Creativity and culture, in their own right, are expanding fields of study within the social and human sciences. They are both highly popular notions in a world defined by unprecedented rates of technological progress, connectivity and mobility, as well as existential questions regarding the threats and benefits of globalisation. How do we build cultures that are, at once, global and local, shared yet unique? What is the role played by creativity in this process? How do acts of creativity use culture while, at the same time, renewing it? These are all rather new and yet timely questions. They are new for a field of creativity studies usually concerned with individual-level variables. They are equally new for scholars of culture who tend to find creativity too individualistic and ‘psychological’ and replace it with other notions. A creativity and culture focus is timely considering not only the societal challenges of today, but also the scientific benefits for both fields. Creativity researchers would gain a deeper understanding of what it means to create as a person who, at the same time, belongs to a society and culture. On the other hand, researchers of culture would benefit both conceptually and practically from recognising many of the change processes they study as the work of creativity.
Nonetheless, creativity and culture researchers also face great difficulties (see also Glăveanu 2014). First and foremost, these are arguably two of the most complex phenomena approached by science. Such complexity made both topics attract very little attention during the heyday of behaviourism and in the early years of the cognitive revolution (Gardner 2008). Positivist approaches pursuing simple causal models are bound to make little progress in these fields. Similarly, the quest for predictive laws will be frustrated by the complexity and non-linearity of both creativity and culture. These ‘shortcomings’ are, for some, a sufficient reason to avoid approaching any of the two topics taken separately, even more together. Second, creativity and culture researchers seldom have opportunities to talk to each other. There are very few common journals or conferences that regularly include contributions from both areas. Moreover, their contributors tend to belong to different disciplines. While creativity is extensively investigated in psychology, education, and design studies, among others, culture is of concern primarily for sociologists, anthropologists, and the growing interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. Despite these difficulties, more and more disciplines, particularly within applied areas, are acutely aware of the need for a unitary framework; examples range from social activism (Jasper 2008) and technology (Hayward 1990) to developmental research (Tan and Perleth 2015).
The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research marks a premiere in this regard. It is among the first large-scale publications to consider creativity and culture as a unitary research area. In doing so, it brings together scholars who made important contributions to this emerging field as well as researchers whose work in either creativity or culture encourages them to reflect on the multiple relations between the two. While many of the contributors to this Handbook are psychologists, a discipline that counts both creativity and culture among its key research topics, they represent different orientations (cognitive, social, evolutionary, cultural, critical, developmental, and organisational, among others) and work within a variety of applied fields (education, marketing, business, engineering, etc.). Experts in sociology, anthropology, media, policy, literary studies, and creative industries join them, in an effort to make this editorial project truly interdisciplinary. The outcome: a unique collection of chapters that both review and advance the state of the art within the area of creativity and culture, legitimising it as one of the newest and most promising multidisciplinary fields of investigation within the social sciences and humanities. Its expected readership is equally wide. It includes psychologists, educators, managers, economists, artists and designers, technology experts, sociologists, ethnographers, advertisers, linguists, philosophers, political scientists, and literary scholars, as well as all those people who share a vivid interest for the cultural dimensions of creativity and the creative aspects of culture. These readers will find in the present Handbook a credible source of scholarly information that goes beyond simply placing creativity and culture side by side—it engages with their relationship and transforms both through this relationship. In summary, a handbook is that takes culture and creativity seriously. In this brief introduction, my aim is to consider this ambitious aim and the way it is reflected in the general organisation of the volume.
Taking Culture Seriously in Creativity Research
What does it mean to take culture seriously in creativity research? For a field traditionally dominated by the study of individual-level variables—from genes and brains to personality structures, cognitive styles, and so on—this means first of all to consider culture important for creative expression. However, adding culture as just one more variable to the mix doesn’t suffice. Correlating cultural dimensions with individual variables might be the first step in research but one whose success is, at best, partial. This is because turning culture into one more variable that impacts the creative mind from the ‘outside’ completely misses the foundational role played by culture in the very construction of this mind. Culture is not an isolated factor that can be easily grouped under the general label of ‘environment’ but a condition of possibility for creativity. How could anyone create in the absence of cultural material to work on (knowledge, objects, norms, etc.), cultural tools to work with (language, technology, etc.), and cultural audiences to work for (from close others to institutions and the general public)? How could we recognise anything as creative without reference to a broader cultural context made up of existing artefacts, traditions, and institutional arrangements? Above all, how could creative ideas originate in a non-acculturated mind or flourish in a world that doesn’t produce and accumulate culture?
Different meanings of the term culture are packed within the questions above. And, indeed, multiple definitions of it are possible (for comprehensive reviews, see Valsiner and Rosa 2007), so many in fact that one might wonder if it’s even worth talking about culture anymore (Jahoda 1984). Culture can designate the socio-material context of human actions, made up of objects, places, and institutions. Culture is also constituted by a variety of symbolic forms, from language and representations to discourses and ideology. Culture exists as well in interaction and communication, in forms of political organisation, in educational practices, and in the traditions that bring together communities and societies. In fact, it is this latter understanding of culture—as that which is shared by people and transmitted more or less faithfully to future generations—that discouraged many creativity researchers from engaging with it. If culture is stable and common while creativity is dynamic and unique, what do they have in common? This false opposition is inscribed, for instance, in romantic views of geniuses as highly gifted individuals who struggle with and against the conformist societies and cultures of their time in order to create (Montuori and Purser 1995). How can this view account for the notion of ‘cultures of creativity’ we often hear about nowadays? Culture, in fact, is equally oriented towards stability and change, tradition and novelty, past and future. All cultures are, in the end, cultures of creativity; we just need the adequate lenses to study them as such.
