Dissertation

Creative Collaboration: Technology, teams, and the tastemakers' dilemma

Noren, Laura

2014

Overview

Creative workers are workers whose products begin with ideas for making something new or different. Social and technological inertia quietly pressures creative workers to conform to existing norms, standards, forms and practices (Becker, 1982). Previous research demonstrates the social structure of creative work but has not fully incorporated the technological aspects of creative collaboration. The sociotechnical framework characterized by tools and technologies in conjunction with organizational and field-specific practices is a key determinant in the way creative groups enact collaboration. This project asks how the tools and technologies fold into organizational structure to shape creative workers' collaborations and give rise to a multiplicative reward structure that includes earnings as well as non-monetary goods like reputation enhancement and creative achievement. Results are based on ethnographic observation and interviews at four field sites: chamber music rehearsals, fine dining kitchens, a graphic design studio and an electric vehicle design lab. The findings suggest that technologies emphasizing individual accountability – like time stamps and personal input trails - thwart the emergence of shared rhythms and collective experience that underpin collective understanding and productive iteration. This is in contrast to tools-in-hand that invite empathic mimicry, ongoing team cohesion, and create conditions for a sense of collective accomplishment. Where technological pressure to work autonomously is present, it is tempered by the importance of social capital in speedy, project-based creative fields. Further, avenues for receiving non-monetary rewards complicate the relationship between social capital and earnings, creating a tastemaker's dilemma in which completing good work is pitted against maximizing revenue. Understanding sociotechnical influences in creative collaborations has implications for the way organizations facilitate and structure creative processes.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Occupational psychology / Organizational behavior / Social research
• ISBN: 9781321374933, 1321374933