Extending processual practice-based organizational creativity : a case from theatre

This thesis addresses the conceptualisation of creativity within organisation studies. It contributes to practice-based processual approaches to organisational creativity (OC), a recent stream of literature that emphasises the temporal progression of activities as the basis of understanding the creative phenomenon from a practice-based perspective. To this end, the thesis explores professional practices in a theatre; an exciting field where the materiality of human and non-human bodies matter, and meanings and contents are negotiated in a complex creation process based on specific professional practices. The thesis contributes to practice-based processual OC by mobilising the epistemology of practice as a theoretical framework for reconfiguring organisational creativity in practice. The epistemology of practice provides a frame for considering the processual, collective and material dimensions of OC. I show how creativity is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon where knowledge, power, performance and sociomaterial dimensions intersect in practice, to stimulate and produce creative emergence. To deepen the analysis of the creative practices, I enrich the epistemology of practice with analytical concepts from the perspective of distributed cognition and Actor-Network Theory. In conversation with the epistemology of practice, these traditions deepen the distributed and sociomaterial dimensions of organisational creativity, offering additional tools for a more nuanced analysis of the phenomenon. This suggests going beyond the conceptualisation of creativity as the solving of a problem, and interpreting it instead as variant composition practices where relationships are tested, and chains of mediations are produced that generate innovative outcomes. This dissertation is organised by way of an introduction and three publications that considered the same empirical case about the production of a theatre show for children, entitled “Ruote Rosa”. The production was written and directed by myself, and the empirical investigations were undertaken as a collaborative ethnography by myself and my co-author for the resultant publications. Research findings demonstrate how the epistemology of practice, with distributed cognition and creativity, and ANT, expand the knowledge of practice-based processual OC, explaining it as a complex multidimensional phenomenon, where different elements meet in practice and give birth to creative emergence. The practical, tacit, sensible professional knowledge of the participants, the power dimension, the sociomateriality and the common orientation of the practice (object of practice), play together and intersect in the creative flow, stimulating and orienting the creative emergence. The thesis documents, and explains, how the dimensions follow each other in a chain of relations that move the process toward something shared and stable; the production of an artifact that, in this case, was a theatre show