Social Creativity

Social Creativity Alfonso Montuori, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, United States © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction 475 Overview 476 Historical and Intellectual Context 477 Women and Creativity 478 Philosophical and Disciplinary Considerations 479 Conclusion 480 References 480 Glossary Dispositional Factors These are internal causal influences, such how personality or cognitive process affect a person’s creativity. Distributed Creativity An approach to research that focuses not on what is inside individuals but what happens between them. Idealism A philosophical position that holds the primacy of thought and mind over the material world. Innovation The process whereby an idea is developed, articulated, and implemented in a particular field, or through the creation and bringing to market of a product. Integrative Transdisciplinarity A self-reflective, inquiry-based form of research that draws on systems and complexity theories to integrate pertinent information that found in multiple disciplines. Materialism A philosophical position that holds the primacy of material factors over thoughts and ideas. Methodological Holism An approach to research that takes the whole rather than the part (often the social system rather than the individual) as the unit of analysis. Methodological Individualism An approach to research that takes the individual as the unit of analysis. Situational Factors These are external causal influences, such as how an organization affects a person’s creativity). Social Creativity Definition Social creativity is an umbrella term for a number of different approaches to creativity that address social factors and issues in the study of creativity. There are considerable differences in the basic philosophical and methodological assumptions of these different approaches. The movement has drawn attention to relational creativity, creativity in relationships and groups, questioned and articulated the roots and philosophical stances of various approaches to creativity. Some researchers have attempted to articulate perspectives that do not view self and society as separate and mutually exclusive. Unit of Analysis Refers to the most basic entity that is being studied, the who or what of as research project. Introduction Social creativity is an umbrella term used to describe a number of different approaches that go beyond psychology’s tradi- tional focus on the individual. It initially emerged in an effort to address social factors and issues in the study of creativity. The increased interest in social creativity has drawn attention to such topics as relational creativity, creativity in relationships and groups, the role of the environment in fostering or inhibiting creativity and has also questioned and articulated the roots and philosophical stances of various approaches to creativity. The psychology of women, discussed below, offers a useful entry point into the relevance of social creativity, since it is not possible to fully understand the creativity of women without an awareness of the historical social and psychological obstacles they have faced in participating in activities which receive high recognition, such as the arts and the sciences. The study of social creativity has also opened up a considerable philosophical discussion, not least because the study of social creativity is not limited to the discipline of psychology, where traditionally most creativity research has been conduct- ed. As a result, there are considerable differences in the basic philosophical and methodological assumptions of these different approaches. This in turn has led to a reflection on how understanding of creativity and creativity research them- selves are created. Social creativity researchers have not shied away from tackling issues with a long philosophical history, and an important contribution of social creativity has been to lead researchers in multiple disciplines to reflect on how researchers have created creativity, what the underlying assumptions of every approach are, and how they in turn reflect the researcher’s values, positionality, and cultural context. Encyclopedia of Creativity, 3rd edition, Volume 2 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.23760-7 475 476 Social Creativity Overview The 1980s saw an expansion in the discourse of creativity to include a more “social” dimension. Until that time, creativity research had almost entirely been the province of psychologists and focused on individual persons and dispositional factors, such as person- ality. Starting with Simonton’s historiometric research in the mid 1970s and then into the 1980’s with Amabile’s social psycholog- ical approach, Csikszentmihalyi’s systems theory, and Harrington’s ecology of creativity, researchers began to include the world beyond the individual, exploring situational factors such as the culture of organizations and the role of gatekeepers in the arts and sciences. The 1990s saw the publication of an increasing number of works addressing the implications of the social turn in creativity research. In 1995 Kasof applied attribution theory to creativity. The fundamental attribution error in social psychology involves making the characteristics of an individual, or dispositional factors, central in interpreting behavior and events. This happens at the expense of situational factors, or what is happening in the world rather than inside the individual. Attribution theory seeks to understand why people behave in a particular fashion. In