Freie Universität Berlin

by Konstantin Hondros

Taking place at the Technical University (TU) Berlin on June 28 and 29 2018, Organized Creativity’s 2^nd Annual Conference was at the same time the 2^nd International Conference of TU’s Research Training Group “Innovation Society Today” (both sponsored by the German Research Foundation DFG). Thus, a collaboration between to research groups interested in similar, yet probably slightly different phenomena: creativity and innovation. The conference took a perspective towards creativity/innovation discussing them together with the concept of fields. Combining keynote speeches from renowned scholars with presentations of doctoral and post-doctoral research, the conference underlined as well its claim of internationality as the research groups’ goal to foster young scholars’ work. In the following we will give a short recall of the different presentations given.

After an introduction by the spokespersons of the two research groups, Arnold Windeler (Innovation Society Today) and Jörg Sydow (Organized Creativity), Neil Fligstein (UC Berkeley) opened the conference with “Innovation, Practical Knowledge, and the Theory of Fields: How to Make Sense of Financial Innovation”. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory, where innovation as a concept plays a rather underrepresented role, he points to fields as strategic action fields that open spaces for innovation.

Georg Fischer (TU) portrayed in his talk “Copyright in Sample-based Music Production” musicians using samples as integral part of their music creations. The creators understand themselves regularly as music archivists, curators or even “sound archaeologists”, thereby pointing to a rather unusual perspective on creation and innovation. He showed convincingly how music actors engage with diverse “workaround”-practices in order to meet the requirements of the legal environment. Thereby the actors frequently demonstrate considerable “workaround”-creativity allowing them to keep on sampling though threatened by legal obstacles.

After lunch, Silviya Svejenova’s (CBS) lecture “The Temporality of Creativity: Organizing for Novelty in Time” engaged with the issue of temporality for organizing creativity. Depicting three interesting contexts – or in temporal language: events – namely fine visual arts, high end cooking and c-suite nomenclature (the “invention” of “chief” positions in organizations) she argued for a more fluid perspective on creation processes as a main goal for further research.

Before a “Schnitzel”-dinner, Birke Otto (Viadrina) reported “Timing Secrecy and Surprise in Idea Generation” and presented the story of a pharmaceutical drug development and how secrecy and withholding information was not only an integral part of the creation process, but also changed the information kept secret itself. Thereby she challenged the typical view on secrets as stable entities once an information is labelled a secret. In her talk she interestingly connected secrecy with surprise, leading to a view on idea generation where abrupt changes from withholding information to intentionally making it public is crucial.

Opening the second day Frank W. Geels (MBS) emphasized the importance of long-term socio-technical transitions and articulated the need for inter-disciplinary frameworks regarding theoretical strands of literature interested in innovation by presenting his paper “Theorising Innovation in Fields with Sociology of Technology, Evolutionary Economics and Neo-institutional Theory”.

Following this theory-laden talk, Ariane Sept (TU) narrated the development “From Slow Food to Cittaslow: Constituting a Field of Slowing Down” and showed how “slowness” became a worldwide social innovation, starting with four small Italian towns in the late 1990’s. The innovation process described here was closely connected to a few distinct actors, the town mayors, regularly reappearing in the narration and the idea of slow as a new option against societal acceleration.

Lukas Vogelgsang (FU/IRS) presented his paper “When nothing is Predefined: Pharmaceutical Development between Organizing and Organized Creativity” that aims at untangling structure and uncertainty. He unfolded a drug’s creation process between a rather output oriented process depicted as “organized creativity” and “organizing creativity” as a process of sense making. Both are necessarily part of the creation process and show a very different handling of creativity.

In the following keynote Kathrine Chen (CUNY) introduced her work on creativity in organizations in the US education system. Calling her talk “Creativizing Organizations and Fields” she delivered insights into her current field work in schools and how these implement “creative practices” into their daily organization.

