Page 201 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 189
argued that creativity is an individual character trait that can be triggered in certain contexts (Woodman et al. 1993; Amabile 1996; 1997; Sternberg 1997) or a collaborative process that is triggered in interactions between people (Hargadon & Bechky 2006; Tschang & Szcypula 2006; Lingo & O’Mahony 2010). For example, Hargadon and Bechky (2006) show that through help-giving, help-seeking, reframing and reinforcing, collections of creatives can trigger novel insights and in such fleeting moments they become creative collectives. Another example is the study of Tschang and Szczypula (2006) who illustrate that video game designers become crea- tive through collectively iterating novel ideas. While such studies help to better understand how creativity in organizational environments can be triggered (Cohendet et al. 2013; Hargadon & Bechky 2006; Jones et al. 2015; Jones et al. 2016), such line of reasoning suggests – albeit implicitly – that creativity is the property of creatives. It is important to recognize that creativity is not only the domain of creatives for several reasons.
First of all, maintaining a divisive boundary between ‘the creatives’ and the rest or ‘the humdrum’, as Townley, Beech and McKinley (2009) call it, suggests that both categories are mutually exclusive. Yet, such categorization is problematic. Creatives can include all people “at the center of a set of activi- ties, referred to by others [as creative] and carry the status of success as defined by the in-group’, which are often ‘marginal’, at the intersection between groups and therefore able to pick up diverse ideas and relations (Hargadon & Sutton 1997; Uzzi & Spiro 2005)” (Townley and colleagues 2009: 945). Crea- tivity, hence, is not something that exclusively belongs to a separate group of ‘lone geniuses’ that possesses extraordinary skills and attitudes.
Secondly, maintaining a division between creatives and ‘the humdrum’ does not reflect what is happening in today’s society, in which not only creatives but also others are involved in creative processes. In particular, in Chapter 4 of this dissertation I uncover a new pattern of collaboration between creatives and their clients by showing that creatives, at times, voluntarily relax their involvement and control over creative processes (through ‘mobilizing’). Similarly, in Chapter 2, I show that also designers do put themselves at the center of creativity constantly. Especially during co-creation workshops like the Ramble, they attempt to make their clients creative and take a more facilitating role themselves.
A consequence of a more democratic understanding of creativity is not only that attention is oriented at how ‘the humdrum’ is involved in creati- vity, but also that creatives do other things besides generating creativity. More specifically, in this dissertation research I contribute to existing lite- rature on creative work (e.g. Jones et al. 2015; Boland et al. 2008; Hargadon & Bechky 2006) by emphasizing that creatives engage in ‘mundane acti-