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Department of Management - DISA

PRIN - Creativity, Audiences and Social Evaluation An Empirical Inquiry into the Emergence and Legitimation of Novelty CASE

Areas: Creative industries

PRIN - Creativity, Audiences and Social Evaluation An Empirical Inquiry into the Emergence and Legitimation of Novelty CASE

Programme PRIN 2015

Coordinator Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali (ref. Prof. Simone Ferriani)

People involved:

  1. Gino Cattani, Associate Professor - Stern School of Business, New York University
  2. Andrea Lipparini, Full Professor - University of Bologna
  3. Gabriele Pizzi, Assistant Professor - University of Bologna
  4. Raffaele Corrado, Associate Professor - University of Bologna
  5. Daniele Scarpi, Associate Professor - University of Bologna
  6. Denise Falchetti, Postdoctoral Associate - Boston University

Durata: 42 months - from 20/09/2016  to 05/02/2020

Objective

Creativity research has long been catalyzed by the ‘romantic’ view according to which major creative achievements are sparked by imaginative and uniquely gifted individuals who succeed in bringing novel ideas, categories, projects or organizational forms to life. Several scholarly contributions have supported this ‘heroic’ view leading to a vibrant body of work that has enhanced our understanding of the individual dispositions and talents that underlie the emergence of novelty. Yet, by focusing primarily on the ‘supply side’ of novelty generation, this research has left largely underexplored another key dimension: the need for legitimation, namely the process by which the new and unaccepted is rendered valid and accepted through the attainment of material and/or symbolic resources from relevant social audiences. This is a significant shortcoming as entrepreneurs, artists, inventors or scientists are rarely recognized as creative until their social systems in general, and other creative people in their field in particular, evaluate, recognize and endorse their work. The project address this shortcoming by focusing on three distinct but related fields of cultural production where audiences play a crucial role in shaping creators’ creative trajectories and are also highly visible and so analytically tractable: advertising, opera houses and fashion.