The closing panel discussion led by David Stark (Columbia) tried not only to wrap up the presented ideas, but furthermore showed underlying dissonances mainly unfolding around the key terms of the two research groups – creativity and innovation. While Gernot Grabher (HCU Hamburg) pleaded for precision and a teasing out of the differences between innovation and creativity, David Stark questioned this “branding” of processes. One key difference, however, might be that creativity is not as much (or not at all?) interested in diffusion processes, while innovation exactly starts at this point. Yet, another claim depicted that innovation could be done without creativity. The opposite might of course as well be possible. In the end, even another of the great questions came up: “What is the new?” with a connected and very interesting side-question referring to idea developments in general and maybe even opening up methodological questions: “How can an idea travel and still be the same?”

by Konstantin Hondros

This May I had the opportunity to visit CREATe, the center for copyright and new business models in the creative economy, as a research visitor thanks to the Organized Creativity “Young Scholar Exchange Program”. Getting to know the University of Glasgow and CREATe as probably the most renowned research hub concerned with the intertwining of creative industries and copyright regulation was definitely a great experience and fits perfectly with the interests of our project 1.4. Organizing Creativity under Regulatory Uncertainty: Challenges of Intellectual Property. Investigating creative industries since 2012, CREATe aims for bringing together academia, industry and civil society, with topics ranging from a creator’s perspective interested in process and copyright or questions regarding user generated content and user behavior, to intermediaries, platforms and open business models in the creative eonomy.

Since I am as well in the middle of my dissertation project as in writing working papers for our project, I spent the time in my roof office opposite the beautiful university tower tracing several threads of interest, all of them considerably benefitting from CREATe’s findings making my stay a worthwhile experience. Besides, I was able to do some additional fieldwork in and around Glasgow, getting in contact with the city’s vibrant music community, making a couple of exciting interviews and interesting observations at festivals and concerts.

Considering our project’s general interests, the work of Adam Behr, Keith Negus and John Street referring the music practice of sampling as a continuum of practices (2018) is of great value. The linkage they draw between ethical codes and different music techniques is an aspect I come across frequently. Talking with a Glasgow based music artist who uses found tapes and especially found voices on found tapes as music material, this broader perspective already proved useful.

Quite influential might be the multilayered presentation of some of the Edward Morgan’s Scrapbook pages CREATe analyzed. Stobo et al. (2018) used a very tangible idea of risk perception (high, medium and low) to make possible losses in information visible that come with legal uncertainty. Another anecdote might fit here: an electronic musician from Glasgow told me his first EP originally used two samples, one famous drum rhythm and a female voice taken from a YouTube Video. During studio recording the producer suggested to take out the famous one due to legal uncertainty. The unknown voice sample remained. Besides other aspects, this unfolds the issue of available and non-available outcomes of creative processes and what can and cannot be heard. Depicting music pieces with and without possibly infringing material in a similar, yet audible manner like the Scrapbook pages would be great.

research visitor looking for results to come

A bit more detailed I want to report on work done for my dissertation project that deals with the creation of soundalikes in music. Generally, soundalikes are a common, often critically evaluated phenomenon in modern, likely popular, music. The main feature of these pieces of music is the similarity of sound they share with another usually famous song. Imitating and for mostly copyright reasons at least partial transforming are practices of importance creating soundalikes. They can be seen as distinct forms of what Negus, Street and Behr call “creative copying” (2017). Creating soundalikes is often connected to remittance work for commercials, which is also one of the two contexts I look at. Focus of my work in Glasgow was, however, a digital platform selling royalty free production music, where soundalikes make up a significant amount of the available songs. During May I gathered material like screenshots and forum-threads online and aimed to analyze the creation and evaluation practices applied on the platform.

There I observe an interplay between aspects of gamification and competition leading to soundalike production. Music producers, typically referred to as “authors”, are ranked in a game like manner. Instead of “kills” the amount of individual sales (note: not the money made) works as the main positional indicator. Additionally, authors can earn a plurality of different badges (I found thirty-six), distinguishing themselves within the community, but also from the perspective of customers. By looking at the “top-sellers” lists with varying temporal scopes one can grasp the pronounced winner-take-all dynamics present. Soundalikes now are often produced in the hope of piggy-backing a fad that from time to time arises around a certain track. Since monetary aspects of music production are very visible, I would argue that the platform produces its own “soundalike-fostering” environment. While now the existence of soundalikes on a production music platform is not too surprising, leniency towards it might be a bit irritating.