the case of creativity, it stressed the role of situational factors and in particular social judgment. Kasof wrote his article at a time when Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model, which emphasized the role of “gatekeepers” in assessing who is and who is not creative, was gaining in popularity. As a result, social creativity began to be viewed as a movement predominantly concerned with the role of social judgment. This in turn created considerable controversy, not least because psychologists were concerned there would be a shift in the emphasis of creativity research to situational and socio- logical factors that psychologists considered inessential. Also in 1995, Montuori and Purser critiqued what they saw as the dominant “lone genius” view of creativity in popular culture as well as its traces in academia, and made an argument for a more contextual and relational view of creativity (Montuori and Purser, 1995). Drawing on systems theory they emphasized the interplay between dispositional and situational factors, a view that had its roots in Morris Stein’s transactional creativity and Frank Barron’s ecological view (Barron, 1972; Stein, 1963). Montuori and Purser emphasized the need to uncover the philosophical, methodological, and cultural assumptions of creativity research, as it had become clear that creativity was being framed and understood differently depending on theoretical frameworks and disciplines. They also pointed to several important areas that had not been sufficiently researched, such as creative relationships, creative groups, environments that support creativity, and the creativity of women, and argued for the integration of multiple disciplinary, philo- sophical, and methodological perspectives in the study of creativity. A few years later, their two-volume edited Social Creativity included essays by leading creativity researchers as well as philoso- phers, anthropologists, management theorists, and systems theorists (Montuori and Purser, 1999). There were several notable essays in that volume. Frank Barron, an early pioneer of creativity research, argued that the dominant view of creativity was a reflec- tion of the monotheistic image of God and the seven days of creation. Barron argued that the image God the Father should be joined by the Mother, reflecting the view that All Creation is Collaboration, the title of his chapter (Barron, 1999). Barron saw the shift from individual creation to pro-creation or co-creation, as quite cosmic and mythical. For Barron, a shift in how creativity is understood and expressed also paralleled a shift in understanding of what it means to be human. Mark Runco critiqued the trend in social creativity research that emphasized social judgment and “unambiguous” creators (Runco, 1999). He felt that it would draw attention away from creative potential of young people and the not-yet or never-will- be unambiguous and focus too much on what in his view is not directly relevant to understanding creativity. Along with potential, what were later to be called “everyday creativity” and “personal creativity” are not unambiguous creative achievements and may not receive significant social judgment. For Runco, Creativity Need Not Be Social, and social judgment is not an essential dimension of creativity. Dean Keith Simonton compared psychology’s focus on individual genius with sociology and anthropology’s focus on the Zeit- geist (Simonton, 1999). He drew attention to this lesser known, sociological and anthropological research tradition in the discourse of creativity, highlighted the fundamental underlying assumptions about the unit of analysis in the different disciplines, and out- lined some of the political, economic, and other factors that contribute to a creative society. It’s not just standing on the shoulders of giants, he wrote, but also rubbing shoulders with other creators, surely as good a case as any for social creativity. Volume 2 of Social Creativity focused on contributions in management and organization theory, disciplines which were soon to become major contrib- utors to social creativity research and because of their focus on innovation, which is concerned with the larger process of bringing a creative idea to fruition in the marketplace. The 21st century has seen the blossoming of the sociocultural perspective, spearheaded by the work of Vlad Glaveanu. Glaveanu developed the concept of “distributed creativity” and articulated three main paradigms in creativity research, the He, I, and We para- digms (Glaveanu, 2010, 2014). Glaveanu coined the term distributed creativity to describe creativity that did not reside inside indi- viduals but between them, in their relationships and interactions. The He paradigm studied the traditional “lone genius,” the I paradigm individual creativity, and the We paradigm moved into the broad area of social creativity, predominantly through systems theory and the socio-cultural approach. From the socio-cultural perspective, the first explorations of social creativity still focused primarily on the individual and did not address the full potential and complexity of social creativity. Individual and social creativity were still treated as two separate worlds. A socio-cultural perspective addresses the complexity of the individual-society nexus and a more relational, contextual creativity. Writing in the introduction to the Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research, Glaveanu (2016) wrote that, “culture is not an isolated factor that can be easily grouped under the