Call for Papers

Barcelona, with its seaside venues and dynamic plazas, offers a wonderful site for enthusiastic dialog and explorations in the linkages between individual creativity and firm creative and innovative processes in creative industries. We seek to extend our prior dialog on the tensions between art and commerce, dialectical processes by examining micro to macro level translation processes. How do creative actors shape their society, profession and art world? How do organizations and macro level forces channel, disrupt, enable or tame individual creators? We seek to explore these dynamics in the context of creative industries.

We invite and celebrate a plurality of theoretical and empirical approaches addressing but not limited to the following topic areas:

1. Creative spaces: how do creative actors identify, engage and create social spaces and social relations that support their divergent and often controversial approaches? Creative artists have often had sponsors or patrons willing to take a risk and fly in the face of convention. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose antics banished him from polite society, found wealthy entrepreneurs such as the Kauffman’s or Johnson’s who provided opportunities and funded his dreams. We know very little about the role of mentors, sponsors and patrons in modern creative activities and innovation. How do these relationships form? Who connects artists to patrons? How does the relationship enable or divert creative vision and talent?

2. The careers and social networks of contemporary artists and innovators may provide fruitful ground understanding the mechanisms of how passion is translated into a cultural product that ultimately may shape how we understand ourselves, our society and an art world.

3. How do competitions energize or compromise creative vision? Competitions such as design competitions in architecture or film festivals are critical yet understudied phenomena for how creative passion and ideas are channeled and recognized, shaping a field? How do these competitive and field events channel or derail creative passion?

4. What institutional and social resources do mavericks, innovators and rebels draw upon in order to realize their vision? How does social skill, in Fligstein's (1997, 2001) terms, enable a creator to take advantage of ideas and drive these toward realization? What do these social skills look like?

5. How can we study failure versus success in creative entrepreneurs in order to identify these social skills? What institutional logics and resources facilitate creativity and innovation? Since multiple institutional logics co-exist, which logics and when do these logics become enabling rather constraining forces for creativity and innovation?

6. What creative leaders have had a profound impact on their creative industry? How did they alter practices, rules of collaboration or understanding of creative products? What strategies did they pursue? How have these strategies in turn been influenced by institutional logics and supported by organizational structures?

7. How do institutionalized logics, regimes and gatekeepers stifle or facilitate entrepreneurial initiatives in creative industries? How do the networks of relationships provide the connectivity needed for novel ideas to emerge and thrive, as well as for mainstream output to persist the coupling and uncoupling of art and business? Art and business are two threads in creative industries that are often tightly woven and just as often in tension and decoupled. Business practices and concerns may drive the art form, or be uncoupled with it as innovative practitioners create niches and arenas for experimentation, such as independent film.

8. What is the relationship between individual creators and creative firms? How is reputation from individual creators embedded in firm renown? What is the intrinsic value of a creative firm if the creative individual leaves? How can individual reputation be transferred to creative firms?