In this regard, CREATe’s work on intermediaries was informing me. Especially Hviid, Sanchez and Jacques’ (2017) finding that market power shifts from label or publishers to the retail sector, suits well to the observations I made in Glasgow. Adding to their point, I would note the platforms power to decide what stays and what is banned from it. The official position of the platform considering soundalikes is to foster emulation and to prohibit imitation. This very vague differentiation leads to multiple interpretations of what a soundalike is and when it is evaluated as infringing an author’s copyright. Alleged infringements happen regularly and are also reported (there are even badges for active reporting), some items are then taken off the platform, but others remain. Often these decisions are challenged by the authors, who try to make sense of which legal evaluation practices are in place.

One intriguing argument still in need of further consideration is a platform’s implicit distinction between tracks exclusively on the platform and commercial tracks from charts or movies. Some authors claim that mainly the imitation of the latter is prosecuted strictly. The risk averse platform thus might circumvent parts of the issue by treating music pieces differently. Legal problems can certainly have greater effects if a commercial star takes legal action against the production music platform than if a platform dependent author does so. Relating to the argument of power this leads to the assumption that actors install their own evaluative schemes to what is allowed and what is not allowed, even leading to a situation with two “copyrights”: one for music inside, one for music outside the platform’s universe. This could underline the substantial difficulty of applying copyright evaluation on pieces of music “correctly”, when referring to uncertain concepts and differentiations like the one between emulation and imitation. However, the linkage between copyright and music is full of questions like these. From a broader cultural perspective, the importance of copying for actors as pointed out by Negus, Street and Behr (2017) can be stressed. Actually, the platform and community give the impression of acknowledging the constitutive role copying plays in music creation processes in general, which is a stance not to be taken for granted in the innovation and novelty driven music industry.

Literature

Hviid, Morten, Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez, and Sabine Jacques. „Digitalisation and intermediaries in the music industry.“ CREATe Working Paper 2017.7 (2017).

Negus, Keith, John Street, and Adam Behr. „Copying, copyright and originality: imitation, transformation and popular musicians.“ European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.4 (2017): 363-380.

Behr, Adam, Keith Negus, and John Street. „The sampling continuum: musical aesthetics and ethics in the age of digital production.“ Journal for Cultural Research 21.3 (2017): 223-240.

Stobo, Victoria, et al. „“I should like you to see them some time” An empirical study of copyright clearance costs in the digitisation of Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks.“ Journal of Documentation 74.3 (2018): 641-667.

from l.t.r.: Peter Tschmuck, Elke Schüßler, Benjamin Schiemer, Carsten Winter

On September 12th the closed workshop for young scholars took place. Interesting papers from around the world (South Africa, Barbados, Canada, Germany!) showed insights on music festivals, on blockchain technology, on carribean collecting societies and also on virtual worlds (www.fawm.org) of music collaboration (Organized Creativity’s doctoral researcher Benjamin Schiemer).

We are happy to inform you that The Young Scholars Award  went to Benjamin Schiemer for his paper “ Virtual Songwriting: Fostering Creative Processes through “Challenge” and “Collaboration” ! The paper very interestingly unfolds the creative processes on a music plattform between incompleteness and closure.

OC-Project I.2 “Organizing Temporary Copresence to Induce and Cope with Uncertainty in Creative Processes“ of the Research Unit „Organized Creativity“ Presents First Research Findings at Three International Conferences

Benjamin Schiemer, Linz, April 24, 2017

1. The presentation “The Messy Socio-spatial Trajectories of Knowledge – Tracing Creative Projects in Pharma and Music”  was already held by Alice Melchior at  the American Association of Geographers‚ (AAG) Annual Meeting (April 5-9) in Boston.  

