Studio Work as a Way to Organize Creative Work in Fashion
In fashion, innovation takes the form of a necessary repetition and provides researchers the opportunity to observe in detail and in practice the creation of innovation. The existing literature, both in cultural studies and in the sociology of organizations, is often focussed at the inter-organizational level, based on a hypothesis linking the production of innovation to market conditions, where “production” becomes essentially the “circulation of a particular innovation as given.” The concept of “diffuse creativity” developed in the fashion studies, has stressed both intra- and infra-organizational dynamics, offering a useful perspective for empirical analysis of activities linked to the development of fashion innovation. “Studio work” is the ideal-typical framework that the author here proposes to help understand the organization of the work of innovation, with its characteristics of reiterated, collective and negotiated activities of creation. This framework allows us to transform a complex (and thus difficult to categorize into discreet categories) “innovation journey” into a complicated routine. The studio work is based on coordination obtained through the creation of mediating conception objects and the imposition of deadlines, using loosely coupled technology and personal authority, on a planned system of openings and closings of a technical core and on craft administration.