Abstract: This presentation draws onfieldwork conducted in workshops organized by an innovation consultancy groupand attended by the innovation architects of different business corporations inthe U.S. In such workshops, participants are supposed to learn a set ofinnovation techniques for generating new products and services. Set within aspecifically western modern normative framework, the task of the consultancygroup— to help corporations to build a culture of innovation that will producea stable pipeline of innovative ideas for new products and services—embodies abasic cultural contradiction because innovation is tightly coupled with theidea of creativity, which itself connotes unpredictability and resistance toformalization and routinization in the modern-romantic western imaginary. Thepresentation theorizes the ways in which the workshop facilitators attempt toresolve this cultural contradiction. Specifically, it argues that byorchestrating specific discursive events, the facilitators invoke a macrosociologicalorder that opposes the romantic ethos and the professional ethos. This macrosociologicalorder becomes the basis for the microsociological context of role-inhabitanceand for suggested transformations in the workshop participants’role-inhabitance within this context, namely, from their presupposedrole-inhabitance of the romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop intotheir entailed role-inhabitance of the professional ethos at the end of theworkshop. In the process, the professional ethos, which is typically associatedwith rational action, is made to encompass innovative action, as well.