Exploring creativity and innovation in broadcasting

Abstract

We consider the emergence of design innovations in process, emerging around the form of polyarchy. This is done by using a case study of innovation conducted by a production organization’s project that was embedded in and hosted by a bureaucratic public institution, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The research reported here was part of a larger project comparing the BBC and ABC’s use of different modes of organization. It focused mainly on the organization designed to deliver a six-part television series, The Code. The innovative process of Scribe, the organization in question, in producing the story is a good example of idea work being instituted in a polyarchic design process. Scribe represents a new organizational design characterized by a polyarchic structure, which is soft and decentralized, with strict and relatively insuperable social and symbolic boundaries. This results in a project-based organization to coordinate collective innovation that is curated by making the writer also the creative director or showrunner. The research contributes further to exploring organizational idea work, through prioritizing creativity and innovation by an explicit positioning of a product and collaborative generative idea work.

Keywords

Creativity innovation media organization design polyarchy projects

Introduction

A television film, as work by Coldevin et al. (2019) established in the case of Media Tales, is a complex relational composition in which creativity and idea work flourish (Coldevin et al., 2019). In organization studies, discussion of how this flourishing might be organized has been oriented to organization design prescriptions such as heterarchy and responsible autonomy (Fairtlough, 2005), to which we wish to add a third approach – that of polyarchy (Courpasson and Clegg, 2012).

Heterarchy (Ogilvy, 1977, 2016) describes a situation of multiple rulers, as in partnerships in professional organizations, such as law firms. Any unit can govern or be governed by others, depending on circumstances; no one group dominates the rest. Authority is distributed. Heterarchy’s close conceptual stablemate, responsible autonomy, describes an organizational situation in which control resides in professional experts open to critique and regular audit (Fairtlough, 2005: 31–33). Combined, heterarchy and responsible autonomy comprise a form of polyarchy as Dahl (1971: 8) defined it: a form of organization that is ‘highly inclusive and extensively open’.

Clegg et al. (2006) brought Dahl’s political science concept of polyarchy into organization studies. When organizational oligarchs take care of the strategic agenda and allow a plurality of relatively autonomous sub-organizational oligarchies to be involved in developing and delivering specific projects within a given organization, polyarchic relations occur. Members have a de facto informal right creatively to contest and make decisions within the sub-oligarchy, despite being embedded in a host system of hierarchical authority. Interrelated changes in technology (digitalization), politics (deregulation and privatization) and culture (shifts to portfolio careers and project organization) create this new type of organization. Temporary in duration, polyarchy’s processes are not unique to each occasion. Clegg et al. (2006: 338) characterize a polyarchic structure of power as ‘soft and decentralized with strict and relatively insuperable social and symbolic boundaries around oligarchic circles’, constituting ‘strong intermediate bodies often articulated around internal professions and sub elites’. Such structures allow for highly individualized forms of action to generate high levels of internal creative debate.

The main focus of the sub-oligarchies that flourish in polyarchy is the collaborative quality of idea work (Coldevin et al., 2019). Intertextuality and the non-linear nature of collective creativity as a process in which ideas are always in translation, characterize this polyarchy. The contribution of this article lies in showing how a polyarchic design establishes a project-based organization with which to coordinate collective innovation and creativity. Our research question asks what practices are established as a sine qua non for generating creativity and innovation in the polyarchy. To answer this, we first consider polyarchy before outlining the case that we chose to focus on, then introduce our methodology. The data that we work with are qualitative, gained from interviews and observations, which we analyse using NVivo to map a latent thematic structure from the data collected, which we expand in our findings. The discussion focuses on explicating the thematic categories identified and relating these back to the literature with which our study resonates. Finally, we advance some conclusions on the implications for the future of national broadcasters such as the ABC.

Organizational design and innovation: Polyarchy

The development of advanced, cost-effective digital telecommunications services enables central broadcasting bureaucracies increasingly to become idea and design centres rather than integrated producers. Actual production is outsourced in various ways, ranging from insourcing skilled contractors from external organizations for specific contributions to total outsourcing. Production becomes a game of Lego, putting pieces of creative infrastructure together. Agencies contract for a particular period, co-design what they should do and fix the costs and benefits through a contract as a rule of engagement (Barley and Kunda, 2006; Bechky, 2006).

Historically, national broadcasting systems were characterized by hierarchy and vertical integration of programme production. Networks of a polyarchic creative organization have grown substantially in recent years in television production (Sydow and Staber, 2002). Project networks (Sydow and Staber, 2002: 217) delivering specific programme ideas nurture longer-term collaborative relationships, beyond the time limitations of particular projects with host organizations. Relatively stable core entrepreneurial teams’ cross-organizational boundaries with host organizations, such as a national broadcaster, exist within a tightly networked institutional field (Manning, 2017). The contemporary TV industry, dominated nationally by a few large network organizations, often has extremely short-term arrangements – in particular, informal contracting for programme production that can be for very short periods, sometimes as little as a few days or a week (Bechky, 2006). The form of contracting is based on personal knowledge, informal ties and shared social capital (Adler and Kwon, 2002). Transactions are focused on intermittent projects, delivered by teams of autonomous workers that are composed and recomposed as occasion demands (Bechky, 2006; Jones and Lichtenstein, 2008). Dense networks of independent producers and freelancers in the industry centre on areas such as Soho in London or Ultimo in Sydney.

