*Passion and Discipline in Creative Industries. EGOS 2009 Barcelona
**EXTENDED ABSTRACTS of no more than 3000 words DUE January 11, 2009*
Barcelona, with its seaside venues and dynamic plazas, offers a
wonderful site for enthusiastic dialog and explorations in the linkages
between individual creativity and firm creative and innovative processes
in creative industries. We seek to extend our prior dialog on the
tensions between art and commerce, dialectical processes by examining
micro to macro level translation processes. How do creative actors shape
their society, profession and art world? How do organizations and macro
level forces channel, disrupt, enable or tame individual creators? We
seek to explore these dynamics in the context of creative industries.
We invite and celebrate a plurality of theoretical and empirical
approaches addressing but not limited to the following topic areas:
(1) Creative spaces: how do creative actors identify, engage and create
social spaces and social relations that support their divergent and
often controversial approaches? Creative artists have often had sponsors
or patrons willing to take a risk and fly in the face of convention. For
example, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose antics banished him from polite
society, found wealthy entrepreneurs such as the Kauffman’s or Johnson’s
who provided opportunities and funded his dreams. We know very little
about the role of mentors, sponsors and patrons in modern creative
activities and innovation. How do these relationships form? Who connects
artists to patrons? How does the relationship enable or divert creative
vision and talent?
(2) The careers and social networks of contemporary artists and
innovators may provide fruitful ground understanding the mechanisms of
how passion is translated into a cultural product that ultimately may
shape how we understand ourselves, our society and an art world.
(3) How do competitions energize or compromise creative vision?
Competitions such as design competitions in architecture or film
festivals are critical yet understudied phenomena for how creative
passion and ideas are channeled and recognized, shaping a field? How do
these competitive and field events channel or derail creative passion?
(4) What institutional and social resources do mavericks, innovators and
rebels draw upon in order to realize their vision? How does social
skill, in Fligstein’s (1997, 2001) terms, enable a creator to take
advantage of ideas and drive these toward realization? What do these
social skills look like?
(5) How can we study failure versus success in creative entrepreneurs in
order to identify these social skills? What institutional logics and
resources facilitate creativity and innovation? Since multiple
institutional logics co-exist, which logics and when do these logics
become enabling rather constraining forces for creativity and innovation?
(6) What creative leaders have had a profound impact on their creative
industry? How did they alter practices, rules of collaboration or
understanding of creative products? What strategies did they pursue? How
have these strategies in turn been influenced by institutional logics
and supported by organizational structures?
(7) How do institutionalized logics, regimes and gatekeepers stifle or
facilitate entrepreneurial initiatives in creative industries? How do
the networks of relationships provide the connectivity needed for novel
ideas to emerge and thrive, as well as for mainstream output to persist
the coupling and uncoupling of art and business? Art and business are
two threads in creative industries that are often tightly woven and just
as often in tension and decoupled. Business practices and concerns may
drive the art form, or be uncoupled with it as innovative practitioners
create niches and arenas for experimentation, such as independent film.
(8) What is the relationship between individual creators and creative
firms? How is reputation from individual creators embedded in firm
renown? What is the intrinsic value of a creative firm if the creative
individual leaves? How can individual reputation be transferred to
creative firms?
*_Co-convenors:_*
/Candace Jones/ (Boston College) e-mail:
jonescq@bc.edu
<mailto:
jonescq@bc.edu>
Jesper Strandgaard (Copenhagen Business School ) e-mail:
js.ioa@cbs.dk
<mailto:
js.ioa@cbs.dk>
Vincent Mangematin (Grenoble Ecole de Management and GAEL) e-mail:
vincent@grenoble.inra.fr <mailto:
vincent@grenoble.inra.fr>