Exploring creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs

Stierand, Marc and Dörfler, Viktor and Sadler-Smith, Eugene (2015) Exploring creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs. In: BAM 2015: The 29th Annual Conference of the British Academy of Management Conference, 2015-09-08 - 2015-09-10, University of Portsmouth.

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Abstract

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the phenomenon of creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs in the organizational setting of their creative industry - haute cuisine. By capturing holistically the complexities and interactions of high-level creativity in high-performance settings, we endeavoured to illustrate how world-leading haute cuisine chefs constructed and understood their experience of being creative and what this can tell us about the nature of creativity more generally. The experiences of our sample of chefs indicate that the phenomenon of creativity is an evolutionary process of 'becoming creative'. Insights into the experience of high-level creativity in a deeply creative commercial setting explain how intra-subjective meaning making of what high-level creativity entails impacts directly on creative outcomes and what this means for creative workers' self-concept, and can be generalized to other settings.