Independent production firms in the cultural industries are not classical entrepreneurial start-ups (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2008, 2010). They are facilitated through ‘soft’ power relations premised on informality in the project networks. Seemingly, there appears to be little in the way of authoritative restriction imposed on the creativity and ‘idea work’ (Coldevin et al., 2019) encouraged within these firms outside of the commissioning organizations’ framing of deadlines and budgets. In television production, there has been increasing recourse to these action networks constructed around specific programme projects that constitute a limited set of interrelated tasks. Hellgren and Stjernberg (1995) define these networks in terms of a set of relations, in which no single actor may act as the legitimate authority for the network as a whole. These networks have open boundaries and are temporally limited, dynamically changing as well as being reconstructed from one project to the next. In addition, they are strongly task-oriented in accomplishing a project and organizationally coordinated by ‘legally autonomous but functionally interdependent firms and individuals’ (Sydow and Staber, 2002: 216).

Rowlands and Handy (2012: 659) state that the ‘film industry in most countries utilises a system of project-based network organization in which diverse teams of highly skilled individuals are assembled for limited periods and disbanded once their part in a production is completed’. Typically, filming occurs only after a complex division of labour assembles the many template elements for production: of cast, crew, location, sets, finance and producers, forming semi-permanent workgroups that are relatively stable (Daskalaki, 2010), sharing collective memories, skills and norms that function as ‘latent organizations’ (Ebbers and Wijnberg, 2009; Starkey et al., 2000). Rowlands and Hardy (2012) note that fragmentation and casualization inhibit creative innovation. Maintaining creativity and innovation rather than the repetition of trusted programme formulae requires projects that performatively promise an ambiguous mix of adventure and playful passion, within a disciplined context that polyarchic design provides, suggest Sahlin-Andersson and Söderholm (2002).

Translating polyarchy to organizational terms (Robinson, 2013), the polyarchic design enables creative elites organized in stable sub-oligarchies to compete constructively in doing idea work. They develop scenarios for programme pitches and then collaborate on the script development. This is undertaken in a way that is deeply embedded in the production process that empowers the project team with the ‘power to invite, connect, and co-create’ (Coldevin et al., 2019: 1386). Although the members of the team are nominally egalitarian, they can coordinate and communicate ideas in an upward direction through the creative sub-oligarchs, who act as promoters for the team. Polyarchic relations are temporally limited and dynamic, revolving around a central creative core, one that is liquid rather than dominated by a central authority, as Hellgren and Stjernberg (1995) suggest, and also spatially mobile, able to switch from one national institutional field to one in another continent.¹ The critical competencies in being liquid are innovation, commitment, adaptability and achievement (Clegg and Baumeler, 2012). Liquidity requires autonomy, spontaneity, creativity, adaptability, and communicative and relational competence. Significant capacities are invested in social and educational capital and a capacity to develop swift trust in switches from project to project (Meyerson et al., 1996). Distinct relational power configurations characterize the polyarchy. More traditional panoptical power (Lancione and Clegg, 2015) is still evident, vested directly in the overall oligarchic and bureaucratic organization. Two systems of power combine as broadcasting authorities commission creative works from innovative producers. These producers practise polyarchic organization nesting inside the formal organization of the national broadcaster.

Creating the polyarchy

ABC television, in the past a classic bureaucracy, allowed polyarchy to flourish inside the corporation when it invited a new production company, Playmaker, to develop a programme series. The venture has been extremely successful. In more recent times, according to the Playmaker website, its Scribe initiative has evolved with the support of Sony Television LA. Playmaker has taken two of the sucessful screenwriters from Australia and under the mentorship of prominent US showrunner developed series concepts for both local (USA) and international broadcasters.

From Sydney to LA was a journey that began in 2011, when David Taylor and David Maher, joint founders and owners of Playmaker, thought the time was right for the next generation of television series production. Following a meeting with industry producers, seeking advice, they began a new era when they applied for an enterprise programme which was a funding initiative from Screen Australia to help companies get off the ground and be self-sufficient. With that investment money, they set up a programme called Scribe, as a showrunner development initiative. The showrunner is the person who has overall creative authority and management responsibility for a television programme. They believed in positioning the writer at the centre of the project with unbroken authorship, which requires the person that comes up with the idea to be there through every stage of the process. With that investment money, Scribe was established to enable face-to-face creativity during specific project durations. The programme production team was assembled through the close knowledge and working relationships the production team shared. The contractors developed artistic freedom and new practices based not on the ABC managerial hierarchy but on their capabilities and judgements. The ABC exercised limited control through budgetary procedures and processes during the production period.

Scribe’s functions were quite dissimilar to a Project Management Office.² Scribe enabled face-to-face creativity through individual project duration and beyond by being oriented to innovation and creativity rather than repetition in execution. It did so by materializing interpretive skills and difficult to code ‘knowing’ that is individually embodied and embrained, translating it into the form of novel drama. Scribe was premised on the ideology that ‘Unbroken authorship is the key to great television drama’. Scribe processes are those of an immersive workshop conducted under the direction of the scriptwriter, designed to develop skills required for creating, pitching and running serialized drama in the international entertainment business. A limited number of writers are brought together to work in teams under the direction of a showrunner.

