Optimizing Multiple Institutional Logics within the Collective Creative Process

Institutional logics form the foundational building blocks for understanding organizational life and work. While earlier conceptions portrayed institutional logics as static and monolithic, scholars have more recently embraced an action perspective that views logics as fluid and dynamic. With this lens, organizations, fields and professions are seen as rife with a plurality of logics that are continuously contested and negotiated. Our research sheds light on how a multiplicity of logics are navigated over time beyond the context of a single organization or profession, and how micro-level action in the context of the collective creative process may inform, and is informed by, the larger field or industry context

DNA and Lovesongs:Optimization within the Collective Creative Process

Contemporary creative work often brings together multiple experts to realize a novel outcome, and each area of expertise is associated with unique aspirations, requirements and standards. How does the collective creative process unfold when these are conflicting? We harness the institutional logics literature as a lens to highlight cognitive and behavioral implications of larger institutional dynamics that shape and constrain the collective creative process. Based on a comparative ethnography of creative work in the science and music industries, we demonstrate that a significant portion of the collective creative process consists of optimization work. More specifically, we find that actors in both settings developed an approach of optimization – shaping their work so as to integrate and satisfy the requirements of conflicting logics to the greatest extent possible. This study illuminates a critical part of the collective creative process that has so far been unarticulated, and adds to best practices of comparative ethnography

Auto-tuned and R-squared:Reflecting audience quality evaluations in the creative process in music production and cancer research

While audiences play a key role in the implementation and ultimate success of novel ideas, how audiences are reflected in negotiations about quality within the creative process remains under-theorized. We examine this question through a comparative ethnography of two settings where the use of digital technology magnifies the countless micro-decisions involved in producing a creative output and therefore considerations of audience evaluation throughout the creative process—Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research. We find that actors encounter a fundamental tension between two competing standards of quality: the technically perfect, processed and ideal versus the empirically grounded, unprocessed and real. We show how actors navigate this tension vis-á-vis three different audiences—internal peers, extended community, and external reviewers—and how this manifests differently across audiences and the arts and sciences, depending on the audience’s expertise. Our study illuminates the tension between the “ideal versus real” in creative processes that is brought to the fore when creating with digital technology, extends extant research on audiences and organizing for creativity, and offers unique insights from our comparative ethnography across the arts and sciences