general label of ‘environment’ but a condition of possibility for creativity” (p. 3). In other words, creativity without culture is simply not possible, and individual and culture cannot be thought of as separate. The individual is in the culture, and the culture is in the individual. Social Creativity 477 A manifesto co-authored by 20 researchers to be published in the Journal of Creative Behavior summarized the central assumptions of the socio-cultural approach (Glaveanu et al., In Press)A manifesto co-authored by 20 researchers and published in the Journal of Creative Behavior in 2019 summarized the central assumptions of the socio-cultural approach (Glaveanu et al., 2019). They include but are not limited to the view that creativity is a multidimensional phenomenon, at once psychological, social, and material (physical and embodied), and it involves culturally mediated action. Creative action is at all times relational. Creativity research needs to consider power dynamics both within its analyses and as a field of study. Central to this approach is a critique of the traditional view of the individual and the social as two distinct and separable units. Izabela Lebuda and Glaveanu (2019)Glaveanu and Izabela Lebuda (2019), are the co-editors of the Handbook of Social Creativity Research, a volume that brings together the state of the art in this rapidly expanding field, and reflects the growing interest that in social creativity over the last 20 years. Harking back to Runco’s original concerns, the emergence of social creativity and the We-paradigm has led some psychol- ogists to argue for a more focused approach, one that is parsimonious and addresses what they feel is strictly necessary for creativity, its sine qua non, which they refer to as the “mechanism” of creativity. This would eliminate bringing in topics that in their view are not directly relevant like social judgment or personality. This approach also brings creativity research squarely back into the psychologists’ fold, rather than having it fragmented in a multiplicity of disciplines. An alternative proposal views transdisciplinarity as a way to integrate the voluminous creativity research currently being generated in multiple disciplines, not primarily for the purpose of creating grand theories, although that is not excluded, but for application to specific issues, con- necting theory and practice, and bringing the research to bear on a world in need of creative approaches to vexing problems (Montuori, 2018). Historical and Intellectual Context The concept of creativity as it is known in the West today can be traced back to the Renaissance, coinciding with the birth of humanism and individualism. It blossomed with the genius myth that emerged with Romanticism in the late 18th century. Assump- tions about creativity established during the Renaissance, Romanticism, and the Industrial Revolution, continued to shape the cultural imaginary and the academic study of the phenomenon. Until the 1980s, research on creativity in the West was situated mostly in the discipline of psychology and focused primarily on what were known as the four Ps: person, process, product and press). The unit of analysis was almost exclusively the exceptional or “eminent” individual. The romantic mythology created an “atomistic” view, which holds that even complex social phenomena can be traced back to the primacy of the individual, and the social and society are merely an accumulation of individuals. A lasting legacy of this view was that the creative person was mostly a lone, often eccentric, genius, and always white and male. In the dominant four P’s model, the who of creativity was a person, and was therefore by definition limited to an individual. Groups, organizations, cultures, and relationships were not included, and in fact popularly depicted as representatives of confor- mity and compliance, and mostly viewed as potential obstacles for the creative person. The genius or more generally the creative person was viewed as being in an oppositional relationship with other people and more generally with society. The social was pitted against the individual. This view is characterized in the popular imagination by such works as novelist Ayn Rand’s popular book The Fountainhead, also made into a movie in 1949 starring Gary Cooper, which depicted the struggles of a headstrong creative architect unwilling to compromise in the face of an onslaught of demands for conformity and mediocrity. Popular movies about highly crea- tive individuals, such as Bird, Amadeus, and Immortal Beloved, focused on misunderstood, tragic genius figures (Charlie Parker, Mozart, and Beethoven) struggling with an often hostile social environment. These images reflected and in turn fed into the mythology of the genius battling with recalcitrant, conformist, jealous, and often cruel others, as in the highly fictionalized relation- ship between Mozart and Salieri in Amadeus. Another view is that creativity is a “gift” the genius possesses and so it does not require any work, which in the case of Parker, for instance, glaringly omitted the less photogenic years he claimed to have practiced 8–10 hours a day. A number of intellectual and social developments in the late 20th and early 21st century have questioned the foundations of Western thought. They directly or indirectly led to questioning, critiquing, and proposing alternatives to the dominant individual-centered approach to creativity. • Psychologists with a social constructionist orientation as well as sociologists have argued that