Creativity, Labour, and the Politics of Profit in the Improvised Music Field

Despite its ubiquity in everyday life and non-Eurocentric musics, improvisation is discursively constructed in Western culture as an edgy, radical, and subversive activity. Although there is no agreement on an ontology of improvisation in either the popular or scholarly domains, recent writings in music studies and the humanities propose that the improvisatory practices of jazz and related musics can be applied to contexts outside of the arts to address static, unethical, or otherwise outmoded ways of organizing society. A problematic example of this cross-fertilization of ideas is the recent trend in management studies of exploring the value in bringing improvisatory practices traditionally associated with the arts into the business field. Proponents of this idea suggest that applying the operational frame of improvisation to business organization can help companies develop new products and labour practices to respond to the shifting demands of the market. In this article I argue that much of the recent work in management studies fails to meaningfully address the real world material conditions under which artists work, nor the ethical implications of incorporating the practices of economically marginalized subjects into profit-based enterprises. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the improvised music fields in London, England, and Toronto, Canada, I will explore the issues raised by this trend in management studies by putting the ideas and experiences of improvisers in dialogue with those of theorists who are looking to the arts for new and innovative business strategies.