The focus of this talk was on three important aspects of knowledge production: scales, physical copresence and virtual copresence. Based on preliminary findings from the music and pharmaceutical field, the presentation took issue with the prevailing binary physical perception of copresence (i.e. actors are copresent or absent). By elucidating the social construction of different dimension of copresence and the increasing hybridization of online copresence and offline absence the presentation advanced a more nuanced and conceptually richer understanding of the notion of copresence. 

2. Two papers will be presented at the 33rd EGOS Colloquium „The Good Organization: Aspirations, Interventions, Struggles“, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark, July 6–8, 2017:

a) “Being There: The Social Construction of (Physical and Virtual) Copresence” by Gernot Grabher, Alice Melchior, Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler and Jörg Sydow at Sub-theme No. 35: “Organizing Space and Spacing within Temporal Contexts”.

b) “Virtual Songwriting: Fostering Creative Processes through ‘Challenge’ and ‘Collaboration’” by Benjamin Schiemer, Elke Schüßler, and Jörg Sydow at Sub-theme No. 03: “New Frontiers for the Creative Industries: Digitization, Mediation and Valuation”. 

3. One paper entitled “Music Collectives in Vienna’s Jazzscene: Organizing and Perceiving Copresence to Make Music and Navigate Uncertainty” by Gernot Grabher, Benjamin Schiemer and Elke Schüßler will be presented at the international interdisciplinary conference on musical creativity, economy and labour “The Place of Music”, Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, Loughborough University, England, June 28-29, 2017.

Another paper for the Vienna Music Business Research Days “Unchaining the Digital Music Business”, Vienna, Austria, September 12-14, 2017, by Benjamin Schiemer is still under review. 

Invitation: Creativity Conference at University Duisburg-Essen: „Von der Künstlerkritik zur Kritk an der Keativität“, October 12-14, 2017

Berlin/Innsbruck/Duisburg-Essen, April 7, 2017

Date: October 12-14, 2017

Call for Papers: May 31, 2017

Place: Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI), Goethestraße 31, 45128 Essen

The conference aims to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on the topics of creativity and projectification as they have recently been considered a paradigm determining life and work in “new capitalism“. Taking processes of subjectification in research and activism as a starting point, the conference invites approaches from various disciplines and methodological backgrounds as well as application-oriented criticism (e.g. by organisations, initiatives or in form of activist and artistic positions).

For more information click here.

The Organized Creativity Project I.4 „Organizing Creativity under Regulatory Uncertainty: Challenges of Intellectual Property“ will be represented at two international conferences:

Berlin/Innsbruck/Duisburg-Essen, April 6, 2017

1. with Lectures at 29^th Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Meeting, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 – Campus Rockefeller, Lyon, France, June 29 – July 1, 2017

a) by Katharina Zangerle, Title: Dealing with Regulatory Uncertainty through Categorization and Justification – the Case of Viagra Patent Litigation

b) by Konstantin Hondros, Title: Justifying Intellectual Property – Analyzing Court Cases of the Music Business

2. with Lecture at 33rd EGOS Colloquium „The Good Organization: Aspirations, Interventions, Struggles“, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark, July 6–8, 2017, by

Leonhard Dobusch, Konstantin Hondros, Sigrid Quack, Katharina Zangerle: Competition, Cooperation and Creativity: The Role of Intellectual Property in Arts and Science

Scholars from economic geography, management studies and organizational sociology participate in the interdisciplinary DFG Research Unit “Organized Creativity” that started working in Summer 2016. The Research Unit is coordinated by Jörg Sydow, School of Business & Economics, Freie Universität Berlin. For more information visit Organized Creativity Homepage or sign up as a follower on Research Gate

The Organized Creativity Project I.3 „Secrecy as Organizing Uncertainty in Creative Processes“ will be represented at two international conferences:

