Creative Action in Organizations: Ivory Tower Visions and Real World Voices. - book reviews

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1997  by C. Marlene Fiol

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Among the multiple objectives of this book, two of the more important are (1) to provide the most comprehensive review to date of the empirical studies on creativity in professional and organizational contexts and (2) to lower the boundaries between academics and practitioners engaged in the study and practice of creativity. Accordingly, the book begins with a review of prior research on creativity; it then features numerous short essays by academics and practitioners. While the book comes up short of achieving those two stated objectives, for reasons I describe below, in failing to reach their intended objectives, the editors nonetheless manage to provide some important insights into creativity and creativity research. After describing what I believe to be the book's shortcomings, I end this review by outlining some of its positive contributions.

In the second chapter, Cameron Ford invites the reader to take on the role of investigator and to consider acts of creativity as an investigator might consider an act of crime, i.e., develop a theory that accounts for the motive(s), the means, and the opportunity that facilitated the occurrence of the act. The idea is to determine the extent to which previous investigations (research) have formulated theories that make sense of creativity and creative acts in organizations. Though the reader is asked to join in the investigation, it quickly becomes apparent that "the jury is already in," the case has already been tried, and the verdict is that the past 40 years of research on creativity is almost devoid of theory, is too narrowly focused on characteristics of the individual, and rarely considers situational (and especially organizational) influences. Are these results surprising? Perhaps not really, when we learn that the author narrowed the investigative field to include only empirical research on creativity conducted in organizational settings, even to the exclusion of all research on innovation. He has narrowed his search with the good intention of being more precise in his depiction of individual creativity in organizations, but doing so has arguably had the unintended consequence of unrealistically constraining the range of his own investigation. Although the author offers some rationales for his chosen delimitations, the net effect appears to be an oversimplification of the complexities of creativity itself.

A second purpose of the book is to lower the boundaries between academics and practitioners. At first glance, it appears that the editors have successfully met this challenge: the volume contains 23 "academic" and 23 "practitioner" short essays on creativity. At the end of the volume, the editors attempt to capture the most important themes underlying the essays, as well as highlight differences and similarities between academic and practitioner views. A closer look, however, reveals that the editors might actually be inadvertently heightening rather than lowering the boundaries between the two camps. The title of the book and the two main sections of the book, "Ivory Tower Visions" and "Real World Voices" separate the world neatly into the two camps. The essays were not sorted into one of these two camps based on whether they addressed conceptual visions or real-world action; they were sorted based on one criterion: academic writers in one and practitioners in the other. To further heighten the boundaries, the chapter that summarizes the themes of the 46 essays emphasizes the editors' perceptions of "intriguing distinctions in the ways that the two groups think and act concerning creativity" (p. 320). We are told that, among other things, academics tend to jump to premature conclusions based on overly conceptual and general observations, while practitioners are more concerned with constraints on creativity and are more specific and action oriented.

The editors might be guilty of some of the sins they attribute to academics. Although they admit that some of the distinctions are overdrawn for effect and that their "own way of seeing inevitably colors the identification of patterns in the writing" (p. 317), their way of seeing tends to overemphasize the distinctions at the expense of the similarities. My own reading of the essays resulted in a rather different impression. The exceptions to the editors' academic and practitioner themes are actually quite informative. For example, regarding the claim that academics focus on the general and theoretical while practitioners emphasize the specific and concrete, academic essay #23 provides 10 concrete tips for generating creativity in the workplace that are geared toward increasing productivity. The Eureka experience described in academic essay #24 similarly focuses on enhancing the competitiveness of European firms. Interestingly, many of the practitioner essays reflect in very general terms on abstract theories explaining creativity (e.g., essays #27, #35, and #41) or appear to be touting their own creative successes of the past (e.g., essays #30, #34, #36, #42, and #43).