Organizational Creativity Revisited : An audio-visual ethnography of the production of contemporary movement and dance theater as ‚making events work'

Most organizational creativity research can be regarded as torn between partial vantage points (Kallio, Barry, Visscher, & de Weerd-Nederhof, 2011), the 4 P's of creativity research - person, process, press and product (Rhodes, 1961). This approach must be seen in regard to two basic assumptions, methodological individualism inherited from psychology and economy, and organization theory's in most parts entitative and static view of organization. Relating these assumptions to the dominant tradition of ‘creativity as creation', in this paper I then propose a ‘forward' reading of creativity (Ingold & Hallam, 2007) resting on alternative, processual and relational assumptions tied to the minor tradition of ‘creativity as creating' (Hope Mason, 2003). This paper then aims at a specific practice-based account of organizational creativity, which allows to theorize organizational creativity in its non-teleological openness, its aesthetic and affective aspects and its collectivity. Opening up organizational creativity to the performativity of its practice then is the basic conceptual move allowing for an understanding of organizational creativity as ‘making events work'. As part of my ongoing PhD project, I draw on these concepts to analyze first material from my video-based, microethnographic studies of the performance-making processes in two different contemporary dance and movement theatre companies. The production of contemporary dance and movement theatre then is portrayed as a performative practice; sensing, attending and surrendering to a broad movement of materialities - the work of making events - and then consuming its own work, evaluating and channeling movement to practice's evolving purpose - the work of making events work.