Regulating Nimbus and Focus: Organizing Copresence for Creative Collaboration

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

Creative collaboration often takes place in collaborative spaces that increasingly use virtual modes of interaction. To better understand the organizational conditions and organizing practices that facilitate collaboration in such spaces, we compare ethnographies of an online platform for collaborative songwriting and a physical songwriting camp, with each of these spatial settings coming with distinct advantages and disadvantages for creative collaboration. We identify the emergence of copresence – an active mutual orientation toward one another – as a common organizational condition for collaboration. Copresence was fostered by practices of regulating nimbus (i.e. making people more or less visible) and focus (i.e. directing attention to others) that not only stimulated moments of converging copresence marked by collaborative problem-solving, but also enabled diverging copresence marked by undirected attention and more serendipitous interactions. Our comparison reveals the challenges of negotiating between converging and diverging copresence to counteract tendencies towards excessive, or conversely, insufficient nimbus and focus of the participants, both of which are barriers to copresence. These insights contribute to ongoing debates about the organization of online and offline collaborative spaces by shifting the focus away from co-location towards copresence, highlighting the oscillation between converging and diverging copresence as important for a collaborative atmosphere and identifying practices by which copresence can be organized in different spatial settings.
OriginalspracheEnglisch
ZeitschriftOrganization Studies
Jahrgang44
Ausgabenummer4
Seiten (von - bis)545-568
Anzahl der Seiten24
ISSN0170-8406
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 04.2023
Extern publiziertJa

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. We gratefully acknowledge funding by the German Research Foundation for supporting the Research Unit ‘Organized Creativity’ (grant no. FOR-2161).

Funding Information:
We thank three anonymous reviewers and Timon Beyes, the handling OS Senior Editor, for their generous and constructive guidance in developing this paper. Earlier versions of this paper have been presented in the context of the Research Unit ‘Organized Creativity’ at Freie Universität Berlin, at the 35th EGOS Colloquium in Edinburgh, at the virtual WK Organisation conference, at the Austrian Early Scholars Workshop, at a research seminar at Manchester Alliance Business School organized by Joseph Lampel and at an internal research seminar at the Institute of Organization Science at JKU Linz. We are grateful for the feedback we have received in these contexts. Particularly, we want to thank John Amis, Robert Bauer, Giuseppe Delmestri, Gernot Grabher, Axel Haunschildt, Oliver Ibert, Judith Igelsböck, Verena Krause, Stefan Meisiek, Amalya Oliver, Birke Otto, Sigrid Quack, and Jörg Sydow for their detailed comments on previous drafts. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. We gratefully acknowledge funding by the German Research Foundation for supporting the Research Unit ‘Organized Creativity’ (grant no. FOR-2161).

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.

    Fachgebiete

  • Betriebswirtschaftslehre - collaboration, copresence, creative industries, coworking, creativity, distributed work, ethnography, virtual

DOI