The storyline is central. The story is not written in advance, as something finished that launches a project but is that project’s very heart, something in constant discussion and revision as the project unfolds. This requires the organizational processes to have an anchor point articulating the creative processes and, in this organizing, the anchor point is Scribe. Scribe is an ideas workshop that combines the talents of two or three writers locked in intensive imaginings as they seek to draft the kernel of ideas that executive producers can pitch to broadcasting organizations, funding bodies and other stakeholders. Using the Scribe process, Playmaker organized a competition for new production ideas from the creative community. From the ideas that were submitted for consideration, three were chosen for further development to take them to a stage where they could be pitched to a broadcaster.³ The directors of the production company were well known to ABC executives and, in collaboration with them, they hired creative freelancers to turn these ideas into product proposals. These freelancers were selected based on prior knowledge of the quality of their work and their dependability in delivery.

The writer was designated as the creative director, the showrunner, to ensure that the integrity of the storyline was prominent – a unique approach for ABC productions. Rather than the scriptwriter delivering a script that is then part of the Lego that is assembled in the filming project, the showrunner as a writing producer is typically teamed with a directing producer and several other co-executive producers. As a writer-producer, there is continuity of creative control vested in the showrunner. Under the curation of the showrunner the script develops, changing with the inputs of the other writers involved in Scribe and with contributions from the other creative personnel, especially the actors and the director who, as does the Scribe’s chief writer, engaged in the entirety of the project.

Scribe was initially run as a competition every 9 months for writers to come in and work in a collegiate way, not imposing what they have to work on but instead exposing them to end-user pragmatism, helping them understand what is going to work for the market, so they are not just developing in a bubble. In establishing Scribe, Playmaker contracted three writers as the core creative talent. The idea of a political thriller sprang out of those discussions, this being a new genre for the ABC that would fit with the corporate objective of drawing in a younger audience. When Playmaker started to work with the ABC, they asked the head of the programme unit to discuss, in a non-pitching environment, what they were looking for (compared with their American counterparts, Australian writers are not as experienced at pitching). During that initial period, one of the three writers chosen came up with the idea of The Code in response to the ABC brief. The ABC loved the concept, and the writer started work on a script, meeting the ABC drama heads for 2 days every fortnight. The process required a great deal of goodwill and trust. Once the ABC was hooked on the programme, the process of getting finance was complicated. The Scribe process required that if the broadcaster was committed to the programme, then they would pay for further development. Finance being confirmed and recruitment of the production team commenced, the writer was appointed as the Creative Director and showrunner – the first time this approach had been taken in Australia, and certainly by the ABC. The Scribe process was seen as a great success, and other recruits went through the process, working with broadcasters other than the ABC. Each creative project ended with a successful television series being launched.⁴

Methodology

Although we focus on the production of The Code in this article, we began the project with a comparative focus. The project researched two ABC programmes and two BBC programmes (Mooney et al., 2018). In the ABC, the young adult thriller, The Code, and the children’s show, Giggle & Hoot, were researched. The BBC programmes were Big Blue Live and Diet Tribes. One, however, stood out as being different in several ways, as we have sought to capture in Table 1, which is what led us to concentrate on The Code for this article.

Table 1.

Analysis of different programme project organizations in ABC/BBC.

Issue	Programme
Issue	The Code (ABC)	Big Blue Live (BBC)	Diet Tribes (BBC)	Giggle & Hoot (ABC)
Project organization type	Short term	Short term	Short term	Semi-permanent
Production responsibility	Outside partner	BBC	BBC	ABC
Finance	ABC/state governments	BBC/outside partner	BBC	ABC
Distribution	Australia: ABC Rest of world: outside partner	USA: Outside partner UK/World: BBC	BBC	ABC
Organizational structure control vested in:	Outside partner	BBC	BBC	ABC
Genre and storyline developed by:	Outside partner	BBC	BBC	ABC
Constituent membership of project organization	Outside partner 95% ABC 5%	BBC 90% Outside partner 10%	Core BBC 70% Advisors/contractors 30%	Core ABC 80% Contractors 20%

ABC: Australian Broadcasting Corporation; BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation.

The production house, Playmaker, had world rights to The Code, whereas the ABC retained rights for Australia. Likewise, Playmaker had total responsibility for developing the genre and storyline of the programme, whereas in the other cases these were controlled by the national broadcaster. Finally, in The Code, 95% of the staff were hired by the outside partner. In Big Blue Live, only 10% of the hires were from outside the national broadcaster; in Diet Tribes and Giggle & Hoot these were 30% and 20%, respectively. Considering these apparent structural differences in essential elements of organization, we concentrated on The Code. At a pre-broadcasting private screening of the first three episodes, the researchers had a chance to discuss the teams’ initial views of the result, in an informal focus group comprising 18 people engaged in the project. After we had conducted these discussions, we adopted a phenomenological methodology that entailed conducting interviews (ranging from 30 to 45 minutes) with six key executive stakeholders in The Code. Through interviews with these six key participants, the study attempted to gain access to their ‘lived experience’ of the practices that underpinned the project’s innovative nature. We assumed that those with central experience of the production process were best able to articulate the practices constituting the phenomenon under research, namely the creation of an innovative product. The interview design and questions were focused on how experimental and creative forms of internal knowledge were appropriated and developed throughout the production process. Given that such knowledge is difficult to imitate internally (Szulanski, 1996), and the importance and difficulty of rendering aesthetic processes and work practices into language (Koivunen and Wennes, 2011), the interviews required the interviewer to explore explicitly the insights gained from the experience of the key participants, as well as the meanings that the subjects ascribed to these. Hence, we co-constructed an account.⁵

Findings

We began interviews by asking seemingly ‘naïve’ questions about how the organization had formed. Producer 1 (P1) answered us this way:

There’s no great mystery as to how it works. With The Code, very early on we had all the network heads come, including XXX1 from the ABC, who said ‘I’d love to do a political thriller in Australia’. XXX1 loves drama, and he was ambitious about drama, and that was something that he’d always wanted, which XXX2 latched onto immediately. It was up her alley, she wanted to do it, she threw around ideas with her co-writers as part of Scribe, and then we pitched back to ABC.

