Creativity, organisation and entrepreneurship: Power and play in the ecological press of money

Drawing on how Marx reverses consumption perspectives (C-M-C) to capture the money-orientation of entrepreneurs (M-C-M), the paper addresses ways the ‘ecological press’ of creativity is affected by money-orientations becoming internalised deeply into institutions. Accepting Hjorth’s critique that managerialism aims at producing ‘today’s ideal of self-managing enterprising employees’, the pressing issue is to understand how organisation, when re-configured around budgets, targets and other metrics, can be opened up to passion, carnival and play without augmenting the ‘power of place’. Asking how ‘spaces of play’ get foreclosed by the ‘ecological press’ of creativity being turned towards money-making, particular scrutiny is given to the ways in which ‘institutional logics’ get altered by internalising money-orientations. Three paradigm cases of reverse-thinking in innovation are examined: namely, Edison’s supply of electricity, Sloan’s use of ROI to grant autonomy, and JIT’s lead towards the flexible factory. While suggestive of the role money may play in limiting creativity to the possible and the potential, the analysis shows how change towards the virtual can be triggered by complex modes of reverse-thinking. While the analysis challenges ‘market logics’ that put creativity in the hands of the ‘chance and caprice’ of internal competition, I conclude that negative effects on the ecological press of creativity, such as ‘making play pay’, might be better countered by more research over how money’s presence and absence is created and tempered.