What’s wrong with creativity?

Abstract

In this essay we put forward a critique of the prevailing orthodoxy of creativity and innovation which are rarely fundamentally questioned neither in science nor in public discourse. We urge to reconsider contemporary purposes and consequences of what we call instrumental and humanist conceptions of creativity and innovation. Based on our critique we speak out to transcend reified notions of creativity and innovation by engaging in disciplined imagination of desirable alternative futures using the example of craft as a timeless form of work. Craft, we argue, prefigures a type of creativity and innovation that addresses the social and ecological challenges of contemporary economy and society and may thus serve as a source for inspiration to radically re-think current, ingrained notions of creativity and innovation.

In 2017, two reporters from Bloomberg conducted a simple experiment. They took a bag of fresh vegetables, squeezed it by hand into a glass and published this event on their website. The simple act provoked a heated debate in the media. Why? The vegetables and fruits were in a bag that fitted into the “Juicero,” a glossy juice pressing machine launched in 2016 and priced at a whopping 699$. The Juicero was the brainchild of Douglas Evans, who had received an astonishing 1,185 M$ from prominent venture capitalists such as Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. It could exert 4 tons of pressure, enough to lift two Tesla cars, and it was connected to the internet so customers could trace the origins of their fruit bags and automatically order new ones. The Bloomberg experiment, however, raised reasonable doubt about the added value of the Juicero. Apparently, the pressure of the palm of the reporter’s hands was strong enough to squeeze fruit into tasty juice, and the Juicero, though a feat of engineering skills, suddenly appeared utterly over-engineered, over-priced and even useless.

The Juicero debacle leaves us with a gnawing feeling of unease. What’s wrong with creativity? How can creative and innovative energy be so misdirected? The Juicero story makes more sense, however, if we consider that the main function of creativity and innovation in our times seems to be to serve continuous and unrestrained economic growth to “dynamically stabilize” economic and societal structures (Rosa et al., 2017), and to enable short term profits at the expense of the long-term well-being of humanity and the planet (Banerjee et al., 2021). Yet such instrumentalist use of innovation and creativity for economic growth seldom sparks critique or critical inquiry (although exceptions exist, see Schaefer, in press; Godin and Vinck, 2017; Hallonsten, 2023; Sveiby et al., 2012). Instead, creativity is generally viewed as inherently benign (Walsh, 2023) and almost always regarded as the dependent variable that we want more of (George, 2007). How could anyone possibly be “against creativity” (Osborne, 2003) or “against innovation” (Vinsel and Russell, 2020)? Well, we are.

We contend that the current dominant instrumental view on innovation and creativity leads to a misguided instrumentality and a co-optation of creativity’s humanist orientation. If creativity is only used to innovate for short-term economic benefits and to serve unrestrained economic growth, opportunities to improve the material and social worlds, to the benefit of the many, are lost. This, we argue, is what is currently happening in our economy. We therefore speak out for a transcending of reified notions of creativity and innovation. In what follows, we first distinguish between instrumental and humanist creativity, and argue that both have adverse societal, ecological, and individual consequences. We then argue for a radically different notion of creativity, using the concept of craft to suggest an alternative future role of creativity and innovation in sustainable economic and societal development.

Before we embark, some clarifications. While the two terms innovation and creativity are inextricably intertwined, it makes sense to analytically distinguish them. Following Ridley (2020: 2), we define innovation as the “process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance.” Creativity is the processual aspect of innovation: continuous intentional individual and collective acts of generating, developing and evaluating ideas that may or may not become part of new products, services, or lead to organizational changes (Schaefer, in press). Creativity is continuous and not limited to one-off acts of producing an innovative product or service: it occurs “over and over again” (Reckwitz, 2017). In this sense creativity may be viewed as continuous “idea work” (Håkonsen Coldevin et al., 2019) which results in innovation—a stable and novel re-arrangement of the world. This makes creativity the sine qua non for innovation.

Instrumental and humanist creativity

In 1950, the president of the American Psychological Association, J. P. Guilford, urged his colleagues to study creativity, calling the thitherto neglect of the topic “appalling.” Psychology scholars heeded his words. Creativity research skyrocketed and various schools of thought soon emerged: the instrumentalist and humanist camps, both focused on different means-ends relationships (Bycroft, 2014). Instrumental creativity scholars aimed at studying and controlling creativity for specific ends, such as military or industrial innovation, whereas humanist creativity scholars treated creativity as an end in itself, and creative expression as an essential human need (Maslow, 1962). But it was the view of creativity as instrumental that was to have the most profound influence on organizations and society, aiding impulsive and accelerated economic growth.

