Call for Papers

Below is the call for papers for the upcoming Cutter IT Journal issue WHAT'S THE ART IN THE "ART OF INNOVATION"?, guest edited by Daniel Hjorth.

What's the Art in the "Art of Innovation"?

Increasingly we hear and read pleas for investigating the relationship between art and management:

  1. Management books want us to learn from artists, directors, conductors, maestros, or art-groups;
  2. Scholars within organizational studies focus on aesthetics, the humanities, and on philosophy;
  3. Business schools integrate literature on the reading lists of students.

What is this about?

It seems that something has changed radically, necessitating new ways of thinking, new practices of managing, and new organizational forms, and that this somehow points us in the direction of art. What are these changes, and how could attention to art provide a way forward in dealing with them?

One of the radical changes accompanying today's post-industrial economy is the entrepreneurialization of organizations. This often means letting the entrepreneur into the organization, creating additional space for entrepreneurial initiatives; re-thinking the employee as an entrepreneur and embracing innovation and creativity as a fundamental basis for work.

When we say "the entrepreneur" we are not referring to the tamed version of an entrepreneur-look-alike that we find in enterprise management writing; we are not imagining the controllable organizational entrepreneur suggested by management thinkers and practitioners alike. We have something different in mind. We are thinking more of a "homo ludens" -- the playing human -- whose relevant philosophy seems to be "acting as if", and whose primary problem is the presently dominant normality, the reigning order.

In today's organizations, where information technology, for the most part, serves to increase the efficiency of control mechanisms via the never-ending automation of back-office routines and procedures, the one in charge of the dominant reigning order, the present normality, is management. Point made: the relationship between management and entrepreneurship is not unproblematic. The entrepreneur represents a threat to predictability and thus control, the latter being associated strongly with economic efficiency in the industrial economy. But homo ludens points us in the direction of art.

For this issue of Cutter IT Journal, we're evoking double attention to art: (1) The new art of innovation, and (2) Art traditionally understood as aesthetic practices. They are related here because we're asking "what we can learn from Art in the development of a new art of innovation?". This can be broken down into a number of challenges. Our goal with this issue is to provide a breadth of inputs needed to tackle the question "What's the Art in the 'art of innovation'?" and to address the many challenges in organizing and managing our economy's' increasingly innovation-intense work. This issue of the Cutter Journal seeks to deal with this wide range of challenges in thought-provoking articles. Some TOPICS YOU MAY WISH TO EXPLORE include, but are not limited to:

  • How should we now understand the new forms of control in innovative organizations?
  • What is the new role of management and how should the balance of management to entrepreneurship look in tomorrow's organizations?
  • If we cannot plan the future, can we still prepare for it somehow?
  • How do we secure a "space for play", independent of but related to the rest of the organization, as a locus of organizational creativity?
  • Will freedom as potential replace freedom as autonomy and provide a constructive new basis for tying the creative class to organizational membership?
  • How can we understand the art of innovation so as to provide the necessary new organizational forms, philosophies, policies, and practices that make the post-industrial economy also a creative one?
  • What can we learn from Art in this process of building a new architecture for organizational innovation?

TO SUBMIT AN ARTICLE IDEA: Please respond to Daniel Hjorth, dhj.lpf[@]cbs[dot]dk, with a copy to itjournal[at]cutter[dot]com by April 28, 2008 with an article outline/abstract.

ARTICLE DEADLINE: Articles are due on June 2, 2008.

EDITORIAL GUIDELINES: Most Cutter IT Journal articles are approximately 2,500-3,500 words long, plus whatever graphics are appropriate. If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to contact CITJ's managing editor Karen Pasley (kpasley [at]cutter[dot]com) or Daniel Hjorth at dhj.lpf[at]cbs[dot]dk Editorial guidelines are available.

AUDIENCE: Typical readers of Cutter IT Journal range from CIOs and vice presidents of software organizations to IT managers, directors, project leaders, and very senior technical staff. Most work in fairly large organizations: Fortune 500 IT shops, large computer vendors (IBM, HP, etc.), and government agencies. 48% of our readership is outside of the US (15% from Canada, 14% Europe, 5% Australia/NZ, 14% elsewhere). Please avoid introductory-level, tutorial coverage of a topic. Assume you're writing for someone who has been in the industry for 10 to 20 years, is very busy, and very impatient. Assume he or she will asking, "What's the point? What do I do with this information?" Apply the "So what?" test to everything you write.

PROMOTIONAL OPPORTUNITIES: We are pleased to offer Journal authors a year's complimentary subscription and 10 copies of the issue in which they are published. In addition, we occasionally pull excerpts, along with the author's bio, to include in our weekly Cutter Edge e-mail bulletin, which reaches another 8,000 readers. We'd also be pleased to quote you, or passages from your article, in Cutter press releases. If you plan to be speaking at industry conferences, we can arrange to make copies of the issue in which you're published downloadable for attendees of those speaking engagements -- furthering your own promotional efforts.

ABOUT CUTTER IT JOURNAL: No other journal brings together so many cutting-edge thinkers, and lets them speak so bluntly and frankly. We strive to maintain the Journal's reputation as the "Harvard Business Review of IT." Our goal is to present well-grounded opinion (based on real, accountable experiences), research, and animated debate about each topic the Journal explores.

Call for Papers: BI With or Without DW?