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CMS5 Conference
at Manchester Business School
11-13 July
2007
A Call for submissions to the stream on:
Apollo Ante Portas! -
Critical Perspectives on the Creative Age
Stream
Description:
Currently, the business press is proclaiming a
new era,
the Creative Age, in which conceptual
and creative work emerge as the major
source of
economic success. Best selling books declare the
rise of a new
creative class and mindset (eg
Florida 2002, 2005; Pink, 2005), innovation
as
the key to managerial success (e.g. Vogel, Cagan
and Boatwright, 2005;
Davilla, Epstein and
Shelton, 2005; von Hippel, 2005; Govindarajan
and
Trimble, 2005; Kim and Mauborne, 2005;
Christensen 2004, 2003; Kahn,
2005, Cukier et.
al. 2003). Leading business magazines such as
Business
Week, Fast Company and Business 2.0
publish special issues and regular
columns on
creativity and innovation. Even the academic
discourse shows
topics such as knowledge
management, organisational learning,
creativity
and innovation are (re-)gaining currency (eg Le
Bas and Latham,
2006; Fagerberg, Mowery and
Nelson, 2004; Poole and Van de Ven,
2004;
Shavinina 2003; Easterby-Smith and Lyles, 2003).
Trend-setting
firms, most notably General
Electric and Procter & Gamble, publicly
embark on
strategies to dramatically boosting innovation
rates (e.g.
Reingold 2005, Huston and Sakkab
2006).
Much of this sounds all to
familiar, as progress
and innovation have been the leitmotif of
modern
societies since the early days of Enlightenment.
It remains unclear
how much of this 'innovation
talk' actually materialised. Although
batch
sizes have become smaller, product life cycles
and time to market
are shorter; the modern
corporation - with mass-production
and
administrative bureaucracies as its paradigmatic
instantiations - is
still fundamentally rooted in
routine - bearing little resemblance
with
research labs or artists' studios. However,
according to the current
management discourse
technologically and economically
highly-evolved
societies are in transition: rapid
commoditisation of
routine work, including
knowledge intense routine work, is driving
them
towards increasing innovation rates.
Apparently, the Creative Age
represents a vision
for Western economies confronted with
global
competition, automation, and saturated customers
and markets rather
than an inevitable historical
event. If this diagnosis echoed throughout
the
management press is correct, this new Apollonian
era bears significant
implications for management
and organisation and, in turn, management
studies
and education. This conference stream focuses on
four sets of
questions addressed or implied in
the discourse about the Creative Age
intended to
help separate the wheat from the chaff and the
hype from the
reality.
Managing creativity - radical approaches to
innovation:
Which management concepts and
organisational designs enable firms to
boost
innovation and creativity in the short and the
long run? What are
the implications of
significantly increased innovation rates on the
nature
of the firm, on industry dynamics and on
labor relations. How do
individuals,
organisations and societies cope with growing
pressure for
innovation? What is the potential
and limitations of current approaches to
managing
innovation? For example, the notion of 'Business
Design', an
umbrella concept, is promoted by
Business Week, the Rotman School of
Management
and IDEO, the world's largest design firm, to
leverage
product-design principles as
general-management principles, bringing
together
tools such as ethnographic methods, brainstorming
techniques,
cross-functional team dynamics,
imaginative problem solving and rapid
prototyping
(Kelley 2001, Liedtka 2004, Martin 2004).
Information systems
literature is also drawing on
new concepts of design (Lee, 1991;
Boland/Collopy
2004).
'The suits and the creatives' - intersections
of
management and arts: The "Creative Age" has been
characterised by
increasingly blurred boundaries
between the roles of managers and
artists.
Vanguard artists such as Joseph Beuys declare
economic success
the ultimate work of art, while
others - from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons -
created
art as radicalised marketing, making corporate
marketing
departments look poor in comparison. On
the other hand, there is hardly any
artistic
trade left that has not yet served as a
management metaphor:
managers are actors,
directors, jazz musicians, conductors,
composers,
authors, story tellers, sculptors and, of course,
designers.
The relationship between world-making
by business leaders and politicians who
dispose
of worldly power and, on the other hand, by
artists who directly
shape epistemological
habits, warrants further research (Guillet
de
Monthoux 2004). Critical reflection is needed to
examine recent
tendencies in popular and academic
discourses to align if not equate the
artist and
the economic actor (Bauer 2006). In the face of
declining
public funding, artists become
(labeled) 'cultural entrepreneur' (Leadbeater
and
Oakley, 1999), while knowledge workers forced
into self-employment
appear 'artist-like'
although all they share with artists is
disruptive
workflow and economic uncertainty
(McRobbie, 2003). We invite contributions
that
critically examine the changing and potentially
converging roles of
artists and managers in the
face of increased pressure for creativity
and
innovation.
The discourse of the Creative Age - fact
and
fiction, ideology and legitimacy: There are
questions regarding the
discourse about the
Creative Age. To what extent and in which ways
are we
actually observing and expecting increased
innovation and creativity or, by
contrast, to
what extent is the Creative Age primarily
discursive
(rhetorical) move? To what extent, is
the current media hype simple one more
- the
latest - re-launch of the call for progress and
innovation echoed
throughout modernity? To what
extent does the discourse about the Creative
Age
represent an attempt to rejuvenate Western
societies challenged by
former developing
countries? Finally, what ideologies are implicit
in this
discourse? Is it political rhetoric
disguising the ugly face of growing
income
disparities and risk being redistributed from the
collective to the
individual? How are the (side-)
effects of intensified pressure for
creativity
for on individuals, organizations and societies
represented in
the discourse?
