Moving Past “Nature or Nurture” to Confront the Ubiquity of Creativity

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 4: Investigating Cultural Ideas

Abstract

Creativity supposedly transcends the boundaries of industries and is promised to be the solution to the greatest global issues. Its egalitarian undertone has dangerous implications, while its vagueness has the potential to disguise more nefarious interests that could contribute to long-term inequalities. Sociologists are mostly absent from these discussions, choosing to view the word as just that: a descriptor or an abstraction to refer to a group of things they believe to be creative. Those who have attempted to build a disciplinary definition have been confronted with the limitations of a semantic approach. A small number of sociologists have joined other disciplines in investigating the structural causes of the social phenomenon, pointing to a fundamental contradiction: if creativity is supposedly something everyone has, is it actually a differentiator? What remains ignored is how individuals engage with or behave in relation to the idea. Despite the definitional incongruence, creativity seems to have retained the capacity to influence behaviors. I argue that we must move past creativity as a singular idea or a symptom of structure problems. To truly work against the potential inequalities that this word has or may have introduced, we must study the idea directly by tracing its behaviors. I conduct interviews with individuals in the space of “functional art” to understand whether switching from a conversation about professional identities, practices, and experiences to focusing on the idea of creativity is viewed as a “problem,” which makes it possible to access what is otherwise embedded in their habitual language and frameworks. This paper proposes a new way to engage with the construct by demonstrating the drastic gap between theoretical and empirical behaviors, as well as the role it plays in informing professional identities and practices.

Author

• Risako Yang, Columbia University