Structure of the chapter

This chapter addresses the literatures on:

3.2 Knowledge workers and intellectual property 3.3 Creativity

3.4 Gurus and creativity

3.5 Intellectual property developers and creativity 3.6 Researchers and creativity

3.7 Competence

I summarise below my purposes in writing each of these sections. My survey of

knowledge workers and intellectual property in Section 3.2 serves to set the scene about the importance of intellectual property and those who develop it. As such, it contributes to justifying the choice of focus for this dissertation.

In Section 3.3 my concern is to examine ways in which creativity - the production o f what is new or, at least, novel, in the realm o f ideas and practice - is examined in the literature. This will serve to introduce the way of thinking about the development o f intellectual properties that I have pursued in my fieldwork, and it will give an account o f why I have rejected other equally well established views.

The next three sections give an account of the literature on three ways o f being creative - the guru, the intellectual property developer and the researcher. This account feels

anachronistic to me, placed before the story o f my deriving and differentiating the three categories. It would, indeed, be misleading, if it left the reader thinking that the literature review gave rise to the categories. In practice, the opposite was the case: the topics for this review arose out of the fieldwork and sensemaking that accompanied it, and the literature was sought in response to this sensemaking.

Section 3.7 on competence assembles largely hostile literature on competence and

competency, and makes it hard to justify a straight attempt to classify the competencies of IPDs.

The story that the literature is assembled to tell

Before going into the literature, and congruent with the sensemaking perspective, I will disclose the broad direction of my thinking by telling the story that this literature is assembled to tell.

We are entering the knowledge age. In this age, what people know is not more complex than in earlier times. Only a modernist bigot would suggest that an M&A lawyer or accountant in New York or the Square Mile lived in a more elaborate intellectual or creative world than a renaissance art worker in a studio in Florence or Amsterdam. Both these types o f knowledge worker would find it hard to maintain a sense of superiority if they analysed the richness and subtlety of the decisions made by a peasant farmer in Perigord or Slovakia at almost any time in the last thousand years.

The change in the work of contemporary knowledge workers, which contrasts with that of earlier times, is that the new work is characterised by a high degree of abstraction. We are entering an age o f demassification or etherialisation, where abstract symbols come to have more and more value in people’s eyes. The peasant and the artist are concerned with palpable stuff. The lawyers and accountants and all the IT workers, consultants and so

many of the burgeoning professions emerging recently, are concerned with symbols on screens and intangible services whose physical existence is no more solid than a floppy disc on a 5lA inch square of plastic.

One strand of the literature that illuminates the process for the production of intellectual properties is the research and writing on creativity. This sometimes attends to the

organisational context in which new intellectual properties are brought forth. I remember Gibson Burrell at the British Academy of Management conference speaking about the importance of the margins, where there is a shifting of the tectonic plates. It was the only occasion in the time I have spent at BAM conferences when I have felt a strong emotion. This feeling was of anger, at the contradiction in the speaker advocating marginality while relishing his own centrality by joking with the professoriate, sitting in a row enjoying his performance. Nonetheless, the point was well made that the place in which intellectual property (IP) is made is a significant influence on the properties and on their impact on the world. Creativity is not just a matter o f individual qualities.

I have shaped my account of the literature on individual creativity to explore a question that underlies my curiosity about IPDs. This question is, ‘Is creativity best seen as a universal quality (we are all creative), or as the special gift of an elite minority?’ The implications of the question for this work are equivocal. On the one hand, if few in the field o f management development are creative in the terms described, it may be that understanding how they perform their magic will offer esoteric knowledge, but will not unlock the doors for others to follow their practices. On the other hand, if the literature

shows that anyone can be creative, then the knowledge o f how the IPDs operate could be used to enable many in the field of management development to be more authoritatively themselves. This work gains its critical edge by examining and exposing the practices of the elite, so as to open these ways of working more to anyone who wishes to avail themselves of them. The limitations of this egalitarian position will also need to be considered, but that is an issue for later chapters. Elsewhere (Megginson, 1997), I have made the analogy that senior management mentors who show their world to their mentees act as ‘windows’ onto that world. I cited Seneca (1969) as one of the finest examples of this with his Letters from a Stoic, where he exposes the workings of the elite in imperial Rome. Whereas the elite in management development do not bestride the world like the giants o f Rome did, they do make an interesting case o f an important breed

