march on novelty
The venerable Jim March gave a fascinating presentation today at the Academy of Management meetings that dealt with the origins of novelty. He maintained that the process generating novelty is distinct from the creativity process. Novelty represents deviance from norms of appropriateness or expectations (similar to juvenile delinquency in nature). Creativity, in contrast, represents those acts of novelty that are deemed successful. Creativity is a rare form of novelty. (Although he didn’t say so, I think he implied that most studies of organizational adaptation/innovation examine creativity rather than novelty.) To understand organizational novelty we need theories that are better equipped to understand how actors deviate from social norms.
March suggested that the natural place to turn if we want to improve our understanding of novelty is to sociological theories of deviance. Deviance theories would lead us to expect that novelty is a form of alienation and separation from social institutions that support conformity and homogeneity. Actors who produce novel goods must be sufficiently isolated from these institutions to be willing to fight against trends and accept the very real possibility of failure and disgrace. In turn, groups that thrive on a culture of deviance and embrace oppositional identities should be most supportive of novelty. Deviant communities provide the social support that allows deviants, like Silicon Valley engineers (he claimed), to cultivate their ideas even in the face of strong mass cultural opposition. In other words, novelty producers need at least a minimal level of social support and positive labeling to enable their deviant ways.
There must be a wealth of theoretical tools in the sociology of deviance that organizational scholars could use in the study of adaptation. Given the graceful logic of March’s argument, it seems strange that nobody has thought of this before and written a dissertation of the sort comparing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to “nuts, sluts, and perverts.” The talk also made me think of the research overlap in organizational ecology and social movement theory, which considers the mobilization of enthusiast identities to be a major source of innovation in highly concentrated industries (i.e., resource partitioning). The generation of market segments like microbreweries is clearly the result of the emergence of oppositional identities that reinforced deviance among a small group of entrepreneurs. This suggests that another literature to look at when studying the creation and maintenance of novelty would be social movement theory. Especially in the early stages of a social movement, mobilization depends greatly on the ability to provide social support to and positively feed the alienated feelings of a potential activist community.
I am writhing with envy that I was not present for March’s talk.
josephlogan
August 12, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Well, the news site Valleywag http://valleywag.com/ lives on the premise that, and is in a large part all about how, Silicon Valley is filled with “nuts, sluts, and perverts.”
anonymous
August 13, 2008 at 12:28 am
Hmmm… a hot house of alienated people … in a social movement … creating new organizational form… I wonder where I could read about that…. hmmm…. another transparent attempt at pumping up the citation count…
fabiorojas
August 13, 2008 at 1:24 am
March was fantastic; the presentation was delivered with beautiful precision.
tf
August 13, 2008 at 5:30 am
Yeah, I also missed March’s talk. Did his talk come with a corresponding paper as well?
I had an interesting conversation with Kathy Eisenhardt this weekend about a similar topic… how to conceptualize and understand innovation. I was noting how the innovation research seems to rely on a definition of something that is both ‘novel’ and ‘useful.’ Kathy however pushed back on the necessity of usefulness for that definition, and used the example of the Apple Newton and its been ahead of its time keeping it from being ‘useful.’ It seems further that our conversation was muddied by a similar conceptual inattention to what is meant by ‘novel’
I wonder to what extent it would be appropriate to keep innovation conceptualized along the novel and useful dimensions, but allow for differences to the extent that the novelty is ‘disruptive’ or more ‘incremental,’ (or the extent to which it deviates from norms or accepted standards to use the language here) with further differentiation on a usefulness measure?
I thought R. Sternberg’s 1999 Psychological Science piece on the propulsion model of creativity does a nice job conceptualizing different types of novelty or creativity, which may get at some of these similar distinctions, though perhaps not with the conceptual parsimony of March’s presentation (identifying 7 different types).
peter boumgarden
August 13, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I believe that the work of Phillips and Zuckerman (2001) on middle status conformity addresses – at least indirectly – this issue. Middle status actors obey the norms because their identities are not very clear. On the other hand, high status actors (and low status actors, too) afford to break the norms more often. There is some follow up on their idea on Ezra Zuckerman’s webpage (High-Status Deviance or Conformity? Professional Purity or Impurity… I believe presented last year at ASA)
Dada
August 14, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Peter – He didn’t mention anything about a corresponding paper. And yes, it sounds like you and Kathy are converging on a similar definition of creativity/novelty as March.
Dada – Yes, there are a lot of great theoretical tools in sociology that would help us get a better grasp of how deviance/novelty emerge. The P&Z piece you mention would certainly provide some leverage in understanding how novelty gets distributed throughout social space.
brayden
August 14, 2008 at 3:23 pm
[...] Brayden and Millo have also posted some thoughts about the conference. Unfortunately I couldn’t [...]
Random Thoughts from the AoM « Organizations and Markets
August 14, 2008 at 7:09 pm
And something from a different field, but strogly related to the likelyhood of deviance -
The Rejection of Moral Rebels: Resenting Those Who Do the Right Thing, by Monin et al, in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2008 Vol. 95, No. 1, 76–93
Dada
August 15, 2008 at 8:01 am