who or what we call “creative” is the result of a social judgment, and that creativity is therefore socially constructed and does not exist “naturally,” independently of that judgment. • Authors in the movement loosely known as postmodernism have critiqued the notion of the autonomous individual. They proclaimed the death of the “subject” and the “author,” and ushered in “the birth of the reader.” This involves foregrounding readers’ individual interpretations and rejecting the dominant role of the author. They also stressed the commercial and political interests and power dynamics embedded in the discourse of creativity. Postmodern thinkers criticized the image of the genius, and the notion of originality, discussing the role of “bricolage,” the combining and recombining of existing materials, summarized in the expression “everything is a remix.” • From the perspective of systems and complexity theories creativity research has viewed individuals as closed systems, unaffected by their context. An open system approach situates individuals in their social context and in a network of 478 Social Creativity relationships. The self-organization and emergence of natural and social phenomena attracted attention, as did the role of “swarms,” with a bottom-up, distributed, rather than top-down approach, stressing the significance of recursive, mutually causal interactions. • Researchers studying the psychology and creativity of women have argued that the creativity of women cannot be assessed without taking into account social and cultural factors. Women were portrayed as fundamentally not creative in the same way as men are, and through much of history women were not allowed to participate in those very domains in which one would be recognized as creative. • Cultural psychology is an interdisciplinary field that draws on a wide variety of disciplines including anthropology, neuro- science, cultural studies, and the philosophy of mind. For cultural psychology, mind and culture are not only inseparable but mutually constitutive. Minds shape culture and culture shapes minds, and the emphasis is on studying the nature of this process. • Management and organization theorists have developed an interest in creativity as part of the larger process of innovation. Whereas the creative process has traditionally been viewed as something that goes on inside an individual and leads to the proverbial lightbulb going on, the process of innovation includes idea generation but is much more extended in time and space. Idea generation is important, but part of larger process that goes all the way to implementation and is therefore by its very nature a more social process. These are but some of the intellectual trends and developments that have contributed to research in social creativity. It should be pointed out that the focus on the individual creator and the genius has also, ironically, become a marketing tool that reflects the deeply interwoven nature of individual and society. The relatively recent focus on social creativity also parallels the fact that post baby-boom generations seem to be less interested in genius, and more in everyday and relational creativity. Women and Creativity The history of women and creativity provides an important entry point into the relevance of social creativity. Historically much if not most creativity research has been about eminent white males in the West. As a result, the picture that was first developed about creativity, the creative person, and the creative process, is based on a sample that was almost exclusively white and male. Eysenck (Eysenck, 1995) summarized the effect of this sample with the following conclusion: “Creativity, particularly at the highest level, is closely related to gender; almost without exception, genius is found only in males (for whatever reason!)” (p. 127). It is perhaps not surprising that Eysenck should conclude with “for whatever reason.” While in 1995 there was already consider- able research on the historical struggles of women in the arts and the sciences, the topic was only beginning to attract interest in psychology. Given the fundamental attribution error, it might be tempting to seek the reason for women’s under-representation in the lists of great creators to their personalities or cognitive processes or even genetics. Feminist scholars have argued for years that for most of recorded history women were not given full access to the domains in which creativity could be demonstrated (the arts and the sciences). In Europe and the USA women were not allowed to practice drawing nudes, give concerts in public, go to medical school, and study science until the middle of the 19th century. These social factors clearly inhibited the creative poten- tial of women, and the perspective of historians and sociologists contributes to a broader picture, addressing aspects of women’s lives that psychologists generally do not address. The argument has also been made that the discourse of genius and creativity is shaped by male-centered or even patriarchal approaches which started out with the assumption that, broadly speaking, men are creative and women make babies. But does the fact that women had no access to socially recognized domains of creativity (major artworks, scientific break- throughs, etc.) mean that they had no opportunity to be creative in Europe and the USA until the 20th century and therefore were simply not creative for millennia? Or merely that working within the social limitations, the definition of the what, who, where, and how of creativity