Governance of Creativity: Distributing Uncertainty in Collaboration Practices

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Creativity is no longer regarded as an individual achievement, but as an outcome of a social process of collaboration. Collaboration is a common practice in both the arts and sciences. Despite its promise, however, collaboration per se is no guarantee for creativity as an outcome: rather, collaboration must be organized and governed. The proposed project draws upon approaches in economic geography and organizational theory to examine an unresolved issue: How can collaboration be coordinated to leverage socially and spatially distributed resources in ways that foster creativity? We approach this challenge by examining the role of governance as institutionalized in ideal-typical modes: market, hierarchy, community, network, association, or state. We seek to reconcile disparate findings on the governance of creative collaboration by understanding the paradoxical role of uncertainty. Namely, creative collaboration must balance under- and over-organizing, or enacting surprise and directing the process. Thus, this project focuses on how governance shapes the distribution of uncertainty among different actors engaged in collaboration. Uncertainty may exist with respect to participation (who participates in collaboration), content (what is the targeted outcome?), process (how are the desired objectives achieved?), and place (where collaboration takes place). Across these dimensions, uncertainty is both a resource to be employed and at the same time controlled as a threat. The central research questions are as follows: How do different modes of governance influence the degree and types of uncertainty among actors in creative collaboration? How do actors utilize these governance modes to induce, reduce and thereby redistribute different elements of uncertainty? And how do different forms of uncertainty in creative collaboration, in turn, influence the choice and effectiveness of modes of governance? Empirically, the governance of creative collaboration will be studied in the fields of music and pharmaceutical research. Interviews and ethnographic methods will be employed to compare practices of creative collaboration drawn from different governance contexts in each field. The project will contribute to a process-oriented theory of organizing creativity.