Organizing Creativity with AI: Creative Industries, Organizational Fields, and the Reconfiguration of Expertise

Generative AI is rapidly entering creative industries such as advertising, media, design, gaming, music, and cultural production. While public debates often focus on whether AI can be creative or whether it will replace creative workers, this session approaches the issue from the sociology of organizations. Creative industries are not only sites of individual creativity, but organizational fields in which ideas, aesthetic judgments, professional roles, authorship, reputation, and value are collectively produced, evaluated, and legitimized.

The session invites contributions that examine how (generative) AI is reorganizing creative industries, creative organizations, and the institutional arrangements through which creativity is produced and recognized. Rather than treating AI merely as a tool for creative workers, we aim to discuss how AI becomes embedded in organizational routines, workflows, hierarchies, evaluation practices, business models, and field-level conventions. How do organizations integrate generative AI into creative processes? How are professional expertise, authorship, and accountability redefined? How do agencies, media organizations, cultural producers, platforms, clients, and audiences negotiate the boundaries between human and machine-generated creativity? How are standards of quality, authenticity, and legitimacy stabilized or contested?

We welcome theoretical, empirical, and comparative papers that analyze AI and creativity as organizational phenomena. Possible contributions may address creative agencies, media organizations, cultural institutions, platform-based creative production, or cross-sectoral transformations of creative fields. The session aims to bring into conversation organizational sociological perspectives on AI in creative industries and to examine how AI reconfigures organizations, fields, professions, evaluation practices, and institutional change.

Session Type: Open Sessions (Paper Presentation Sessions)