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  • Publication
    Organizational creativity as taste-making - towards a pragmatics of contemporary dance theater production
    (EDIS, 2015)
    In this thesis, I sought to contribute to organizational creativity research by empirically studying the collective production of Contemporary Dance Theater (CDT). I began with suggesting that the literature domain of organizational creativity, while a burgeoning academic field, is perpetuating paradigmatic and ideological assumptions that often separate creativity from practice. It is the prevailing ontological and methodological individualism of most organizational creativity research that brings about conceptual and methodological quandaries when seeking to account for (a) organizational creativity as a relational, processual and thoroughly embodied and affective affair, and (b) the basic question of how novelty and creativity are possible. The overall aim of this thesis was therefore to reclaim creativity as a prolific category of social and organizational thought by exploring it within the holistic process of actual work. For this, I studied creativity as a form of practice and enactive sensemaking within the richness of the moment-to-moment, affective engagement of experienced bodies with culturally meaningful materials. From a perspective of creative practice, this meant turning creativity into a problematic modality of attachment and thus a matter of taste. Framing creativity in terms of a pragmatic conception of taste-making then allowed me to account for the performativity of relational becomings that conserve as well as refine and transform sensibilities and materials. This meant granting the materials of practice their own agencies, as well as endowing the practitioner with "passion," a specific skill set of active sensibilities that allows one to follow and intervene in the flow of materials. Seeking to enact these conceptual formations through an empirical study of CDT production, I based this study on a multi-sited and focused organizational video-ethnography within a comparative, embedded case design. I thereby developed a methodology that attempted to "follow forward" the creative process and sought to produce rich and suggestive descriptions of the creative practice and its processes within CDT while developing theoretical propositions alongside the empirical material. First, the empirical study detailed creative practice in terms of its ecology. I distinguished between (a) the actual material of creative practice, which consists of incorporated motion repertoires as well as biographical and cultural proficiency; (b) the various practice carriers (plug-ins) - from social techniques, over performative theories, devices, and the conduit of "taste talk" to the enactment of material in productive articulations - that enable creative practice through forging skilled bodies; and (c) the affective and "normaesthetic" milieu of creative practice that is constituted by the community of practitioners. Together, these elements were described as forming an experimental apparatus, or a collective set-up of a performance and event ecology that harbors poetic practices and their occasions. Second, this study specified the process of CDT production as an incremental qualification of a performance. Marked by a peculiar "fever curve" of attachments and detachments, CDT production was described as being affected within the formats of researching, assembling and scaffolding. A detailed analysis of the various practices of these formats revealed a nexus of experimental and codifying modes of taste-making. The findings were integrated within propositional models that specified the modes of taste-making as revolving around three central reciprocal relationships: (a) between immanent and explicit, (b) between prospective and retrospective and (c) between inventive and restorative forms of taste-making. Overall, this study expands our understanding of organizational creativity by showing that creativity is 1) temporalized and processualized, 2) spatialized and collectivized, 3) grounded in affect and 4) politicized. It demonstrates the prolificacy of a practice-based framework of organizational creativity that is rooted in a pragmatic conception of taste-making and suggests that such a framing could open up creativity-as-practice as a stimulating research agenda. On a more general level, this study develops a framework of creative practice that concerns the status of its elements. It provides an "infra-language" or theory that seeks not to represent, systematically and from the outside, but to provide the sensibilities to explore organizational creativity from up-close - which can, as this study suggests, bear remarkable surprises.