6 Oct 2022
The volume “Corporate Underground: Bootleg Innovation and Constructive Deviance”, edited by Peter Augsdörfer, has just been published at World Scientific.
The volume “Corporate Underground: Bootleg Innovation and Constructive Deviance”, edited by Peter Augsdörfer, has just been published at World Scientific.
In the corporate underground, creative intrapreneurs produce ideas autonomously and without the consent of management. Such informal activity frequently 'corrects' and compensates for the weaknesses of formal organizational systems. The corporate underground is an adjusting element for a number of organizational paradoxes. This imposes a certain legitimacy on covert activities such as bootlegging and constructive deviance. It reflects a basic axiom of the evolutionary perspective: change and creativity are reliant upon elements of redundancy, waste and inefficiency.
With contributions from 16 leading experts in this field, this book offers a comprehensive picture of the nature of covert creativity for theory, research and practice. The chapters cover a wide range of facets of underground activity, including basic information, the sensitive transition from underground to formal disclosure at an organization, and psychological factors.
The book contains a chapter by Prof. Tenzer dedicated to creative deviance, i.e. the violation of a managerial order to stop working on a new idea, as an extreme form of bootlegging. It complements prior research on the organizational-level determinants of creative deviance by discussing its individual-level antecedents.