Berlin/Frankfurt O., March 29, 2017

1. with Keynote-Lecture by Prof. Jana Costas, Ph.D. (European University Viadrina, Germany) at 9th Annual Global Advances in Business and Communication Conference, University of Antwerp, Mai 22–24, 2017. Title: „Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Life“

2. with own Stream at 33rd EGOS Colloquium „The Good Organization: Aspirations, Interventions, Struggles“, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark, July 6–8, 2017:

Stream No. 62: „Secrecy, Secrets and Organizations„, Convenor: Prof. Jana Costas, Ph.D. (European University Viadrina, Germany)

Lecture by Dr. Birke Otto (European University Viadrina, Germany): „Secrecy and Creativity: The Potential of Discretionary Spaces in Science-based Innovation“

Scholars from economic geography, management studies and organizational sociology participate in the interdisciplinary DFG Research Unit “Organized Creativity” that started working in Summer 2016. The Research Unit is coordinated by Jörg Sydow, School of Business & Economics, Freie Universität Berlin. For more information visit Organized Creativity homepage or sign up as a follower on Research Gate

How is Creativity Governed? An Illustration from the Music Industry

Gregory Jackson/Tobias Theel, Berlin, March 23, 2017

How is creative collaboration in the music industry governed? Creativity is not merely an individual process of a lone genius, but often an outcome of socially embedded collaboration (e.g. Sawyer 2007; 2012). Yet the idea of organizing a creative process with all its inherent unpredictability seems paradoxical, if not impossible. In effort to understand how creative collaboration is organized, theories of governance may help us compare different ways of coordinating collective effects to achieve specific objectives (Benz et al. 2007; Jessop/Ngai-Ling 2006) and better understand their consequences for creativity. Den ganzen Beitrag lesen »

First Conference Presentations and Publications

Berlin, March 10, 2017

Four papers with first results from our joint research have been accepted for presentation at leading international conferences such as those of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Boston, USA, and the European Groups of Organization Studies (EGOS) in Copenhagen, Denmark.  A paper on “Studying organizational creativity as process: Fluidity or duality?” by Johann Fortwengel (now King’s College London), Elke Schüßler (JKU Linz) and Jörg Sydow (FU Berlin) has just been officially published in Creativity and Innovation Management  (26 (1) 2017, pp. 5-16), another one by Günther Ortmann (Universität Witten/Herdecke) and Jörg Sydow (FU Berlin) on “Dancing in chains: Creative practices in/of organizations” just been accepted for publication in Organization Studies, the leading European journal in this field, later this year.

Scholars from economic geography, management studies and organizational sociology participate in the interdisciplinary DFG Research Unit “Organized Creativity” that started working in Summer 2016. The Research Unit is coordinated by Jörg Sydow, School of Business & Economics, Freie Universität Berlin.

For more information visit https://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/forschung/organized-creativity/ or sign up as a follower on Research Gate https://www.researchgate.net/project/Organized-Creativity-Practices-for-Inducing-and-Coping-with-Uncertainty

Organized Creativity on ResearchGate

Berlin, Mar 6, 2017

Creativity is widely understood as the generation of novel and valuable ideas. Drawing on empirical comparisons of an arts-based and a science-based field, both of which are in turmoil because of disruptive economic, technological and regulatory changes, this research unit seeks to contribute to the development of a multi-disciplinary theory of organized creativity. The aim is to go beyond individual- and group-centered theories that presently dominate creativity research, education, and training, by providing a better understanding of the conditions under which creativity can be socially organized. The very notion of organized creativity evokes immediate tension: creative processes are inherently uncertain and elude intentional organization, but nonetheless unfold typically among networks of actors embedded in different temporal-spatial contexts which necessitate at least some degree of organization. The basic premise of the proposed research unit is that creative processes involve social structures and practices for shaping degrees of uncertainty as a central “ingredient” of creativity. More specifically, we submit that certain practices of organizing creativity involve attempts to foster, channel, and control creative endeavors by inducing, reducing, tolerating, amplifying, or coping with uncertainty.

See: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Organized-Creativity