The Ideology of Creativity and Challenges of Participation

Anna Craft, a leading researcher on creativity and education, described a condition that many of us have watched accelerate: “Creativity is an important element of the zeitgeist in the early twenty-first century, worldwide” (2005, p. ix), encompassing discourses on genius and individualism, democracy and politics, the social good, technological advances and educational practice, among others (Banaji, Burn, & Buckingham, 2006 as cited in Craft, 2010). It is important to note just how distinctive our times are in this regard. The ancient world did not subscribe to a psychological view of creativity, and during the Middle Ages in Europe in most places to assert that someone was creative would have been blasphemous (Weiner, 2000). God created. People only made things. In other words, we do not need a psychological concept of creativity to write great literature, develop philosophies, lay the foundations of democracy or build beautiful temples and cathedrals. In addition, the idea of “creating” or being “creative” retained implications of the dangers as well as the promises that come with change until the late nineteenth century. Then a wholly positive view of creativity largely eclipsed its negative connotations as dangerous, hubristic and potentially destructive (Mason, 2003). Since creativity came to be viewed as almost wholly positive, its importance has steadily grown. In particular, an ever-broader range of creativity theories in psychology and sociology have contributed to the creativity zeitgeist. There is a consensus definition of creativity in social science: producing something novel and of value in a context. As it turns out, though, that definition is just a starting point for a wide range of controversies. Early psychological views of creativity included sublimated infantile desires (Freud’s views of the sources of creative ideas and motivations), sudden restructuring of perception (Gestalt views of insight) and the traits of divergent thinking (ideational flexibility, fluency and originality). Then the humanistic psychologists argued that creativity was the expression of a universal self-actualizing drive and its development was necessary to be a “fully functioning person” (Rogers, 1969, p. 278). Since the cognitive revolution in the mid-twentieth century, psychologists have developed a range of cognitive views from creativity as systemic evolution of thought (Gruber & Wallace, 1999; Wallace & Gruber, 1989) to creativity as decision making (Sternberg, 2003; Sternberg & Lubart, 1991) to creativity as a cognitive variation-selection process (Simonton, 1999). Meanwhile, sociocultural theorists have gone beyond the individual to locate creativity within the dynamics of the social and material worlds (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, 1999; Glaveanu, 2014b; Sawyer, 2010). This Cambrian explosion of creativity theories has contributed to a conceptually rich and socially powerful concept within culture. At the same time, the proliferation of theories put the very social scientists who developed them in an increasingly fragmented field without a clearly defined subject of interest. These theorists regularly decry the fact that we do not have a clear view of what we are studying. As another leading creativity researcher, Teresa Amabile, and her associates described well: “Creativity researchers are often accused of not knowing what they are talking about” (Amabile et al., 1996, p. 19).