Organization and Management Theory OMT

The EGOS theme in Athens calls for reflecting on actors' embeddedness in sociomaterial practices and what constitutes excellence. Our subtheme seeks to reflect on material practices and explore how institutionalizing creativity generates aesthetics experiences that are integral to "excellence" in creative industries. As most studies of creative industries have focused on economic and organizational aspects (Becker, 1982; Hirsch, 2000), organizational scholars have overlooked the role played by the actual material artistic production in creative fields.  Artists and other creative actors generate artifacts that express new ideas and provide audiences with new experiences through their material forms. Recently, scholars have indeed started to explore how material and symbolic dimensions of artifacts from the creative industries influence their acceptance and institutionalization (Jones, Maoret, Massa & Svejenova, 2012; Jones & Massa, 2013). The overall goal of this subtheme is to extend this line of research by exploring how artifacts' material forms produce aesthetic responses that shape which practices become institutionalized in creative industries.

A core assumption is that the ideas that artists express materially in their artifacts interact dynamically with audience experiences to shape the formation and institutionalization of new practices. For example, architects encode and express ideas in the design of their buildings, which in turn shapes the experiences that people have when encountering the buildings. The interaction between the artifact and the audience's responses may consolidate over time into established architectural styles and construction practices tied to specific building types, such as courthouses, schools, museums or jails. Alternatively, artists may reject established styles and seek to upend these because of an institutionalized demand for originality (Martindale, 1990). Such institutional effects may inspire architects to express their ideas in building design, just as it may lead other people to seek out architects and offer them opportunities to give material form to their ideas. Creative actors such as architects, engineers, artists use the material form of buildings to stimulate new types of experiences and to change - or to alternatively maintain - established practices (Jones, Maoret, Massa & Svejenova, 2012).

We highlight two dimensions for potential analysis: aesthetics and practices. Within creative industries, aesthetics is a central concern and experience. Aesthetic experiences refer to feelings and judgments about "what is beautiful, moving or sublime" (Charters 2006, p. 236) and emerge through the interaction between an artifact produced within the creative industries and audiences such as users, consumers and others who experience this creative artifact in tangible material or visual form. These experiences not only engage social actors in the experience of awe, but also differentiate products for companies and drive consumer choices (Charters, 2006; Hagtvedt & Patrick, 2008). Aesthetics is expressed in the social realm through language, specifically emotive words and metaphors, and visual forms and appearances (Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary & van Leeuwen, 2013). Given that audiences are institutionally embedded (Battilana, Leca & Boxenbaum, 2009), the expectations of what is socially appropriate and valuable guide artists' innovations and shape audiences' responses, constraining or reinforcing established notions of what is aesthetic. In addition, audience responses may elicit an experience of identification, creating an emotional attachment by audiences to a particular artifact (Jones & Massa, 2013). Aesthetic responses of audiences may align into expectations for types of material expression; this alignment, however, also prompts creative actors to search for new aesthetic expressions and material innovations that trigger fads and fashions (Simmel, 1957; Martindale, 1990). The role of aesthetics in institutional processes constitutes a fruitful and insufficiently examined topic of institutional inquiry (Suddaby, 2010).

Practices constitute a second dimension for analysis and are central to the study of creative industries and the arts (Bourdieu, 1992; 1996) and to institutionalization processes (Boxenbaum & Battilana, 2005; Lawrence, Leca, & Zilber, 2013). Within creative industries and arts, a Bourdieusian perspective tends to dominate the literature. In this perspective, practices connect structure and agency within a field, and thus explain how social systems are produced and reproduced. Actors' socialization may constrain what cultural and symbolic capital is deployed by whom, but also provides the basis by which actors' manoeuver within and move social systems. Actors may engage in symbolic violence to wrench or alter the social system. Although DiMaggio integrated Bourdieu's insight into institutional theory, institutional theorists focus on practices as shared behavioral patterns that partially reflect the cognitive and emotional realm at which aesthetics operate. Action-oriented and observable, practices capture a dimension of institutionalization that is complementary to the realm of cognition and emotions, where collective status is achieved primarily through language and symbols. 

Few scholars have examined how artists use aesthetic elements to alter or reproduce the practices of their art world. Artifacts that evoke aesthetic responses can be a powerful motivating force for practices; whether they are adopted, changed or discarded. For example, the history of modern and post-modern arts, architecture and creative industries is to eschew traditional notions of aesthetic experience and use new material practices to generate a new aesthetic. Whether actors use symbolic and aesthetic elements and audiences' aesthetic responses converge and constrain practices or drive innovations and the creation of new artistic practices is an open question.

We seek papers that examine institutional processes in creative industries; we are particularly interested in how material form and aesthetic experiences may crystallize into socially endorsed notions of what is beautiful and into institutionalized patterns of practice.  The following non-exhaustive list presents some research questions that are welcomed in our subtheme:

(1) How are new ideas encoded into the material form of artifacts within the creative industries? Who is responsible for this encoding-artists, gatekeepers who offer opportunities to showcase and produce new artifacts, or critics who endorse and spread new ideals?

(2) How do audience responses to creative artifacts stabilize into new aesthetics that become widely endorsed by particular communities within the creative industries?

(3) How does artifact design influence the acceptance of an artifact (and the ideas it conveys) among consumers and other audiences that are external to the creative industries?

(4) How does the material form of an artifact shape emergent patterns of practice (or maintain established practices) within the creative industries? How does the tangible or visual form of an artifact shape the emergence of practices related to its use among consumers and audiences outside the creative industries?

Conveners

Eva Boxenbaum, Mines ParisTech, France and Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

(Eva.boxenbaum@mines-paristech.fr)

Candace Jones, Boston College, USA (Candace.jones@bc.edu)

Massimo Maoret, IESE Business School, Spain (mmaoret@iese.edu)