P2 added to this:

So basically, in year one of Scribe we run Scribe every 9 months or so, three writers come in and work in a collegiate way, where we don’t impose what they have to work on, but we expose them to the programme and they kind of get an end user pragmatism about what’s going to work for the market, so they’re not just developing in a bubble, but they still come up with their ideas from a place of passion . . . You’ve got to get the right combination of writers working together; they really need a degree of trust.

Working in this way, the writers came up with ideas for drama that were born from a deep synergy between writers and producers, creativity and markets, as P2 discusses:

When we start developing, we bring the heads of television into a non-pitching environment to talk about what they like. It’s not a formal scenario; the writers are sitting around the table. You often find in those situations that the heads of television really spill the shows they love to watch, what they wish they had that’s on another network and why, what sells internationally and why – all the kind of information your average writer just doesn’t get because they’re not exposed to the heads of programming.

Chronologically, the discussions with the ABC about programme preferences occurred first. In response to Playmaker’s ideas for The Code, the ABC as a sign of their commitment provided further funding for the script development. A great script starts with great writing. One Playmaker producer said, ‘If you write great scripts and send them out to the best actors, directors and producers, they will all start calling, even if you haven’t sent it out to them. It happened on The Code.’ These arrangements were made before confirming total financing from the government agency for production and broadcasting. As one ABC executive explained it, ‘the power of the broadcaster should never have to be asserted’ if an innovative and creative process is to flourish. Hence, the polyarchy was given free creative reign.

What emerged from the initial readings of the data was the idea that the creative team comprised ‘a whole lot of leaders’ who greatly valued professional autonomy in their collaborative efforts, including a strong emphasis on process and relationships rather than structures and roles. The practices that underlay this autonomy were ones that we began to theorize in terms of dialogue and reflexivity, which we understood to be crucial to the dynamics of negotiation during the production process. Having gained clarity about the overall processes from initial data inspection of the transcripts, we sought to investigate the data further by using NVivo, from which we were able to identify the latent thematic structure indicated in Table 2.

Table 2.

Representative supporting data for each second-order theme.

Representative supporting data	Second-order themes
‘The magic ingredient was great writing. All the other elements followed.’ ‘We needed a bloody good idea. You scope it in broad terms, like an impressionist painting, what the over-riding story will be.’ ‘It was a difficult decision. It was a fresh idea that centres on a strong relationship between the brothers that we thought people would bond with.’ ‘We had difficulty in making our writer the centre of the production; they had no experience in pitching. In America, they learn to pitch and become storyteller and raconteur.’ ‘It was not difficult to attract the people we wanted because the script was fantastic. Everyone knew The Code would be something special.’	Collaborative story-writing
‘Was there competition between the two leading actors (playing brothers)? Yes, but there was a kind of desire to find solutions,’ ‘Everyone was invested in the end product. The Code was one of the happiest and most committed I’ve ever worked.’ ‘You need to know the network and the chemistry has to be right. That is why I became involved. I know XXX2 and a lot of the crew and have worked with them before . . . XXX2, the author and artistic director, worked on long-running drama in-house for the BBC before moving to be an independent writer and associate producer.’	Building trust
‘The early part of the process was 2 years with the ABC, lots of checks and balances. Not a good idea. Whether it’s vampires or kitchen sinks, things change, the vision changes.’ ‘This is one of the two best projects I have ever worked on. A remarkable experience due to XXX2’s fabulous script, it is an Australian story that will play internationally.’	Creating a core vision
‘Our model is different from the commercial free to air where the writing is done outside then brought in-house and gets overwritten and disempowers the original writer.’ ‘We continue to look for the next generation. It is a brilliant discipline. It makes sure you are always engaging with your clients, buyers and constantly redeveloping.’ ‘Australian dramas, in general, tend to look inward, whereas I think this story has an absolute reach that stands beyond our culture but portrays our culture beautifully.’	Being open to experimentation
‘We need to learn how to compete with US drama, where they have funding of $4 million per hour vs our $1 million per hour.’ ‘Choosing the actors was incredibly important. Are they available and can we afford them? The project needs to be exciting enough.’ ‘One of the creative challenges in attracting a younger audience was to deal with the computer world in an exciting way.’	Styling of brand/genre
‘Teamwork is essential. The Australian film crews are as good as anywhere despite Australian business being small. They have global experience.’	Affirming teaming
‘Affirmation is always given to the team that went very well and that we were proud of the outcome. This creates collegiality.’ ‘Selecting the team is extremely important to create a loyal and harmonious team. A lot of verbal reference checking goes on. It is a closed shop, hard to break in to and CVs don’t cut it.’ ‘Creativity (acting) requires a combination of preparation and discipline, a kind of flexibility and a relaxed attitude.’ ‘Teams need to be led from the top and create a culture of can-do and solution orientation, rather than problem orientation and whingeing.’
‘Having XXX3 as a director on all six episodes was unusual but important. The three locations and a tight budget required its location shoots to be made simultaneously.’‘It’s more creative to work with different outside people because you don’t get stale. Fresh ideas with fresh brains and fresh people.’	Intertextuality
‘Our radical Scribe concept positions the writer at the centre of the project with unbroken authorship evolving the story.’‘The Code was very ambitious, with everyone on production being selected for their ability to be nimble on their feet, but not compromise on quality.’	Liquid organizing

