Nexus Work: Brokerage on Creative Projects

Abstract

One body of research treats brokers as strategic arbitrageurs extracting advantage from their position, while another body of research paints brokers as relational experts connecting others to foster creativity and innovation. Because both conceptions are static, they fail to capture how brokerage evolves throughout the creative process. With an ethnographic study of music producers, we find that creative brokerage involves blending both approaches depending on the type of ambiguity involved. Producers leveraged their brokerage role not just for individual gain but to integrate project contributors’ ideas while maintaining project support. In doing so, they moved between these two ideal conceptions of brokerage and broke from them - to foster a collective creative outcome.