The dichotomy is reminiscent of Weber’s conceptual distinction between instrumental rationality and value rationality, a cornerstone of his analysis of modern society. Instrumentally rational action is oriented toward identifiable and measurable goals, most clearly accumulation of monetary assets and power, whereas value rational action is oriented to that which has intrinsic value, such as beauty, insight, and virtue (Weber, 1922). Weber was profoundly ambivalent in his approach to these categories, defending the value rational spheres of society against their instrumentalization, but also acknowledging the efficiency and aptness of instrumentally rational action. Later sociological works, building strongly on Weber, analyzed how the “system” of economic and administrative (instrumental) rationality colonizes the “life world” where the deep values of human action and interaction reside and are reproduced—including not least knowledge, creativity and innovation (Habermas, 1984, 1987).

In a similar vein, latter-day expansion of administrative and technical rationality has been critiqued under many headlines, including the rise of “managerialism” (Parker, 2002), the “era of total bureaucratization” (Graeber, 2015), “market triumphalism” (Sandel, 2012), the spread of “enterprise culture” across society (Keat and Abercrombie, 1991), and the senselessness of the power that corporations hold over people’s lives today (Klein, 1999). Specifically concerning the role of innovation in labor processes, studies have argued that subsuming the deeply human desire for creativity and the scientific and scholarly search for knowledge under an economic logic means turning humans into Marxian “appendages of the machine” (Walsh, 2023).

Instrumental creativity and unceasing growth

In this multifaceted but manifest development, humanity is made servant to the economy, rather than the other way around. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa and colleagues have used the notion of “dynamic stabilization” to describe this state of (late) modernity. They argue that economic growth nowadays does not serve progressive and transformational ends, but that its key function instead is to re-produce and stabilize Western economies and societies, for better or worse. This means that faltering economic growth today would lead to system breakdowns and instability, which creates the ultimate imperative to keep the economy growing without any real purpose beyond this self-serving and thoughtless cycle of dynamic stabilization (Rosa et al., 2017). The analysis echoes similar arguments concerning the “zero-sum-game” of consumption and status (Alvesson, 2013) and the current economy’s conflation of progress with consumption (Roberts, 2014). A stable economy runs on high levels of consumption, mostly financed by consumer debt (Jackson, 2009), and so our future prosperity hinges on the necessity of continuous economic growth. A daunting prospect, especially since economic growth itself is only a by-product of human and social development and achievement (Sen, 1999), that is an indication of progress (among others), not progress in itself.

The upshot is that instrumental creativity is essential to consumption-driven economic growth, which has also continuously accelerated over the last decades (Rosa, 2013). The growth imperative and acceleration means that the practice of patiently working on transformative creative solutions has been displaced by shorter and shorter cycles of production and consumption. The problem is that technical and social innovation are gradual and cumulative processes that require perseverance, deep professional knowledge, skill, and long-term planning (Bijker, 1995; Mokyr, 1990). Shortsightedness and instrumentalization of creativity and innovation have led to a profound neglect of the values and virtues that took humanity from its premodern state to today’s wealth and well-being. Consider the story of Thomas Edison’s purposeful work with finding the right filament for the light bulb, reportedly testing thousands of different materials (Ridley, 2020)—arguably the opposite of the Juicero story. Sure, it took Doug Evans 3 years to develop the Juicero, but that clearly was not enough. Had Evans, like Edison, tried thousands of varieties—in his case thousands of ways of pressuring juice out of fresh fruit—he would have discovered himself what Bloomberg News later exposed.

It is also telling that none of the engineers of the Juicero ever thought about the actual usefulness and value of their machine, but only seemed to focus on creating a return on investment for the venture capital firms, and their own short-term financial gains. Such a view on innovation and creativity reflects “an unholy marriage of Silicon Valley’s conceit with the worst of Wall Street’s sociopathy” (Vinsel and Russell, 2020: 10), resulting in a lack of substantive justification and individual and collective reflections on the purpose of creativity and innovation. So, while instrumental creativity can spur skillful engineering, it tends to discount civic implications and disregard long-term consequences in favor of instant gratification (Roberts, 2014). Instrumental creativity is simply unsustainable in the long run, in the true meaning of the word, not the vacuous, ubiquitous buzzword in management discourse. Growth is limited and societies and the planet will not be able to sustain itself in the future.

At this point, the counterargument of resource efficiency is usually raised, pointing out how nothing is wrong with (instrumental) creativity. The argument is that it will eventually lead to more resource efficient technologies, and enable us to reduce resource consumption (e.g. McAfee, 2019). Yet, as research has shown, more resource efficient technical solutions run the risk of leading to a rebound effect related to increased consumption of resources (see for overviews Herring et al., 2009; Polimeni et al., 2009). A most conspicuous example is air travel. While it has certainly become more fuel efficient, this has not led to lower but higher consumption. The lowering of costs has increased demand and several low-cost airlines have entered the competition. The example shows the doubtfulness of the argument that instrumental creativity will eventually lead to more resource efficient innovation and in the long run to more sustainable consumption and growth.