Eight themes were identified that emerged from the semi-structured interviews. We developed an understanding of these practices through composing Table 2, which provides illustrations of the interview data from which these second-order themes emerged. From these eight second-order themes, using NVivo analysis of the transcripts of the interviews, we were able to explore, via semiotic clustering, successive deeper layers of meaning. These were represented systematically as collaborative story-writing, building trust and creating a core vision – including being open to experimentation, the styling of brand/genre and affirming teaming, as well as intertextuality and liquid organizing. The first-order concepts, located in the first column in Figure 1, emerged directly from the data. These were based purely on the interviewees’ language, and were primarily focused on creativity and innovation. The development of unrefined expression into thematic categories was developed into second-order themes in the second column. Deeper meanings not evident in the first-order concepts were developed. Finally, the overarching dimensions were developed in the third column.

Figure 1.

Data structure.

Structuring the latent themes in the data

Collaborating and building trust

Scribe, as a process for generating new programme ideas and genres, was particularly attractive to the ABC as a way of producing scripts for television drama. The creative talent, including the producers interviewed, argued that the choice of the writer acting as the showrunner was a fundamental decision. In addition, the development of the script as a collaborative process among multiple partners (actors and editors, amongst others), was equally important. The method of script development took place over 2 years, the reason being that there was a considerable delay that resulted from the ABC’s struggle to confirm funding for the production from various government agencies. The whole process of The Code took 4 years, which was double the time a production of this scope should be expected to take. These delays created significant management problems in terms of keeping the team committed and engaged. It also introduced a significant element of risk that the storyline could become dated in terms of fashion and current practice. On occasions, anxieties about the delay created tensions, but the process survived because of creative commitment to the idea work in process.

By making the scriptwriter the creative director of the production, the authorial ‘voice’ did not get lost in the collaborative development process. Although the development of the script involved significant stakeholder engagement, the collectively reflexive practices that characterized this ‘creatively abrasive’ process were always collaborative. The open discussion was never combative, allowing participants to feel ‘comfortable and free to play with ideas’. Similarly, participants were encouraged ‘to be bold’. The scriptwriter curated the creative processes of idea work (Coldevin et al., 2019). Ideas that did not engage collaboration were not forced or followed. No end was held in sight as an a priori; instead, the focus was on a process whose means would be allowed to produce creative ends that were collaboratively generated. When responding to a question of what the critical success factors are, the answer was writing, casting and editing. The process of writing generated the casting because the talent was attracted to working in a highly creative compartment (Fairtlough, 1994) within the bureaucratic organization. What made the writing sparkle was the tight collective editing process, in which each writer gave up proprietary rights.

The concepts of questioning and suggesting alternative approaches during the production process were seen as equally important. A common theme amongst those interviewed was that the Scribe process created an ‘ego-less’ culture – one in which there was the generosity of spirit. The culture focused on creativity, experimentation and therefore the need for risk-taking, and all stakeholders were aware of this value. The trust factor was high, ensuring that everything was both collaborative and recursively creating more trust in a positive spiral (Fredrickson, 2003).

Creating a core vision and being open to experimentation

An analysis of the interview transcripts indicated that the second issue of importance was the creation of a core vision. The producers saw the concept of a core shared vision involving the whole team as essential for the successful delivery of the script. When Playmaker pitched the story successfully, they had to enrol support, building relations with stakeholders through the careful use of social capital. A network of shared interests was rapidly and artfully constituted, in which a mutuality of interests emerged as ‘temporarily stabilized outcomes’ (Callon and Law, 1982: 622) of the processes of enrolment engaged in. One producer explained it as:

. . . there will be meetings and discussions and looking at things and going to locations and whatever. Just trying to connect with every person the vision of the creator and the director and the producers. So ultimately it is about communication.

While the scriptwriter lauded the emotional investment of all stakeholders as ‘the magic ingredient’ in the production, others recognized the importance of pre-production planning. As one ABC executive explained, ‘planning is everything . . . every minute wasted on set is expensive, so the need for creating a common vision and language was essential’. For Playmaker, this was achieved through in-depth knowledge of the field and shared social capital:

You hire great production managers and producers who run crews at the top of their game and are very loyal and harmonious. They hire teams with our involvement and approval; they need to be suited to the project, but HR is just everything in producing. If you make one wrong move on the head of the department in a production, you are going to pay for it. And you’ll see it on the screen in some way when you get to the edit.

Styling of brand/genre

The third issue identified from the transcripts was the styling of the brand/genre. The first stakeholders that were influential in the creative process leading to the commissioning of The Code were the ABC’s requirement for a younger demographic. One Playmaker producer was very complimentary about the broadcaster’s ability to ‘to value and credit ideas so that nobody is scared to suggest something’. He also commented on the ABC representatives’ ability to give critical feedback to ‘creatives’ without ‘riding roughshod over their ideas’ and demoralizing them – in stark contrast to his earlier experience in commercial broadcasters.