was preventing an understanding how the creativity of women was manifesting? Is it the case that, despite their lack of access to traditionally accepted domains of creativity, women are simply not as creative as men? This does not appear to be the case. Perhaps it is necessary to redefine creativity through an articulation of a more relational perspective and highlight the many ways in which women have been creative in different contexts and different ways (Eisler et al., 2016). Examples include areas that have traditionally been seen as women’s domains, in the home, child-rearing, and in such private, domestic activities as improvising meals for the family rather than in more public, dramatic ways such as becoming celebrated chefs. The creativity of women, while initially excluded from the arts and sciences, has therefore historically man- ifested in what today might be considered more social, more relational, and more everyday activities, as opposed to socially recognized creativity. In that sense, the new interest in everyday, everyone, everywhere creativity is prefigured in the creativity of women, meaning more specifically the areas in which women could express their creativity. This should not be interpreted to mean that these are the only areas where women can or should be creative, of course, simply that given the social restrictions, articulated so well in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, women were in fact being creative during the centuries they could not participate in the domains where eminent creativity was recognized, but in domains and ways that were not as yet recognized in the research literature or socially acknowledged. Ravenna Helson (1990) wrote that Social Creativity 479 We think the understanding of creativity in women requires attention to the social world, to individual differences in motivation and early object relations, and to changes in society and the individual over time. In fact, we believe that the study of creativity in general needs all of these directions of attention (p. 57). The reasons for Helson’s argument for a more social approach are clear and not just confined to an understanding of historical obstacles. In the last 50 years considerable changes have seen many more women become prominent in the arts and the sciences and join the rank of Nobel prize winners. Nevertheless, in the early 21st century, research found that girls and boys are taught science differently, it is still difficult for women to break into certain disciplines, and Silicon Valley, a center of tremendous innovation, is criticized for being a “brotopia” that excludes women. What Helson is pointing to is the need for an approach that draws on multiple disciplines and recognizes the pervasive role of culture in shaping young women, their choices and opportunities, as well as the way the cultures of organizations and universities can exclude women. Along with understanding how women have been excluded from creative endeavors, it is also important to explore how a better understanding of women’s creativity might broaden our understanding of creativity as a whole. Social creativity is beginning the exploration of a more relational approach to creativity. Philosophical and Disciplinary Considerations The emergence of social creativity brought focused attention to the way in which researchers create their understanding of and approach to creativity. As a result it has raised numerous complex and important issues that can be traced to ongoing debates in philosophy and specifically the philosophy of social science, as well as the role of disciplines in framing questions and entire subject areas. The interest in social creativity has shown how different disciplinary perspectives and different underlying philosophical and cultural assumptions can lead to very different perspectives on creativity. In the philosophy of social science, the different perspec- tives broadly underlying psychology and sociology are sometimes referred to as atomism and holism, or and more specifically methodological individualism and methodological holism respectively. If atomists argue for the primacy of the part and the ficti- tious nature of the whole, as in Mrs Thatcher’s famous statement that there is no such thing as society, holists argue for the primacy of the whole over the part. A key difference between psychology and sociology is precisely the choice they make about whether to foreground the part or the whole. This choice determines the unit of analysis. Psychologists have historically viewed creativity as the result of dispositional characteristics, processes, and properties of individuals. For the vast majority of psychologists, the individual is therefore the unit of analysis. Sociologists and anthropologists have viewed creativity more as a function of social structures and processes, and the Zeitgeist or spirit of the times, therefore situationally. For methodological individualists in creativity research, the focus on the individual also means that whatever is outside the indi- vidual is essentially epiphenomenal, or not causally affecting the phenomenon in question. In this view it is not necessary to include factors that are considered epiphenomenal in order to gain a full understanding of creativity, and it has been argued that any attempt to include complex factors such as culture would simply be too daunting. The implications have been considerable, and not limited to making the research process more manageable. With methodological individualism the dominant approach in