Re-theorizing Organizational Creativity through a Psychosocial Lens: Introducing the Radical Imagination of Cornelius Castoriadis

Abstract

This chapter draws on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) in order to explore the under-researched role of imagination in organizational practice. Although rarely mentioned in extant reviews of psychosocial approaches, Castoriadis’s philosophy presents an important contribution to the field, resonating greatly with the latter’s dynamic view of the psychic and social. It offers a radical ontology of being that is couched in the interplay between human desires, affects and representations as a source of creativity in society. In what follows, we argue that Castoriadis’s alternative theorizing of creativity advances psychosocial accounts of organizational identity, agency and emotionality, accounting for both individual and collective dimensions of organizational creativity, and positioning it as a process of ‘meaning-giving’ that places human imagination at its core. To date, these affective and unconscious dimensions of creativity (Vygotsky, 2004) remain largely overlooked in the organizational creativity literature, which often displays a marked insistence on ‘outputs’ and ‘controllable’, individual-level characteristics (Drazin et al., 1999; Driver, 2008; Unsworth, 2001), as a ‘creative behaviour’ or ‘the products’ of such behaviour within an organizational context (Woodman et al., 1993: 293). Organizational creativity is also typically examined through a normalizing and neutral concept of ‘novelty’ (Amabile, 1996; Osborne, 2003), leaving out important power and political considerations that are at the heart of psychosocial understandings of organization.