Introduction

When many people think of entrepreneurship, creativity, or innovation, they immediately think of the lone, sole creative genius, the sudden flash of inspiration, or the final breakthrough product or business model. I examine creativity and innovation as a collective and negotiated process, one that's best understood when studied from idea stage through to implementation.

More specifically, I focus on how leaders co-create novel ideas, sustainable human-centered change, and more creatively vibrant organizations. As an ethnographer of work and organizations, I am especially interested in the situated and lived experience of everyday work, and inductively analyze qualitative data to build new theory and unexpected insights. My scholarship is primarily process-focused, and offers three major contributions to the field:

1) launching a stream of research on creative brokering that informs how leaders advance entrepreneurial opportunities and novel outcomes within networks;

2) illuminating the micro-processes that enable low-power and under-represented actors to advance change and innovation; and

3) exploring the future of creative work and careers, with a particular interest in how digital technology enables and constrains creative work.

My research has been published in top-tier academic and practioner-focused journals including Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ)-twice! :), Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Harvard Business Review, Poetics, Work and Occupations, and the Chronicle of Higher Education and featured in the New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Forbes, Fortune, and BBC Global news. My paper, “Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects,” was recognized in the ASQ Editor’s Choice Collections as one of the top papers focused on networks and knowledge.

My current research projects focus on: 1) how digital technology is shaping creative work and organizations, 2) the creative practice of visualizing qualitative data and theory, and 3) how leaders and individuals can cultivate, manage, and sustain creative energy.

Publications

Bruns, H. C., & Long Lingo, E. (2024). Tedious Work: Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization in the Arts and Sciences. Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(1), 39-79. 

Meluso, J., Chambers, C. R., Littauer, R., Llamas, N., Long Lingo, E., Mhangami, M., Pitt, B., Splitter, V., & Wang, H. (2024). Opening Up: Interdisciplinary Guidance for Managing Open Ecosystems. Available at SSRN 4821969. 

Long Lingo, E. (2023). Digital curation and creative brokering: Managing information overload in open organizing. Organization Studies, 44(1), 105-133. 

Long Lingo, E., & Bruns, H. C. (2022). Digital Tedious Work and Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization.  Best Paper Proceedingsof the Eighty-second Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Online. ISSN: 2151-6561.

Long Lingo, E., & Demetry, C. (2022). Navigating Incongruent Perspectives of Meaningful Work: Moral Outrage and Inhabited Institutions. Academy of Management Proceedings. 

Zhou, S., Loiacono, E., Nerur, S., Randolph, A. B., Long Lingo, E., Iyer, L., & Carter, M. (2022). Authorship, Collaboration, and Influence of Women IS Scholars: Using Social Network Analysis. 

Long Lingo, E., & Bruns, H. C. (2021). Auto-tuned and r-squared: Reflecting audience quality evaluations in the creative process in music production and cancer research. In Organizing Creativity in the Innovation Journey (pp. 91-113). Emerald Publishing Limited. 

Long Lingo, E., (2020). Entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering: The process and practice of co‐creating and advancing opportunity. Journal of Management Studies, 57(5), 962-1001.

Long Lingo, E., & McGinn, K. L. (2020). A New Prescription for Power Spend less time exerting control and more time mobilizing energy and commitment. Harvard Business Review, 98(4), 66-75.

Demetry, C., Long Lingo, E., & Skorinko, J. L. M. (2020). What is valued and who is valued for promotion? Enacting and sustaining a policy that rewards multiple forms of scholarship. ASEE annual conference proceedings.

Demetry, C., & Long Lingo, E. (2019). Transforming the associate-to-full promotion system: Wrestling with strategic ambiguity and gender equity. ASEE annual conference proceedings. 

Demetry, C., Long Lingo, E., & Skorinko, J. (2019). Increasing Diversity in the Ranks of Full Professors--For Both Tenured and Nontenure-Track Faculty. New England Journal of Higher Education. 

Long Lingo, E., & Elmes, M. B. (2019). Institutional preservation work at a family business in crisis: Micro-processes, emotions, and nonfamily members. Organization Studies, 40(6), 887-916.

McGinn, K. L., Ruiz Castro, M., & Long Lingo, E. (2019). Learning from mum: Cross-national evidence linking maternal employment and adult children’s outcomes. Work, Employment and Society, 33(3), 374-400.

Long Lingo, E. (2018). Brokerage and creative leadership: Process, practice, and possibilities. In Creative leadership (pp. 208-227). Routledge.

