The Metamorphosis of Cultural and Creative Organizations

Abstract

The essays in this volume edited by Federica De Molli and Marilena Vecco provide the state of the art of the organizational study of the spatial dimension of organizations operating in the creative and cultural industries. Much is learned about organizing in these social contexts thanks also to the empirical research that is illustrated there. At the same time, the book draws the attention of organization scholars to issues that show how the debate on space in organizational life in the creative and cultural industry has its roots in the more general one concerning the conceptions of space in the sociology of organization, in organizational theories and in management studies.To fully understand the importance of this book, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the spatial dimension has been taken for granted in organizational studies for many decades and that it is due to the Cultural Turn of the 1980s that we began to "see" it. For a long time, therefore, space represented the "container", the "boundary" or the "distance" in organizational theories, just as it represented it in the study of society.But if in the everyday organizational language space is often considered as if it were one thing, and always the same thing, so much so as to be taken for granted, on the contrary space is multiple and even fragmented, as Georg Simmel (1903) pointed out in his writings on the sociology of space. For each specific particle of space there is an aspect of uniqueness that can have sociological relevance to understand social formations such as states, communities, organizations in general and organizations operating in the creative and cultural sectors in particular. In other words, social formations acquire a character of uniqueness or exclusivity also thanks to the specificities of the space they inhabit.