Aiding this creative licence was the vesting of proprietary and branding rights in Playmaker, with the company being responsible for overseas marketing. The profits would be retained by the production company, while the ABC would receive a television series for local viewing in a new genre that would appeal to a younger audience. Playmaker, by contrast, was building niche and brand equity that it was able to retail globally.

Affirming teaming

The production could be seen as a team process in which the outcomes were framed by specific power relations premised on the empowerment of the writer as the showrunner. The showrunner had creative and management responsibility, combining the roles of head writer and script editor. These roles were widely shared within the production team, cast and crew, in a way that invited questioning and innovation, affirming teaming. In large part, this relied on a carefully selected team known from previous projects, with shared social capital. Putting the team together was a carefully curated exercise, seeking flexibility and a relaxed attitude together with preparation and discipline.

Intertextuality and liquid organizing

The Code was a project that was not only self-contained but also intertextual. For Kristeva (1980: 69), intertextuality is mediated by ‘codes’ shared between writers, and readers informed by other texts. To play with these codes, intertextuality demands a high degree of experience in working with similar textual material. Intertextually, the viewpoint of a reader who is a co-writer is important. Also important is consideration of the experience of the actors and director as interpreters of what is written and being written. The co-writers are also co-producers with the director who worked on all episodes. This was important as it resulted in continuous learning, and dispensed of the need for new protocols and understandings with different directors’ ideas interpreting the scripting processes. Thus, the shooting and the scripting were highly intertextual.

Intertextuality was manifest in various ways. One involved bringing prior experiences and social capital to attention and making them available for combination in new ways. Scribe enriched authorial ideas through comments, extensions and suggestions from other partners who connected their experiences and insights to the idea in question. For instance,

P2:

Because of the way Scribe works, the writer was on set every minute that was shot of the entire series, which is very unusual for an Australian drama. So, the actors had access to the writer constantly while they were rehearsing and shooting.

Interviewer:

So, they would have a dialogue –

P2:

Oh, before every scene, after every scene, in the middle of every scene, probably too much dialogue from Shell’s perspective given you’ve got to shoot fast. At times, it’s just so hard to keep the ball rolling, and you can’t get too bogged down, and that’s on set, but the passion on The Code was so high that everyone wanted to get it right, and then you had the author there – there’s your opportunity, really.

One consequence was that the process was extremely liquid. Liquid organizing, according to Hancock (2003), seeks to structure fun, novelty and excitement into the experience of being at work. Above all, relations were flexible: they did not solidify into structures that could not adapt and change easily. Such liquidity and flexibility framed intertextuality.

Discussion

The Scribe process is a way of putting definite structure on collective processes of idea work as Coldevin et al. (2019) identify them. When people work on focal ideas, typically they do so not individually but by collaboratively ongoing efforts connecting to the ideas of others. The legitimating of imaginings is central to these processes. Ideas of what to do should be linked to ideas worth doing and producing. Where the creative methods of idea work take place in one organization, oriented to creativity per se, they still have to be funded and produced. Creative ideas need to enrol the financial disciplines of a large bureaucratic organization, such as the ABC, in narrative imagination. In Scribe, this process was started by taking the programmers’ concern about a drop in audience ratings. Discussions began with ideas in the plural that became a singular focus produced by those practices of generating, communicating, connecting, evaluating and reshaping ideas, which Coldevin et al. (2019) call idea work. In discussing idea work, they concentrate on ‘moments in multidirectional conversations’ that ‘involve legitimating focal ideas by connecting them to a variety of resources in a larger field of ideas’. This primarily occurs in ‘moments and processes of evaluation’ that ‘are amongst the points at which the collective nature of this stream of intertextual work is most evident’ (Coldevin et al., 2019: 1392). In Scribe as a process, the idea work amounted to far more than mere moments or points. A way of organizing processes was designed to ensure that idea work is not fleeting but is invested in everyday practices.

The organizational design allowed all the members of the production team to have significant creative control and to maintain a voice in the process. When commissioning The Code, no formal rules of collaboration and empowerment were made other than that the chief scriptwriter was nominated as the showrunner. Similarly, the leveraging of historically generated and contemporaneously regenerated relational capital contributed to the energizing relations that occurred during the production process. These were reinforced by deeply shared experience in creative industries. It is through such experience that embodied forms of knowing (knowledge manifesting in practice) were generated that enabled commensurable understanding. The upshot was the development of methods prioritizing creativity in scripting and positioning scripting as the central process in shaping the project’s production, collaboratively involving multiple writers and actors in the process.

The ABC representatives argue that outsourcing to production companies such as Playmaker brings in diverse ‘outsiders’ who constitute a source of ‘fresh ideas’. This is necessary for roles where there is a lack of available talent and where there are financial constraints concerning tapping into global industry networks (Fowler et al., 2015). Given the competitive pressures of the industry, broadcasters compete to leverage and enhance recognized talent. In an industry where much knowledge comes from rich, culturally shared experience, this has far-reaching implications for the development of artistic talent.

