You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘organized creativity’ tag.
We, that is Sigrid Quack, Konstantin Hondros, Katharina Zangerle and I, proudly present the article “Between Anxiety and Hope? How Actors Experience Regulatory Uncertainty in Creative Processes in Music and Pharmy”, which has recently been published in “Research in the Sociology of Organizations” (RSO) as part of a volume on “Organizing Creativity in the Innovation Journey”. Check out the abstract below:
Uncertainty about Intellectual Property Regulations (IPR) is prevalent in today’s knowledge-based and creative industries. While prior literature indicates that regulatory uncertainty affects creative processes, studies that systematically analyze the effects of IPR on the experiencing of involved actors in creative processes across fields are rare. We ask how core professional actor groups including creators, legal professionals and managers involved in creative processes experience regulatory uncertainty in the fields of music and pharma. By studying practices of engaging with, circumventing and avoiding regulatory uncertainty about IPR, we show how creative processes in both the music and pharma fields are entrenched with emotional-cognitive experiences such as anxiety, indifference and hope that vary by professional group. Our findings point toward managers and legal professionals observing, exposing and cultivating emotions by ascribing experiences to other actor groups. We conclude that comparing regulation-related emotions of involved actors across fields helps to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamics of creative processes.
In case you or your institution does not have access to RSO please do not hesitate to contact me so I can send you a copy of our article.
The German Science Foundation is funding a new research unit based at Freie Universität Berlin with the topic “Organized Creativity: Practices for Inducing and Coping with Uncertainty“.
The research unit examines the challenging question of how creativity can be socially organized. It comprises four projects, each of which examines different dimensions of uncertainty in a specific area of organizing practices: collaborative practices, temporal practices, and regulatory practices.
Doctoral positions (and one postdoc) are open at the different partner universities of the research unit, which is comprised of the following scholars:
Prof. Dr. Jörg Sydow, Freie Universität Berlin (spokesperson)
Prof. Jana Costas, Ph.D., Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder
Prof. Dr. Leonhard Dobusch, Universität Innsbruck
Prof. Dr. Gernot Grabher, Hafen City University, Hamburg
Prof. Dr. Oliver Ibert, Freie Universität Berlin and IRS Erkner
Prof. Gregory Jackson, Ph.D., Freie Universtität Berlin
Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack, Universität Duisburg-Essen
Prof. Dr. Elke Schüßler, Freie Universität Berlin and (from 1.5.16) Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
Please access the individual job offers here (in German only) and check out the general project website for further information.
When Sigrid and I researched the organizational network orchestrated by the US non-profit Creative Commons (see our MPIfG Discussion Paper 08/8, PDF), one of the most interesting findings was the benefits of its transnationalization efforts. What initially appeared as a challenge – legal differences between jurisdictions and the perceived need to adapt its alternative copyright licenses accordingly – actually turned out to be a mobilizing and diffusion strategy. At least initially, porting the licenses to different jurisdictions provided a task for locally embedded copyright lawyers, who then became part of a transnational network of affiliate organizations helping to promote Creative Commons licenses. So, at least in this case of private regulation via standards distance between different actors became an asset.
In their most recent paper entitled “Distance as asset? Knowledge collaboration in hybrid virtual communities” (not open acces available yet), economic geographers Gernot Grabher and Oliver Ibert make a more general argument emphasizing the benefits of geographically dispersed communities. They define hybrid communities as “a specific kind of community, which encompasses on the one hand the sphere of professional expertise, and the mundane world of ordinary users, lay-persons, enthusiasts, and hobbyists, on the other” (p. 101). Empirically, the paper compares three types of communities with three cases each:
- Firm-hosted communities (Huggies Happy Babies Forum, Kraft Food Message Boards, Dell’s Ideastorm Forum)
- Firm-related communities (IKEA Fans, Nikonians, BMW Luxury Touring Forum)
- Independent communities (A Swarm of Angels Forum, Sandboarder Forum, DCA Forum)
governancexborders.com 