Organizing Creativity With Constraints—Insights From Popular Music Songwriting Teams

Abstract

Creative processes within and across organizations have not only been associated with freedom but also with constraints. By taking a dialectical process perspective, we examine how creatives actually engage with constraints and how constraints thereby emerge, unfold and terminate over time. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with popular music songwriting teams, we found that collaborators do not simply experience but also actively utilize constraints. Doing so enables songwriters to process constraints and to organize for an oscillation between stable, generative, and flexible constraint characterizations, fueling the creative process. Notwithstanding the persistent nature of some structural constraints, these findings contribute to research on organizing creativity by conceptualizing constraints as intertwined, malleable and even transformable by actors as they unfold. Thereby, the findings extend the current understanding of creativity with constraints by pointing to the crucial role of certain constraint characterizations that need to alternate procedurally between stability and fluidity.