Digital Tedious Work and Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization

Digital technology is pervasive in creative work, yet how it shapes the process of making novel outcomes remains underexamined. Drawing from a comparative ethnography of two settings in which digitization prevails—Nashville music production and systems biology cancer research—we present a model of digital tedious work in developing novel outcomes. We discover that exploiting digitization's potential for unlimited experimentation and refinement amplifies digital tedious work. Digital tedious work is highly repetitive, time-intensive, requires substantial expertise, and is inherent to creating with digitization. If not managed deftly, digital tedious work undermines the generation and synthesis of novel ideas. We find that actors engage in three curbing practices—truncating technology, automating, and zooming in and out—to limit digital tedious work and move the creative process forward. Our study offers three contributions: First, we develop a model of how digital tedious work arises throughout the creative process, why it becomes problematic, and how actors engage in curbing to respond. Second, we demonstrate the essential role of curbing practices as a necessary complement to exploiting digitization. Third, we provide evidence of how digital technology not only supports but also undermines the development of novel outcomes by exposing the pitfalls of digitization’s unlimited possibilities.