Organizational Creativity, Play and Entrepreneurship: Introduction and Framing

With our call for this Special Issue, we wanted to summon the themes of organizational creativity, play and entrepreneurship so that people responding to the call would be inclined to combine them in various forms and ways. The call gives heed to streams of research on collective creativity (Austin & Devin, 2003; Catmull, 2008; Hessel, 2013) and process studies (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & van de Ven, 2013; Helin, Hernes, Hjorth, & Holt, 2014; Hernes, 2014), on play, aesthetics and performativity (Åkerstrøm-Andersen, 2009; Beyes & Steyaert, 2011; Gherardi & Strati, 2012; Höpfl, 2002; Hjorth, 2005; Sørensen & Spoelstra, 2012), and on the organizational conditions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship as organization-creation (Gartner, 2012; Hjorth, 2012). Importantly, we also wanted to give space to play as an ethics in the SpinozianLevinasian sense, i.e. as a grounding condition for us as relational-organizational bodies and subjectivities (Huizinga, 1949; Rhodes, 2009; Winnicott, 1971). We wanted to invite potential contributors to think there is a virtual fringe for thinking opened up by those three themes. What if they were thought together, what would it mean to have thought move in the freedom of a juvenile conceptual space delimited by organizational creativity, play and entrepreneurship? What would one do with such a space – ask new questions, bring in new empirical material for analysis, and/or perform in it?