To be sure, we are not arguing that creativity cannot or should not have instrumental value. Quite the opposite, we are convinced creativity that feeds innovation will have instrumental value—this, we argue, is manifestly evident from a quick glance at history. What we criticize is the current precedence given to instrumental creativity, in the mindless pursuit of immediate gratification, financial gains, and economic growth, and how it crowds out humanist or value-rational creativity. Therefore, as we will argue below, humanist creativity and instrumental creativity should not be seen as mutually exclusive, but as complementary mindsets and approaches that should inform an alternative approach to creativity.

Empty promises of self-actualization

What about simply shifting focus on humanist creativity? As mentioned earlier, humanist creativity developed as an alternative to the instrumental justification of creativity encouraging creative act as ends in themselves, rather than means to an end. Humanist creativity is considered to be an essential part of what it means to be human (Maslow, 1962) and a prime example of value-rational action based on “conscious belief in the unconditional and intrinsic value (. . .) of a specific form of particular comportment purely for itself” (Weber, 1922: 101). Humanist creativity, therefore, prioritizes individual and collective creative expression without the explicit consideration of economic or other instrumental goals. The humanist ideal of creativity has had a significant influence on society and organizations. In his historic analysis of how creativity became the dominant socio-cultural ideal, Reckwitz (2017: 13) argues that during the 1970s “creativity was deployed as a promise of emancipation” by “artistic and counter-cultural niches” which during the new economy hype in the 1990s seeped into organizations as well (Ross, 2004).

Yet it appears that humanist creativity has not delivered on its promises of self-actualization for individuals in organizations. Willmott (1993) illustrates how organizations may be able to create (engineered) systems of values that obfuscate the fundamental incompatibility between the humanist expression of fun, creativity and play and the rational and calculative logic of an organization. Fleming (2009) echoes this argument by claiming that the mantra of “being yourself” at work is in reality an “individualized conformism.” Difference and self-actualization is encouraged as long as it does not violate the “universal role” of profit making; in other words “just be yourself but only up to a point” (Fleming, 2009: 8). Promises of emancipation, self-actualization and humanist creativity have slowly been absorbed into a “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005).

Another problem is that humanist creativity is paid lip service, as image and substance are decoupled (Hallonsten, 2022; Schaefer, 2019). The deluge of “innovation speak” in government and public administration, evident since at least the mid-1990s, has diluted concepts of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship (but also sustainability and progress), mostly by the efforts of politicians and decisionmakers to signal action and decisiveness. This is all often in lieu of substantive or profound renewal, leadership and much-needed political action (Vinsel and Russell, 2020). Managers have been shown to engage in “symbolic work,” talking about freedom but acting to increase control, thus wilfully ignoring the gap between their imagination of how to facilitate creativity, and their subsequent actions (Schaefer, 2019). “Innovation speak” and wilful ignorance seems to divert attention away from tasks and processes that are crucially important for innovation in the long run and in a deeper sense, such as maintenance and development of existing structures, including both technical/material and intellectual resources (Vinsel and Russell, 2020).

We may also question whether it is really necessary to stimulate more self-actualization based on comparably shallow and transient (images of) achievement. As Richard Sennett famously argued, the new world of work based on flexibility, self-expression and possibilities of self-actualization oftentimes create instable identities, disorientation and the loss of communal sensitivities (Sennett, 1998). Others have equally observed the side effects of unfettered creative expression manifested in a loss of community (Putnam, 2000), an impulsive need for instant gratification (Roberts, 2014), a proliferation of image building over substantive skills (Alvesson, 2013), a pervasive sense of entitlement (Foley, 2010), and the mismanagement of organizations due to a fast turnover of fashionable management ideas rather than proper attention to real tasks (Kärreman et al., 2021).

Transcending creativity

So far, we have argued that the mindless pursuit of consumer-driven economic growth requires instrumental creativity which becomes complicit in the unsustainable exploitation of resources and ecological problems. We have also critically discussed how the potential alternative, humanist creativity, has been co-opted and converted into a form of insidious control, in which people may self-actualize if they do not violate the objectives of the organization on which they depend. In addition, humanist creativity may act as a fantasy rather than a substantial organizational practice, and it is also doubtful whether more self-actualization is what current society really needs.

As the previous arguments illustrate, it is time to re-think creativity and question the prevailing orthodoxies of instrumental and humanist creativity. We need a type of creativity that is neither mindlessly fueling economic growth, nor compulsively self-absorptive. This requires a re-evaluation of the means and ends of creativity. Creativity should strike a balance between a positive instrumental use and a genuine humanist orientation based on the principles of an alternative form of organizing that allows for autonomy but also solidarity and responsibility (Parker et al., 2014). With such goal in mind, we need to “work from the assumption that the moral and social position of creativity is not given” and “that all forms of creativity are culturally contingent, and that statements about their importance can only be fully understood as a form of reification” (De Cock et al., 2013: 152).

