Discussion: View Thread

Apologies for cross-posting

Call for Short Paper Submissions 

EGOS Sub-theme: Discovering Creativity in Necessity: Organizational Ingenuity under Institutional Constraints

Deadline: Please submit a short paper of not more than 3,000 words (incl. references and all other materials) by January 16, 2012 at the EGOS website: http://www.egos2012.net  The conference takes place in Helsinki, Finland, July 5-7, 2012.

Convenors:

 Joseph Lampel , City University London, UK,
lampel@city.ac.uk

Benson Honig , McMaster University, Canada,
bhonig@mcmaster.ca

Israel Drori, University of Michigan, USA,
idrori@umich.edu

 The construction of creativity in organizations continues to puzzle scholars. Creativity is often associated with organizational spaces where rules and boundaries are weak if non-existent, and by the same token is considered to decline when these constraining forces are strong and pervasive. This dichotomy – organizational freedom versus necessity – results in opposing images of creativity and its absence: On the one hand we have romantic images of entrepreneurs asserting their creativity by breaking rules and transcending boundaries, and on the other we are presented with institutionalized managers constrained by rules and prevented by boundaries from exercising their creativity.

Reality belies this dichotomy. In practice the interplay of freedom and necessity in organizations is more nuanced. Most organizational actors have to operate within boundaries and through prevailing rules to effect creative solutions to new or existing problems. To meet the challenge of the situation these actors must develop a set of skills, social tactics, and mental orientation that express "organizational ingenuity", defined as the ability to create innovative solutions within structural constraints using limited resources and imaginative problem solving.

Organizational ingenuity is practiced at different organizational, sectoral, national, and international levels. It is practiced within the organization at the interface between individual, team, project, and business units, but is also employed externally by the organization as it engages with its regulatory and societal interactions. In these contexts, organizational ingenuity mobilizes cooperation and co-opts dissent to 'game and tilt' organizational and societal power in the pursuit of limited or global goals. Its practices therefore reflect the governance system in which it is embedded, but this embeddedness is used to advantage by co-opting, coordinating, and whenever possible drawing on organizational slack to effect change.

Accordingly, the following overarching questions will inform discussion in this Subtheme:

This Subtheme is organized in conjunction with an Organization Studies special issue on the same topic. It is dedicated to bringing together scholars interested in the more contextual and practice oriented aspects of organizational ingenuity and creativity. We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines and point of views. 

Joseph Lampel (PhD McGill) is Professor of Strategy at Cass Business School, City University London. Joseph Lampel has authored and edited five books, among them "Strategy Safari" with Henry Mintzberg and Bruce Ahlstrand, and "The Business of Culture," with Jamal Shamsie and Theresa Lant. He has edited five journal special issues, including one on "Field Configuring Events" in Journal of Management Studies with Alan Meyer, and another on "Learning from Rare Events" with Jamal Shamsie and Zur Shapira. He is currently editing a special issue on the same topic as this EGOS proposal with Benson Honig and Israel Drori.

Benson Honig (Ph.D. Stanford University) is the Teresa Cascioli Chair in Entrepreneurial Leadership, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. Studying entrepreneurship worldwide, his research includes over 40 articles on business planning, nascent entrepreneurship, transnational entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, social capital, and entrepreneurship in environments of transition. He is the co- winner of the Grief award for highest five year impact article in entrepreneurship in 2009, as well as the most cited paper for JBV; 2003- 2009. He is an editor of ET&P and serves on five editorial boards, including JBV and JMS.

Israel Drori ( PhD, UCLA) is a visiting professor of management at the Ross Business School, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also a professor at the School of Business , College of Management, Israel. His publications include 7 books as well as numerous papers published in journals such as: Organization Science; Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice; European Management Review; Human Resource Management; Public Administration Review; Social Science Quarterly;