Future perspectives for research on creative and cultural organizations using a spatial approach

This book was born from the observation that creative and cultural organizations, in recent decades, have undergone several significant changes: from rethinking their role in the ecosystem, to changing their relationship with stakeholders; from finding ways to meet the new needs of the audience, to changing their organizational processes and ways of working. We are, indeed, observing these organizations experiencing a sort of metamorphosis, a transformation of their ways of working, which is also reflected in a modification of their spatial arrangements, which are constantly transformed through everyday practices and processes (Clegg & Kornberger 2006). Analyzing these multiple organizational changes through the exploration of how the space of these organizations changes allows us to read them in their material becoming, and to reach an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon anchored to the physicality of their being. In this book, we have therefore sought to explore the metamorphosis that creative and cultural organizations are undergoing from a spatial point of view. We have done this by providing contributions from scholars active in multiple research fields, such as organization theory, sociology, philosophy, entrepreneurship, economics, anthropology and dialogue. This plurality of approaches provides a polyphonic reading of the complex and varied phenomena of the metamorphoses, as well as numerous relevant insights. The contributors have been organized around the three dimensions of space as proposed by Vilnai-Yavetz and Rafaeli (2005) - aesthetic, symbolic, and instrumental - dimensions which should not be considered as distinct, but as inter-related and inter-dependent.