Creativity as Governance: Hybridity, Dispositif, and the Institutional Organization of Imagination in Indian Contexts

Abstract

This article advances a reconceptualization of creativity as an institutionally embedded mode of governance, thereby challenging dominant Eurocentric paradigms that construe creativity as an instrumental precursor to innovation. Drawing on qualitative interpretive insights from Indian organizational contexts, it develops a multilingual theoretical framework integrating dispositif, gouvernementalité, Lebenswelt, habitus, and savoir-faire. The analysis demonstrates that creativity is neither an autonomous expressive force nor a purely managerial technique, but a regulated, relationally sustained, and culturally mediated phenomenon enacted through hybrid configurations of formal managerial Ordnung and locally embedded institutional logics. By theorizing hybridity as a processual negotiation rather than a structural condition, the article positions Indian organizations as theory-generative sites for rethinking creativity in plural modernities. It contributes to organizational theory by advancing a governance-oriented, decolonized understanding of creativity, foregrounding the institutional organization of imagination.