Creative Actions and Organizations: Towards a Reflexive Sociology of Serendipity

This book details a 15-year theoretical and practical research study that destroys the cliches of creative processes and inaugurates a reflective sociology on serendipity. In today’s highly innovative organizations, creative processes are proceduralized in the form of techniques and give rise to routine phenomena. This text hybridizes paradigms such as Donati’s relational sociology, the Luhmanian systemic approach, Von Foerster’s radical constructivism, Sennett’s ideas on the craftsman, the ideas of Wittgenstein and Searle on language, and the ideas of Dummett and Goedel on logic, as well as Hofstadter’s on artificial intelligence. Drawing on over 600 works, including essays and articles, the currents of thought of scholars who have dealt with the topic are identified here. The 200 techniques surveyed present common elements, such as common meta-rules of opposition, combination, and separation that determine creative behavior and are triggered by a recursive but paradoxical relationship between thought and language.