Dancing in chains: Creative practices in/of organizations

Abstract

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, artists impose restrictions on themselves to encourage creativity and even have a way of “making things difficult” – imposing new constraints on themselves within which they have to dance. At least in the arts, it is difficulty rather than ease which promotes creativity in accordance with this view. This goes beyond the well-known idea of rules and other structures not only restricting but also enabling creativity; it also goes beyond insight into the creativity-enhancing effects of constraints, as recently emphasized in organization studies. Nietzsche adds three dimensions to this dialectic: time and the process of dancing inspired and encouraged by constraints; the opposition of old and new constraints; and the quality of intended, stimulating self-binding. We see this as an opportunity to explore the inspiring potential of Nietzsche’s piece about arts, “Dancing in chains”, when it comes to the different realm of creative practices and creativity in and of organizations. Such an exploration can obviously not aim to offer recipes of how to bring about valuable novelty, but simply intends to identify pertinent themes, issues and questions for organization studies – topics and aspects brought into a new or sharper light when looked at from Nietzsche’s perspective and that of some other philosophers, including Jon Elster’s analyses of constraints in general and of the complications of self-binding in order to promote creativity in particular. Also, we consider Míchel de Certeau’s “silent production” and Martha Feldman’s improvisational routines as being cases of “dancing in chains”.