Amer- ican creativity research, it is not surprising that creative collaborations, group creativity, the study of creative cities and epochs and generally of environments that foster or hinder creativity have historically received less attention, with some notable exceptions. For methodological holists it is individuals who are epiphenomenal. Specific individuals are merely vehicles for ideas that are part of the Zeitgeist, or ideas that are “in the air.” This is not a mystical phenomenon but usually simply the result of an accumulation of developments in a particular field leading to a situation where it is almost inevitable that someone will take the next logical step. The phenomenon of “multiples,” when two or more scientists come up with the same ideadDarwin and Wallace with evolution, for instancedis often used as an example. The role of networks connecting schools of thought and tracing lineages of philosophers and social scientists, has also begun to play a role in the understanding of creativity in the history of ideas. The underlying philosophical assumptions of the two major perspectives on creativity have further differences. Using rather broad generalizations, it has been argued that the psychological, individualistic approach is also fundamentally idealistic in the sense that it focuses largely on the generation of creative ideas, but no systematic attention is paid to how those ideas can become a reality. Idealist philosophy is more interested in the idea rather than its physical manifestation. An idealist aesthetics holds that the score of a musical composition is an ideal which can only be approximated by a performance because it is closer to what the composer had in mind, and subject to less translation and interpretation. This is arguably the view of psychologists who want to decouple crea- tivity from the social, by eliminating the term “useful” from the definition. What is essential for them is the generation of creative ideas, and specifically the mechanism whereby ideas are generated. They are less or not interested at all in the implementation. Sociologists, and particularly sociologists of work, have brought a different perspective to the table, namely a more materialist philosophy. This is evident in their close study of what it actually means to work in professions such as the arts and put on a jazz performance, get a motion picture into the theaters, a novel into bookstores, and so on. The sociologist Howard Becker listed the credits of a motion picture to give an idea of the enormous collective effort that is required to bring a movie in front of the public. The same is true for a musical recording, getting a book from the author’s desk to the bookstore, and even a school produc- tion of a musical. To attribute the creation of a motion picture, the performance of a jazz group, or the design of a fashion item to 480 Social Creativity one individual simply overestimates the importance of the individual and does not recognize the contribution of others. The romantic mythology of the creator as lone genius takes a back seat to the network of relationships necessary to take any creative idea into the world. Key differences between the two approaches are in the definition and scope of the creative process. Can the creative process be reduced to the essential moment the light-bulb goes on, or is it a process that can be traced beyond the individual, perhaps as far back as the education and preparation preceding the idea(s), and then all the way to implementation, bringing a product to market or a concert performance of a composition? The sociological approach has broadened the understanding of creativity to the extent that it tells us about how an idea becomes a reality, and clearly this is an extremely important dimension of the process. A greater understanding of the process by which creative ideas become realities can also help create environments and systems that facilitate creativity. Where we draw the boundary around what constitutes the creative process is a function of the researcher’s disciplinary and philosophical perspective. Systems theorists refer to this as the system definition, essentially what is in and what is out of the scope of any inquiry. One view sees the creative process as confined to the generation of the idea, for the other it extend to include the entire production of a movie, including the script writing, editing, and all the support functions from the technical to the logistical. This difference exemplifies the different definitions of creativity and innovation, idealist and materialist respectively, but it also reflects different angles on a large and complex phenomenon, each offering insights that reflect a different facet. Are these contrasting views of the who and how of creativity opposed, incompatible, or complementary? Or would the relation- ship best be described by saying . it’s complicated? The history of social science is full of oppositions and polarizations, with schools of thought and disciplines identifying themselves in opposition to each other. The disciplinary split between psychology and sociology is one example, showing up as the lone genius versus the zeitgeist, but also individual agency versus sociological determinism. The problem of disciplinary fragmentation means that researchers in one discipline may be carrying on their own research agenda with assumptions and theoretical frameworks that are diametrically opposed to those in the discipline next door, which might as well be a universe next door, often blissfully