The innovation of the Scribe model, involving multiple writers working together with one acting as showrunner, is culturally innovating, creating zones of cultural creativity. This creates intense emotionality (Lindgren and Packendorff, 2006; Lindgren et al., 2014) and diverse socio-political dynamics operate (Strauss, 1978). This often creates tensions and conflicts over ideas expressed in quite heated exchanges. These are generative as the script is regarded as a process rather than an apriori and finished template for production. The role of intra-personal and inter-personal dynamics underpinning project innovation is foundational (Allen and Dovey, 2016). Although the collaborative process in the project organization is one of highly liquid organizing, curated through Scribe, this organizing takes place with a highly structured organization, the ABC. Public broadcaster outsourcing of creativity risks undermining creative capacities within the host organization (Molina-Morales and Martínez-Fernández, 2009). Contracting out displaces the risk of managing creativity to the transacting partner. Playmaker’s retention of global distribution rights meant that they had a significant interest in the creative styling of the brand/genre. The project had to produce a marketable programme for world markets, not just the domestic market. As well as being culturally innovative, the process had to combine creativity with a concern for product positioning globally.

Scribe puts the creative directors in control throughout the process in collaboration with the whole production team and the cast. It is this continuity of creative collaboration directed by the script and its writer that produces creativity in the process. The continuity of the presence of the writer in the production is the source of Scribe’s intertextuality, which encourages engagement and creativity. Through a combination of ‘hard’ commissioning power and ‘soft’ normative/relational power practices embedded in Scribe, the innovative outcomes are facilitated for the host organization.

The production of The Code occurred through sophisticated relational practices that generated mutual identification, facilitated intellectual humility, thereby creating a basis for learning, and encouraged ‘intelligent caring’, whereby interpersonal confrontation and the contestation of ideas and performance were enacted as a ‘service’ to the collective (see Carlsen et al., 2012; Coldevin et al., 2019; Spicer et al., 2009: 548 on this point). It was through these practices that a relatively ‘ego-less’ environment was experienced in which creative licence, risk-taking and critique were evident. Furthermore, although the individual agency was recognized, such contributions were mediated by collective ‘improvizational struggle’ and by evolving material artefacts during everyday problem-solving, an example being the collaborative development of the original script of The Code and the way this co-created artefact mediated subsequent creative endeavour. Collaborative idea-oriented organizing rather than role prescription was the hallmark.

The status of The Code as a creative project external to ABC’s organizational structure allowed ABC executives to take risks. It allowed Playmaker to ‘pick their team’ from outside the organization and to access and leverage intangible capital embedded in tried and trusted relationships, in this case, ironically nurtured mostly through past employment in the ABC. The Code project organization was prepped to be fully functional because it had implicit resources and practices to enable innovation as well as the power and autonomy to be able to deploy these resources appropriately. Furthermore, the project organizational form, drawing its members from outside the permanent organization, minimized the impact of institutional and organizational inertia upon the innovation process. The silos were kept at a distance from the Playmaker team so that organizing processes could flourish that were specifically designed to accomplish what we have termed idea work.

We can note some points of agreement with the literature on projects as well as some points of departure. A project is a temporally defined and limited set of tasks (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995), oriented to a specific outcome that involves complex, interdependent tasks that to some extent are unique (Goodman and Goodman, 1976; Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Whitley, 2006) and thus innovative. What is distinctive about new forms of organization emerging in fields such as media production as a result of projectification (Schoper et al., 2018) is the emergence of forms of collaborative and more open strategy and polyarchic organization (Clegg, 1989; Courpasson and Clegg, 2012; Dahl, 1971). This results in the host national broadcasters increasingly depending on resources they do not directly control and source externally, such as funding, freelancers, temporary workers, suppliers and partners. Projects ‘are partially self-contained, partially dependent upon norms, resources and expectations from other social contexts, such as project-based firms, networks and fields’, as Manning (2017: 1399) states. For a public-sector broadcasting bureaucracy, senior commissioners typically impose ‘fairly tight’ constraints (Sydow and Staber, 2002) on in-house production teams. A programme that results from a highly distinctive pitch from independent producers loosens that control considerably.

We found some elements in the Scribe process at Playmaker that were familiar from the review of the literature on temporary organizations by Burke and Morley (2016). So-called programme projects are of limited duration whose organization is not an entire legal entity but dissolves once the project is completed. The structure is not designed to be merely routine; it is designed to facilitate creativity and innovation. Although the emphasis that Burke and Morley (2016: 1241) place on transformational leadership is well-placed, we did not find it characterized by stages that separate idea-generating and decision-making periods. Nor did a lack of sedimentation of knowledge occur, largely because of the continuity of key personnel, scriptwriters, from project to project (Burke and Morley, 2016: 1242).

In television production, there has been increasing recourse to networks constructed around specific programme projects that constitute a temporally limited set of interrelated tasks. Hellgren and Stjernberg (1995) define these project networks in terms of a set of relations, in which no single actor may act as the legitimate authority for the network as a whole. These networks have open boundaries and are temporally limited, dynamically changing as well as being reconstructed from one project to the next. In addition, they are strongly task-oriented in accomplishing a project. These tasks are organizationally coordinated by ‘legally autonomous but functionally interdependent firms and individuals’ (Sydow and Staber, 2002: 216). With DeFillippi and Sydow (2016) and against Hellgren and Sternberg (1995) we agree that project networks are more than temporary systems. In addition, with DeFillippi and Sydow (2016), we have a case where there is a lead organization, the ABC as the commissioning network, but one in which it does not govern the creative process. The governance is vested in the creative direction of the showrunner, in a highly participatory process. The project principals, the scriptwriters and producers, are more permanent, whereas other participants vary from project to project. This concept has been well illustrated in our in-depth study of The Code.

