?

• How do we understand organizational outcomes as creative in an essentially open-ended process?

• What is the role of aesthetics and aesthetic experiences in the creativity journey?

• To what extent is creativity and the creativity journey an ‘open’ process involving participation beyond a focal organization?

• What methodologies, methods and/or templates allow for researching the autotelic and emergent character of creativity?

References

• Amabile, T. . (1996): Creativity in context: Update to “The Social Psychology of Creativity”. Boulder, CO: Westview.

• Austin, R., Hjorth, D., & Hessel, S. 2018. How aesthetics and economy become conversant in creative firms. Organization Studies, 39(11): 1501-1519.
• Bergson, H. (1913): An introduction to metaphysics. London: Macmillan and Co.
• Burgelman, R. A. 2002. Strategy as vector and the inertia of coevolutionary lock-in. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47: 325-357.
• Chia, R., & Holt, R. (2009): Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Chia, R.C. and Mackay, D., (2023): Strategy-in-practices: A Process-philosophical Perspective on Strategy-making. Cambridge University Press.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996): Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins.
• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987): A Thousand Plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.): Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Garud, R., Gehman, J., & Tharchen, T. (2018): Performativity as ongoing journeys: Implications for strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Long Range Planning (51), 500-509.
• Garud, R., Gehman, J., Kumaraswamy, A., & Tuertscher, P. (2016): From the process of innovation to innovation as process. In A. Langley & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (pp. 451-465): Sage.
• George, J. M. (2007): Creativity in organizations. Academy of Management Annals, 1(1), 439–477.
• Hjorth, D., Strati, A., Drakopoulou Dodd, S., & Weik, E. (2018): Organizational Creativity, Play and Entrepreneurship: Introduction and Framing. Organization Studies, 39(2/3): 155-168.
• Ingold, T. (2022): Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. London: Routledge.
• Joas, H. (2005): The creativity of action. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
• Koch, J., Wenzel, M., Senf, N. N., & Maibier, C. (2018): Organizational creativity as an attributional process: The case of haute cuisine. Organization Studies, 39(2-3): 251-270.
• MacKay, R. B., Chia, R., & Nair, A. K. (2021): Strategy-in-Practices: A process philosophical approach to understanding strategy emergence and organizational outcomes. Human Relations, 74(9), 13337-11369. doi:10.1177/0018726720929397
• Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985): Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6, 257-272.
• Reckwitz, A. (2017): The invention of creativity: Modern society and the culture of the new. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
• Rescher, N. (1996): Process metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Rescher, N. (2000): Process Philosophy: A summary of basic issues. University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Sarasvathy, S. D. (2009): Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
• Sarasvathy, S. D. (2001): Causation and effectuation: Toward a theoretical shift from economic inevitability to entrepreneurial contingency. Academy of Management Review, 26(2): 243-263.
• Strati, A. (1992): Aesthetic understanding of organizational life. Academy of Management Review, 17, 568–581.
• Strati, A., & de Monthoux, P. G. (2002): Introduction: Organizing aesthetics. Human Relations, 55, 755–766.
• Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R., (2002): On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization science, 13(5), 567-582.
• Whitehead, A. (1926/85): Science and the Modern World. London: Free Association Books.
• Whitehead, A. (1929): Process and Reality. New York: Free Press.
• Woodman, R. W., Sawyer, J. E., & Griffin, R. W. (1993): Toward a theory of organizational creativity. Academy of Management Review, 18, 293–321.
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