Creativity on Demand : The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age / Eitan Y. Wilf.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilf, Eitan Y., Author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online.

Chicago scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Creative ability in business.

Corporate culture.

Organizational behavior.

Business anthropology.

Industrial management.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (229 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation-and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today? In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation

ONE. Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With

TWO. "Putting This Mess into a Structure" Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions

THREE. "Listening to the Voice of the Product" Human Creativity Displaced

FOUR. The Post-it Note Economy Understanding Post-Fordist Business Innovation

FIVE. Clutter Unpacking the Stuff of Business Innovation

SIX. "Life Design" The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation

CONCLUSION. Institutional Myths of Innovation

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Also issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226607023

022660702X

OCLC:

1078574676