Long Lingo, E., Fisher, C. M., & McGinn, K. L. (2014). Negotiation processes as sources of (and solutions to) interorganizational conflict. In Handbook of conflict management research. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Long Lingo, E., & Tepper, S. J. (2013). Looking back, looking forward: Arts-based careers and creative work. Work and Occupations, 40(4), 337-363.

Lee, C. W., & Long Lingo, E. (2011). The “Got Art?” paradox: Questioning the value of art in collective action. Poetics, 39(4), 316-335.

Long Lingo, E., & O'Mahony, S. (2010). Nexus work: Brokerage on creative projects. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(1), 47-81. Selected for ASQ Editor’s Choice Collections.

Long Lingo, E., (2010). The creative foil: Managing multi-disciplinary expertise. In Qualitative organizational research: Best papers from the Davis conference on qualitative research (pp. 91-113). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Press.

FUTURE OF CREATIVE WORK IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Tedious Work: Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization in the Arts and Sciences

Tedious work is pervasive in creative work, yet it has received little attention in the literature on creativity, including studies of science, innovation, and product development. Drawing from a comparative ethnography of two settings—systems biology and music production—we illuminate tedious work as an essential, previously under-investigated aspect of creative work that becomes increasingly prominent with digitization. Tedious work is repetitive, detail-oriented, and expertise-based, and we classify four types of it: fishing, administrating, polishing, and compiling. We develop a model of how tedious work emerges, why it becomes problematic, and what actors do to reduce its negative effects. Tedious work presents three risks to developing viable, novel outcomes—time drain, disengagement, and information overload—and we identify tactics that actors use to mitigate these risks and support individual creativity and the collective creative process. By unpacking the central notion of iteration and documenting the repercussions of creating novel outcomes with digitization, specifically the potential to amplify tedious work, we provide an important counterpoint to voices that hail digital technology’s low cost and unlimited potential for iteration and refinement.

Auto-tuned and r-squared: Reflecting audience quality evaluations in the creative process in music production and cancer research

While audiences play a key role in the implementation and ultimate success of novel ideas, how audiences are reflected in negotiations about quality within the creative process remains undertheorized. We examine this question through a comparative ethnography of two settings where digital technology use magnifies the countless micro-decisions involved in producing a creative output and considerations of audience evaluation throughout the creative process – Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research. We find that actors encounter a fundamental tension between two competing standards of quality: the technically perfect, processed and ideal versus the empirically grounded, unprocessed and real. We show how actors navigate this tension vis-á-vis three different audiences – internal peers, extended community, and external reviewers – and how this manifests differently across audiences and the arts and sciences, depending on the audience’s expertise. Our study illuminates the tension between the “ideal versus real” in creative processes that is brought to the fore when creating with digital technology, extends extant research on audiences and organizing for creativity, and offers unique insights from our comparative ethnography across the arts and sciences.

Digital Curation and Creative Brokering: Managing Information Overload in Open Organizing

How do leaders foster ongoing commitment and concerted strategic action within a diverse, emergent network of stakeholders in the face of information overload?

While open organizing offers great promise for harnessing diverse and previously untapped knowledge and perspectives in strategy and innovation processes, how leaders manage the fundamental problem of information overload within these efforts remains unexplored. In this qualitative study, I develop a model of digital curation as creative brokering—how leaders strategically select, share, and interpret digital material across a diffuse network of actors to achieve concerted strategic action in the face of information overload. More specifically, I identify five digital curation practices—spotlighting, amplifying, refuting, recapping, and refocusing—and show why and how these practices are used in combination over time to respond to differing information overload challenges arising as open organizing unfolds. The paper’s contributions are threefold. First, it advances open organizing scholarship by showing how leaders engage in digital curation to build shared understanding, nurture ownership and ongoing commitment, and foster concerted action in the face of information overload. Second, it springboards research on the behavioral practice and process of brokerage within open organizing networks. Third, it highlights the critical role of managing emotions, in addition to information and knowledge exchange, in brokerage and open organizing processes.

Creative Brokering: How leaders advance creative ideas within networks

Nexus Work: Managing ambiguity in Creative Projects

My study of producers working in the Nashville country music industry was a three-year ethnographic study recognized as a best paper at the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research.  Using a grounded-theory approach, I developed a theory of “nexus work”—how brokers on creative projects foster and integrate others’ contributions throughout the creative process.

