The New Spirit of Creativity: Work, Creativity, and Compromise

This talk will discuss insights from my recent book, The New Spirit of Creativity, and underscore the relevance of the sociology of creativity as a subdiscipline.

Based on fieldwork conducted at Imagination University (pseudonym), I present the day-to-day work, organization, and administration of artistic creativity and its clashes with a "new spirit” of creativity that has widely taken hold. The combined uncertainties of higher education and cultural work make for a volatile mix, and workers must navigate heightened ambiguity around artistic identities and creative excellence. Accordingly, compromises of different orders and consequences emerge between artistic creativity and the new spirit.

Here, I will illustrate how this research provides an original framework for understanding the relationship between creativity and compromise within cultural occupations specifically, as well as some of the wider implications for higher education and the study of work and organizations.