If creativity is culturally and socially constructed, it follows that it is not inevitable and therefore should be critically scrutinized and ultimately open for change (Hacking, 1999). Yet, when transcending socially constructed notion of creativity we are bound by existing institutions and social conventions. There is, according to Kuhn (1959), an “essential tension” between innovation and conventionality in all creative efforts. Stability and change presuppose each other, and institutions are both conducive of renewal and in themselves reproduced by renewal—this is how organizations and society progress (e.g. Merton, 1938; Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Put differently, “humans are both subject and object of making history” (Göpel, 2016: 44). Accordingly, if we seek to transcend current reified notions of creativity, we need to allow for a radical openness and imagination to existing social structures and cultural norms while at the same time institute new ways of structuring and shaping our societies and organization (De Cock, 2016). The recent revival of craft may illustrate how this could look like in practice.

Creative craft

One way of striking a balance between conventionality and creativity is to engage in disciplined imagination of desirable alternative futures by drawing on examples from the present that prefigure alternative conceptions of creativity (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022; Schiller-Merkens, 2022). We argue that an alternative conception of creativity prefigures in the resurgence of craft and the concomitant enchantment of work (Suddaby et al., 2017). This might seem surprising at first, not least because craft has been associated with tradition and not a hotbed of innovation (Kieser, 1989). We contend, however, that this is a misunderstanding. Craft should be understood as a timeless ideology of work which has questioned the dominance of mass production and consumption (Fox Miller, 2017). In this vein, Bell et al. (2021: 2) propose that “future-oriented craft imaginaries” may serve as inspiration for “disruptive organizational, societal and ecological changes” and consequently, craft inspires reflections on alternative conceptions of creativity and innovation as well.

According to Sennett (2008: 9), craft is “a human instinct to do a job well for its own sake.” At the core of this seemingly simple definition is a radical different understanding of work including creativity and innovation, which ultimately rests on the understanding of creativity and innovation as value-rational action (Weber, 1922: 101) and is reminiscent of a humanist approach to creativity. Indeed, in their systematic analysis of different craft “configurations” Kroezen et al. (2021) identify a “pure” craft configuration which is a form of self-expression that resists all attempts to instrumentalize craft for commercial purposes. It involves the adherence to passed-on traditions and an anti-stance to all things commercial. Such type of craft as inspirational for new forms of innovation and creativity is, however, not what we have in mind here. As argued above, we believe that instrumental and humanist forms of creativity should complement rather than oppose each other.

We argue that regressing to craft as a timeless ideology of work, while at the same time reflecting on the challenges of contemporary economy and society, is the quintessence of the type of creativity and innovation that we speak out for here. Such approach to creativity and innovation need to finely balance economic, social and ecological demands through creatively combining past and present craft conventions with future challenges (Bell et al., 2021). Creative powers should not be targeted at selling products at all costs but to cater to a community with shared values. This community includes consumers as well as producers and common values such as balancing cooperation and competition (coopetition) (Mathias et al., 2018). Moreover, creativity and innovation should not be geared toward quick turnover and speedy development but related to the slow, accumulative progress of developing new ideas and products and honing one’s skills that is so typical of craft processes (Crawford, 2009).

As we argued above, instrumental creativity seeks not to do a job well for its own sake but producing a specific outcome and maximize profit. This impulsion is the engine of the current mindless pursuit of economic growth at all costs, which threatens the well-being and long-term progress of our societies. It can only be countered and pushed back by a return to deep human values of art, science coupled to an instrumental orientation based on a pluralist value base (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). We believe that craft and craft organizations may constitute such an alternative including a different approach to creativity. Yet, much more in-depth empirical studies are needed to explore substance, nuances, struggles and consequences of creative craft.

Cracking the surface

To be sure, we do not advocate the abolishment of capitalism as an economic system, and that instrumental creativity be replaced entirely by humanist creativity and craft, in an effort to transcend current notions of creativity and innovation. We urge that the critique of reified conceptions of creativity as a dependent variable be intensified and conducted with the help of the ideas outlined in this essay. A good place to start is for innovators, venture capitalists, and consumers that seek to transcend creativity to attempt to spot the obvious cracks in the dazzling surface. What is the value of a product? What is the purpose of the project? Who will benefit? Such critical inquiry may then lead to the emergence of alternative evaluations of creativity and patterns of organizing such as the example of creative craft we discussed. The questions are astonishing in their simplicity, and could be asked of many so-called innovations today. There is something wrong with the corrupt and unsustainable obsession with superficial creativity and innovation. The Juicero, that we started this essay with, is a self-evident symbol of such development, and a powerful testimony that changes are desperately needed.