unaware of what their neighbors are doing. If each discipline or subdiscipline believes it has the right (and most legitimate or scientific) approach to creativity, then researchers may choose to ignore each other or argue against other perspectives. While debate and critique are healthy, it is a sad fact that exchanges among academics are often critical rather than creative, as captured in statements like “I defended my position,” “she destroyed his argument.” Arguments over intellectual territory are not unusual but attempts to create across disciplines can be few and far between. How to address this often conflicting proliferation of research, disciplines, and assumptions? Most academics do not receive training in integrating knowledge across disciplines, or in how to be socially creative in the study of creativity. A key challenge for creativity researchers today, during a historical moment when creativity is needed more than ever, is to connect across disciplines and across cultures to put creativity research to work. While increasing specialization is a given for academia, social creativity points to the need to be able to integrate complex ideas and pertinent findings across different disciplines and each with different funda- mental assumptions, a task which itself requires social creativity. In that sense, the criticism that social creativity is too complex, and researchers would be better off working with clearly delineated closed systems that are all within their specific area of competence is perhaps legitimate, given the current state of affairs. But one of the most exciting aspects of social creativity research is precisely that, by its very demands, it may usher in a new and more complex, transdisciplinary approach to creativity. Conclusion The broad umbrella of social creativity has drawn attention to and created a space for research in topics such as creative relationships and groups that had largely been ignored until the 1990s. It has also led to philosophical questions and debates about the nature of the individual, the relationship between individual and society, and the nature of creativity. Social creativity has also begun to explore how creativity research itself has been created, through the way it is represented in popular culture, with implicit folk beliefs about creativity, and by creativity researchers themselves, who are themselves not immune to the influences of their own culture. Increasingly, researchers are approaching creativity from a multiplicity of disciplines and perspectives. Understanding social creativity requires this rich multiplicity of views and thereby makes new demands of researchers to expand their scope and become inter- or even transdisciplinary. Social creativity may succeed in articulating the centrality of creativity in society and social change processes, thereby bringing creativity to the forefront of social research. References Barron, F., 1972. Towards and ecology of consciousness. Inquiry 15, 95–113. Barron, F., 1999. All creation is a collaboration. In: Montuori, A., Purser, R. (Eds.), Social Creativity, vol. 1. Hampton, Cresskill, NJ, pp. 49–60. Eisler, R., Donnelly, G., Montuori, A., 2016. Creativity, society, and gender: contextualizing and redefining creativity. Interdiscip. J. Partnersh. Stud. 3 (2 Spring/Summer), 1–33. Eysenck, H., 1995. Genius: The Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Glaveanu, V.P., 2010. Paradigms in the study of creativity: introducing the perspective of cultural psychology. New Ideas in Psychology 28, 79–93. Glaveanu, V.P., 2014. Distributed Creativity: Thinking outside the Box of the Creative Individual. Springer, New York. Glaveanu, V.P., 2016. Introducing creativity and culture, the emerging field. In: Glaveanu, V. (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research. Palgrave, London, pp. 1–12. Social Creativity 481 Glaveanu, V.P., Hanchett Hanson, M., Baer, J., Barbot, B., Clapp, E.P., Corazza, G.E., et al., 2019 (In Press). Advancing creativity theory and research: a socio-cultural manifesto. J. Creat. Behav. Helson, R., 1990. Creativity in women: inner and outer views over time. In: Runco, M., Albert, R.S. (Eds.), Theories of Creativity. Sage, Newbury Park, pp. 46–58. Kasof, J., 1995. Explaining creativity: the attributional perspective. Creativ. Res. J. 8 (4), 311–366. Lebuda, I., Glaveanu, V.P. (Eds.), 2019. The Palgrave Handbook of Social Creativity Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Montuori, A., 2018. Creating social creativity: integrative transdisciplinarity and the epistemology of complexity. In: Glaveanu, V., Lebuda, I. (Eds.), Palgrave Handbook of Social Creativity. Palgrave, London, pp. 743–765. Montuori, A., Purser, R., 1995. Deconstructing the lone genius myth: towards a contextual view of creativity. J. Humanist. Psychol. 35 (3), 69–112. Montuori, A., Purser, R. (Eds.), 1999. Social Creativity, vol. 1. Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ. Runco, M., 1999. Creativity need not be social. In: Montuori, A., Purser, R. (Eds.), Social Creativity, vol. 1. Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ, pp. 237–264. Simonton, D.K., 1999. The creative society: genius vis-à-vis the Zeitgeist. In: Montuori, A., Purser, R. (Eds.), Social Creativity, vol. 1. Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ, pp. 237–264. Stein, M., 1963. A transactional approach to creativity. In: Taylor, C.W., Barron, F. (Eds.), Scientific Creativity. Its Recognition and Development. John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 217–227.