And these lenses necessarily take us back to the way we conceive and study both culture and creativity. Recently, I have listed a number of approaches creativity researchers use to theorise the social—as gatekeepers, consensus, clusters, boxes, shopping lists, and onion layers (for details see Glăveanu 2015). In many ways, this typology applies to culture as well. What I propose here is another perspective on culture, one that focuses on key metaphors for this phenomenon. The four examples I will briefly discuss next are by no means the only ones possible, but they seem to me particularly adequate for creativity studies. Each one of them captures a specific ‘reading’ of culture and is indicative of its strengths and shortcomings.
Culture as Achievement
One of the most common ways of approaching culture in the field of creativity is in terms of its highest achievements in selected domains such as the arts, science and technology, and the social and political sphere. This is the culture embodied within galleries and museums, awards and patents for innovation, academic citations, and Nobel Prizes. Each of these is important for the social validation of creativity, and in turn, revolutionary creative acts make culture itself one of the highest forms of human achievement. Among the most prominent lines of research in this area is represented by historiometry (Simonton 1999) or the study of creativity patterns across historical time. This is creativity with a capital C, considered as such precisely because it leaves its mark on ‘high culture’. However, there surely is more to both culture and creativity than great achievements; how to account for that?
Culture as a Toolbox
The second metaphor of culture focuses precisely on its everyday expression and highlights its functionality. Culture is not only related to the macro social system but represents a set of resources creators use, mix and match, keep and change. Most cognitive approaches to culture, dominant today in psychology and connected fields, propose a definition of this phenomenon based on the association or combination of existing elements (Finke et al. 1992). While these cognitive elements are rarely acknowledged as cultural, they do point us towards the pragmatic use of culture within creative work. However, is culture nothing more than a set of sophisticated tools?
Culture as a Garden
The third metaphor highlights the formative and developmental role of culture in relation to creativity and the human mind more generally. Cole (1996) discussed this metaphor as foundational, taking us back to the etymological roots of culture and particularly its relation with cultivation. Indeed, like fish in the water of culture, we are often unaware of how cultural environments structure our thinking and our behaviour. While this metaphor is gaining ground in creativity and education, especially under the influence of Vygotsky’s (1978) thought, it is rarely used to understand adult creativity. How does culture cultivate the creativity of adults?
Culture as Dialogue
The fourth and last metaphor takes further the idea of cultivation by placing dialogue at the core of culture and its creative dynamic. Against static and structuralist perspectives, this approach brings to the fore exchanges and interaction in the constant (re)making of culture within everyday life. Informing most cultural psychological studies of creativity (see Gla˘veanu 2010), this view is particularly sensitive to acts of small c creativity and their role in fostering psychological health and prompting cultural renewal. A key question here is how to relate back the micro-creativity of dialogues with the macro-historical achievements of the first metaphor.
The metaphors of culture proposed here do not oppose but complement each other. Moreover, more than one metaphor might guide one and the same research project. There can be cases as well in which, at a theoretical level, authors operate with one conception while, methodologically, their work enforces another. Whereas only together they offer a full picture of human culture, it is of vital importance to combine these approaches in a reflective, critical manner. This is because they reflect different epistemologies (see Marková 2003). Some postulate the separation between person and culture (e.g., culture as achievement and as a toolbox); others see the two as deeply interconnected (e.g., culture as a garden and as dialogue). These epistemological differences are important for how we consider creativity either as a property of the mind or as a property of social and cultural relations (‘in-between minds’). They also impact on the way we define creativity itself, a topic I go on to discuss.
Taking Creativity Seriously in the Study of Culture
Just as in the case of culture, creativity research is familiar with multiple paradigmatic approaches. Sternberg and Lubart (1999) defined, in this context, six approaches to creativity based on their scientific value: mystical, psychoanalytic, pragmatic, psychometric, cognitive, and social personality. In previous work (Glăveanu 2010), I identified three paradigms, the He (genius), the I (creative person), and the We (creative collaboration), grouped around the relation between person and sociocultural context. Arguably, both could be used to guide culture researchers in their exploration of the creativity literature. However, a more basic question emerges here: why should scholars of culture be interested to know more about creativity in the first place?
The reason this question is asked rests on the fact that very few studies of creativity, particularly within the psychology of creativity, are of real interest for cultural theorists. Not only are they generally silent about the social and cultural environment, but their methodology is often considered reductionist (Montuori and Purser 1997). This comes as a consequence of the fact that, in dealing with creativity, psychologists tend to reduce it to the smallest components they can measure or control in research. These components (such as personality traits, divergent thinking, neural activation patterns, group organisation, etc.) are relevant for creativity, but, taken separately, they are all insufficient. The systemic perspective that underlines most investigations of culture reminds us that the whole has emergent properties and should never be reduced to its parts. Another problem of creativity research, from a cultural perspective, i...