Why So Firm? A Case Study on Play in a Temporary Creative Organization

Abstract

In a postindustrial innovation driven economy, organizations are increasingly turning to concepts such as entrepreneurship, creativity and play to meet their need to constantly create new superior value. Research on the organizational conditions for creativity and innovation has often highlighted strategies for controlling creativity and creation of the new. While process philosophy is entering organization studies, we explore the relation between the economy of the existing and the creativity of the becoming by putting creation at the core of the organization. In addressing this challenge, we turn to play, as a free movement and to entrepreneurship, as organization-creation. This thesis contributes to the understanding of play and entrepreneurship in the becoming organization, by developing local knowledge through 'writing stories’ about the empirical case. Applying a narrative approach to a case study of a temporary creative organization, operating in the cultural industries in Oslo, Norway, we find play to be at the core of creation processes. With support from the empirical case, findings show that play is part of the firming of an organization, not in opposition. Play is a relational, collective, and imaginative condition affirmatively reconciled in the organization-creation process. Embracing play as a free boundary transcending activity can help organizations to keep up with the fast-paced environment that they operate in.