My article, “Nexus Work: Brokerage of Creative Projects,” with Siobhan O’Mahony, was published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2010 and chosen in 2012 for the ASQ Editor’s Choice Collection as one of the top papers focused on networks and knowledge. 

In our paper, we advanced the field’s understanding of creative work by focusing not only on how ideas are generated, but also how ideas and contributions are edited and synthesized—while maintaining the commitment of those involved. We identified three types of ambiguity inherent to the creative process and provided a more nuanced and practice-based understanding of brokerage, resolving two conflicting portrayals of brokerage and its consequences. We found that producers moved between two ideal conceptions of brokerage—as strategic actors extracting advantage from their position or as relational experts connecting others to foster creativity and innovation—to respond to ambiguity and foster a collective creative outcome.

Expanding upon this work, I illuminated the role of the creative foil in harnessing multi-disciplinary expertise in the invited chapter, "The Role of the Creative Foil," in Kimberly D. Elsbach and Beth A. Bechky's (Eds.), Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research (2010).

I also extend my research on creative brokering to develop a model of integrative creative leadership—creative leadership in contexts where leaders lack authority over those involved and must elicit and integrate their own and others’ contributions through an ongoing, negotiated process. I first develop this model in peer-reviewed chapter, “Creative Brokerage as Integrative Creative Leadership: Process, Practice and Possibilities,” in the field-defining book, Creative Leadership: Contexts and Prospects, by Mainemelis, Epitropaki, and Kark. 

Entrepreneurial Leadership as Creative brokering: The PROCESS and Practice of Co-creating and Advancing OpportuNity

How does entrepreneurial leadership drive the process of forming and advancing opportunity?

Drawing from an ethnographic field study of Nashville music producers, in this paper I develop a model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering – the practices and process by which entrepreneurs lead and mobilize a complex network of actors in co‐creating and advancing opportunity. I find that entrepreneurial leaders encounter three tensions as they advance this process: 1) generating novel ideas and fitting them within the competitive landscape; 2) incubating opportunity and seizing the moment in the market; and 3) fostering experimentation and navigating hyper‐competition. I show when these tensions arise and identify six creative brokering practices through which leaders leverage their brokerage role to navigate these tensions in order to move opportunity forward. The paper offers a model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering, extends extant creative brokering scholarship to consider more distal market actors, and shows how creative brokering and leadership towards creative outcomes involve iteratively stepping forward to infuse market perspective and exert control, and stepping back to let others shine and co‐create ideas.

Learn more in this WPI featured article: Finding Entrepreneurial Leadership in Recording Studios

Power and Fostering Micro-Processes and systems of equity and Change

A New Prescription for Power

Simply exercising control over others—the traditional concept of power— is often not the best strategy. When the path ahead or the very need for change is in dispute, when looking to seize an opportunity rather than put out a fire, when working across silos where claims to authority may be ambiguous, leaders should take a different approach.

Our new prescription for power focuses on its three core dimensions: situational, relational, and dynamic. The degree to which leaders draw on all three determines how effectively they get things done.

ARTISTIC CAREERS AND PATHWAYS

The Future of Artistic Careers & the Creative Workforce

In our special issue of Work and Occupations, “Patterns and Pathways: Artists and Creative Work in a Changing Economy,” my colleague Steven Tepper and I bring together a unique blend of traditional research papers and policy briefs from leading scholars in the cultural policy field to take stock of our understanding of artistic careers and the creative workforce.

In our article,  “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Arts-Based Careers and Creative Work,” we note that the last two decades of research and policy discussion have illuminated important changes in both the opportunities and challenges facing artists and artistic workers as they pursue their careers and advance their artistry.

We argue that artists need to be masters of navigating across historically disparate domains, for example specialization and generalist skills, autonomy and social engagement, the economy’s periphery and the core, precarious employment and self-directed entrepreneurialism, and large metro centers and regional art markets.

In addition, artists both work beyond existing markets and create entirely new opportunities for themselves and others. As catalysts of change and innovation, artistic workers face special challenges: managing ambiguity, developing and sustaining a creative identity, and forming community in the context of an individually-based enterprise economy.

How do we re-design higher education to Foster Creative leaders ?

Despite the tremendous enthusiasm and buzz around creativity and innovation in higher education, what is meant by these terms —in theory and practice—requires further interrogation.  

I examine higher education initiatives integrating the arts, design, engineering, entrepreneurship, and science; national field formation around arts and creativity initiatives; and the process of how leaders are advancing initiatives at their respective institutions (including gender- and role-specific leadership challenges).