Misfits, Mavericks and Mainstreams: Drivers of Innovation in Creative Industries

Abstract

This special issue of Organization Studies welcomes scholarly work on the nature, sources, and value of innovation in creative industries, as well as on the roles and relationships of actors who drive these processes (Bechky, 2006;Jones, 2010). In particular, we invite explorations on the activities and interactions of misfits, mavericks and mainstream individual and collective agents (Peterson & Berger, 1971;Becker, 1982;White & White, 1965) in the emergence of radical or incremental novelty (e.g. genres, forms of production and consumption, new business models) that transforms creative industries (Jones & Thornton, 2005;Svejenova, Planellas & Vives, 2010).Creative industries encompass individuals and collectives engaged in conceiving, developing, and distributing artifacts and experiences with aesthetic properties and symbolic functions, such as books, music, films, paintings, or dance and theatre performances, design, fashion, and architecture. Their strong dependence on originality and novelty for distinctiveness (Alvarez, Mazza, Strandgaard Pedersen, & Svejenova, 2005), as new genres and styles get conceived, theorized, legitimized, diffused and consumed by a range of audiences, makes them a valuable setting for advancing theory on the originators, genesis, and trajectories of innovation.We seek contributions that allow unpacking important dynamics of how newness of products, categories and consumption patterns comes into being and transforms art worlds, fields or industries