We add to past analysis of projects a concern with a distinctively creative project organization that sought to institutionalize collective creativity. Scribe was anything but routine; apart from its empowerment of the showrunner, roles, responsibilities and relations were fluid. Nor were the project outcomes measured in terms of efficiency and effectiveness because the process, compared to a more usual division of less fluid roles, responsibilities and relations (DeFillippi and Sydow, 2016), was extremely liquid. In their terms, Scribe is one of the ‘rare cases’ where responsibility is shared among project members (DeFillippi and Sydow, 2016: 9). Moreover, against Manning and Sydow (2011), the whole network is not so much emergent as curated, as we have argued. It is curation that repeats, however, as Scribe is recycled from one project to another (Davies and Brady, 2000), in innovative creativity (https://www.playmakermedia.com.au/scribe) rather than routine repetition. In contradistinction to Whitley’s (2006) analysis, we did not find in the Scribe process that roles were stable and separate. Instead, they were creatively mixed as the story-writing evolved as a curated but shared experience in which the role of Scribe and the writers was far from ‘idiosyncratic’ (DeFillippi and Sydow, 2016: 10). Finally, the paradoxical tensions noted by DeFillippi and Sydow (2016) were not evident in the data related to the Scribe organizing process. The centrality of story-writing and the curatorial role of the showrunner encouraged an embrace of tensions that were resolved through creative solutions that participant practices supported.

The organizing processes of Scribe could be assumed to be in a subordinate relationship with the ABC as the commissioning authority and the dominant actor in the network, although this relationship proved not to be one of domination. The ABC and other broadcast bureaucracies are engaged in rethinking end-to-end innovation, not just their customer interface, but also how they are going to position their organization in the new and evolving global ecosystem (Burdon et al., 2016). Broadcasting is being disrupted by transforming technology, different digital platforms and the increasing need to produce programmes with global appeal as well as quality and economic viability in respective national markets. Contractual governance vested global distribution rights in Playmaker, which created a high degree of relative autonomy, aimed at a demographic that the ABC’s in-house producers found it difficult to engage. In the longer term, although new approaches are being explored for programme production, the extent to which they may be diluting previous in-house core competence in designing and producing programmes could well emerge as a central issue.

Conclusion

Scribe is an organizing process that brings innovation to project networks and the idea of project organizing. It institutes curatorial creativity in the central role rather than a concern with roles, responsibilities and routines, working with relations embedded in the project network. We have investigated Scribe as an example of idea work being instituted in a polyarchically designed process. We have analysed the Scribe processes as designed to initiate idea work as the central flow of the organization, not just as moments or points within it. In this way, we contribute to the further exploration of organizational creativity as idea work that presages different forms of organizing.

It is easy to imagine that future national broadcast television may increasingly turn to production organizations using similar practices as Scribe to produce programmes. Creativity is hard to achieve in organizations oriented towards fulfilling scheduling routines, such as national broadcasters. The implications of outsourcing creativity for broadcast bureaucracies are such as to suggest that further hollowing out of their capabilities is most likely. Doing this could be extremely corrosive of in-house capabilities for demanding drama productions and diminish the source of fecundity for the networks which the national broadcaster anchors.

There is a further issue: as producers such as Playmaker establish their creativity globally, that creativity is easily sucked into a vortex that strips the talent away from the national broadcasters with whom it has initially developed. The global English-language film business operates in a vortex whose epicentre is Los Angeles; indeed, Playmaker Media is now a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Television, based in LA. Whether the polyarchic form can retain its creativity within a much larger organizational host will be a moot point. Research in related areas suggests their diminution when innovation and creativity lodged in polyarchic relations are incorporated into larger bureaucratic hosts (Van Marrewijk, 2016).

Finally, polyarchic organization adds another dimension to existing accounts of growth and change in project networks. Further research might investigate some of the characteristics of temporary organizing processes creatively similar to Scribe in other case studies. A research question of particular importance would address if the outsourcing of creativity might dilute the core competencies of commissioning organizations, as well as consider what policies and strategies can be developed to address this disadvantage.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation for their co-operation and assistance in this research project.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: We would like to thank and acknowledge Luca Belgiorno-Nettis AM of Transfield Foundation for his financial assistance in this research project.

ORCID iD

Stewart R Clegg

Notes

Stewart R Clegg is Distinguished Professor of Management and Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. He has published prolifically in the management, organizations and politics literatures in many of the leading journals. Widely acknowledged as one of the most significant contemporary theorists of power relations, he is also one of the most influential contributors to organization studies, recognized by his being chosen as an EGOS Honorary Member, a Distinguished Fellow of EURAM and ANZAM as well as a Fellow of the Academy of Management. A recent article (Coldevin et al., 2019, ‘Organizational creativity as idea work: Intertextual placing and legitimating imaginings in media development and oil exploration’, Human Relations) was awarded the best article in the journal for 2019, and the present article builds on ideas developed there as well as elsewhere. [ Email: Stewart.Clegg@uts.edu.au]

Stephen Burdon is currently a Professor of Strategic Management and Technology at University of Technology Sydney in Australia. His research interests are disruptive technology, innovation, megaprojects and government policy, with more than 50 journal articles, conference papers and book chapters published in these areas. He has been an advisor to UK and Australian Government Ministers, and a number of leading Australian corporations, including Telstra, Westpac and KPMG. He previously held the position of Managing Director of British Telecom, Asia Pacific, and has held over a dozen private and public company directorships. He recently received an Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian Technology and Education. [ Email: Stephen.Burdon@uts.edu.au]

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