Johnny Cash’s song “One Piece at a Time” (1976) describes a GM assembly line worker who manufactures his own automobile by pilfering car parts from the factory over a span of 20 years and assembling them in his garage. The final car is a unique blend of styles and years—the narrator’s own creation. Instead of being slave to the assembly line, he makes the assembly line his own.
The song fancifully illustrates what the editors of Political Creativity call “creative syncretism” (p. 29), a phenomenon they regard as central to the creation, maintenance, and transformation of political institutions. The contributors to the volume challenge in various ways the notion that institutions tightly constrain agents, or that creative political action is possible only for those who set themselves in opposition to reigning institutions. Political Creativity rejects this “false duality of structure and agency” (p.1). It maintains, instead (as editors Gerald Berk, Dennis Galvan, and Victoria Hattam argue in the Introduction) that institutions, including the most effective and enduring, are not internally unified, highly path-dependent structures but instead “partial and multiple” in ways that enable actors—including the apparently powerless—to “dismantle orders,” “select useful parts,” and “combine them in new ways” (p. 8).
Thus, political creativity takes place not only during moments of institutional rupture like revolution (where creative action is obviously necessary), but also, and more surprisingly, during periods of apparently hegemonic order. Institutions that would fail if “operated by the rules” may succeed only because they allow “tinkering from below by empowered creative actors” (p. 9). Maintaining and justifying institutions requires continuing acts of “creative assemblage”; political order is itself a kind of political change, creatively disguised (p. 9).
This is an important claim, and on the whole the fifteen contributors to Political Creativity make an effective case for it. The volume ranges widely in subject matter and intellectual approach, resembling the car assembled in the Johnny Cash song. Sites of “creative syncretism” featured in the volume include AIDS activists’ transformation of FDA procedures for approving experimental drugs (Berk and Galvan), the emergence of professional political consultants (Adam Sheingate), the fusion of family and guild politics that empowered the Medici family of Renaissance Italy (Chris Ansell), the evolution of an internationally accepted System of National Accounts (Yoshiko Herrera), the capacity of Chinese firms to reshape the multinational corporations with whom they do business (Gary Herrigel, Volker Wittke, and Ulrich Voskamp), and the convergence of small business and Islam, modernity and tradition, in Algerian politics (Deborah Harrold).
It is unrealistic to expect a tightly argued theory of political creativity to emerge from the “expansive theoretical roaming” (p. 2) represented in the book. Most of the contributors make good-faith efforts to connect their particular researches to the volume’s central themes. The editors wisely characterize the project as a “research program on political creativity” (p. 5) rather than a finished theory, and close the volume with an invitation for further research on political creativity by others (including political theorists and political methodologists) not represented among the contributors.
Ato Kwamena Onoma’s essay on tribal land boards in Botswana, “Animating Institutional Skeletons” (pp. 123–145), is especially effective in advancing the broader argument of Political Creativity. Onoma describes how the institutions established under Botswana’s Tribal Land Act of 1968 were creatively subverted by precisely the tribal chiefs whom the Act was designed to put out of business. The Act established Land Boards whose mission was to allocate land to families, a power traditionally belonging to the chiefs. But the Land Boards lacked the local information necessary to distribute land efficiently and fairly, and in the end invited the chiefs back in as “overseers” of the process. The essay is interesting because it is not simply a narrative about how special interests capture a government program—an old and familiar story. What is important, instead, is that by “tricking land boards into legitimizing their interests,” the tribal chiefs were able to substantially improve the process of land allocation for everyone involved, and rendered more durable the institutions established under the Tribal Land Act (pp. 141–142). This nicely illustrates Political Creativity’s central claim that “order exists because people act creatively to make it, maintain it, shore it up, and keep it relevant to changing contexts and conditions” (p. 286).
Stephen Amberg’s essay on the Obama administration’s rescue of the American auto industry (pp. 100–119), and Victoria Hattam’s and Joseph Lowndes’s essay on Condoleezza’s Rice’s appropriation of the American Civil Rights legacy for the Republican Party’s interventionist foreign policy (211–235), also effectively advance the volume’s larger argument by describing creative political assemblage where others might perceive only corporate capture and disingenuous rhetoric.
Two of the essays are effective on their own terms but only marginally advance the volume’s larger argument. Rudra Sil’s chapter, “The Fluidity of Labor Politics in Postcommunist Transitions” (pp. 188–208), describes the challenges faced by labor unions in post-Soviet Russia. The author criticizes those who exaggerate labor’s apparent quiescence in the post-communist period, arguing that labor “got the best deal it could get under trying circumstances” (p. 202). The narrative here demonstrates labor unions’ survival and adaptation, but does not make a strong case for their political creativity—unless all adaptation is also creativity, which stretches the latter concept too far.
Kevin Bruyneel’s essay, “The Trouble with Amnesia: Collective Memory and Colonial Injustice in the United States” stands in deep, though curiously unacknowledged, tension with the rest of the volume. Bruyneel describes radical acts of protest by Native Americans against Columbus Day festivities, and contrasts them with the “barely conscious habit memories” by which “settler societies” create and control “passive and disengaged citizens” (pp. 242–244). Only through radical acts of “unstructuring” is it possible to “unleash political agency and generate political change” (248). There is no hint of the creative fusions of order and change featured in the other essays. One of the purposes of Political Creativity is to challenge the dichotomy between structure and agency (p. 1, 298). Bruyneel’s essay reinforces that dichotomy and should be acknowledged as a dissenting view.
Two of Political Creativity’s three organizing themes, “Assemblage” and “Time” function well in giving shape to the larger project. The remaining theme, “Relationality,” is too vague and should be replaced with a more precise term in future work on political creativity. The concept of power is frequently invoked (pp. 3, 6–7, 17, 53–54) but never critically examined or brought into dialogue with theoretical literature on power. The volume says little about how political creativity shapes core political institutions such as constitutions, legislative assemblies, presidencies, or judicial bodies. These omissions should be corrected in future work.
On the whole, however, this volume is effective in lending coherence and direction to its research program on political creativity. The editors’ invitation to political theorists, methodologists, political development specialists, comparative political scientists, and others to engage with Political Creativity deserves a thoughtful response.
