ABSTRACT
The emphasis in organizational theory on order and control often handicaps theorists when they want to understand the processes of creativity and innovation. Symptoms of the handicap are discussions of innovation that include the undifferentiated use of concepts like flexibility, risk, and novelty; forced either-or distinctions between exploration and exploitation; focus on activities such as planning, visioning, and strategizing as sites where improvements are converted into intentions that await implementation; and reliance on routine, reliability, repetition, automatic processing, and memory as the glue that holds organization in place. Since the term “organization” itself denotes orderly arrangements for cooperation, it is not surprising that mechanisms for rearranging these orders in the interest of adaptation, have not been developed as fully. (See Eisenberg (1990) for an important exception.) That liability can be corrected if we learn how to talk about the process of improvisation.
