Synopses & Reviews
Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. In the last 50 yearss, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity that at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity researchers tended to focus on highly valued activities like fine art painting and Nobel prize winning science. Sawyer brings this research up to date by including movies, music videos, cartoons, videogames, hypertext fiction, and computer technology. For example, this is the first book on creativity to include studies of performance and improvisation. Sawyer draws on the latest research findings to show the importance of collaboration and context in all of these creative activities.
Today's science of creativity is interdisciplinary; in addition to psychological studies of creativity, Explaining Creativity includes research by anthropologists on creativity in non-Western cultures, and research by sociologists about the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity. Explaining Creativity brings these approaches together within the sociocultural approach to creativity pioneered by Howard Becker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner. The sociocultural approach moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, emphasizing the role of collaboration and context in the creative process.
Review
"Sawyer has put together a mountain of research from a variety of fields to create a unified approach to understanding how people manage to do something different. His book is readable and learned, origninal, but mindful of its relation to all that other work, and well worth the attention of anyone who wants to think seriously about innovation in the arts and in social organizations."--Howard S. Becker, author of Art World, Tricks of the Trade and Outsiders
"An extremely knowledgable, wide-ranging, integrative summary of how the social sciences understand creativity. Keith Sawyer has again produced an intelligent and valuable contribution to knowledge. This is a volume that any scholar or lay-person interested in what creativity entails will want to have."--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Director, Quality of Life Research Center and C.S. and D.J. Davidson, Professor, Peter F. Drucker School of Management, Claremont Graduate University
"With the publication of Explaining Creativity, Keith Sawyer has emerged as the leading young scholar and proponent of a sociocultural approach to the study of creativity. And with his remarkable grasp of this young field, Professor Sawyer has written the most comprehensive and compelling work on creativity studies in years."--David Henry Feldman, Professor, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, Tufts University, and co-author of Changing the World
"Without doubt Explaining Creativity is the most comprehensive single-volume presentation of what we know about the creative process, person, and product. Besides that, the book is extremely well written. It would be my first recommendation for anyone fascinated with creativity in all of its complexities and manifestations. There's simply nothing better out there for either specialist or general reader."--Dean Keith Simonton, Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, and author of Origins of Genius
Synopsis
In the last 50 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly turned to studying creativity, so we now know more about it than ever before. However, until about a decade ago, creativity researchers focused only on highly valued activities, such as creating masterpieces in art and making highly significant discoveries in science. In
Explaining Creativity, R. Keith Sawyer extends the study of creativity by examining not only these endeavors, but also movies, music videos, cartoons, video games, hypertext fiction, stage performance, business innovation, and advances in computer technology.
Sawyer uses the sociocultural approach to creativity that was pioneered by Howard Becker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Howard Gardner, allowing him to move beyond the individual to consider the social process. Taking into account the interdisciplinary nature of creativity, Sawyer integrates psychological data with anthropological research on creativity in non-Western cultures and sociological studies on the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity. For more information, see www.explainingcreativity.com.
About the Author
R. Keith Sawyer is Associate Professor of Education at Washington University. He is the author of many books on creativity, including
Improvised Dialogues,
Creating Conversations, and
Group Creativity.
Table of Contents
Part 1. Conceptions.
1. Introduction
2. Conceptions of Creativity
Interlude 1. Defining Creativity.
Part 2. Individualist Approaches.
3. Personality Psychology
4. The Second Wave: Cognitive Psychology
5. Biology
6. Computational Approaches
Interlude 2. From Individual to Context.
Part 3. Contextualist Approaches.
7. Sociology
8. Culture
9. History
Interlude 3. Applying Individualist and Contextualist Approaches to Creativity.
Part 4. Artistic Creativity.
10. Visual Creativity
11. Writing
12. Music
13. Acting
Interlude 4. Goodbye to Our Creativity Myths.
Part 5. Everyday Creativity.
14. Science
15. Business Creativity
16. How to be More Creative
Epilogue.