Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

Wilf, Eitan Y.

ISBN 10: 022660683X / ISBN 13: 9780226606835

Published by University of Chicago Press (edition First Edition), 2019

About this Item

It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 022660683X-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022660683X
• ISBN 13: 9780226606835
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today?
 
In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.
 

About the Author

Eitan Y. Wilf is associate professor of anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of School for Cool and Creativity on Demand, both published by the University of Chicago Press.