I have explored the literature about gurus and fads to defend and to differentiate the EPDs. The literature of gurus seems, in a sense, to be a literature of envy, and it also contains a sub-set, which might be called the literature of pathology. If gurus develop cult-like organisations and this leads them to paranoid behaviour and pathological personality changes, then this is different from the objects of my study, and I want to make these differences clear. The literature on gurus connects with the related literature about fads. This takes a somewhat different angle - focusing upon the intellectual property rather than the characteristics o f the gurus themselves. Again, this literature is disparagingly critical o f the process o f fad production, which it views as part of a wider pathology of management. In exploring it, I am seeking for a purpose behind the evolution o f ideas in management development.

In my review o f the creativity of researchers working within normal science I am seeking to explore the claims to distinctiveness o f the research approach over the IPDs’ way of working.

The final section of the chapter tells of my deep misgivings about the use o f competences to analyse and measure the exercise of an occupation. It offers a ray o f hope, which is used to justify the attempt in Chapter 4.4 to carry out such an assessment process for IPDs on the basis o f the data generated during the fieldwork.

The place o f the literature in this study

The way that I use the literature illuminates the sensemaking approach at work in this part of the thesis. I have not followed the usual sequence of becoming familiar with the literature so as to identify what are the important questions in the field and which questions remain under-explored, and thus merit further inquiry. The conventional approach is supported in the prescriptive books about the research process. For example,

‘Study is an indispensable preliminary to research’ (Watson, 1987, p. 29), ‘Literature searches and reviews take place early in the research sequence’ (Gill & Johnson, 1997, p. 21), and McCracken’s (1988) argument in the quotation at the head of this chapter that immersion in the literature is a crucial preliminary for the for qualitative researcher.

I have not taken this advice, and my literature study has been done after the fieldwork. As someone who has worked in the field for many years, I had a background familiarity with the literature, which told me that knowledge workers and IPs were growing in

importance. I was also broadly familiar with the literature on creativity. The guru literature I knew of, and had begun to connect it with the accompanying writing about management fads. There was also a great deal written about the research process and about the researchers operating within it. By contrast, I was aware of no literature specifically on the subject of IPDs.

So, at the beginning of my inquiry, my main sense o f the literature was that there was a gap in the area o f IPDs and their processes. I felt that I was well enough equipped in terms o f pre-understanding to make sense of the field and to develop a research process without further recourse to the literature at this stage. It is an interesting feature of ethnographic enquiry that its emergent character can seem to reduce the need for preparatory, systematic reading. O f course, I am not saying that it is possible just to ‘be5 in the field without some preliminary, if dim, sense of the sorts o f phenomena that one will encounter there. ‘Researcher as tabula rasa ’ was never a fantasy I was attracted to. I did, however, want to remain as open as I could to what I would find. I am conscious, as I write this, of the advice that I often give to others about the value of reading widely in the early stages of a research process in order to open up new possibilities. Indeed this advice is repeated throughout the ethnographic literature (e.g. McCracken, 1988). In my own case, however, I was happy to remain relatively open by not conducting the majority of

my literature search until after my data had been collected and much of the analysis completed.

In this study there is an additional consideration. One of the characteristics o f the objects o f my study - intellectual property developers (IPDs) in management development - is that many o f them are relatively autarchic in the production of their intellectual properties (IPs). I found myself, in this study, drawn to think and work in a similar way. I used my fieldwork to build up a set of models and frameworks, without bolstering my thinking with a great deal o f material from others.

Reflection

So, where does this leave the literature search in the sequence o f this study? Having developed my sense of IPDs and their production of IPs, I found it enormously helpful to turn to the literature to make sense of what I had been exploring. Not being a doctrinaire follower o f any particular methodological school, I ran the risk o f having a lot o f

observations suspended in intellectual space and not soundly connected to any ways of thinking about individuals and their processes. This risk was not at the level of whether my study was ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-modern’, ‘constructivist’ or ‘constructionist’: it was much broader and more basic than that. The concern I experienced was as fundamental as whether my work was psychological or sociological. Could my IPDs be most usefully understood in terms of their inner processes, or in terms of the milieu in which they

operated? The sense that I made o f the literature on creativity helped me to gain a perspective on this question.