We welcome empirical and theoretical papers
addressing
a broad range of topics including but
not limited to the following
-
o Radical approaches to managing
creativity and innovation
o Managers'
versus artists' creative powers
o
Critical analyses of the discourse about the Creative
Age
o Empirical analyses of -
potentially
changing - types, rates and processes
of
innovation
o Linkages between
individual, firm and
societal level innovation and
creativity
o Challenging the status
quo:
radical-structuralist readings of innovation
and
creativity
o Implications of the
'Creative Age' for Management education
References
* Bauer,
Robert M. (2006): Organizations as
Orientation Systems: Some Remarks on
the
Aesthetic Dimension of Organizational Design, in:
Shamiyeh, Michael:
Organizing for Change, Basel -
Boston: Birkhäuser (2006, forthcoming)
*
Boland, R. J. and F. Collopy, Eds. (2002):
Managing as Designing; Stanford,
CA: Stanford
University Press.
* Brody, Leonard, Wendy L. Cukier, Ken
Grant,
Matt Holland, Catherine Middleton, and Denise
Shortt (2003):
Innovation Nation: From Java to
Jurassic Park, Toronto: Wiley.
*
Christensen, Clayton M. (2003): The Innovators
Solution; Boston: Harvard
Business School Press.
* Christensen, Clayton M. (2004): Seeing
What's
Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict
Industry Change;
Boston: Harvard Business School
Press.
* Davilla, Tony, Marc J. Epstein
and Robert
Shelton (2005): Making Innovation Work; Upper
Saddle River, New
Jersey: Wharton School
Publishing.
* Easterby-Smith, M. and M. A. Lyles,
Eds.
(2003): The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational
Learning and
Knowledge Management; Oxford:
Blackwell.
* Fagerberg, Jan, David C. Mowery
and Richard
Nelson Eds. (2004): The Oxford Handbook of
Innovation; Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
* Florida, Richard (2002): The Rise of the Creative
Class; New York: Basic.
* Florida, Richard (2005): The Flight of
the
Creative Class; New York: Harper Collins.
* Govindarajan, Vijay and
Chris Trimble (2005):
Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators; Boston:
Harvard
Business School Press.
* Hippel von, Erich (2005):
Democratizing
Innovation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
* Huston, Larry and
Nabil Sakkab (2006): Connect
and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble's New
Model
for Innovation; Harvard Business Review, 48/3,
pp. 58-66.
* Kahn,
Kenneth B. (2005): The PDMA Handbook of
New Product Development; Hoboken, New
Jersey:
Wiley & Sons.
* Kelley, Tom (2001): The Art of Innovation; New
York et al.: Random House.
* Kim, W. Chan and Renée Mauborgne (2005):
Blue
Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market
Space and Make
Competition Irrelevant; Boston,
MA: Harvard Business School Press.
* Le
Bas, C. and W. Latham, Eds. (2006): The
Economics of Persistent Innovation;
Berlin - New
York: Springer.
* Leadbeater, Charles and Kate Oakley (1999):
The
Independents. Britain's New Cultural
Entrepreneurs; London:
Demos.
* Lee, Allen S. (1991). Architecture as a
Reference Discipline for
MIS in Information
Research: Contemporary Approaches and
Emergent
Traditions, H. E. Nissen, H. K Klein, and R.
Hirschheim (Eds.),
North-Holland, Amsterdam,
573-592.
* Liedtka, Jeanne (2004): Strategy as
Design; Rotman, Winter 2004, pp. 12-15.
* Martin, Roger L. (2004): The Design
of
Business; Rotman, Winter 2004, pp. 6-10.
* McRobbie, Angela (2003):
Everyone is Creative.
Artists as Pioneers of the New Economy?; in:
Silva,
E. B. and T. Bennett, Eds. (2003):
Everyday Life and Contemporary Culture;
Durham:
The Sociology Press 2003; pp 184-210.
* Pink, Daniel (2004): A
Whole New Mind; New York: Time Warner.
* Poole, Marshall Scott and Andrew H.
Van de Ven,
Eds. (2004): Handbook of Organizational Change
and Innovation;
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Reingold, Jennifer (2005): What P&G
Knows about
the Power of Design; Fast Company, June 2005, pp.
56-61.
*
Rushkoff, Douglas (2005): Get Back into the
Box: Innovation from Inside Out;
New York: Harper
Collins.
* Shavinina, Larisa V., Ed. (2003):
The
International Handbook of Innovation; Oxford:
Elsevier.
* Vogel,
Craig M., Johnathan Cagan and Peter
Boatwright (2005): The Design of Things
to Come;
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson / Wharton
School
Publishing.
Convenors:
Robert M Bauer
Johannes Kepler
University, Linz, Austria
Joseph L Rotman School of Management, University of
Toronto
[log in to unmask]
and
Wendy L
Cukier
Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario
Canada
[log in to unmask]
Timeline for paper
submission:
Abstracts to Convenors (email) - 6 November 2006
Decisions on
acceptance/rejection communicated to authors - 14 February 2007
Full papers
to Convenors (email) - 28 April 2007
Abstracts must contain the following
information:
* authors (including affiliation and contact
details, with
lead author clearly indicated)
* stream to which the abstract is
submitted
* title
* body text
* maximum 300 words
All abstracts must
be single-spaced, prepared
using at least an 11-point Ariel font, with
a
left margin at least 1 inch for binding and be
formatted for A4 paper
(21cm * 29.7 cm).
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Prof. Paul S. Adler,
Management and
Organization Dept,
Marshall School of Business,
University of Southern
California,
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0808
Tel: (818) 981-0115
Fax: (818)
981-0116
Email: [log in to unmask]
Bio sketch, c.v., and course outlines at:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/
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