Transorganisational work and production in the creative industries

Abstract

Academic and practitioner debates on managing creativity typically centre on how to facilitate people and groups being creative, how not to constrain their inventiveness, imagination and originality.To understand how creativity can be managed, a range of studies have focused on individual creativity, its antecedents, conducive environments and management techniques as well as potential constraints (e.g.Amabile 1996, Drazin et al. 1999, Oliver et al. (in this volume), Schiuma (in this volume), Sutton 2001).The underlying assumption of much of this debate is that management implies planning, organising and controlling processes of production and marketisation whereas working creatively requires freedom from tight schedules and space for imagination, unpredictable developments and play (e.g.Bilton and Leary 2002, Davis and Scase 2000, DeFillippi et al. 2007, see Thanem and Vaerlander in this volume for a discussion of whether office design can help provide such spaces for creativity).Where creativity is to be managed in an at least partly economic context, i.e. in relation to markets for product, finance (be it venture capital or public funding) or labour, the allegedly conflicting logics of management/business on the one hand and of creativity, artistic ambition or cultural innovation on the other tend to be the focus of the discussion.But while management and creative practice do follow different logics (Eikhof and Haunschild 2007), a growing number of studies shows that their relationship is by no means one of pure antagonism.As for instance Barrett (2004), Eikhof (2010) and Grabher (2002) show for software production, theatre and advertising, deadlines, finite budgets and management control can provide the boundaries that condense creative practice and facilitate innovative explosions and progress.Consequently, in their introduction to this volume, Bilton and Cummings expose dichotomist conceptualisations of management and creativity as too reductionist and as limiting our understanding of the real-life complexity in both management and creative practices.They call for conceptual and

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