Ann-Christina Lange
PhD Project Title: ‘Creative Processes: An Ethnographic Study of Innovation, Art and Business’
Research Description:
My research interests focus on the notion of innovation and its deployment in various creative practices. Here, I am particular interested in the way artistic creation has been introduced as an integral part of new forms of production within contemporary capitalism. The thesis entitled examines the practice of innovation from a sociological perspective. It asks how artistic transformation is translated into a strategy for innovation. I investigate various art-specific practices, performances and methods, which engage with businesses to enable and promote innovation in terms of inventing new products or strategies for corporate companies.
Following Barry’s definition of innovation as introducing novelty into a particular domain and transforming the being of this domain (2008:26), I investigate the ways in which these practices lay claim to a particular form of ontological change by asking: how do these artistic practices subvert their discipline, field or industry? Accordingly, I take experimental filmmaking and design methods as practical examples of such ontological transformations. At a practical level, I ask how these practices function and what they produce. To investigate these questions, I take two prime empirical strategies. First, I follow the techniques and methods by which the concept of innovation is enacted within various artistic practices. Second, I examine how, in practice, these ideas are translated into management principles guiding the process of innovation.
As such, I present an ethnographic study of two artistic practices. First I investigate the artistic idea of ‘dogma’, referring to the dogma filmmaking movement, as it was deployed in an event organised by a small-scale Danish consultancy firm. In the second study, I explore the idea of ‘critical design’ as it was deployed in a design brief organised by a London-based design studio. In this way, I consider artistic ideas as enacted in specific events and how these variously draw upon aesthetic perspectives, economic realities and technological futures. As such, this thesis is an empirical contribution to innovation studies, investigating how innovation is invoked in various art practices operationalizing new forms of capitalism where creativity is said to play an ever-increasing role.
This research project is founded by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation as an international collaboration between the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School and Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London